Category Archives: Anglophobia

The future of England

Meeting arranged by the Campaign for an English Parliament (CEP)

House of Lords 20th November

Speakers

Frank Field Labour MP

Lord Maclennan (Lib Dem)

Professor Wyn Jones ( Professor of Welsh Politics, Cardiff U)

Eddie Bone CEP

There were around 100 people attending including a sprinkling of young faces which is always encouraging.  The audience was also pretty hostile to any suggestion that England should not have a Parliament  or be Balkanised with regional assemblies. This type of audience reaction has been growing   in meetings  I have attended over the past couple years which have dealt with the EU, immigration and England’s place in the Union. I would suggest it is indicative of a growing anger and desperation amongst the native population to what they rightly see as the selling out of their country one way or another. People have had enough of what in any other time would have been given its true name: treason.

Frank Field MP on the need for an English Parliament

Field began by pointing out that he had been against devolution in 1998 (when he voted against it) because he could see that it was a flawed settlement that was on offer which would inevitably lead to future conflict. The chief flaw in the settlement was the absence of England within the devolutionary plan.

To his credit Field  argued for an English Parliament despite the fact that his Party  derives great advantage from having many Scottish and Welsh MPs sitting in the Commons and, consequently, Labour would struggle to form a majority in the Commons if either the Union dissolved or it remained intact but with ever more powers being given to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.  Indeed, even as things stand it is difficult for Labour to get a majority of English seats. His reasoning was this,  if Labour does  not embrace the cause of an English Parliament the increasing dissatisfaction felt by the English would erode Labour’s electoral base,  because sooner or later those in control of the Tory Party would recognise that it is de facto the English party and successfully appeal to the English . This would radically undermine present Party loyalties.   Because of this Field saw the only hope for Labour in the long term was for the Party to embrace the cause of an English Parliament and accept that it was desirable  for the English to be able to assert their identity.

Field rejected regional assemblies for England because it was clear the English do not want them and would divide the country with different regions competing against one another.  Instead he favoured a federal system for the four home countries with foreign policy, defence and finance  being federal matters dealt with in a federal parliament and the rest left to the four national parliaments.

I would support this structure (I would even go so far as to invite the Republic of Ireland to join) , but some further matters would need to be decided at the federal level most especially immigration policy. There would also be the problem of welfare benefits, NHS provision and educational facilities if each home country funded its expenditure from taxes it raised within its borders. If there were significant  differences in benefit levels in the four home countries,  eligibility for the benefits would  need to be decided at federal level because otherwise people would flock from the lower benefit level countries to the higher benefit level countries. Nonetheless, a federal government would deal with only a minute part of what Westminster deals with now.

Field’s explanation for the failure of the English in the past to display national identity strongly is the loss of Empire (he seemed to be unaware that the English never had any shyness about doing so at the height of Britain’s  imperial power). He argued that while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland used the occasion to carve out a new national rather than imperial identity for themselves, England did not because her people went on in the imperial mindset because they could not face the loss of world importance.

Frankly, I think this is unsustainable. I was born in 1947 and I have never encountered anyone outside a political group or meeting where any lament for the loss of Empire was heard. The much more likely explanations are  that the English being the dominant nationality in the UK never felt to the need to bumptiously press their nationhood. Then came  Post War mass immigration with  the vast majority immigrants  ending up in England. The British elite who permitted the immigration  saw the danger that this could and probably would lead to English nationalism being hitched to anti-immigrant feeling and  set about ruthlessly suppressing it by the law and the support of the mainstream media.  English nationalist became shorthand for racist. But devolution has made it increasingly difficult for them to censor the subjects of England’s place in the Union and with that debate comes the wider one of  immigration.

Lord Maclennan (Lib Dem) A Constitutional Convention for England

Maclennan described himself as a man of many allegiances saying he was a Glaswegian (he speaks with an RP accent and anyone would take him  for English), a  Scot, a Briton, a European and God help us a citizen of the world.  Just in case the audience had not got where he was coming from, Maclennan added that he was very pro-EU.

He is in favour of an English Constitutional Convention being but there is a good deal of fudge in it. Maclennan says he wants it have popular input to prevent it being a body which simply hands down its ideas from on high. Rather curiously  he thinks that popular involvement means that it should not be time limited.  This lack of a time limit could be a device to allow the Convention to be manipulated by those controlling it by choosing the time most favourable to their interests for any final proposals to be made. At worst the process could even be deliberately stretched out until a government favourable to the wishes of those controlling the convention was elected. Moreover, unless the Convention was elected by the general population it is a little difficult to see how popular opinion could override the wishes of those making the final recommendations. It would not even be a question of  saying the Constitutional Convention’s recommendations should be put to a referendum, because the electors would still be unable to control what the question was and what the proposals were. Those two things would go a long way to determining the outcome of any referendum.

Maclennan raised the spectre of regional assemblies by speaking warmly about them,  something  which produced considerable dissent amongst the audience, with people shouting out their disapproval.  He tried to justify them by making a comparison between Bismarkean Germany and a UK where England had a parliament to look after her affairs. The newly unified Germany in 1870 was dominated by Prussia and Maclennan said he feared the same would happen if England had her own parliament. This was a poor analogy  because the newly unified Germany had two substantial states – Bavaria and Saxony – as well as Prussia  while the UK has only one large state, England.  Hence, England dominates the UK naturally through her vastly larger population whereas Prussia did so by her political and military standing, the Kaiser being a Prussian. Because England is naturally dominant it will always be so. It is also insulting to the English to suggest that her Parliament or government would abuse their dominant position to the disadvantage of the other home countries.

To justify regional  assemblies in a slightly less obviously  Anglophobic way, Maclennan  introduced the EU concept of subsidiary  and trotted out the EU line of “taking decisions at the level at which they could be best implanted”.

In short, Maclennan  peddled the Balkanisation of England,  just as the last Labour government had done.

Professor Wyn Jones ( Professor of Welsh Politics, Cardiff U) The data on the English

Jones is Welsh. However, that did not prevent him providing  a good deal of useful data to knock on the head the claims of the Anglophobes that England is too diverse for Parliament for the entire country to  meet the aspirations of devolution or that the English are content with the present constitutional settlement. He drew his data primarily  from two papers he had been involved with published by Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR): The dog that finally barked  (http://www.ippr.org/publication/55/8542/the-dog-that-finally-barked-england-as-an-emerging-political-community) and  England and its two Unions. (http://www.ippr.org/publication/55/11003/england-and-its-two-unions-the-anatomy-of-a-nation-and-its-discontents).

Jones made these points from the research:

1. With exception of London, there are no significant differences by English region of the English attitude towards both seeing themselves as  English and their attitude towards the devolutional disadvantage England labours under.  In London the presence of large numbers of ethnic and racial minorities makes the attitudes towards devolution and how people see themselves in terms of their nationality less pronouncedly English.  However, this is simply a reflection of the attitude of ethnic and racial minorities throughout England where there is a strong tendency to describe themselves as British rather than English.

2.   The English are discontented with the constitutional settlement and are growing ever more so: the more English you feel, the more discontented you are.

3. There is a strong correlation between feeling you are English,  Euroscepticism and the desire for England to have a Parliament or independence.

4  IPPR research which offers the people being questioned a series of political policy areas to rank in order of importance finds the EU at number one and England’s devolution predicament at number two.

5. The English overwhelmingly do not want regional assemblies. Fewer than 1 in 15 are in favour.

6. In the IPPR research there was  a dead heat between those who want an English Parliament and those who want English votes for English laws.  This division would almost certainly vanish if the choice was put to a referendum and the matter discussed honestly in the mainstream media, in particular discussion of the  severe problems of definition when it comes to deciding what constitutes and English law. Moreover, once it became a matter of public debate with politicians and the media making the case for  a Parliament , the public would begin to ask why should England not have what the other home nations have?  However, I suspect that if a government simply announced English votes for English laws it would probably dampen English discontent in the short term.

7. English nation feeling is becoming politicised.

8. There is only a weak demand for English independence – 15% according to the IPPR research.

I take issue with the Professor on one major point.  Jones, claimed that what he called  political Englishness is a recent growth and this explains why there has been so little public dissent from the English following devolution.

