Tag Archives: Political Correctness

The Camp of the Saints  tested against reality

English translation from the French by Norman Shapiro, Professor of French Romance Languages and Literatures Department 3089, Wesleyan University,  Connecticut, USA.   Email nshapiro@wesleyan.edu

The full English text can be found at https://archive.org/stream/CampOfTheSaints/Camp_of_the_Saints_djvu.txt

Robert Henderson

The French writer Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints  was  published in 1973. It is notorious or famous,  according to your politics,  for its story of  the Third World poor successfully invading the First World. The invaders come  armed not with guns and bombs,  but the potent weapons of  their huge  numbers and  the knowledge  that  the self-destructive  ideology of Western elites  – what we would  nowadays call  the “anti-racist” part of political correctness  – had warped the minds of most of those  elites  and also  those  of the masses of  the First World,  who  have been beaten into a state  where they either cannot see when their own interests are being sacrificed on the altar of one worldism or are cowed to the point where  they are paralysed into inaction.

At the time of its writing the  book  was set in twenty or so years in  the future. As the story opens a  fleet of 100 ramshackle ships  dubbed the Ganges Armada  gathers in India and soon  sets off  for Europe.  In the ships are one million of the subcontinent’s poor.  The intention of the Armada is to run  the ships aground on European shores – this is a strictly one way voyage – decant their cargo and present the land on which they descend  with a dilemma, namely,  allow the million  to invade or resist them with force with the ultimate sanction being mass slaughter of the invaders.

It takes  the ships fifty daysto arrive on the northern shores of the Mediterranean with Southern France as the final  destination.   As the Ganges Armada sails the Western elites are either  starry eyed about their dream of a world in which there is no us and them – no nation states, just Mankind  with a capital M –  or paralysed by the one-world propaganda which has been so assiduously fed to them.

Even those members of the elite who do not  believe in the One Worldism  have developed the  peculiar state of mind which arises  when  propaganda is not only incessant but gainsaying the propaganda is seen as   dangerous.  Such people do not embrace the content of the propaganda,  nor play along out of abject and immediate  fear. Rather, they sublimate the fear and develop a feeling that to rebut the propaganda is somehow wrong, although if asked they could not say exactly where the wrongness lay.   The state of mind is akin to that of a person who feels that a sick joke is inappropriate if expressed in company even if it makes them inwardly laugh.  In short, they have been conditioned to think of certain ideas and words as unclean for no other reason that they have been told over and over again that these things are beyond the Pale.   As for the masses,  they have variously bought into the propaganda,   had their true feelings suppressed  by the constant propaganda as described above or  been censored out of public life.

But human nature has not been utterly transformed.  There is the natural  human response to trouble of thinking it will not happen. While the Ganges Armada is a long way off heads are buried in the sand with non-pc thoughts such as that the ships will all be sunk by rough weather and seas  before they reach Europe because of their decrepit state.  Hardly anyone in a position of authority or influence is realistic and honest about the outcome of the Armada if it reaches its destination , namely,  that it will be an invasion which if not resisted will overturn the societies into which the human cargo,  full of misery  and entitlement, is decanted.  Instead they either preach the  message that  the arrival of the Armada will be a great blessing for it will allow the West to show its generosity of spirit by welcoming the invaders with open arms or indulge in the hypocrisy of secretly hoping the ships will founder at sea.

But the weather is unusually clement and the Ganges Armada comes closer and closer until its arrival off the French Mediterranean coast is imminent.  This causes the vast majority of the population of the South of France  to abandon any pretence of seeing the ships’  arrival as anything other than a threat  and the vast majority  flee to the North of France. This is only a temporary place of safety and before  long much of the French elite also hot-foot it  to Switzerland ,  thinking wrongly that it will be a haven against the One Worldist mania –eventually the Swiss fall prey to the same lack of will to resist the invaders and opening their borders to the invading Third World hordes.

The most naïve of the  One Worlders advance towards  the point at which the ships will make landfall in the sublimely silly expectation that they will be welcomed with open arms  by the invading one million. Once they  arrive the One Worldist simpletons are at best ignored and at worst attacked. They also find that they are at risk from the Third World immigrants and their descendants who are  already in France.

When the Ganges Armada finally  arrives and  sheds its cargo of one million there is little resistance because not only have most of the population fled , but the  French armed forces prove worthless, most having been robbed of the will to resist the invasion with  brute force by the ceaseless propaganda which has been fed to them.   The result is mass desertions.

The Ganges Armada is only the beginning.  Other fleets full of  Third World  misery to west upon the West  are being prepared. Nor is it just a seaborne invasion. Even as the Ganges Armada is at sea huge numbers of Chinese are massing on the Chinese border with the Asiatic Russian territories.

The novel ends with France overrun and the white native French population reduced to not exactly slavery but an irrelevance as power shifts to the non-white migrants who were either in France before the Armada arrived or are part of the Armada and its successor Third World invasion. The same general thing happens throughout the West, with the white native population everywhere becoming subordinate, becoming strangers in a strange land which was once theirs but is now utterly changed.

How prophetic is  the Camp of the Saints? Raspail understood when he published the  book that it would not  be prophetic in the detail of his imaginings,    but only in his  general  message. Indeed, in  his short preface  he admits that the detail of the action in the book is unrealistic: “I had wanted to write  a lengthy preface to explain my position and show that this is no wild-eyed dream; that even if the specific action, symbolic as it is, may seem farfetched, the fact remains that we are inevitably heading for something of the sort. We need only glance at the awesome population figures predicted for the year 2000, i.e., twenty-eight years from now: seven billion people, only nine hundred million of whom will be white.”

The invasion of the First World has not occurred as  dramatically as Raspail portrayed it. If it had perhaps even the Quisling politically correct  politicians of the West would have been forced to resist it with force,  both because they feared the fury of the people they supposedly represented and for fear of what the reality would be if such an invasion force had landed.  Instead the immigration  has  happened piecemeal, surreptitiously.  There has never been a dramatic massing  of Third World immigrants to gain entry to the First World Promised Land in one fell swoop, just an  incessant trickle through numerous points of entry. The nearest events  to what Raspail describes  are the various boat people  arriving in the West  from Latin America, Africa and Asia. But although large in aggregate,  each individual attempt at invasion contains hundreds at best and most commonly in numbers of less than ten. When seaborne they come not as an imposing  fleet but singly or as a small flotilla  at worst.  More commonly their illegal entry is by plane, train or motor vehicle, a handful at a time.

Where Raspail was  strikingly astute is his prediction of the immense weight of “anti-racist”  politically correct propaganda which the West has seen. He l catalogues all the politically correct grotesquery  we have today with definitive characters.   There are those in positions of authority and influence such Albert Dufort, the trendy radio journalist,  who prostitute themselves and their country by representing  the  Ganges Armada  and the other soon to be launched Third World invasion fleets, not as a threat but as a great opportunity to show their humanity.  There are those drawn from the ethnic minorities already well ensconced in French society such as the  Algerian Ben Suad (who goes by the name of Clement Dio)  whose lives are devoted to biting the hand that feeds them.  Perhaps most forlornly there are the French  young who have  had their natural tribal feeling sucked from them: “ That scorn of a people for  other races, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest — none of that had ever filled these youngsters’ addled brains, or at least so little that the monstrous cancer implanted in the Western conscience had quashed it in no time at all. In their case it wasn’t a matter of tender heart, but a morbid, contagious excess of sentiment, most interesting to find in the flesh and observe, at last, in action.”  Chapter 1

All of this is most impressive because when the book was written political correctness was in its  early stages.  In Britain  a couple of Race Relations Acts  had been passed in 1965 and 1968, and one worldism, especially with a Marxist tinge, was very popular in academia. But there was no general  propagandising of the British population and punishments for being non-pc about race and immigration had barely begun to get a hold on British society. Even in the United States, the most advanced of states promoting  “anti-racist” measures ,  measures such as “positive discrimination” and “affirmative action”  were still in their infancy.  The secular inquisition of individuals accused of pc “crimes” that we know today with people increasingly  being sent to prison or routinely losing their jobs  did not exist. The long march through the institutions still had a good  distance to go.

The book’s general argument that the West would be subject to massive immigration which would radically change their societies  is correct.  In Britain the last national census  in 2011 showed this for the population of England and Wales combined :

White was the majority ethnic group at 48.2 million in 2011 (86.0 per cent). Within this ethnic group, White British1 was the largest group at 45.1 million (80.5 per cent).

The White ethnic group accounted for 86.0 per cent of the usual resident population in 2011, a decrease from 91.3 per cent in 2001 and 94.1 per cent in 1991.

White British and White Irish decreased between 2001 and 2011. The remaining ethnic groups increased, Any Other White background had the largest increase of 1.1 million (1.8 percentage points).

The population of England and Wales at the time of the census was”  56,170,900 in mid-2011, with the population of England estimated to be 53,107,200 and the population of Wales estimated to be 3,063,800”. In a generation the white population, British and foreign , has dropped by 8% and those describing themselves as white British  were only 45 million out of 56 million.

There is also strong evidence that the idea of deliberately encouraging mass immigration of the unassimilable to change Western societies  has been practised by  Western Governments. Think of the words of a Tony Blair special adviser  Andrew Neather :

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.

This shone through even in the published report: the “social outcomes” it talks about are solely those for immigrants.

And this first-term immigration policy got no mention among the platitudes on the subject in Labour’s 1997 manifesto, headed Faster, Firmer, Fairer.

The results were dramatic. In 1995, 55,000 foreigners were granted the right to settle in the UK. By 2005 that had risen to 179,000; last year, with immigration falling thanks to the recession, it was 148,000.

In addition, hundreds of thousands of migrants have come from the new EU member states since 2004, most requiring neither visas nor permission to work or settle. The UK welcomed an estimated net 1.5 million immigrants in the decade to 2008.

In May 2014 the British  think tank Policy Exchange  published a report  on racial  and ethnic minorities entitled A portrait of modern Britain.  The headline grabbing statistic in the report is the claim that ”the five largest distinct Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities could potentially double from 8 million people or 14% of the population [now] to between 20-30% by the middle of the century. Over the past decade, the UK’s White population has remained roughly the same while the minority population has almost doubled. Black Africans and Bangladeshis are the fastest growing minority communities with ethnic minorities representing 25% of people aged under the age of five.”