The reasons I disagree are  very simple. First, there was no English politician let alone Party with substantial representation  in the Commons who would voice English anger at what has happened, while the mainstream media has been very reluctant to give the subject any space.  To that censorship can be added the gross intimidation offered both by the state in the form of ever greater legal restrictions on what may be said in public, the disgusting eagerness of the police to harass any attempt to provide public demonstrations of English national feeling, the complicity of the media who conduct hue and cries after anyone  deemed to be non-pc and large employers, particularly those in  the public sector,  who routinely sack or demote  people “convicted” of pc “crimes”.

If a public voice is denied and the power of the state used to intimidate people it is scarce to be wondered at that no public campaign for an English Parliament has  entered the political mainstream.

Eddie Bone CEP

Bone began by pointing out that 32 million people in the last census described themselves as English. He followed this by asserting that people were no longer demonised for being English. (I took issue with this strongly– see under questions from the audience).

Bone then turned his guns on the IPPR (and by implication Jones) for being behind the curve, of concentrating on what Englishness is rather than discussing the governance of England.

On the question of English independence, Bone said that the idea that there was little support as yet did not agree with his personal experience whilst working for the CEP. He believes it is a strong trend and getting stronger.

Bone dwelt on the dismal fact that there is not major British political party producing policy for England. Nor are there regional parts of the major party which are devoted to England, no English Tory Party , no English Labour Party as there have long been in Wales and Scotland.

For Bone an English  constitutional convention is wanted before the Scottish referendum on independence is held to both allow policy for England to be made and demonstrate to the Scots what independence would mean.

He described the Blair devolution settlement as stupid and lamented the fact that the cabinet papers relating to the cabinet meeting where the decision on devolution was agreed have not been made public despite FOI requests.

Bone derided regional assemblies as a tool for divide and rule and believed that piece of elite mischief at least was over and done with for ever.

Questions from the audience

The questions from the audience (not that many) centred around particular issues such as the recent sacrificing of warship building capacity in Plymouth in favour of Glasgow to curry favour with the Scots and considerable hostility to any suggestion that England should be Balkanised with regional assemblies. There was also a certain politically correct concern with whom can be considered  English following the mass post-war immigration.

Lord Stoddart,  who was there simply as a member of  audience, said that he had recently put down a question asking whether the government had any plans for an English parliament to which the answer had been a curt no.

The Lib Dem MP for North Cornwall Dan Rogerson raised the question of Cornish separatism claiming that the Cornish “are not English”.    Apart from the howling  impracticality  of Cornwall existing as a sovereign entity,  I would doubt whether more than 50% of the present population of Cornwall have been there for two generations, there having been a considerable influx of people from outside the county over the past 50 years. But even if every person living in Cornwall was born there it is difficult to see how they could be anything but English, the county having been effectively  part of the English state since the Norman Conquest and arguably before that time.

I managed to put two questions after a decent preamble:

1, Where is the evidence that the English are no longer being demonised for asserting their Englishness?

Against this idea I pointed out the  EDL’s  crawling adherence to multiculturalism had not saved them from a shameful level of harassment by the state most plausibly   because they had English in the movement’s title. When I described their treatment as  more suited to a police state than a democracy this brought sounds of approval from the audience but looks of disapproval from some of the speakers. I further pointed out that as far as the Labour Party is concerned, the fact that two of their current MPs, Gisella Stuart and Jack Straw (who both sit for English seats), had referred to English national feeling as being “dangerous”.

I ended that part of the preamble by saying that before the English could feel safe from the persecution by the state all laws which proscribed speech which was un-pc would need to be repealed and the police restrained from their current pathetically eager interference with any public political activity deemed to be un-pc.

2. In the absence of any major British party showing any interest in taking up the English question how will anything change?

I received no meaningful answer to either of these questions.

It is difficult to see how progress can be made while the major political parties are controlled by elites who are resolutely opposed to giving the English a voice and a focus for political action through an English Parliament. Ironically, the most likely instrument for change would be a vote for independence by the Scots.

The other event which could provide impetus is an EU IN/OUT referendum, if one is ever held. A vote to leave would toss British politics up in the air and force the British political elite, whether they want to or not, to concentrate on national rather than supranational issues.

Robert Henderson 22 11 2013

Wanted – Nicholas Kenyon – £1,000 Reward for Information Leading to Prosecution and Conviction for Anti-English Hate Speech. Last Night of the Proms were "dangerously English" says ex-BBC boss Sir Nicholas Kenyon

Wanted – Nicholas Kenyon – £1,000 Reward for Information Leading to Prosecution and Conviction for Anti-English Hate Speech.

Last Night of the Proms were “dangerously English” says ex-BBC boss Sir Nicholas Kenyon.

I will pay a reward. To claim the Reward report this matter to the Police and get Kenyon prosecuted and Convicted for Anti-English “Hate Speech”!
Any Police Officer who refuses to act and claims that this isn’t a Racist remark should be reported to the Police Complaints! 

Section 18 of the Public Order Act 1986 says:
“A person who uses … abusive or insulting words …. is guilty of an offence if—
…. having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby.”

Section 4A of the Public Order Act 1986 says:
“A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person ….. distress, he— (a) uses …. abusive or insulting words ….. thereby causing that or another person … distress.”

The Crown Prosecution Service has an agreement with the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) that the police will identify a file that meets the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report definition of a racist incident when they send it to the CPS to prosecute.
That definition is: 
“A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.”

So if you consider it so, it is! Insist upon your right to report it and their obligation to act on the report. You merely need to confirm that you feel that Anti-English hatred is likely to be stirred up (Sect. 18) and that you are caused distress (Sect. 4A) and that you see it as Racist.

Race is legally defined as as a “Protected Characteristic” under Section 4 of the Equality Act 2010. “Race” is used in a very wide sense of an individual’s race, colour, nationality and ethnic or national origins

 As the Daily Mail Reports:-
“It is the flag-waving finale to one of the cultural highlights of the nation’s calendar.
But according to its former director, patriotic fervour should be kept to a minimum at the Last Night of the Proms.
Sir Nicholas Kenyon, who ran the concert series for 11 years until 2007, claimed the event was ‘dangerously English’ until he brought in a host of international musicians to make it more ‘inclusive’.
The former BBC Radio 3 controller welcomed the fact this year’s concert will feature talent from overseas.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House programme yesterday: ‘The Last Night of the Proms, from being something dangerously English, has now become something totally inclusive.
‘We’ve taken it on and my successor Roger Wright has kept this going – the Proms in the Park in Hyde Park and around the country –  and this has developed absolutely marvellously. It has been a great Proms season.’
Among those performing in the finale at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday are conductor Marin Alsop and opera singer Joyce DiDonato – both American.
Sir Nicholas was responsible for booking the concert’s first American conductor, Leonard Slatkin, in 2001.
The choice drew protests, particularly after Mr Slatkin attacked one of the traditional Last Night anthems – Rule, Britannia! – as ‘militaristic’ and ‘outdated’.
But Sir Nicholas, who is now managing director of London’s Barbican centre, defended his decision to open the concert to the world, saying: ‘It’s a celebration of the best of British, but now in an international context with musicians from all over the world – just like at the Barbican, where we try and welcome as international a range of musicians, artists and performers as possible…”

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2408607/Proms-dangerously-English-says-ex-BBC-boss-Sir-Nicholas-Kenyon.html#ixzz2djqQXC78

The Archers: an everyday story of simple feminists saying “Men!” folk

Robert Henderson

The white male characters in the Archers are invariably  either louts or cringing wimps who are treated as children by the female characters.  (Ethnic minority male characters are of course exempted from this rule, being invariably middleclass and if not always models of moral decorum never pathetic).

In recent weeks the dissatisfaction   with men of the crazed feminists who control the programme has reached new levels of intensity and scope.  Everywhere in the fictional village female characters are treating their menfolk with a disdain and lack of consideration unusual by the very high standards of contempt and condescension they normally display towards them. This feminine misbehaviour is of course not misbehaviour at all in feminist eyes but female “empowerment”.