Because immigrants and their descendants  have a substantially greater propensity to breed than that of the native white British population and that fact coupled with  the  much younger average age  of immigrants than that of native Britons means that the Policy Exchange projections are realistic.

What the Camp of the Saints should do is force people to accept at both an intellectual and emotional level what mass immigration represents.   It is a form of conquest,  and conquest of the most pernicious and fundamental   kind when it consists primarily of  those who cannot or will not fully assimilate into the native population. Oncesuch  immigrants are  in a country in large numbers,  the country is faced with two terrible choices:  either capitulate to the fact of  their conquest and allow the country to dissolve  into a motley multicultural mess occupying a single territory or forcibly remove the  immigrants and their descendants through expulsion or  massacre.  Nor should it be imagined that the dissolution of the country into racial/ethnic  blocs will mean an absence of war. History tells a single simple story about racially and ethnically divided territories: violence is an inevitable and ineradicable  part of such societies and the more the different groups within a territory begin to be of equal size the greater the risk of conflict.

The question which Raspail brings us to is this, is the invasion to be permitted through an excessive and fatal excess sentiment or is it to be  resisted through force, including in the final extremity the    mass killing of men , women and children,  or will the invaders be permitted to come, breed and settle the territory of the original population? Mass immigration is conquest, just as surely as an armed invasion is conquest.  A people who forgets that or buries their collective head in the political sand hoping the bogeyman will go away is doomed.

There are weaknesses in the novel purely as a literary work,  although the fact that I am commenting on an English translation should be born in mind. There is little character development, the dialogue is feeble,  the language flowery, there is a good deal of Gallic intellectual exhibitionism and a considerable amount of what I can only describe as a third person stream of consciousness.  The last I must confess is not to my taste. Raspail also gives his story a strong flavour of the leftist student protest of 1968 and the widespread attraction to the Western intelligentsia of Marxism, especially in its Troskyite manifestations.  This seems like another world today  even though the period  is only 40 odd years ago and may make the work seem alien or simply dated to some readers.

But these  weaknesses do not diminish the importance of the book, for it is  Raspail’s general  message which   matters. The message is important both because its general thrust is true and for the shameful fact that it is saying things which if expressed in a new work being offered for publication today would ensure that it did not find a mainstream publisher in the West.

How the BBC fixes phone-ins – The Radio 5  Breakfast Programme phone-in on 6 May 2014

Robert Henderson

The think tank Policy Exchange  has published a report  on racial  and ethnic minorities entitled A portrait of modern Britain.  The headline grabbing statistic in the report is the claim that” the five largest distinct Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities could potentially double from 8 million people or 14% of the population [now] to between 20-30% by the middle of the century. Over the past decade, the UK’s White population has remained roughly the same while the minority population has almost doubled. Black Africans and Bangladeshis are the fastest growing minority communities with ethnic minorities representing 25% of people aged under the age of five.”

On 6 May BBC R5 decided to devote their morning Breakfast Programme  phone-in  hosted by Nick Campbell to the report.  Did the programme  address  the question of what the native British population thought of such a  radical change in the demographic composition of their country? Don’t be silly this is the BBC.  Instead the programme was devoted to asking  how welcoming Britain is to immigrants.  Campbell set the tone by  asking questions such as “Do you think this is one of the most welcoming countries across the world for immigrants” and making comments such as “The vast majority of people who come here, I’m sure, respect what are the cultural aspects of this country”. He also activated the pc  device of making discussion about immigration permissible by claiming that ethnic minorities and immigrants generally were often worried by ongoing  immigration.

But even with those  brakes  on any honest discussion of mass immigration and its effects on Britain, the BBC were nervous. Some frightful  non-pc people might get on and horror of horrors say that mass immigration was not the best thing to happen to Britain since sliced bread. So to make sure that such a ghastly  thing would not happen,  the BBC  unashamedly packed the programme with those who were either immigrants themselves or  the descendants of immigrants.

The studio guests were Rishi Sunak (Head of the Black & Minority Ethnic Research Unit at Policy Exchange),  Don Flynn from the  Migrants Rights Network and Gurinder  Josan  of the Sikh Council of the UK.

There were ten  callers put on air. Of these eight  were black or Asian, viz:

Mal –An  Asian of sub-continental origin who was sent to Britain at a young age.

Carl – He described himself as an Australian of mixed heritage. He is probably Asian from certain hints he gave.

Alex – He described himself as black. His voice suggested that he was raised in Britain.

Anoop –  A Kenyan Asian immigrant.

Ken –  A  old white workingclass man  from Luton.

Ravi – A Sikh.

Abdul – He described himself as Glaswegian with Pakistani and Irish ancestry.

Sabeena – Asian immigrant long resident in Britain..

Liz – A white lower-middle class English woman.  Lived in Leicester for  forty years before moving to Devon.

Bernie – A black man born and raised in Britain.

The general thrust of the comments by everyone except for Ken and Liz was that we all lived in a wonderful multicultural world, although there was a bit of victimhood whining by Alex and Bernie brought in the subject of slavery.  Abdul complained about recent immigrants getting council houses.  It is probable that he was deliberately put in to validate Campbell’s claim that many immigrants were against further immigration.

Ken was the perfect pc selected spokesman for the non-pc side,  old, white working-class,  inarticulate and palpably hamstrung by fear of saying something which could get him labelled a racist.  He emphasised the mixed nature of Luton and claimed that,  in his own experience,    abuse of  blacks and Asians was unknown and said he could not understand why black and Asian complaints were forever being heard  in the mainstream media.  This could have caused Campbell a problem because his complaint was about the practice of victimhood amongst ethnic minorities.  Sadly, Ken  then inadvertently blotted his pc copybook by  suddenly and irrelevantly recounting how he had asked his neighbour whether they wanted to be called  coloured or black. This  produced a snort of derision from Alex to whom Campbell eagerly went back to ask what he thought of Ken’s ideas and the question of victimhood and the media’s promotion of it went undiscussed. .

The nearest anyone came to expressing  outright dissent from the politically correct rubric was Liz. Her general point was that integration was a “two way street” and she was dubious about whether it was a “two way street”  because  immigrants were not always making an  effort to abide by the British way of life.  She made dangerously non-pc statements such as mosques in Leicester being  unwanted by the white population when they were first built and that immigrants to this country “should respect our religion”, but her complaints was surrounded by mantras such as “diversity is good” to ward off the pc Inquisition.  Campbell of course jumped in to correct matters, for example, by saying “What do you mean by our religion?”  But Liz kept veering off dangerously off pc message  and her contribution ended with this exchange with Campbell:

Liz:…if we both respect each other. If I went to another country I would respect their beliefs and wishes  and I would….” Campbell interrupts.  

Campbell: ““And the vast majority of people who come here, I’m sure, respect what are the cultural aspects of this country”. 

Liz : “Well if they do there will be no problem at all. Why is there a problem?  Why is there a problem in all these different cities? “

Campbell: “Is there a problem? Well, we have had  person after person saying it’s all going terribly well.”

Liz: “Well, I’m sure it is…” At this point Campbell cut her off.

That short exchange encapsulates the problem so many white Britons have when speaking in public about immigration and its  consequences. Clearly Liz wanted to express her fears  about the effects of mass immigration,  but she was so handicapped by fear of being thought a racist that she was l willing to agree with Campbell’s assertion there is no problem at the end because of her fear of being dubbed a racist.

I rang the phone-in after it had been going for about twenty minutes. Eventually the  producer phoned  me  back and said he would put me on. I waited on the phone  for over twenty minutes but never got on. There was the strongest of reasons  for putting me on: the programme was utterly unbalanced there being  not a single person who argued the case against mass immigration.

Had I got on I would have made these points:

  1. That no society anywhere welcomes mass immigration because mass immigration is invasion of territory, a surreptitious form of conquest.

2. That the permitting of mass immigration is the most fundamental form of treason those with power can commit.

3. All elites understand that mass immigration is  never wanted by any population and this leads them to suppress dissent,  as happens in this country now with people such as Emma West being charged with criminal offences simply because she spoke against immigration in a public place.

4. That mass immigration has already created the basis for considerable racial strife, something which will increase as the minority populations grow.

5. That mass immigration has already  resulted in many disastrous effects on British society such as minority ghettoes, a catastrophic housing shortage and a low wage economy.

I had made it clear that these were the issues I wished to raise when I spoke to the producer.  I suspect that the final decision is about who goes on is made by the programme  presenter . If so, Campbell must have seen my position on the question and deliberately excluded me.

My complaint is not that I did not get on the programme. Rather it is that no one expressing my views or anything like them  did so.

If there had been no post-1945 mass immigration into Britain …

Robert Henderson

Without mass immigration we would not have ….

1.. A rapidly rising population. http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/06/uk-population-rise-ons

2. Ethnic minority ghettoes. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/100047117/britains-ethnic-ghettos-mean-liberals-can-wave-goodbye-to-their-dream-of-scandinavian-social-democracy/

3. Race relations legislation, most notably the Race Relations Act of 1976. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1976/74

4. Gross interferences with free speech such as those in the 1976  Race Relations Act  and 1986 Public Order Act arising from the British elite’s determination and need (from their point of view) to suppress dissent about immigration and its consequences.

5. Native Britons being  charged with criminal offences and,  in increasing numbers of cases,  finding themselves in  prison  for expressing their opposition to mass immigration  or  for being non-PC about immigrants and British born ethnic and racial minorities.  https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/the-oppression-of-emma-west-the-politically-correct-end-game-plays-out/

6. Native Britons losing their jobs simply for beings non-pc  about  immigration and ethnic and racial minorities. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1239765/Park-ranger-sacked-racist-joke-wins-40k-compensation-tribunal-tells-council-skin-colour-fact-life.html

7. Such a virulent political correctness,  because the central plank of the creed  – race – would have been removed or at least made insignificant. Without large numbers of racial and ethnic minorities to either act as the clients of the politically correct or to offer a threat of serious civil unrest to provide the politically correct with a reason to enact authoritarian laws banning free discussion about the effects of immigration, “antiracism” would have little traction.   Moreover, without the massive political  leverage race has provided,  political correctness in its other  areas,  most notably homosexuality and feminism,   would have been much more difficult to inject   into British society.  But   even  if  political correctness  had been  robbed of its dominant racial aspect  whilst leaving  the rest of the ideology  as potent as  it is now,    it would be a trivial thing compared to the ideology with its dominant  racial aspect intact.   Changes to the status of homosexuals and women do not fundamentally alter the nature of a society by destroying  its natural  homogeneity. Moreover, customs and laws can always be altered peacefully. A  country with  large unassimilable minorities  cannot be altered peacefully.