Brenda Tucker has given her long-time live in boyfriend Tom Archer the old heave-ho for  the high-octane feminist reasons that (1) she wants to follow her own career and (2) is determined not to have children.   The announcement of this opened the way for the script writers to have Tom trying to blub his way to getting her back and sundry female characters saying how understandable it was that Brenda had decided to put her own feelings and career first.

Chris Carter, who was recently in intensive care after having an accident  after  being distracted at his work by his wife  Alice being selected  for a job in Canada and expecting  him to drop his own business as a farrier to join him there on spec.  Nothing daunted in the feminist selfishness stakes,  Alice  spent weeks during his recovery still thinking about going to Canada before eventually deciding against emigrating  – for the moment.

Lillian Bellamy’s excruciating geriatric affair with the overtly ineffably wet Paul has hit a rocky patch with Paul revealing more and more of his distinctly sinister side with  possessiveness  and pettishness alternating, while Lillian continues to show no remorse about betraying her live-in partner Matt Crawford.

Darrell Makepeace and his Albanian wife are at odds over Darrell’s inability to get regular work and is even more concerned over what he is doing to bring in the money he does bring in. Darrell being white, English and working-class  is fair game for misbehaviour to be allotted to him. He arrived in the series with a prison sentence behind him and has now been plonked into a storyline which has him caught up in a dog-fighting ring which is where he is getting his money from.

Pip Archer, arguably the most irritating female character ever to hit the airwaves, is permanently in a rage with her father David for daring to expect her to help about the family farm whilst she is living there rent and board free during her time at university.

But it has not quite been all feminist abuse of men. Helen Archer,  well into her thirties and replete with child obtained through artificial insemination from an unknown donor, is dating again in the manner of a 15 year-old. Nothing disastrous has happened yet but this being Helen it will. And needless to say, she and  the other main female characters will be saying “Men!”

On the everyday story of disabled folk front, the Downs child Bethany born to Mike and Vicky Tucker when Mike is in his sixties and she in her forties, is now greeted with cries of joy by every Archers’ character. This week the “normalisation of disability” in Ambridge took another step forward with the local WI putting on a talk given by a mother and her adult age Downs son. The event  was of course  greeted with universal praise.

Finally, the introduction of the Muslim character Iftikar Khan into the Archers core family  has been at least temporarily delayed. An attempted kiss and embrace between the chatelaine of lower Loxley Elizabeth  Pargetter and Khan resulted in a rebuff, gentle of course, from Elizabeth,  on the grounds that  she was “Not quite ready for a relationship”. But diversity lovers should not fear. It is only a matter of time before they are an item.  Indeed, the white, English  characters  are already preparing the ground . When gossip about a romance was developing between Khan and Elizabeth, a number of them talked about it without batting an eyelid at the prospect of a Muslim ending up as the squire of an English country estate with doubtless the patter of tiny feet of  a Mohammed or Fatima or both echoing in the ancient Lower Loxley halls.  Will Elizabeth have to convert to Islam is the big question.

Truly amazing what the BBC thinks goes on in an English farming village.

BBC Anglophobe anti-white propaganda: The liberty of Norton Folgate

Robert Henderson

The Saturday play on Radio 4 The liberty of Norton Folgate  (9 February)  was an unashamed piece of racism, the racism being directed at the native English. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qgr4f).

The play was set in the East End of London. Norton Folgate is a street connecting Bishopsgate with Shoreditch High Street.  The  playwright Mark Davies Markham hung the play on the skeleton of the British pop group Madness’  album of the same name.

Madness wrote their album after a building which the locals prized was in danger of being demolished.  This was eventually prevented after it was discovered that Norton Folgate was a liberty, an archaic free status which put it outside the jurisdiction of the local authority.   Hence the title The liberty of Norton Folgate.

The Madness album concentrated on the racial and ethnic diversity of the area both past and present. Davies Markham took this general theme and made it his with knobs on.  In the play the building threatened with demolition becomes the Union café, its proprietors Asian and the wicked developer who wants to demolish the building is (natch) white and English.  Davies Markham’s  intention are clear from a blog he wrote for the BBC:

“The Union café is threatened to be demolished. The livelihood of Bangladeshi owners, Gazi and Sitara, is under threat. They fear for the identity of the community. This family make a stand for preserving British culture. The right for all their customers to a full English breakfast.  “ (http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcmusic/posts/The-Liberty-of-Norton-Folgate-A-drama)

You get the idea: the Asians are the true Britons: the English are not.

The Asian characters are constantly promoted positively (with the subtext that they are the real British patriots now) while the white  English characters (interestingly there was no non-white character represented as English) with the exception of Jess,  the white daughter of Ralph Burke, the evil property developer and leader of the New England Party,  were caricatures of what the liberal left fondly but mistakenly imagine are the only English people who resist immigration and its effects, namely, Neo-Nazis.  Jess is in a relationship with an Asian (natch) and just to put a cherry on the cake of Asian good, English bad scenario,  the wife of Ralph ran away with an Asian.

This was a deliberate denigration of theEnglish. It  was also unabashed politically correct, pro-immigrant propaganda. How does  all this  fit with the BBC legal requirement to attempt balance and remain within the law of  incitement to racial hatred?  You tell me.

When shall we see  BBC productions which honestly address the plight of the native English population,   especially that of the working class, a plight which engineered by the white liberal elites through their encouragement  and permitting of mass immigration? How about a topical drama which takes as its subject the Muslim gangs roaming places such as the area in which Norton Folgate was set with the intent to intimidate and assault non-Muslims? Now that would be realistic.

The Archers – an everyday story of simple ever more politically correct folk

Robert Henderson

Listeners to the Archers have long remarked at the miraculous retention of an Irish accent by the bastard son of  Brian Aldridge and Siobhan Hathaway Ruairi Donovan after arriving in England at the age of 5 and living there ever since. He  has suddenly re-appeared speaking  a form of RP.  A very rare example of reality intruding into the modern Archers.

Elsewhere  the serial  has continued to be the story of ever more politically correct folk. The inhabitants of this village supposedly  set in the heart England  continue to be treated to more and more of the joy of diversity as the Ambridge demographic increasingly  resembles that of England’s  inner-cities.   The village cricket team is being coached by  Iftikar Shah,  who is of God-like visage and physique (natch)  and immediately captivates all the women and the two gays in the village who spend time swooning at the mere thought of him.  In addition the black ex-boyfriend of “dual heritage” Amy, the vicar’s daughter, is due to return at some point with a story which gains him redemption from his stereotype feckless black male situation at present.

The Albanian care worker Elona who is married to the English Darryl Makepeace. Darryl is a chippie who was “led astray” by bad influences who persuaded  him to steal  from his employer resulting in a jail sentence for receiving. He has been employed by the dodgy Matt Crawford (another disreputable English character with a prison record) who wants to pay him “off the books”. Sidesplittingly,  Elona,  insists he is placed under PAYE . A  storyline  using the same basic characters which would have been connected with  reality would be Elona having the criminal record and urging Darren to remain “off the books” so no tax was paid and benefits could be safely falsely claimed at the same time.

There are English additions to the cast, but unlike the pc approved characters, they are a white “problem family” of the type beloved of the British political class and the Daily Mail. An extra brood of Horrobins has arrived, living off benefits, coming from broken relationships and, horror of horrors, smoking.  One of the Horrobins, Tracy, is relentlessly pursuing Iftikah and another is charged with having set fire to the Brookfield barn in an arson attack to try to frighten David Archer out  of giving evidence in a criminal case involving a serious attack on his cousin Adam.   The only new  white character  who is not presented as a blot on the landscape is Rhys the barman who is Welsh .

But the biggest laugh for watchers of political correctness has come from the desire of Jamie Perk’s girlfriend to play cricket more than anything else in the world. This improbable female ambition  has resulted in the Ambridge youth team playing a local girl’s school team and losing (natch).

Gay storylines have begun to overwhelm the  programme.  Ambridge’s civil partnership couple Adam and Ian have reached a crisis in what they unblinkingly refer to as “our marriage”  , with the terminally self-regarding  Adam  threatening to move away from Ambridge after quarrelling with his step-father Brian Aldridge over how the farm is run.  After a quarrel Adam leaves the house and has what turns out to be a one-night gay stand with Pawel, one of his Polish seasonal pickers, a one-might stand  Adam regrets the next day . As things stand Pawel is hanging around like a bad smell with Adam terrified that he may spill the beans about their one-night stand.

But that is not the end of Ambridge’s politically correct  sexual liberation.  Harry, a young middleclass Englishman is a graduate who has somehow ended up as a milkman working for Mike Tucker,   heads off in a camper van for a few days at  the Edinburgh Fringe.  With him go Fallon, the daughter of the landlady of the Bull, his Scottish flatmate Jazzer and Kirsty  the barmaid from  Jaxx’s Bar.   Fallon is desperately hoping that she will be able to start a relationship with Harry during the trip.

Going through the Lake District the van breaks down and Harry takes them to the house of an old university  friend of his  named Karl  whom he has not seen for years. During the course of  the evening and the following night Harry is outed as having had a homosexual relationship with Karl before they broke because Harry is, guess what, bisexual,  while Karl is  simply homosexual and resented  Harry’s female friends.  (I am not making this up, honest!).    The four would-be  Edinburgh Fringers get into the van and begin driving off before Harry suddenly stops the van and announces that he is staying with Karl. He gives Fallon a note for Mike Tucker saying he will not returning.

The result of all these exciting new storylines is a loss of 400,000 listeners in short order as regular Archers turn off in disgust and dismay.  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/bbc/9445689/Archers-loses-400000-listeners-amid-controversy-over-sexed-up-storylines.html).

A Machiavellian explanation for this bizarre behaviour would be that the BBC is trying to surreptitiously destroy the programme.  In a way I wish I could believe that because it would at least be a rational act. Sadly, I think the producer of the Archers is doping this in the belief that if the Archers becomes a model of the politically correct fantasy world dreamt of by liberals it will become, in the favourite liberal word, relevant and much more successful.

What next? Well, here a  few  storylines  to fit the new Archers’ template which  the writers could tuck into:

– Peggy Archer outs herself as a lesbian who is hankering after the Albanian help Elona.

– Jack Woolley is revealed as Nazi war criminal Jakob Wolter,  a death camp guard at Belson  who  escaped to Britain at the end of the war and settled in Birmingham under an alias.

– The wicked  agribusiness fiend Brian Aldridge  is convicted  for the possession of  child pornography, loses everything and the Borchester Land mega-dairy plan dissolves into nothing.. Jennifer has to become a charwoman to stave off starvation.

– The beast of Ambridge turns out to be an alien from outer space intent on abducting  human specimens for  dissection.  Caroline and Oliver, the only  remaining  genuine  toffs  mysteriously  disappear.

– Helen Archer is found to be an android created by the aliens to study the local life. The android  was introduced to Ambridge  decades ago when it  was substituted for the newly born Helen.

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

Robert Henderson

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

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

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

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

Multiculturalist from the word go

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danny Boyle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A political opening ceremony

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

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

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

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

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

No irony intended

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

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

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

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

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

The relentless political correctness

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

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

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

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

The British media and politicians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The blind alley of Britishness

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

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

An appropriate show

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

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

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

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

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

What does the opening ceremony tell us?

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

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

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

Robert Henderson

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

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

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

And of the nations that comprise it.

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

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

We must be in the future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This does not make sense.

You can be proudly Scottish and British.

And you can be proudly English and British.

As I am.

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

Something was holding us back from celebrating England too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anti-Scottish.

Hostile to outsiders.

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

Fearful what is beyond our borders.

Convinced our best days behind us.

I don’t think like that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

This is the reality of modern day Britain.”

What I remember when I think about English identity.

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

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

Or that we’re necessarily the best.

Celebrating our differences but drawing us together.

Remembering our history.

But building a shared future.

Honouring our people.

And learning from their stories.

This is what I have learned from my own story.

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

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

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

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

I am proud to lead the Labour Party.

I am proud to be Jewish.

I am proud to be English.

And I am proud to be British too. “

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

“Neither my Mum nor my Dad came from Britain.

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

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

He was a Jew.”

And

“This is who I am.

The son of a Jewish refugee and Marxist academic.”

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

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

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

“We must always debate the right approach on immigration.

And never run away from the issues it throws up.

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

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

A common good.

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

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

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

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

Because that recognises the dignity of work.

It’s an idea that came from working people.

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

An economy that works for working people.

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

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

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

A politics that starts with people.

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

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

The denial of an English Parliament

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that is about the centralisation of power in London.

This resentment is felt in many parts of England.

A sense that our politics is too distant.

Too detached.”

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

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

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

The Lion and the Unicorn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Britishness is dead letter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Henderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liberals in a multicultural denialfest

Robert Henderson

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

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

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

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

The tactics of liberal denial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the report actually says is this:

“Ethnicity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The crimes were objectively racist

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

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

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

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

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

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

“January 11, 2011

Poush Shukla Saptami, Kaliyug Varsha 5112

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The nature of Islam

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

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

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

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

2.  Explicitly saying women are subordinate to men:

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

3. Sanctioning the corporal punishment of wives by husbands:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How ideologies fail   

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

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

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

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

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

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

The English white working-class and the British elite – From the salt of the earth to the scum of the earth

Robert Henderson

1. How it used to be 

Thirty years ago the Labour Party primary client base was the white working-class, while the Tories still had remnants of the heightened sense of social responsibility towards the poor created by two world wars. Fast forward to 2006 and the white working-class are treated by the entire British political elite as a dangerous, almost subhuman species.

The mixture of contempt, fear and hatred which the white working-class now draws from the political class is echoed by the elite generally, indeed by not just the elite but the middleclass as a whole. Where once the white working-class were next to uninsultable publicly, sneering references to “chavs” and “chav culture” are now commonplace in the mainstream media where they pass with barely a critical public word, while ethnic minorities seemingly have licence to publicly  insult the white working-class with impunity, vide the Coronation Street episode in January 2006 where a male Asian character accused his sister of behaving like “poor white trash”.

What caused this immense change in the status of the white  working-class? There were three direct primary engines of change. The first was the success of Thatcher and her ideology, the second a critical point was reached in post war mass immigration, the third Britain’s membership of the EU and other restrictive treaties which tainted her sovereignty.

2. Globalism and laissez faire economics

When Margaret Thatcher became Tory Leader in 1975 the neo-paternalist stance the party had adopted since the smashing Labour victory of 1945 was changed to one of laissez faire non-interventionism, with its an inherent disdain for public provision and service. Thatcher threw away the protectionism which had sustained the white working-class, allowed much of British industry, especially heavy industry, to go to the wall, and privatised the nationalised industries. Unemployment, already at a post-war high at the end of the Callaghan government, rose dramatically to around 3 million. The unions were then weak enough to successfully attack with severe legal restraints on strikes and a ban on secondary picketing.

Unemployment has remained high since the early 1980s – the current official employment figures are bad enough taken at face value (around 2.7m by the international Labour survey method) – but in reality it is probably considerably higher – there are 2-3 million on long term sick benefit now compared with around 600,000 in the early 1980s  ago. Common-sense says the country cannot in 2012 have four or five times the number of seriously incapacitated people it had 30-odd  years ago. This high unemployment has kept the white  working-class largely quiescent and the unions emasculated.

Thatcher also threw away the post-war consensus that the white working-class was admirable, or at least deserving of special consideration because of their disadvantaged social circumstances. Thatcherite Tories were only interested in the working-class insofar as its members were willing to buy into the narrow aspirational template which Thatcher promoted. If you were working-class and wanted to buy your council flat and were happy to gobble up the shares of privatised national industries, the Tories approved of you; if you wanted to maintain traditional working-class employments and communities, you were a soldier in the ranks of the enemy.

Labour did not immediately cast off the white working-class as clients. That took 18 years of opposition. Through four election defeats Labour gradually jettisoned all that they stood for in their cynical quest for a way back to power. The end result was a supposedly Labour Government headed by Blair which became, quite bizarrely, even more fanatically committed to “free markets” and “free trade” than the Tories.

3. Immigration reaching a critical level

By 1979 immigration had swollen the population of blacks and Asians in Britain to a point where their numbers were significant enough to pose a serious threat to British society if racial conflict got out of hand.