8. State sponsored  multiculturalism, which is now institutionalised within  British public service and the state  educational system. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12371994

9. Islamic terrorism. https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/mi5-history/mi5-today/the-rise-of-the-islamist-terrorist-threat.html

10. The creeping introduction of Sharia Law through such things as the toleration of sharia courts to settle disputes between Muslims provided both parties agree. The idea that such agreement is voluntary is highly suspect because of the  pressure from within the Muslim population for Muslims to conform to Sharia law and to settle disputes within the Muslim population.  But even if it was always entirely voluntary, it would be wrong in principle to have an alien system of law accepted as a rival to the law of the land because inevitably it would undermine the idea of the rule of law and  further  isolate Muslims from the mainstream. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/10778554/The-feisty-baroness-defending-voiceless-Muslim-women.html

11. Muslims Schools which fail to conform to the national curriculum at best and at worst are vehicles for the promotion of Islamic supremacist ideas. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10777054/Ofsted-chief-to-take-charge-of-probe-into-Islamic-school-plot.html

12.  A calamitous housing shortage. http://www.jrf.org.uk/media-centre/shortage-homes-over-next-20-years-threatens-deepening-housing-crisis

13. Housing Associations which cater solely for ethnic and racial minority  groups. https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/the-truth-about-social-housing-and-ethnic-minorities/

14. A serious and growing shortage of school places, especially primary school places . http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-23931974

  1. Health tourism on a huge scale http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8880071/international-health-service/

16  Benefit tourism on a massive scale. http://www.migrationwatchuk.co.uk/pdfs/BP1_37.pdf

17 . Such crowded roads and public transport. http://www.london.gov.uk/media/assembly-press-releases/2013/10/fears-of-future-overcrowding-due-to-167-million-more-london-bus

18. Such a low wage economy.  http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jan/17/eastern-european-immigration-hits-wages

19. Such high unemployment and underemployment. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/11/13/uk-employment-figures_n_4265134.html

20. Such a  need for the taxpayer to subsidise those in work because of the under cutting of wages  by immigrants.  http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/majority-of-new-housing-benefit-claimants-in-work/6521183.article

21. Areas of work effectively off limits to white Britons because either an area of work is controlled by foreigners or British born ethnic minorities, both of whom only employ those of their own nationality and/or ethnicity, or unscrupulous British employers who use foreigners and ethnic minorities because they are cheap and easier to control. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/800000-uk-jobs-advertised-across-europe–and-foreign-jobseekers-even-get-travelling-costs-8734731.html

22 As much crime (and particularly violent crime) because foreigners and British born blacks and Asians commit a disproportionately large proportion of UK crime, for example see http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2522270/Foreign-prisoner-total-11-000.html

and

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/269399/Race-and-cjs-2012.pdf

and

https://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/the-black-instigated-and-dominated-2011-riots-and-the-great-elite-lie/

23.  Double standards in applying the law to the white native population and immigrants, with the white native population being  frequently treated more harshly  than blacks, Asians and white first generation immigrants. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/12/07/female-gang-who-attacked-woman-spared-jail_n_1133734.html

24. Female genital mutilation. http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/apr/15/fgm-first-suspects-charged-court

25. “Honour” killings. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/honourcrimes/crimesofhonour_1.shtml#h2

26. Forced marriages. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/honourcrimes/crimesofhonour_1.shtml#h2

27. Widespread electoral fraud. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10557364/Election-watchdog-demands-action-amid-fears-of-Asian-voter-fraud.html

 

We would have ……

1. A very homogenous country,  as it used to be.

2. No fear of speaking our minds about race and  immigration.

3. No fear of speaking our minds about foreigners.

4. No fear of being proud of our country and Western culture generally.

5. No people being sent to prison for simply saying what they thought about race and ethnicity.

6. Much less political correctness.

7. Equality before the law in as far as that is humanly possible.

8. A stable population.

9. Plentiful housing, both rented and for purchase, at a price the ordinary working man or woman can afford.

10. Abundant  school places.

11. An NHS with much shorter waiting lists  and staffed overwhelmingly with native Britons. Those who claim that the NHS would collapse with foreign staff should ask themselves one question: if that is  the case,  how do areas of the UK with few racial or ethnic minority people manage to recruit native born Britons  to do the work?

12. A higher wage economy .

13. Far more native Britons in employment.

14. No areas of work effectively off limits to white Britons because either an area of work is controlled by foreigners or British born ethnic minorities, both of whom only employ those of their own nationality and/or ethnicity, or unscrupulous British employers who use foreigners and ethnic minorities because they are cheap and easier to control.

15. A much lower benefit bill for those of working age.

16. Substantially less crime.

17. An honest electoral system.

The Old Buffoonian treads on dangerous ground

The Old Buffoonian treads on dangerous ground

Robert Henderson

Boris Johnson  has suggested that the radicalisation of Muslim children should be treated as child abuse and children subjected to such an environment should be taken into care:

“At present, there is a reluctance by the social services to intervene, even when they and the police have clear evidence of what is going on, because it is not clear that the “safeguarding law” would support such action. A child may be taken into care if he or she is being exposed to pornography, or is being abused – but not if the child is being habituated to this utterly bleak and nihilistic view of the world that could lead them to become murderers. I have been told of at least one case where the younger siblings of a convicted terrorist are well on the road to radicalisation – and it is simply not clear that the law would support intervention.

“This is absurd. The law should obviously treat radicalisation as a form of child abuse. It is the strong view of many of those involved in counter-terrorism that there should be a clearer legal position, so that those children who are being turned into potential killers or suicide bombers can be removed into care – for their own safety and for the safety of the public. “(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10671841/The-children-taught-at-home-about-murder-and-bombings.html).

Even for the Old Buffoonian this is extraordinary obtuseness. Johnson has failed to recognise three very obvious facts: (1) removing Muslim children from their parents will also certainly radicalise the children;  (2) it will provide potent ammunition for Islamic extremists and (3) you can bet your life that once the principle of “bad” ideas is established as a reason for the social workers to come in, it will be extended to many other “bad” ideas, for example, in these  pc times anything which is non-pc.  Let us have a look in detail at those disturbing implications of Johnson’s proposal.

To begin with at what age would children be removed from the family? If at birth or shortly afterwards,   the child and eventually the adult will feel that their lives have been ruthlessly changed by the state and may well turn to extremism to revenge themselves on the society which has treated them so. If  taken away at an older age the child, especially if they are old enough to have imbibed the radical message, is likely to be not merely confirmed in their radical ideas but  have them substantially amplified.

Of course  it is not only parents who could be a radical influence within the home. What about brothers, sisters, Aunts and Uncles and cousins who were Jihadists? Would they be grounds for removing children? Would they have to be banned from having any contact with the children?

There is also the ticklish question of what constitutes an idea radical enough to sanction removal of the child.  Would it have to be direct exhortations to kill non-Muslims? If less than that, where would the line be drawn? At Muslims telling children non-Muslims are damned to Hell?  At  Muslims simply telling their children that they should not associate with non-Muslims?

Then there is the question of where the children would be placed after they were removed. Most would probably end up in care because if  the policy was enforced rigorously,  thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of Muslim children would have to be removed. This might seem extreme but think of the hundreds of Muslims  who have already been convicted in Britain of terrorist related crimes (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24454596)  Think of the hundreds or even thousands  who are reported to be fighting abroad in places such as Syria and Afghanistan (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-25893040). They will often have children or  be uncles,  cousins and aunts to Muslim children.

Even with much smaller numbers the chances of a Muslim child being left in  care would be strong because Muslim adopters and foster parents are thin on the ground. If they are left in care that would be likely to provide an unhappy childhood which  would engender a strong sense of victimhood, fertile soil in which to plant Jihadist ideas. The child would also be brought up as a Muslim to ensure that he was not denied his “cultural heritage” and would consequently be exposed to other Muslims who might well be Islamic radicals.

Adoption and fostering might provide more palatable lives for the children than care,  but they would have difficulties of their own. The current politically correct adoption and fostering policies  very strongly favour placing a child in families which are racially and culturally akin to those of the child. That would mean most, possibly all, of such children ending up in a Muslim family. That family  might be moderates who treat their religion in the same way that the average C of E worshipper does, as a tepid private observance rather than a fervent matter of public policy. But even in such circumstances, the child would still be regularly be exposed to Muslims with more rigorous Islamic ideas and could easily become radicalised or have  radical ideas obtained before their removal from their birth parents enhanced.

Then there is school. Whether in care, foster homes or an adoptive home, the child is likely to be in a school with a significant number of  Muslims because of the emphasis on providing a racially and ethnically environment which matches the child’s original circumstances. To achieve that the child will almost certainly be  living in a town or city which has a substantial Muslim population. There will also be pressure on those responsible for the child to place them in a school with a healthy Muslim intake. The child might  even be placed in a Muslim  school if  he or she  is adopted and the adoptive parents favour such an education.

Aside from all this, there is the Internet. Any child forbidden to have contact with anything whether it be  radical Islam or pornography is likely to be drawn to it like a moth to a flame.

The propaganda value of Muslim children being forcibly removed would be immense. Muslim terrorists would use it to justify their violence and, because the issue is such an emotive one, they would gain sympathy  from Muslims generally in the way  IRA bombers enjoyed a sympathy amongst the wider republican movement along the lines of “I don’t agree with their methods but…”  the practice  would undoubtedly resonate throughout the Muslim world and have effects far beyond those willing to engage in violence. In particular, it could seriously affect trade with Britain.

Such a policy  would almost certainly have an antagonising effect on other minorities, both because they would fear that the same might happen to them and because of a sense of solidarity with Muslims, for  they are all  part of what one might call the victimocracy,  the army of  those who harbour a grievance,  justified or otherwise, simply because they are minorities or from some notion that white Western society owes them something.  The policy would also be a fundamental questioning of the policy of multiculturalism which has ruled the British elite roost for over thirty years.

There would also be the danger that in a bid to boost their pc credentials to offset the non-pc draconian removal of children. For example,  concessions could be made to Muslims generally by the British political elite, concessions such as the relaxation of immigration rules for Muslims and allowing sharia law to be expanded in Britain from the supposedly voluntary sharia courts which now exist to Sharia courts which were compulsory for Muslims.