Until the end of the 1970s the official line on immigrants from all the mainstream parties was they must assimilate. Towards the end of the decade it was obvious to even the most fervent advocate of integration that assimilation was not happening. Rather, large populations of various ethnicities were stubbornly continuing to form ghettoes in the major British towns and cities and were attempting to lives which as far as possible replicated those of their ancestral countries.

To avoid having to admit what a disaster immigration had been, the British liberal left adopted an ideology to fit the facts of what was happening. That ideology was multiculturalism, a creed which rested on the fantasy that a coherent society could be produced by allowing every ethnic group in Britain to retain its separate identity. Indeed, the multiculturalists did more than say we should allow such a development, they positively encouraged ethnic minorities to remain separate. The kindest interpretation of their behaviour is that these were people enthusiastically pouring paraffin onto a fire in an attempt to put it out.

But the multiculturalists were faced by a most awkward fact. The white working-class was and always had been resolutely opposed to mass post-war immigration. Not only that but they were willing to say so publicly – the dockers had marched with Enoch Powell. Therefore, the liberal left had to do two things to prevent the white working-class from expressing their discontent both with the immigration which had occurred and with the new policy of multiculturalism , in which the native British culture was to have no privileged place but was to be merely one amongst many competing cultures. Worse, in practice the  native culture (or cultures if you prefer) was not even to be  allowed to compete because to do so would be to give the native population a public voice and a focus for their discontent.

The Labour Party at the parliamentary level was generally willing to espouse the new ideology uncritically because it fitted with their internationalist rhetoric. It also helped that the immigrants overwhelmingly voted Labour and were neatly consolidated in ghettos in the larger towns and cities where their votes were likely to elect Labour candidates more often than not.

Of course there was the seemingly ticklish problem for the multiculturalists of Labour being out of power for 18 years. In practice it did not matter, for it was not only the overt liberal left who embraced multiculturalism. Whatever their rhetoric, in practice,

the Tories climbed on the multiculturalist bandwagon quickly enough. Thatcher had spoken not long before being elected in 1979 of Britain being “swamped” by immigrants. But once in office she did nothing and the position continued to worsen, not least because she signed the Single European Act in 1985 which granted any person legally resident in another EU state the right to work in Britain. And of course throughout the 18 years of Tory office, people with the “right” multiculturalist views controlled the media, academia and increasingly the civil service. They were always on hand, both behind the scenes and publicly, to ensure the Tory Government did not actually do anything to disturb the multiculturalist programme.

Worse was to follow. In opposition the Tories followed the course of the Labour Party. Three election defeats in a row persuaded them elect as leader David Cameron, a man who adopted the same strategy for the Tories as Blair had pursued when he dumped everything Labour stood for. Cameron quickly got rid of everything which was considered “Old Tory” . This included wholeheartedly embracing multiculturalism. The electoral circle on immigration was formally closed. There is no major party to vote for if you do not want further mass immigration.

The silencing of the white working-class voice on immigration was achieved by a number of means over the past quarter century. Most potent was the mixture of legal threats such as the various Race Relations Acts and associated legislation such as the Public Order Act of 1986 and  the religious exclusion of anti-immigration views from the mainstream media. British culture was gradually relegated to a less prominent place in schools. Pupils were taught, if they were taught anything about the past, of white wickedness. The Atlantic slave trade was represented as the greatest crime of history, the British Empire nothing more than a cruel invasion and subjugation of defenceless peoples. Any sign of publicly expressed native English pride was jumped on from everyone from politicians to teachers and denounced as xenophobia at best and racism as worst.

It did not take long for anyone who was not a supporter of multiculturalism to be beyond the liberal elite Pale. By 2006 multiculturalism had been formally embedded into public life through a mixture of ideological sharing amongst the elite and their auxiliaries and the law, most notably in recent years by the Race Relations (Amendment Act) of 2000 which effectively places an obligation on all employers who receive public funding to demonstrate that they are not being discriminatory.

The contemptuous mentality of those who currently permit and advocate mass immigration to Britain is epitomised by a speech in 2006 to business leaders by the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King:

“If the increased demand for labour generates its own supply in the form of migrant labour then the link between demand and prices is broken. Indeed, in an economy that can call on unlimited supplies of migrant labour, the concept of output gap becomes meaningless….The UK is not in that extreme position, but the inflow of migrant labour, especially in the past year or so from Eastern Europe, has probably lead to diminution of inflationary pressure in the labour market,relative to previous experience.

“The Home Office estimates that around 120,000 workers entered the UK from the new member countries of the European Union between March 2004 and March 2005. Without this influx to fill the skills gap in a tight labour market, it is likely earnings would have risen at a faster rate, putting pressure on employers, and, ultimately, inflation”.’ Daily Telegraph 14 6 2006.

There you have the elite view of the day: human beings are to be treated purely as factor of production along with land and capital. No greater contempt for the masses, including the white working-class, can be held.

4. The EU and other treaties

Whatever their public words, both the Tory and Labour parties were generally nationalist in their behaviour until well after the second world war. Traditional Tories were nationalists by conviction, while even the Labour left were in practice protective of the nation state because they strongly opposed the importation of cheap goods and cheap labour. British membership of the EU (then the EEC) from 1973 onwards changed the rules of the game for both parties.

The Treaty of Rome made Britain generally subordinate to a foreign authority. It was not like a normal treaty such as that of NATO which is formed simply for a particular limited purpose and which can be ended or withdrawn from cleanly. The Treaty of Rome was a full blown political project with the specific aim of creating a supranational political entity. Even when Britain joined, the EU’s powers to interfere with British political decisions were substantial, although nothing like as extensive as they are in 2012. It simply was not possible to be a wholehearted nationalist any more. That undermined traditional Toryism and paved the way for Thatcherism, which was predicated on the individual rather than the community.

For the Labour Party learning to love the EU took a long time. Their 1983 manifesto advocated withdrawing because the EU was viewed as a capitalist club. But as the Party painfully lurched towards accepting the globalist market-led creed, there came the realisation on the left that both globalism generally and membership of the EU were wonderful promoters of internationalism. They did not deliver the internationalism which the left had traditionally sought, all brotherly love and material sharing, but they accomplished a central part of the internationalist dream, the destruction of nations. This realisation, together with the fear they would never hold power again drove Labour away from their practical nationalism.

As the years passed the entire political class also discovered general benefits from globalism and EU membership. Being in international clubs such as the EU and the WTO effectively destroyed democratic accountability. Any policy relevant to a treaty could be pushed through with the excuse that Britain was legally bound by treaty to do this. Membership of the EU in particular ensured that the excuse could be used over vast swathes of policy. This loss of democratic accountability removed the last vestiges of white working-class power because there was no mainstream Party with a chance of forming a government to speak or act for them. The white working-class might as well have stopped voting then for all the good it now did them.

5.Devolution and demonising the English

Up to 1997 the white working-class in the UK as a whole suffered much the same decline in prestige and strength. Blair’s victory in that year altered matters fundamentally. Primarily for the self-serving political reason that Labour normally depends heavily on Scots and Welsh MPs to achieve a working majority in the Commons, the Party adopted a policy of devolution for Scotland and Wales. (Northern Ireland was also brought into the devolution mix but for other reasons). It was one of the first major pieces of NuLabour manifesto-promised legislation to be enacted.

Devolution created a ticklish problem. How could it be that England, where more than 80% of the population of the UK resided and where even more than 80% of the UK’s GDP was generated, should have no national representation? Why did England not deserve its own political voice if Wales and Scotland and even tiny Northern Ireland did? Because there was no reasonable answer to that question Labour (and the liberal left generally) invented unreasonable ones: England was too big, there was no such thing as Englishness, the English had no desire for a parliament, such a parliament would only mean more politicians and expense and, most tellingly, the English could not be trusted with nationalism, a claim best translated as “The ruling liberal elite are determined at all costs to prevent the English having a voice because if they do they will look after their own interests which are currently being outrageously neglected”.