In short doing what Johnson proposes would make matters considerably worse for all concerned, for Muslims and the general population of the UK. What should be done? We need to start from the fact that there  is no realistic way that Muslim children can be shielded from radical Islam. Nor is there any hard proof that most radical Muslims in Britain were radicalised by their families or became radicalised when they were children. Radicalisation within mosques or through a radical   preacher operating outside the mosque at a fairly advanced stage of childhood or in early adulthood seems far more common. Moreover, Britain’s inability to control her borders whilst within the EU will always allow radical Muslims to come from abroad.   Short of expelling every Muslim in the country (several million)  and  allowing none to visit the country, the danger of Islamic terrorism, home grown or otherwise, will be a constant. Just as Irish republican terrorism had to be managed rather than exterminated, so Islamic terrorism will have to be managed.

All of that is depressing enough, but the really sinister aspect of what Johnson  proposes is the opportunity it would provide for the interference by the state in how parents generally bring up their children.  This could be in part a politically correct desire to create a spurious equality between Muslims and non-Muslims, but it could equally be an ideological  vehicle for the extension of political correctness.

As things stand,  the politically correct  legions in our midst  incessantly chomp at the bit as they try to ensure that  any opinion but their own is at best driven from public debate and at worst made  illegal in any circumstances. An excellent recent example of the  totalitarian mentality of such people is the leader of the Green Party Natalie Bennett’s call for cabinet ministers, senior public officials and political advisers to be sacked unless they unquestioningly backed the idea of man-made global warming (http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2014/02/20/the-british-green-party-expose-their-totalitarian-mentality/).

If it was allowed that Muslim children could be removed from their homes because of the beliefs of their parents (or any other family member), why not permit the removal of children whose parents disapproved of mass immigration, were members of the BNP or the EDL, refused to accept the claims of the man-made global warming believers, thought gay marriage was a nonsense  or simply ridiculed the idea of human equality?

This might seem fanciful at first glance,  but think of the absurdities  the politically correct have forced upon us in the name of racial and sexual equality and multiculturalism  and the use of the law to intimidate and increasing charge with criminal offences those who speak out against the effects of political correctness, for example, http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/courage-is-the-best-defence-against-charges-of-racism.

What the British people want from their politicians … and what they get

Robert Henderson

What do our politicians think of the electorate: precious little. All the major mainstream parties either ignore or cynically  misrepresent  the issues  which are most important to the British – immigration, our relationship with the EU, the English democratic deficit,  foreign adventures , the suppression of free speech and the precarious state of the economy. . These issues are  not addressed honestly because they either clash with the prevailing internationalist agenda or because to address them honestly would mean admitting how much sovereignty had been given away to the EU and through other treaties.

This antidemocratic failure to engage in honest politics is an established trait. The wilful removal from mainstream politics of vitally important issues has been developing for more than half a century. The upshot is that the British want their politics to be about something which is not currently on offer from any party with a chance of forming a government. The British public broadly seek what these days counts as rightist action when it comes to matters such as preserving nationhood, immigration, race and political correctness, but traditional leftist policies on items such as social welfare, the NHS and the economy (has anyone ever met someone in favour of free markets and free trade who has actually lost his job because of them?).

The electorate’s difficulty is not simply their inability to find a single party to fulfil all or even most of their political desires. Even on a single issue basis, the electorate frequently cannot find a party offering what they want because all the mainstream parties now carol from the same internationalist, globalist, supranational, pro-EU, pc songsheet. The electorate finds they may have any economic programme provided it is laissez faire globalism, any relationship with the EU provided it is membership, any foreign policy provided it is internationalist and continuing public services only if they increasingly include private capital and provision. The only difference between the major parties is one of nuance.

Nowhere is this political uniformity seen more obviously than in the Labour and Tory approaches to immigration. Labour has adopted a literally mad policy of “no obvious limit to immigration”. The Tories claim to be “tough” on immigration, but then agree to accept as legal immigrants more than 100,000 incomers a year from outside the EU plus any number of migrants from within the EU (350 million have the right to settle here). There is a difference, but it is simply less or more of the same. Worse, in practice there would probably be no meaningful difference to the numbers coming whoever is in power. The truth is that while we remain part of the EU and tied by international treaties on asylum and human rights, nothing meaningful can be done for purely practical reasons. But even if something could be done, for which serious party could the person who wants no further mass immigration vote? None.

A manifesto to satisfy the public

All of this set me thinking: what manifesto would appeal to most electors? I suggest this political agenda for the What the People Want Party:

We promise:

1. To always put Britain’s interests first. This will entail the adoption of an unaggressive nationalist ethic in place of the currently dominant internationalist ideology.

2. The reinstatement of British sovereignty by withdrawal from the EU and the repudiation of all treaties which circumscribe the primacy of Parliament.

3. That future treaties will only come into force when voted for by a majority in both Houses of Parliament and   accepted in a referendum . Any  treaty should be subject to repudiation following  Parliament passing a motion that repudiation should take place and that motion being ratified by a referendum.  Treaties could also be repudiated by a citizen initiated referendum (see 29).

4. A reduction in the power of the government in general and the Prime Minister in particular and an increase in the power of Parliament. This will be achieved by abolishing the Royal Prerogative, outlawing the party whip and removing the vast powers of patronage available to a government.

5. That the country will only go to war on a vote in both Houses of Parliament.

6. An end to mass immigration by any means, including asylum, work permits and family reunion.

7. An end to all officially-sponsored political correctness.

8. The promotion of British history and culture in our schools and by all publicly-funded bodies.

9. The repeal of all laws which give by intent or practice a privileged position to any group which is less than the entire population of the country, for example the Race Relations Act..

10. The repeal of all laws which attempt to interfere with the personal life and responsibility of the individual. Citizens will not be instructed what to eat, how to exercise, not to smoke or drink or be banned from pursuits such as fox-hunting which harm no one else.

11. A formal recognition that a British citizen has rights and obligations not available to the foreigner, for example, the benefits of the welfare state will be made available only to born and bred Britons.

12. Policing which is directed towards three ends: maintaining order, catching criminals and providing support and aid to the public in moments of threat or distress. The police will leave their cars and helicopters and return to the beat and there will be an assumption that the interests and safety of the public come before the interests and safety of police officers.

13. A justice system which guards the interests of the accused by protecting essential rights of the defendant such as jury trial and the right to silence, whilst preventing cases collapsing through technical procedural errors.

14. Prison sentences that are served in full, that is,  the end of remission and other forms of early release. Misbehaviour in prison will be punished by extending the sentence.

15. An absolute right to self-defence when attacked. The public will be encouraged to defend themselves and their property.

16. A general economic policy which steers a middle way between protectionism and free trade, with protection given to vital and strategically important industries such as agriculture, energy, and steel and free trade only in those things which are not necessities.

17. A repudiation of further privatisation for its own sake and a commitment to the direct public provision of all essential services such as medical treatment. We recognise that the electorate overwhelmingly want the NHS, decent state pensions, good state funded education for their children and state intervention where necessary to ensure the necessities of life. This promise is made to both reassure the public of continued future provision and to ensure that the extent of any public spending is unambiguous, something which is not the case where indirect funding channels such as PFI are used.

18. The re-nationalisation of  the railways, the energy companies, the water companies and any  exercise  of the state’s authority such as privately run prisons which have been placed in  private hands.

19. An  education system which ensures that every child leaves school with at least a firm grasp of the three Rs and a school exam system which is based solely on a final exam. This will remove the opportunity to cheat by pupils and teachers. The standards of the exams will be based on those of the 1960s which is the last time British school exams were uncontaminated by continuous assessment, multiple choice questions and science exams included practicals as a matter of course. .

20. To restore credibility to our university system. The taxpayer will fund scholarships for 20 per cent of school-leavers. These will pay for all fees and provide a grant sufficient to live on during term time. Any one not in receipt of a scholarship will have to pay the full fees and support themselves or take a degree in their spare time. The scholarships will be concentrated on the best universities. The other universities will be closed. This will ensure that the cost is no more than the current funding and the remaining universities can be adequately funded.

21. A clear distinction in our policies between the functions of the state and the functions of private business, charities and other non-governmental bodies. The state will provide necessary public services, business will be allowed to concentrate on their trade and not be asked to be an arm of government and charities will be entirely independent bodies which will no longer receive public money.

22. A commitment to putting the family first. This will include policies which recognise that the best childcare is that given by the parents and that parents must be allowed to exercise discipline over their children. These will be given force by a law making clear that parents have an absolute right to the custody of and authority over their children, unless the parents can be shown to be engaging in serious criminal acts against their children.

23. Marriage to be encouraged by generous tax breaks and enhanced  child allowances for children born in wedlock.

24. Defence forces designed solely to defend Britain and not the New World Order.

25. A Parliament for England to square the Devolution circle. The English comprise around 80 per cent of the population of the UK, yet they alone of all the historic peoples are Britain are denied the right to govern themselves. This is both unreasonable and politically unsustainable in the long-run.

26. A reduction to the English level of Treasury funding to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This will save approximately £17 billion pa because the Celts receive overall approximately £1,600 per head per annum more than the English.

27. An end to Foreign Aid. This will save approximately £11  billion.

28. A written constitution to ensure that future governments cannot abuse their power. This will be predicated on (1) the fact that we are a free people, (2) the belief that in a free and democratic society the individual can be trusted to take responsibility for his or her actions and to behave responsibly and (3) that politicians are the servants not the masters of those who elect them. It will guarantee those things necessary to a free society, including an absolute right to free expression, jury trial for any offence carrying a sentence of more than one year, place citizens in a privileged position over foreigners and set the interests and safety of the country and its citizens above the interests and safety of any other country or people.

29. Citizen initiated referenda shall be held when ten per cent of the population have signed a petition asking for a referendum.

Those are the things which I think most of the electorate could embrace, at least in large part. There are also other issues which the public might well be brought to  support if there was proper public debate and a serious political party supporting them such as the ownership and bearing of weapons and the legalisation of drugs.

The positive thing about such an agenda is that either Labour or the Tories could comfortably support it within the context of their history.

Until Blair perverted its purpose, the Labour Party had been in practice (and often in theory – think Ernie Bevin), staunchly nationalist, not least because the unions were staunchly protective of their members’ interests and resistant to both mass immigration (because it reduced wages) and free trade (because it exported jobs and reduced wages).