When I say ruling liberal elite I am of course including the entire political elite. A prime example of the cross-party agreement on the “dangers” of English nationalism came in a BBC Radio 4 programme Brits which went out on 10 January 2000. The then Home Secretary Jack Straw and the Tory leader of the moment William Hague appeared. This is what they said:

Straw: “[the English] are potentially very aggressive, very violent [and had in the past] used their propensity for violence to subjugate Ireland, Wales and Scotland”.

Hague:” English nationalism is the most dangerous form of nationalism that can arise in the United Kingdom, because England is four-fifths of the population of the UK…Once part of a united country or kingdom that is so predominant in size becomes nationalistic, then really the whole thing is under threat…”

The unresolved question of English devolution within an otherwise devolved UK led to a shift by politicians from the denigration of the white working-class generally to denigration of the English in general and the English white working-class in particular, the latter being commonly portrayed by politicians and the media as brutish people with the unspoken subtext “they cannot be trusted with power”. As most of the British white working-class are English, the white working-class were further marginalised.

Devolution also had a direct material effect on England and in particular the English poor. The amount spent per head on public services has for a long time grossly disadvantaged the English, viz:

According to official figures from the Treasury, 2010/11 projected average UK government spending per person was £10,212 in Scotland, compared to just £8,588 in England. Spending was also higher in Wales (£9,829) and Northern Ireland (£10,706). (http://tinyurl.com/cxmgwly)

The rate of increase of the per capita payments accelerated after devolution and consequently weakened public provision in England compared with the rest of the UK . That diminution of provision has struck most profoundly at the English white working-class.

6.The ethnic minority problem

Where do ethnic minorities stand in a devolved UK? German-born Labour MP Gisela Stuart writing in online magazine openDemocracy.net in December  005 described the problem, whilst also gaily insulting the English: “It  as only been in the last five years or so that I have heard people in my constituency telling me ‘I am not British – I am English’. That worries me.

“British identity is based on and anchored in its political and legal institutions and this enables it to take in new entrants more easily than it would be if being a member of a nation were to be defined by blood.

“But a democratic polity will only work if citizens’ identification is with the community as a whole, or at least with the shared process, which overrides their loyalty to a segment.” (Quoted in Birmingham Mail 18 11 2005)

The problem for people such as Ms Stuart is that Britishness was destroyed by devolution. There is no longer a comfortable overarching label of British under which everyone can be placed. All that is left for the people of Britain to cling to are emotional ethnicities.

The situation is most acute in England because that is where the majority of ethnic minorities in the UK live. There is hard evidence that ethnic minorities in England routinely do not think of themselves as English. In 2005, the CRE commissioned from the research firm Ethnos a poll designed to discover how Britons identify themselves (http://www.cre.gov.uk/downloads/what_is_britishness.pdf). A couple of passages are particularly telling:

“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”.

This tells us two things: ethnic minorities in England routinely reject the idea of Englishness and ethnic minorities everywhere in the UK have no identification with Britain’s past. So much for Britishness.

 7. Balkanising England

Recognising the danger that English nationalism represented to Labour’s domestic political hopes (and quite possibly to the EU’s wish to divide the UK into a series of regions), the Blair government attempted to create a political structure which would make an English Parliament next to impossible. Their method was to Balkanise the country through the creation of regional assemblies (the artificial regions chosen just happened to fit the regions into which the EU bureaucrats have decided England should be divided). But this plan fell over, at least for the foreseeable future, when a referendum to set up an assembly in the least artificial of the regions, the North-East, was humiliating by an overwhelming NO vote.

 8. The gradual demoralisation of the white working class

If laissez faire economics, immigration reaching a critical level and international treaties were the immediate reasons why the white  working-class has fallen so far from favour, the ground for their realisation was prepared during the thirty-five years which followed the Labour victory of 1945.

It is important not to be sentimental about the white working-class before their desertion by the British political class. Britain was far from being a peaceful society. Industrial relations were seriously fraught from the Eighteenth century onwards, long before nationalisation and the modern welfare state. Much crime went unreported because working class communities refused to report it. Vicious fights regularly took place in places such as the docks and the mines. There was considerable football hooliganism. Until the Irish Free State was founded, Irish nationalism was a constant  running sore. Violent criminal gangs controlled places such as the Elephant and Castle and Brighton.

British education until after the second world war (and the Butler Act’s implementation) was seriously flawed, with most children leaving school at 14 having received no more than a primary education – only those who committed themselves to staying until 16 received  secondary education. The general standard of education was not high,  although, unlike now, the members of the political elite were frequently well educated.

There was also a great deal of abject poverty right up to 1939 with many working people living from wage packet to wage packet, often  with the aid of a weekly trip to the local pawnbroker. There was only a rudimentary welfare state and to fall ill if you were poor was to place yourself at the mercy of the charity of others.

Despite these shortcomings, at the outbreak of the second world war working class society was much more coherent and secure than it is today. Most important was the fact that mainland Britain was racially and ethnically a very homogeneous society, even the ancestral  cultural divisions between the English, Scots and Welsh were largely shadings within a single cultural spectrum rather than violently competing ethnicities. Across the water Ireland was a problem, but even there the divisions were political and religious rather than matters of  profound ethnic difference. Such serious ethnic tension as there was resulted from the influx of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, but even there the persistent failure of Mosley’s Blackshirts to gain electoral support in the midst of the Depression tells its own story: vehement anti-semitism was not a widespread problem.

The homogeneity of Britain generated a sense of security because the mainland British at least did not have the distraction of chronic and serious ethnic strife. That sense of security was bolstered by the fact that each of the four home nations had their own territory which they dominated in terms of occupation of the land even if they did not formally control their territory. The white working-class generally did not feel threatened by people whom they felt had no place in Britain. Most felt, whatever their personal troubles, that at least they were secure in their own land.

Added to, and arguably arising from, this marvellous ethnic and territorial security were potent and well established social support mechanisms of the working class, viz:

1. Unions, including their large welfare role.

2. Co-Operative Societies – Harrods for the working class.

3. Friendly societies.

4. Homogeneous working-class communities which mutually  supported their members.

5. Large scale manual employment for the working class.

That was the position at the end of WW2, and for a considerable time after 1945 the condition of the white working-class actually improved as a full blown welfare state, rising wages and very low employment significantly increased their security and advantage.

The 1944 Butler Education Act gave all British children the chance to go to a grammar school and even those who did not gain a grammar school place got an extra year of schooling, schooling which went beyond the primary level. It was a far from perfect educational system but it was a considerable improvement on what had gone before. Most importantly, for the first time it gave large numbers of white  working-class children the chance of a first rate education and, for a significant minority, the chance to go to university.

Unions remained strong and both major political parties were committed to maintaining by protectionist measures the British economy, a fair slice of which was in any case nationalised. The white working-class were both the electoral bedrock of the Labour Party and courted by a Tory Party which realised it had to abide by the Attlee Government’s social reforms if it was to be elected (in the mid-fifties one of the proudest boasts of the Tory Government was that they had built 300,000 council houses in a year).

To this growing advantage was gradually added a de facto censorship of criticism of the white working-class. Throughout the period 1945 to 1975 there developed a pernicious habit amongst the British elite whereby public criticism of the white working-class became unacceptable in much the same way that over the past thirty years ethnic minorities have ceased to be publicly criticised.

Like any powerful class which is exempted from criticism the white  working-class abused their position, or perhaps more correctly, allowed their elected representatives whether in politics or unions, to lead them into abusive ways. The unions were all too ready to call strikes, strikes which when they affected the nationalised industries had the power to cripple British life.

The unions had become too powerful and it was their extreme propensity for “industrial action” – strikes, working-to-rule, demarcation disputes and violent picketing – which began to break down the public silence over white working-class abuses. Gradually it became acceptable for politicians and the media to criticise the white  working-class. They needed little prompting because politicians of all colours and mediafolk were more often than not were middleclass, and the middleclass had very little natural empathy with the white  working-class, just as today politicians and the media have no natural empathy with the ethnic minorities who are their current client class.

By 1970 the white working-class was outwardly as secure as a class as they had ever been and would be again. But even at the seeming height of their class advantage they were weaker than they once had been, naturally weaker than ever before in fact because sociological rats  had been gnawing away at their natural cohesion since 1945.