For the Tories, the Thatcherite philosophy is as much an aberration as the Blairite de-socialisation of Labour. The true Tory creed in a representative democracy is that of the one nation nationalist. It cannot be repeated too often that the free market internationalist creed is the antithesis of conservatism.

The manifesto described above would not appeal in every respect to ever member of the “disenfranchised majority”. But its general political slant would be palatable to that majority and there would be sufficient within the detail to allow any individual who is currently disenchanted with politics to feel that there were a decent number of important policies for which he or she could happily vote. That is the best any voter can expect in a representative democracy. People could again believe that voting might actually change things.

The non-economic costs of mass immigration to the UK

Robert Henderson

Debate about the costs of mass  immigration in mainstream politics and  media concentrate overwhelmingly on the economic costs. Indeed, public debate is very often solely about the economics, whether that be the difference between tax paid and benefits drawn by immigrants or the supposed need for immigrants because of their alleged superior skills or work ethic . These costs are important – although never honestly calculated: see http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/what-a-true-assessment-of-the-economic-costs-of-mass-immigration-would-include/ – but the more damaging costs are the non-economic ones which change the tenor of a society.  That is not to say that the non-economic costs do not have economic implications, for example, the 2011 riots in England did,  but what I am considering here are the psychological and sociological costs. I concentrate on Britain,  but the vast majority of the points listed apply to any first world society with a large immigrant population and  many of the points apply to any society, rich or poor, which  has suffered a large influx of immigrants. The non-economic costs to Britain are:

1. The colonisation of parts of the UK, especially in England,  for example, much of inner London, Leicester, Birmingham and Bradford by immigrants who create separate worlds in which to live with next to no attempt at integration.  This makes living in such areas for native Britons very problematic,  because not only will they  feel they are a minority in their own land, a severe psychological burden,   those native Britons who are parents  will have a very real concern that the state schools (where the  large majority of British pupils are educated)  in their area will be Towers of Babel in which their children will be neglected, taught more of the cultures of immigrants than their own culture and quite probably bullied simply for being native Britons. The poorer native Britons in such areas will often not have the option of moving – as white liberals frequently  do – to an area where there are few immigrants because of the cost of moving, especially the cost of  housing.  It is also much more difficult for someone in an unskilled or low-skilled occupation to find such work in areas without a large immigrant component.

2. The damaging effect on the morale of the native British population of seeing parts of their country colonised with the connivance of their elites.

3. The damaging effect on the morale of the native British population of  employers and politicians  claiming that immigrants are more able and possessed of a superior work ethic than the native Briton.

4. Immigrant Ghettoes. Their formation is a natural tendency amongst immigrants which was  given a great deal of added energy by the British elite’s adoption of  multiculturalism in the 1970s. This  was both a consequence of the  Left-Liberal internationalist terminally naïve  happy-clappy “we are all one big human family” ideology and an attempt to ameliorate when it became clear that  assimilation/integration had not taken place amongst the black and Asian immigrants of the fifties and sixties after several generations had been born in Britain.  The effect has been  to create long-lasting ghettoes which are not only separate from the British mainstream but hostile to Britain, its native population  and its culture

5. Censorship. The need by the British elite to suppress  dissent amongst  the native population at the invasion of their country  has resulted in a gross diminution of free speech. They have done this   through legislation, for example, the Race Relations Act 1976, Public Order Act 1986 and the Race Relations  (Amendment) Act 2000; by creating a willingness amongst  the police to intimidate by pouncing with the greatest zeal on those who dare to be any other than  rigidly politically correct in the matter of race and immigration (this done  frequently with no intention of bringing charges because no law on the statute book will  fit the pc “crime” but simply to frighten),   and through the complicity of those in the media and employers (especially public sector and large private employers) to punish the politically incorrect heretics  with media hate campaigns or the loss of jobs.

6. Double standards in law enforcement. As mentioned above,  the police and the Crown Prosecution Service  show  great eagerness in  investigating and prosecuting  cases when a white person (especially a white Briton) is accused of being racist on the flimsiest of evidence  and a remarkable sloth where someone from a racial or ethnic minority group has been blatantly racist.  The case of Rhea Page is an especially fine example of the latter behaviour whereby a vicious indubitably racist attack by Somali girls on a white English girl and her boyfriend did not result in a custodial sentence (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2070562/Muslim-girl-gang-kicked-Rhea-Page-head-yelling-kill-white-slag-FREED.html#ixzz1flw8TY6p.) The strong reluctance of the British state to act against crimes specific to  ethnic and racial minorities can be particularly seen in the case of “honour killings”, Female Genital Mutilation and the clearly racist grooming of white girls by men from the Indian sub-continent.

7. The general privileging racial and ethnic minorities over the native British population.   The incontinent pandering to immigrant cultures, especially Muslims, by politicians, public service organisations, large private businesses and much of the  mainstream media. The pandering ranges from  such material advantages  as housing associations which cater only for specific ethnic and racial minorities (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/04/08/the-truth-about-social-housing-and-ethnic-minorities/)  and a toleration of customs and morals which would be unreservedly declared to be wrong if practised by the  native population, for example, the ritual slaughter of animals.

8. The incessant pc propagandising in schools and universities, even in subjects which do not seem to readily lend themselves to pc manipulation  such as economics and geography.  The most pernicious effect of this ideological corruption of schooling  is to effectively  rob native British (and especially English) children of their history. This occurs because the general history of Britain (and especially that of England) is not taught (there is no meaningful chronology of British or any other history delivered to children because themes rather than periods are the order of the day) and the history which is covered is heavily slanted towards  portraying the British as pantomime villains forever oppressing subject peoples and growing rich on the wealth extracted from them.  The upshot is the creation of several generations of native British (and especially English) children who have  (1) no meaningful understanding of their history and general culture and (2) have acquired  a sense that any praise of or pride in their own land, culture and history is dangerous and that the only safe way to get through school is to repeat the politically correct mantras of their teachers.

9. The piggy –backing on “anti-discrimination” laws to do with race of the other politically correct mainstays of sexual and gender equality and lesser entrants to the equality game such as age and disability.   Racism is undoubtedly the most potent of all pc voodoo words and without it the present gigantic edifice of the “diversity and equality”  religion would in all probability not exist, or would at least exist in much less potent form.

10. The claustrophobia of diversity (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/02/12/the-claustrophobia-of-diversity/). A sense of paranoid claustrophobia (something common to totalitarian states) has been created amongst the native British population  by the suppression of  dissent about mass immigration and its consequences, by the imposition of the multiculturalist creed and by the   ceaseless  extolling of the “joy of diversity”  by white liberals who take great care to live  well insulated against the “joy”. The effect of this claustrophobia  is to generally reduce the native British population to an ersatz acceptance of the pc message,  but the discontent every now and then bubbles over into public outbursts such as those of Emma West   (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/emma-west-immigration-and-the-liberal-totalitarian-state/). Such outbursts, which are a basic form of political protest, are increasingly visited with criminal charges and jail sentences.

11. The enemy within. The creation of  large communities of those  who are ethnically and racially different from the native British in Britain produces  de facto fifth columns. We are already seeing how countries such as India and China respond to any attempt to restrict future immigration for these countries by making veiled threats about what will happen if Britain does this.  At a less direct level of foreign threat, British foreign policy is increasingly shaped by the fact that there are large ethnic and racial minorities in Britain.  There is also the growing numbers, especially amongst Muslims in Britain, of those who are actively hostile to the very idea of Britain and are willing to resort to extreme violence to express their hatred, actions such as the 7/7 bombings in London and the recent murder of the soldier Lee Rigby.

12. Violence based on ethnicity and behaviours  peculiar  to immigrant groups such as “honour” killings”, street gangs  and riots.  Every self-initiated British riot since 1945, that is a riot started by rioters not violence in response to police action  against a crowd of demonstrators,  has its roots in immigration. The Notting Hill riots of 1958 were the white response  to large scale Caribbean immigration; every riot in Britain since then has been instigated and led by blacks or Asians from the Indian Sub-Continent. This includes the riots of 2011 in England which the politically correct British media have tried desperately to present as a riot which in its personnel was representative of modern England.  In fact, it began with the shooting of a mixed race man in North London  by police and even  the official statistics on the race and ethnicity of those convicted of crimes in the riots show that blacks  and Asians comprised  more than fifty percent of those brought to book (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/11/04/the-black-instigated-and-dominated-2011-riots-and-the-great-elite-lie/).

13. Uncontrolled immigration. The larger the number of immigrants, the louder voice they have, the greater the electoral power. This in practice means ever more immigration as politicians pander to immigrant groups by allowing them to bring in their relatives or even simply more from their ethnic group.  This trait  has been amplified by the British political elite signing treaties since 1945 which obligate Britain to take large numbers of asylum seekers and  give hundreds of millions of people in Europe the right to reside and work in Britain  through Britain’s membership of the EU. Britain cannot even deport illegal immigrants with any ease because either the originating countries will not take them or British courts grant them rights to remain because of Britain’s membership of the European Convention of Human Rights.  The overall effect is to create de facto open borders immigration to the UK.

14. The introduction of ethnic based voting. This is phenomenon which is in its infancy as a serious threat, but it can already be found in areas with a large population of Asians whose ancestral land is the India sub continent.  This is a recipe for eventual racial and ethnic strife.

15. The corruption of the British electoral system. Voter fraud had been rare in Britain  for more than a hundred years before  the Blair Government was formed in 1997.  This was partly because of the general culture of the country and partly because of the way elections were conducted (with the vast majority of votes having to be  cast in person)  made fraudulent voting difficult. The scope for postal voting was extended from special cases such as the disabled and the old to any elector by the  Representation of the People Act 2000. The frauds which have been discovered since the extension of the postal vote have been disproportionately  amongst Asians whose ancestral origin were in the Indian sub-continent (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1271457/General-Election-2010-Postal-vote-fraud-amid-fears-bogus-voters-swing-election.html). The influence of fraudulent voting could be substantial because around 20% of votes cast in the 2010 General Election were postal http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/105896/Plymouth-GE2010-report-web.pdf).

All of these things gradually erode the fundamentals of British society including immensely valuable and rare values and behaviours such as respect for the law, trust between the population at large, mutual regard  and a large degree of tolerance for others. Most fundamentally, the native British, and especially the English, have been seriously deracinated.  They no longer know their history and worrying many seem to view their nationality as merely one ethnicity competing with many others. That is a dangerous mentality because no people will survive if it does not have an innate sense of  its own worth and fellow feeling for those sharing the same territory. In short, patriotism is not an optional extra ( http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/08/01/patriotism-is-not-an-optional-extra/).

The British elite since 1945 has been programmed to attack the very idea of nations. Mass immigration has been the tool they have chosen to  attain that end in Britain. We have the word of Andrew Neather, a special adviser  to the Blair government that the massive immigration (over 3 million net) during the Blair years was a deliberate policy to dilute the native culture of the UK:

” I [Neather] 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.

“This shone through even in the published report: the “social outcomes” it talks about are solely those for immigrants.

“And this first-term immigration policy got no mention among the platitudes on the subject in Labour’s 1997 manifesto, headed Faster, Firmer, Fairer.

“The results were dramatic. In 1995, 55,000 foreigners were granted the right to settle in the UK. By 2005 that had risen to 179,000; last year, with immigration falling thanks to the recession, it was 148,000.

“In addition, hundreds of thousands of migrants have come from the new EU member states since 2004, most requiring neither visas nor permission to work or settle. The UK welcomed an estimated net 1.5 million immigrants in the decade to 2008.

“Part by accident, part by design, the Government had created its longed-for immigration boom.”

(http://www.standard.co.uk/news/dont-listen-to-the-whingers–london-needs-immigrants-6786170.html)

That should be seen for what it was, the most fundamental form of treason,  because it is far more damaging than selling a nation out to a foreign invader arriving by military means.  Such invaders can be eventually driven out or the invaders assimilated because the numbers are not massive.  Mass immigration totalling millions  of those determined to retain their  own culture can never be undone by such means.

What a true assessment of the economic costs of mass immigration would include

Robert Henderson

The politically correct never cease to tell us that mass immigration is a net benefit to Britain. By this they mean that immigrants pay more in taxes than they cost in publicly funded services. To make such an assessment the following statistics would be needed:

1. The amount of income tax and National Insurance paid by immigrants.  Because of the type of work involved – seasonal, work offered by foreign gangmasters and so on –  it is reasonable to assume a  disproportionately  large proportion of those working in the black market are immigrants. There is also a practice of immigrants working and paying tax until they exceed the single person’s tax allowance in a tax year, ceasing to work in the UK for that tax year and then reclaiming all the income tax paid at the end of the tax year. That rebated tax  needs to be deducted from the tax paid figure held by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

2. The costs arising  from the native population who are denied jobs which immigrants have taken. This will involve the benefits native workers have to collect because they cannot find a job, the costs of having to move to a new area to either seek work or because  the new benefits cap will not meet their rent and the costs of having to take children out of one school plus the costs of registering with a new GP because a family is forced to move .

3. The cost to the native population of a reduction in wages caused by immigrants increasing the pool of labour. This will mean  less tax paid and more in-work benefits

4. The cost of  benefits drawn by immigrants when they are not working.

5. The cost of benefits drawn by immigrants when they are working, for example, working tax credits, housing benefit.

6. The cost of NHS care given to immigrants.

7. The cost of education given to immigrants, this to include the additional costs arising from those with poor or non-existent English.

8. The cost of benefits, education and NHS care for the children of immigrants born in the UK.

9. The costs of benefits paid to immigrants to support children born abroad and living abroad.

10. The inflation of  housing costs caused by immigrants and their children born in the UK increasing the demand for housing.

11.  The costs involved in a decline in the quality of NHS care and educational standards because of the pressure placed on the NHS, schools and higher education by immigrants.  The inadequate English of many immigrants employed in the NHS in particular must reduce the efficiency of the service and increase the likelihood of error. The difficulty of teaching in schools with huge numbers of pupils lacking English as a first language speaks for itself.

12. The costs involved  in the British economy generally from a loss of efficiency through the inadequate English of immigrants and their lack of understanding of British customs. It may be cheaper for an employer to employ an immigrant in terms of wages,  but,  especially where the immigrant is dealing with the public, there must be a substantial the loss of efficiency in terms of  extra time taken to conduct conversations with customers, misunderstandings of what is wanted and an inability to explain  to customers what is on offer.

13. The loss of expertise to Britain of skilled Britons who seek work abroad because of opportunities the UK being blocked by immigrants, for example,  newly qualified British doctors and nurses have encountered difficulty in obtaining British posts despite the frequent claims of NHS staff shortages (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9272640/New-doctors-will-face-unemployment.html),  while positions at British medical schools are cut and large numbers of foreigners recruited (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2407585/NHS-recruits-thousands-doctors-Third-World–limits-places-deny-British-students-chance-study-medicine.html)

14. The costs – which can be lifelong –  of the loss of work experience for Britons  unable to get work at all, whether skilled or unskilled.  This is particularly important for the young.

15. The costs in terms of wear and tear on the roads because of increased traffic arising from immigrants.

16. The cost of criminal activity amongst immigrants.

17. The cost of criminal activity amongst the descendants of immigrants.

18. The costs of guarding against Islamic terrorism.

19. The costs of the remittances made by immigrants and their descendants to their ancestral countries.

20. The costs of meeting the requirements of the “anti-racist” legislation which puts considerable burdens employers. These are  particularly severe for any employer who is funded in whole or part by the taxpayer.  Such employers have to not merely be non-discriminatory,  but they have to prove that is what they are as a result of the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/34/pdfs/ukpga_20000034_en.pdf). The police are particularly keen to show how PC they are (http://www.acpo.police.uk/documents/edhr/2010/201001EDHREDH01.pdf)

21. The cost of dealing with visa requests, asylum claims,  claims regarding family reunions  and claims based on compassionate grounds. The costs include employing civil servants to process claims to stay in the UK, the cost of staffing of immigration tribunals, the costs arising from the court time taken by the cases  which go to the courts, the  legal costs of those trying to stay in the UK (which are normally paid by the taxpayer), the cost of running immigration detention centres and the cost of removing people from the UK .

22. The ongoing cost of the descendants of immigrants – potentially through many generations – of racial and ethnic groups who continue to display high levels of unemployment, high benefit dependency,  low-skills,  poor educational attainment, low payments of tax and  abnormally high levels of criminality.

I defy anyone to find a piece of research which comes close to including all those costs or even a majority of them.

Of course the economic arguments are not  the most important thing about mass immigration which is that it changes the nature of a society because immigrants arriving in large numbers from the same country will invariably colonise parts of the country and resist assimilation.  Nonetheless, it is important to thoroughly examine the weaknesses in the economic claims made by the politically correct because it is their favoured ploy to try to pull the wool over the public’s eyes.

The costs fall most heavily on the poor, the rich being, as yet, largely untouched because they arrange their lives so that they do not encounter the supposed joy of diversity and have no need to seek work in a competitive situation.

Bruges Group International Conference 9 11 2013

Which Way Out?

Speakers

Prof. Tim Congdon  (Economist)

Prof. Ivar Raig (Tallinn University)

Prof. Roland Vaubel (Mannheim University)

Ian Milne (Banker and Industrialist)

Prof. Patrick Minford (Prof of Economics Cardiff Business School)

Christopher Booker (Telegraph journalist)

Dr Richard North (Long time EU campaigner)

Mary Ellen Syon (Irish Daily Mail Journalist)

Kieran Bailey (15-year-old who is shortlisted for the Brexit prize)

This conference is important because it brought together some of the people who are likely to be part of the public face of the OUT campaign if and when a referendum is held on Britain’s future in the EU.  Frankly, it was not encouraging,  both because there was great deal of conflict between the views of this supposed panel of Eurosceptics and  many of the proposals had a Utopian ring for they did not take into account the likelihood or otherwise of their plans being put into operation.

Prof. Tim Congdon

Congdon was the most forthright of the speakers. He wants Britain out of the UK full stop: no Lisbon Treaty Article 50 exit,  just the Westminster Parliament repealing the Act which binds Britain  into the EU. His main reason for taking this stance was that to commit to the use of  Article 50 would mean accepting its legitimacy. That has its dangers because if its legitimacy is accepted before  Britain activated the Article , the EU might extend the maximum two year waiting period the Article stipulates  before a member state can leave to a much longer time.  As this would require a Treaty change over which any member state would have a  veto I think this is not a realistic threat provided a referendum is held soon.

Nonetheless, Congdon’s instincts are right,  for to tie us into a two year waiting period would allow the EU to create a good deal of mischief. Using the Article 50  route would also provide an escape route for our Europhile political elite because they could argue that b ecayuse of the Article the best deal they could get was one which left us still within the coils of the EU, for example, a similar  relationship with the EU to that of Norway or Switzerland, both of whom are signed up to the so-called four EU freedoms: the freedom of unrestricted movement within the European Economic Area (EEA) of capital, services, capital and labour.

Congdon was just as unequivocal on the claims that Britain would lose greatly if she  left. He pointed out that the vast majority of UN member states were not EU members but were able to trade successfully both generally and with the EU, and cited various examples of countries, some small,  outside the EU which had made treaties with much larger nation states  such as the USA and China.  Congdon also made  much of the EU’s declining share of world trade, which is only around 12% now and is set to decline further.

As for Britain needing a plan as to what exactly she would do after leaving the EU before leaving, Congdon said this was completely unnecessary and cited the fact that some  65 independent  countries today had gained their independence  from Britain without having such a plan.

I agree wholeheartedly with Congdon’s  overall strategy,   but there is a presentational problem with the man. This is the first time I have heard him speaking in person. I was astounded by the eccentricity of his delivery.  He would be speaking normally when suddenly he would explode into what I can only describe as an hysterical rant. This he must have done at least half a dozen times in his twenty minutes or so of speaking. As he is very likely to figure in any OUT campaign this is worrying. It is odds on he will not go down well with the general public, because eccentricity of any sort, even that which has some charm,  will alienate as well as attract and frankly this  was not an engaging eccentricity.

Congdon was also caught out by a questioner from the audience. He had cited the recent Canada-EU trade treaty as evidence of what could be done by Britain once she is outside the EU.  A questioner asked him for details of the treaty. Congdon had to admit he did not know what they are. That is just plain sloppy. If you are going to cite something as evidence common-sense tells you to mug up the facts  because as sure as eggs are eggs you will be challenged on the evidence.