The mass post-war immigration began in the late 40s but it was not a major problem for the white working-class until the 1960s. More immediately damaging were the slum clearances which dominated the twenty five years after the War. These destroyed many working class communities by the simple expedient of dividing them up  between different housing estates. The working class were still living together but they were no longer the tightly knit coherent communities which had existed for generations. Instead it was strangers living together and living together not in housing which allowed an easy social life to develop, but more often than not in high rise buildings which destroyed social intimacy.

Ironically the new welfare state damaged the white working-class because it weakened the informal traditional social supports deriving from a well established community (help from friends and extended family) and led to the decline of formal supports such as friendly societies and the co-operative movement.

9. Education subverted

In the 1960s came the disaster of comprehensive schools and progressive educational theory. Comprehensivisation took away the ladder by which the bright white working-class child progressed, the grammar schools. The secondary modern -technical school- grammar school established by the Butler Act was far from perfect because it left large numbers of children labelled as educational failures, but that which replaced it was far worse a system. Most comprehensives simply did not have the resources or the will to provide a grammar school level education for their brightest pupils.

Progressive educational theory caused a general diminution in educational standards through a combination of its “discovery” method of learning, ie, do not actually teach them anything, and a self-denying ordinance which forbade any criticism of a child’s work. Stir in the lunacy of producing school exams to be taken by children of all ability (GCSE) and the incontinent expansion of higher education from the late 1980s onwards, season with the quasi-commercialisation  of schools and universities through money following the pupil or student, top with school examination boards becoming overtly commercial, and you have the recipe for the mess which is modern British education, where exam grades rise inexorably while performance moves just as remorselessly in the opposite direction.

The percentage of working-class children at university is actually lower in 2012 than it was forty years ago. Of course the numbers of children in higher education has expanded massively since the mid-sixties and in absolute numbers far more white working-class pupils go on to university in 2006 than 1966. But it counts for nothing. If more white working-class pupils may have GCSEs, A Levels and degrees now, the standard of the education they receive to gain such qualifications is so degraded from what it was forty years ago that the qualifications are next to worthless as guides to employers of a person’s ability and the education received while taking them fails to equip students for the world of work even at the basic level of literacy and numeracy.

Had the major sources of traditional white working-class employment not been largely destroyed in the 1980s and 1990s, comprehensive education would not be so dire in its consequences for the white working class, because they would still have been employed in secure jobs which do not require much education. Instead, millions  are trapped in unemployment (admitted unemployment or disguised as ill, retired early or attending worthless courses in higher education) or in insecure and ill-paid jobs, stranded without the education to find decent, well-paid work.

Any society also has to take into account the fact that any population contains many people who are naturally poorly equipped to do anything other than unskilled jobs. Ten per cent of the British population has an IQ of 80 or less. An IQ of 80 is the level at which psychologists generally agree someone begins to struggle to cope with the demands of an advanced society such as Britain. Such people require jobs they can do. Immigrants take those jobs and depress wages. The white working-class are being left with less and less.

With their traditional employments largely destroyed, subject to a state educational system which leaves them ill-equipped for any job other than the unskilled, beset by cheap immigrant labour competing  for unskilled jobs and crippled by the cost of housing, the white  working-class are ever more dependent on public provision. That provision is becoming increasingly uncertain as immigrant demand for social provision multiplies, public spending soars to dangerous heights and Blair’s mania for introducing private money and companies into public provision runs riot.

What were once the public utilities – gas, electricity, water, the railways – are becoming dearer and dearer despite providing an increasingly poor service through a lack of investment in maintenance and the shedding of jobs (the government cannot do anything to subsidise utility prices because of our membership of the EU). The poorer you are the larger part of your income is taken by these vital products and services.

Benefits and the state pension are linked to the Retail Price Index (RPI) but this understates inflation substantially, primarily because the cost of housing, i.e. what it costs to buy a property, is not included (only average mortgage repayment costs and rents are). This understatement of inflation means that benefits and the state pension are gradually losing their value in real terms.

There are also many people for whom the basket of goods and services is unrepresentative. For example, 14% of the index is devoted to motoring expenses which means that the RPI figure is barely relevant to non-car owners. RPI also excludes from its spending pattern such inconvenient people as OAPs surviving on the state pension because they are not “typical”. Generally, the poorer you are, the less representative of your spending RPI will be.

Wages are also affected by official inflation figures because they are used as a benchmark for both public service and private industry wage increases. I say inflation figures because more than one index is used. The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) is the index used these days to give the headline rate of inflation. This is even less accurate a guide to the true rate of inflation than RPI because it excludes housing costs altogether. Where this figure is used to guide wage increases the real value of the wage decreases even more rapidly in real terms than benefits and the state pension.

Then there is taxation. The poorest people in work in the population pay by far – in direct and indirect taxes combined – the highest proportion of their income in tax of any part of the population.

10. How could the present position be remedied?

Britain needs to do four things. (1) withdraw from the EU and  repudiate any other Treaty which prevents the country exercising her sovereignty over immigration and her economy. (2) Recognise that public provision is generally best supplied by the state directly providing it. (3) Substitute for the globalist ideology an unaggressive nationalist one which steers a middle course between protectionism and manic free trade and which clearly distinguishes between the status of  citizens and foreigners. (4) End mass immigration.

The first two are essentially acts of domestic political will. Withdrawing from the EU and treaties such as the UN Convention on Refugees would doubtless cause a great deal of political huffing and puffing but would be unlikely to produce any profound ill-effects because the EU would still wish to trade with Britain and the UN is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Public services – by which I mean genuine public services such as the NHS and prisons – are essentially a domestic matter and should concern no one outside this country.

The last two are more problematic. Adopting an unaggressive nationalism and clearly distinguishing between the status of citizens and foreigners would be no difficulty in practice because those are decisions which have little practical effect on other nations, but what of our trading treaty relationships, especially our membership of  the World Trade Organisation? If we remained within the WTO would that make a middle course between protectionism and free trade impossible?

The WTO in practice permits many protectionist measures – readers will recollect how the USA suddenly slapped tariffs on foreign steel a year or so back. There is a good deal of wriggle room which Britain could use to protect her domestic economy. For example, if another WTO member is doing something protectionist and getting away with it, and many are, then the WTO will scarcely be able to penalise Britain. If the worst comes to the worst and we had to leave the WTO, bilateral agreements with other countries could be made – Britain has too large an economy for other states en bloc to forgo the opportunity for trade.

11. The end of mass immigration

That leaves mass immigration which I shall deal with in some detail because it is the most dangerous threat to the welfare of both the white working-class and the native British population as a whole. The stopping of further mass immigration alone would do more for the white working-class than any other single action by government. It would tighten the labour market and improve their employment opportunities. That in turn would improve their status. The pressure on public services, transport and housing would be lessened making access to them cheaper and easier for the white working-class. More generally, the moral climate would change because the ending of mass immigration would signal that there is a clear distinction between the rights of British citizens and the rights of foreigners.

With control resumed over our borders through withdrawal from the EU and the repudiation of other treaties, there would be in principle no problem with stopping further mass immigration. But what about the economic effects? The liberal internationalists tell us that the woes of the world would come upon us should we do such a thing,  although, like Lear threatening retribution, (“I shall do such things ….I know not what they are”) they are strangely unable to quite  say what the woes will be.  If reality, there would simply be a manageable period of economic and social reconstruction.

The immediate economic effect would be  a redistribution of labour. Labour would move into those occupations which are essential and which cannot be provided at a distance, for  example  healthcare  and education. We would discover how  occupations rank in terms of utility. Wages would rise in those occupations which had most utility to attract staff from elsewhere.

Employers would respond to labour tightening by using labour more efficiently. Automation would increase and employers would  change their attitude to the older person and the disabled.

Both employers and government would take vocational training more seriously. Government would provide incentives to employers to train their staff and increase the training of public service  professionals such as doctors and dentists. Government would also be forced to tackle the mess which is our public education to ensure an adequately educated workforce.

Employers who could not find the labour to run their business in this country would have to accept they could not do so. No one has a right to engage in an enterprise regardless of the effects on the welfare of the community as a whole. Capital which cannot be used in this country can be invested abroad.