Prof. Roland Vaubel

Vauble detailed the vested interest of  the various  instruments of the EU – Commission, Parliament, Court of Justice.  In every case centralisation of EU powers increased their power. Hence, he saw no likelihood of any repatriation of substantial powers unless Article 50  is activated.

As for the process of leaving, Vauble took a legalistic approach. He  maintained that the activation of Article 50   was the only way Britain could leave the EU because he considered the acceptance of the Lisbon Treaty by Gordon Brown made any other exit  illegal.    The answer to that is simple: treaties signed by a government which cannot be repudiated by a future government are utterly undemocratic.

Assuming Britain activated Article 50, Vauble said that the EU elite would give nothing much  to Britain over the two years and the odds were that at the end of two years no agreement would have been reached and Britain would simply exit the EU without any agreement.  Because of this Vauble claimed that Britain had to have a strategy for what was to happen after Britain left without a Treaty. Vauble’s solution was for Britain to make alliances with other EU members, especially the smaller ones.  His overall message was that Britain could not survive on her own.  Vauble further envisaged that a Britain which had left the EU and had some form of alliance with other states, both within and without the EU, could act as a lever to change the centralising tendencies of the EU.  He seemed much  more interested in using Britain as a tool for other states’ ends than suggesting  the best strategy for Britain.

Prof. Ivar Raig

Even making considerable allowances  for the fact that English was not his first language, Raig was an awful speaker, mixing incoherent passages with statements of appalling banality , all delivered in what I can only describe as a prolong yell.

Out of the incoherence came a desire for Britain to wrap itself in another  supra-national bloc, in this case one based on North America, Germany, Scandinavia and other Northern European states. This he grandiosely labelled the New Atlantic Project. Like Vauble he believed Britain would not be able to go it alone.

Ian Milne

Milne was in  favour of using Article 50, although he was less committed to it under all circumstances than Raig and Vaubel.. For Milne activating the Article was more a question of showing willing to preserve legal form than a commitment to observe it.  If the EU showed they were going to be obstructive after  Britain activated the Article, then he was happy for Britain to simply leave by making a unilateral declaration.

He was far from pessimistic about Britain being able to negotiate a reasonable settlement with the EU, not least because of the disruption of EU’s  trade with Britain if there was any serious delay.  Milne emphasised how advantageous the EU’s trade with Britain is to the EU , both because of the large trade deficit Britain runs every year with the EU and the supply of goods to EU businesses such as the German car industry.  He also pointed out the rest of the world would not take kindly to uncertainty because they also had an interest in Britain and the EU resolving their differences.

The most useful part of his speech was his detailed plan for how the exit should be administratively planned. He wanted a Ministry for EU Transitional Arrangements (META) set up to manage the business. He took his inspiration from large projects such as the Olympics and Crossrail.

There are contentious points in the detail of his ideas, not least his rather too trusting belief in the efficiency of private industry compared with public service. But his basic idea of a ministry devoted solely to the administrative, economic, legal and political issues arising from our departure is sound because it will be a complicated business.

The problem with his plan is that it is difficult to envisage any conceivable British government implementing it,  not least because for a government to develop such a detailed plan would be to hamstring both the government of the day and any future government.

Prof. Patrick Minford

A decent speaker but completely out of touch with reality because he is in thrall to the laissez faire quasi-religion. A clear example of a man being captured by one of Richard Dawkins’ memes, in this case by a very harmful one. The problem with Minford is that he has spent his entire working life in either public service or academia. This allows him to maintain his fantasy of  perfect markets with perfect information without the evidence of real life intruding.

Minford wants out of the EU because he has the fashionable but untrue idea that the British are in favour of free markets and free trade while the other EU members are locked in a socialist mindset.  Towards the end of his offering he made the comment that the British had always been free traders including during the Industrial Revolution.  This was a truly incredible statement because the British Industrial Revolution occurred whilst  Britain operated arguably the most successful protection system ever seen through the Navigation Acts and the Old Colonial System. That  tells you Minford either has a very tenuous grasp of economic history or is willing to deliberately fabricate to maintain the plausibility of his ideology.  He might also ask himself how unions became so powerful in Britain  if support for free markets and free trade is so heavily stitched in British minds.

From this misreading of both British history and indeed  her current realities,  Minford  built his case for leaving the EU.  He wants Britain to depart  because he views the EU as a protectionist syndicate which prevents Britain from following her supposedly free market ways.

Having laid out his general scheme of objections to the EU he wandered into the ground of employment and extolled Britain as a far superior job creator than most of the EU whose unemployment was much higher. This difference he attributed to Britain’s free market instincts.  From there he moved to the question of immigration and blithely told the audience that immigrants do not take jobs from Britons. He produced what he fondly imagined to be a knock down argument by trotting out the crude classical economic argument about how Britons would find jobs if only they would accept lower wages (which would be facilitated by less welfare provision)  or were better qualified.   This caused a good deal of anger amongst the audience with quite a few calling out.

When questions were taken I managed to get myself called. I told the meeting that on the question of immigration and jobs I had special knowledge from my time as an Inland Revenue investigator. I proceeded  to detail some of  the ways that huge numbers of jobs never came onto the open British market because of foreign gangmasters employing only their own nationals, ethnic minority employers employing only their own people, foreign companies bringing in their own nationals and the recruitment of foreigners for jobs by not only British companies but British public service employers.  I further pointed out that around 5 million people who were counted as being in work in Britain were not meaningfully employed because they had to draw benefits to provide a living wage. If this 5 million is added to the 2.5 million officially unemployed, the real rate of unemployment in Britain is running at over 20% (the official unemployment rate using the Labour Survey count  stood  at 7.7% for 2.49 million unemployed in October 2013).  That is not so very different from much of the Eurozone.

Having done that,  I  attacked the idea that Britons were wedded to the idea free market economics, pointing out the evidence against this belief such as I have already mentioned, and ended by asking from where exactly Minford got his fantasy view of Britain and the British. All of this was very warmly greeted by the audience and many came up to afterwards to express agreement.

What was Minford’s response? It was feeble to the point of embarrassment. He just kept on repeating various forms of “You are wrong” with  absolutely no attempt to address the detailed objections I had raised to his words.

On the plus side he did reject the “Norwegian Option” on the grounds that it would not only tie us into the single market legislation but force acceptance of the four so-called EU freedoms, namely, the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour within the European Economic Area.

Minford was also on the right track when he pointed out the quite small part of the British economy which is devoted to exports (he put it at 10%).  He was also generally confident of Britain’s ability to be successful outside of the EU.

Christopher Booker

Booker is a promoter of the use of Article 50 as the only means by which the EU could be forced to open negotiations.  That begs the questions of what negotiations would result with the Europhile  British political elite bargaining for Britain and the probable response of the EU if Britain simply announced it was leaving.

The answer to the former question is that the Europhile politicians  who would be leading the British side of the negotiations would try to tie Britain firmly back into the EU. If Britain simply repudiated the European Acts which have led to  her entanglement in the EU by repealing them that would make it much more difficult for the British political elite to tie us back into the EU. This is  because Britain would immediately start operating in a post-EU world and British politicians would have to adapt to that reality whether they liked it or not.

As for the response of the EU elites, they would be unlikely to do much by way of creating heavy protectionist barriers against Britain both because of their healthy trade surplus with Britain and the many economic links between Britain and the rest of the EU and because of  the World Trade Organisation’s regulatory framework which binds its members to pretty tight restrictions on protectionist barriers.  It is also human nature to be more respectful to those who adopt strong dominant action than to those who display weak cringing behaviour such as has been the norm for British politicians dealing with the EU for over twenty years.

If leaving the EU means we cease to be covered by the many treaties signed by the EU which currently apply to  Britain (Booker said there are around 700), so  much the better for that would force a re-evaluation of the ones we wished of which to continue to be members.  It is wildly improbable that Britain would be denied independent membership of any it chose to sign up.

Booker is also a supporter of the “Norwegian Option”.  Hence, much of what he says about wanting Britain to be free of the EU grasping hands is pointless at best and dishonest at worst because the Norwegian Option” would still leave Britain within the coils of the EU.

Mary Ellen Synon

By far the most interesting speaker because she was the most realistic. Synon has worked in Brussels for many years and she is under no illusions about the corrupt and self-serving and above all ideological nature of the EU. Synon  said there are instructions to Eurocrats about the language they use in public. They never say people always citizen as in “a citizen of the EU” The word country is used as little as possible and if a Eurocrat is talking about his own country he or she will says “the country I know best” not “my country”. She was generally scathing about  British and other EU politicians.

According to Synon said the 2017 date for a proposed referendum was  chosen because Britain will take the six-month rotating presidency of the EU Council of Ministers in the second half of 2017. This would give Cameron (or anyone else who is PM) and various cabinet members a great deal of opportunity to bring EU summits to Britain and to posture regularly in front of the cameras.

Synon is sceptical about a referendum being held even if Cameron is PM after the next election. She thinks he will try to wriggle out of it as he wriggled out of the promised referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.  I think is  unlikely because the situation will be rather different to what it was with the Lisbon treaty.  The latter  was accepted by a British Government before Cameron came to power. In this case he would be remaining in power. In addition, Cameron has nailed his colours very firmly to the referendum mast.  It would be immensely difficult for him to renege on his promises because he would have no one else to blame but himself if the promise was broken.

But even if  there is a referendum and it is won  by a large majority,  Synon thinks that the EU will do what they have done with other referendum reverses such as the Irish rejection of the Lisbon Treaty first time round. They will try to engineer another referendum. In the Irish case they did this despite a healthy vote against ( 53.4 percent against, 46.6 percent in favour) in the original referendum.

The tactic was dependent on the existence of willing collaborators in the Irish government. Synon had  no doubt that a Cameron government would find such collaborators, not least because questioned by the Spanish newspaper La Pais in April 2013.  Cameron was asked whether, in the event of a vote to leave the EU this question: “Would you be willing to leave the Union?”  He replied  ”I would not”. (Synon described Cameron as collaborator).

Using the Irish example as a template, Synon then outlined in gory detail what were likely to be Cameron’s tactics if a vote to leave occurred .  The government would not accept the vote. There would be a questioning of whether the electorate had understood what they were voting for. This would be followed by the commissioning of  an opinion poll  designed to  either reject the result of the referendum outright or provide a pretext to hold another referendum  on the grounds that the electorate had not understood what the first referendum really meant.