12. Would there be an unmanageable labour shortage?

The idea that Britain is short of labour for most purposes is demonstrably absurd. The official figure for those under the state retirement age who are economically inactive in the UK is 7 million. Clearly not all of those would be able or willing to work, but equally clearly a large proportion would be able and willing to work if the conditions were right, i.e., wages rose, employers became more accommodating and the benefits system was tightened as the number of opportunities for work rose.

The claim that the indigenous population will not do the jobs immigrants take is demonstrably false. In areas of the country with few immigrants native Britons do them willingly. In many instances where foreign workers are employed it is not because native Britons will not work. Take the case of the cockle-pickers who died in Morecombe Bay several years ago it was widely reported in the media that the Chinese cockle pickers clashed with British cockle pickers who resented them invading their territory. These Chinese were not filling jobs which were unfilled by the British but competing with the British for the work.

The experience of the cockle-pickers is found elsewhere, not least because employers, particularly  gangmasters,  are frequently immigrants. They generally prefer to employ people of their own ethnicity.  The consequence is that the British are not found in some occupations in some places because the  immigrant employers deliberately avoid recruiting them.

The other thing which prevents native Britons taking jobs in some parts of the country is the fact that the native Briton does not want to work for employers whose workforce is predominantly formed of immigrants or native-born ethnic minorities. Like every other people, native Britons do not wish to be forced to work in their own land in a employment where they are in the minority.

It is also important to remember that the menial jobs immigrants take are worth far more to them than a native Briton. If you earn as little as £250 a week net – many immigrants work cash in hand – and live in accommodation either supplied by an employer or in crowded accommodation for very little rent, you will probably still be able to save a a substantial amount, say, £2,000 pa.

If you come from China where wages even in the big cities are 50 pence an hour, you would earn œ1,000 pa for a 40 hour week. Working at a menial job in Britain allows you to save double the average Chinese big city annual wage in a year. That money remitted to China takes on the local purchasing power. The multiplier for Eastern Europeans is less but even there œ2,000 saved in a year would be a good professional salary in places such as Poland. Give native Britons the chance to save the equivalent of a British professional’s salary in a year doing a menial job and they will flock to the work and put up with basic living conditions. Of course, no such employments are on offer to Britons.

13. Conclusion

The crime of the post-war British elite of all political colours has been to destroy the social and economic structures which gave  security and viability to white working-class society without replacing them with something else. The elite mashed their communities through slum clearance, thrust mass immigration into the areas in which the white working-class lived, destroyed through “free trade” the great industries which traditionally employed them and hamstrung the unions by a mixture of legislation, cheap foreign labour both at home and abroad and the creation of a perpetual “reserve army of labour” from the native population. At the same time the white working-class were deprived of the means to create new lives and social structures through a decent education. Whatever the white working-class are now, they are the product of decisions made by the British political elite since 1945.

I am not a sentimentalist who imagines that the ideal world would be one in which the white working class continued unchanged as noble “sons of toil” or that ” working-class culture” should be preserved in aspic. Had every white working-class person in the country been converted into part of the middleclass by an unforced process of improved education and rising wages I would have seen that as part of a natural sociological change. But that of course did not happen, probably in principle could never have happened in a country the size of Britain. The white working-class have been disenfranchised. The British middle class have been at best complicit in the attack on the white working-class and at worst have taken an eager and active part in it. For decades they thought themselves personally safe from the consequences of immigration and, later, imagined that they were immune from the effects of globalisation. They find themselves unable to buy houses because of the absurd prices They are beginning to learn the hard facts of sociological life: mass immigration and globalisation eventually affects all but the truly rich, a poetic justice but one which harms the country.

Can things change? For the first time in half a century British politicians (and the liberal elite generally) are beginning to display realism over the effects of immigration. This realism is coming from both the major Parties. Here is the Tory MP Julian Brazier writing in a pamphlet for the Cornerstone group:

“Overcrowding is a key cause of many of the factors which are destroying quality of life: mortgage slavery, over-development, congested roads, water shortages, flooding and overstretched public services. We should do everything we can sensibly – and fairly – to reduce the level of immigration to well below the level of emigration.” (The Times August 01, 2006)

On the other side of the political fence is Labour MP Jon Cruddas, MP for the Essex seat of Dagenham. Writing a commentary on a Rowntree Trust study THE FAR RIGHT IN LONDON which deals with the recent success of the BNP in his constituency he comments:

“…it [the Blair Government] has tacitly used immigration to help forge the preferred flexible North American labour market. Especially in London, legal and illegal immigration has been central in replenishing the stock of cheap labour across the public and private services, construction and civil engineering…

“For many of my constituents the value of their social wage is in decline. House prices appear to rise inexorably upwards whilst thousands and thousands seek nonexistent, new social housing. Public service improvements fail to match localised population expansion let alone the long term legacy of underinvestment…

“At work their terms and conditions are under threat as they compete for work with cheap immigrant labour. In terms of access to housing  and public services and their position in the workplace many see immigration as a central determinant in their own relative impoverishment….

“Those communities that must accommodate the new immigrant communities are the ones least equipped to do so they themselves have the most limited opportunities for economic and social mobility…”

But realism from a few politicians acting as individuals is worthless if the major political parties do nothing or indeed, with our various treaty obligations, can do nothing legally while we are bound by them. The only way Britain could meaningfully regain control of immigration is to leave the EU and renounce all other treaties, such  as the UN Convention of Refugees, which prevents Britain from controlling her borders. There is absolutely no sign that any major party or even individual politician is willing to contemplate such a policy.

Immigration is only one part of the problem. There is still very little realism from even by individual MPs over the effects of laissez faire economics and freer trade, both of which severely undermine the condition of the white working-class (and increasingly, much of the middleclass).

The manic drive to privatise everything in sight, whether by outright privatisation or the introduction of private money into public services, shows no sign of abating. The immediate consequence of this is all too often reduced services at greater cost, while the long –term effect may be to reduced public provision generally, either because the costs simply go out of control or because the fact that a service is provided by a private contractor rather than by direct labour public provision makes it easier to reduce the service or stop providing it altogether..

On the education side so much damage has been done to our education system, from primary schools to universities, that it is difficult to see how things could be changed in less than a generation.

Perhaps the greatest problem is the current state of our political system which has become utterly unresponsive to the needs of the British people in general and the white working-class in particular.

The Labour MP John Cruddas wrote this recently in his commentary on a Joseph Rowntree Trust report “The rise of the Far right”. “The [Blair] government is not a coalition of traditions and interests who  initiate policy and debate; rather it is a power elite whose modus operandi is the retention of power.” The words could be as readily applied to the modern Tory Party.

Compare this with George Orwell’s words in 1984:” “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. …We are different from the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and Russian Communists came very close to us in our methods, but they never had the courage to recognise their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power  with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard arevolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” (O’Brien speaking to Winston Smith during his interrogation).

That is the political system we have now: a simple desire for power. The only thing which will change it is fear, fear in the political elite that things are running out of control, that they may be brought to account. Then they will shamelessly amend their ideology, what they said was black yesterday will become white tomorrow. Elites only have one settled principle – to do whatever is necessary to preserve their power and privilege.

“British identity is based on and anchored in its political and legal institutions and this enables it to take in new entrants more easily than it would be if being a member of a nation were to be defined by blood.

“But a democratic polity will only work if citizens’ identification is with the community as a whole, or at least with the shared process, which overrides their loyalty to a segment.” (Quoted in Birmingham Mail 18 11 2005)

The problem for people such as Ms Stuart is that Britishness was destroyed by devolution. There is no longer a comfortable overarching label of British under which everyone can be placed. All that is left for the people of Britain to cling to are emotional ethnicities.

The situation is most acute in England because that is where the majority of ethnic minorities in the UK live. There is hard evidence that ethnic minorities in England routinely do not think of themselves as English. In 2005, the CRE commissioned from the research firm Ethnos a poll designed to discover how Britons identify themselves (http://www.cre.gov.uk/downloads/what_is_britishness.pdf). A couple of passages are particularly telling:

“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”.

This tells us two things: ethnic minorities in England routinely reject the idea of Englishness and ethnic minorities everywhere in the UK have no identification with Britain’s past. So much for Britishness.