In Ireland another referendum had to be held because the constitution required it. In Britain there is  no such requirement.  The British government could simply ignore the referendum result unless Parliamentary action forced either another referendum or the respecting of the vote of the referendum which had been held that  returned a vote to leave the EU.

Synon’s full notes for her speech can be found here http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=84482

Dr Richard North

North began his speech by saying no referendum could be held in  2017 because David Cameron has committed himself to “substantial re-writing” of the Treaties before referendum.  This  he claimed would  require an Inter-Governmental Convention (IGC) which would take several years to convene, agree changes and have the changes ratified by the various member states, some of whom would have a constitutional  requirement to put the matter to a vote. In principle, Britain would be one of them because of the  referendum lock” provisions in  the European Union Act of 2011. This requires any substantial change to the EU treaties to be put to the British electorate. In addition, the 2015 European Parliament elections would mean that before any IGC could be called the newly elected Parliament would have to approve a new Commission, a process which North believes would take until the end of 2015. (http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=84483)

The obvious objection to that is the fact that the EU has shown itself willing to disregard legal niceties when it suits them. Moreover, it all depends on what “substantial re-writing” would mean. It could be that Cameron (if it is he doping the renegotiation) will simply be tossed a few insignificant bones which the EU elite can claim can be managed within the present treaties. Alternatively, the British government might simply say this is the fruit that  our negotiations have born and they will be incorporated into EU law in due course if the vote is to accept them and stay in the EU. It should be remembered that the Wilson renegotiation which led to the 1975 referendum were put to the British electorate without  a Treaty change.

The interesting part of  North’s speech dealt with the  amount of law  coming from Brussels which is in reality merely Brussels rubber-stamping decisions made by  other supranational bodies. (North claimed that it was most of the EU regulations we toil under).   This law is  called Dual International Quasi Legislation. It derives from what North describes the   EU as having become, namely,  “part of a nexus of legislative bodies, linking international agencies of the United Nations with regional, national and local bodies, to form one continuous, seam-free administrative machine.” (http://eureferendum.blogspot.co.uk/2007/03/sucess-of-eu.html)

The rather shadowy  bodies  which make such laws  are  the likes of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, (http://www.codexalimentarius.org/) which sets standards for  the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Health Organisation, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  (http://www.ipcc.ch/)  and the Bank for International Settlements (http://www.bis.org/about/index.htm).  The rules agreed by such bodies  go through the  EU  legalising process on what is known as the “A List” without a vote.

Although the process may be rubber-stamping,  it is worth noting that the EU is not legally bound to accept such agreements. However, it suits the EU elites’ purposes to do so because it fits with their anti-democratic supranational agenda for it restricts who makes the decisions to an even smaller group  than would be the case if the EU instigated the regulations.

North is in favour of using Article 50 as an exit vehicle. He gives no sign of appreciating the potential damage which two years of prevarication by the EU could do or the opportunities for active collusion with the EU elite  by the British elite to trap  Britain  once more within the tentacles of the EU.

His idea of using the “Norwegian Option” as a staging post to full independence is wishful thinking,  because once a new settlement is reached it is highly improbable that a further referendum would be held for many years if at all, not least because the “Norwegian Option” would tie us into the four so-called EU freedoms and the  general single-market obligations.

Kieran Bailey

He spoke confidently but,  unsurprisingly for a 15-year-old, said nothing of obvious importance. His appearance smacked too much of gimmickry.

An unasked question

Had I had the opportunity I would  have posed a question which went unasked, namely, what should be done to tie down Cameron (or any other PM) to what will happen if there is a vote to leave the EU? We need to know before the IN/OUT referendum what the British government is committed to.

What should be done?

If a referendum is to be won the OUT camp must put forward a coherent and attractive message which goes to the heart of British people’s fears and anger resulting from British membership of the EU.  Talking legalistically about invoking Article 50, negotiating for a relationship similar to that of Norway or Switzerland  or mechanically reciting mantras about free markets and free trade will not do that. Indeed, it will drive voters away.

The British resent and distrust the EU because of the impotence of the British government and legislature to prevent EU law taking precedence over the will of Parliament. However, they are often unclear about which areas of policy have been subcontracted to Brussels. The OUT campaign must keep hammering home exactly how much cannot be done while Britain is entrenched within the EU.

The most important EU issue in British minds is indubitably  immigration. That should be made the focus of the OUT campaign. Indeed, the more it becomes an anti-immigration campaign the better because mass immigration affects from the entirety of life. The primary ill is simply the fact that huge numbers of foreigners coming into Britain change the nature of Britain both generally – think of the laws against speaking freely and those imposing “non-discrimination” dictats  on the grounds of race and ethnicity – and particularly, for example, here parts of the country are effectively colonised by those of a certain ethnicity or race.

Then there are the secondary ills which immigrants bring: the undercutting of wages, the removal of jobs from the open British market by ethnic minority employers who either employ only those of their ethnicity  and   foreign gangmasters who supply only those of their own nationality, the use of the NHS, the taking  of housing (especially social housing) which forces up rents, the overcrowding of schools in areas of heavy immigrant settlement, the drawing of benefits  by immigrants very soon are they arrive in Britain  and  a disproportionate propensity for crime.

A full throated campaign against these ills, which should encompass non-EEA citizens in Britain as well as EEA citizens, would be something the British electorate would instinctively and enthusiastically   respond to.  It would also allow those speaking for the OUT campaign to vividly illustrate the extent that the EU affects British life in all the important political policy areas.

The danger is that those running the OUT campaign  will, because of the grip that political correctness has on modern Britain, turn away from immigration as a major plank in their platform or  even shun it altogether.  That will guarantee either a lost referendum or allow  Britain to be re-stitched into the EU with something like the “Norwegian Option”.

Is the English Defence League (EDL) the real deal?

Robert Henderson

The decision by the EDL  leaders Tommy Robinson*  and Kevin  Carroll to leave the movement  has been so abrupt that it raises severe doubts about the nature of the EDL.  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/10363174/EDL-Leaders-quit-over-concern-about-far-right-extremism.html).

The resignations of Robinson and Carroll are made all the stranger because both men were enthusiastically purveying  the normal EDL  line at a rally in Sheffield on 21 September, only 17 days before their resignations were announced  (http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/tommy-robinson-in-sheffield/).  Here are a few samples statements made by Robinson at the rally:

“At what point does diversity become takeover?” (enter video at 1 minute 50 seconds)

“English girls in Sheffield are being groomed and raped… by members of the Islamic community”  (3 minutes 21 seconds)

“We don’t want any more mosques in this country”  (4 minutes exactly)

“People will no longer stand by and watch their towns and cities being taken over” (3 minutes 30 seconds).

It is rather difficult to square such comments with Robinson’s claims so soon afterwards that he now thinks the EDL is no longer  the vehicle to combat  Islamicists because it has been, he claims,  taken over by right extremists .

These recent Sheffield comments become  even stranger in the light of his Newsnight resignation interview on the day of his resignation when he says in response to a Paxman question that he decided to leave the  EDL in February 2013 – see http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=744_1381276885  – enter at 4minutes and 4 seconds). Robinson needed an exit strategy but this was just about as clumsy a one as it would be possible to construct. If he had really wanted to go as early as March why wait for six months?

Carroll’s Sheffield speech was primarily about the double standards of the police when treating Muslims and non-Muslims, but it included what looks like in retrospect a piece of howling cynicism   when Carroll boasted to the crowd that “We are getting bigger and stronger everyday”. (Enter the video at 12 minutes and 58 seconds –  http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/kevin-Carroll-in-sheffield/)

The ostensible reasons for the  resignations

During his various media appearances announcing the resignations Robinson said “I have been considering this move for a long time because I recognise that, though street demonstrations have brought us to this point, they are no longer productive.

“I acknowledge the dangers of far-right extremism and the ongoing need to counter Islamist ideology not with violence but with better, democratic ideas.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24442953).

But he also laid  emphasis on the threats to his family and the fact that he was judged by what the more extreme members of the EDL did, viz: “When some moron lifts up his top and he’s got the picture of a mosque saying ‘boom’ and it’s all over the national newspapers, it’s me, it’s when I pick up my kids from school the parents are looking at me, judging me on that.

“And that’s not what I’ve stood for and my decision to do this is to be true to what I stand for. And whilst I want to lead the revolution against Islamist ideology, I don’t want to lead the revolution against Muslims.” (Ibid).

The problem with these reasons is that they have existed throughout the four years of the EDL’s existence.  That does not mean his fears are invalid but we do require an explanation from him as to why they have suddenly become intolerable.

Nonetheless, it is not implausible that Robinson  in particular may have simply tired of the harassment and worse he has experienced.   That the harassment has been considerable we know because  many  publicly reported instances of marches being hamstrung or stopped altogether and the frequent arrests  of  EDL members.  But there is also what goes on without getting into mainstream media reporting.  In his  recent Sheffield speech (enter the video at 5 minutes 44 secs)  Robinson  said that as a consequence of being charged with criminal damage valued at a paltry £30 (something he is still waiting to go to court about), the police obtained warrants to search his parents’ house and his house, the officers who arrived at his house he said were armed with machine guns. Robinson also  spent 18 weeks in prison earlier in the year and with three young children he does have reason to fear for their safety.

Is all not as it seems?

There is a well tried and tested intelligence service  technique of  setting up a front organisation which ostensibly provides a platform for those opposed to government policy or just the way society is organised.   The idea is that the front organisation acts as a light to a moth and attracts dissidents. This allows the security service to both monitor and manipulate those considered politically dangerous to the status quo.   The manipulation may be anything from infiltrating agent provocateurs to persuading  a dissident by one means or another to change their ideological tune.

What are the signs that point to a front organisation? Such things as rapid formation,  a ready supply of money both initially and as the organisation progresses, organisational skill and a failure to make any progress towards attaining  its claimed ends despite making a good deal of public noise.  MigrationWatch UK strikes me as a  classic example  of a front organisation – see http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/is-migrationwatch-uk-a-security-service-front-organisation/.

The other and very obvious  used security ploy is to infiltrate an existing dissident group and attempt to monitor and manipulate it.

Which is most likely in the case of the EDL? Well, it rose quickly and has displayed a certain organisational aptitude. It runs a decent website and can get marches, rallies  and demonstration up and running with sufficient people to raise them above the risible, especially when their performance is put in the context of the considerable harassment they have suffered both from the British authorities and the hard Left.

To those facts you can add the concentration on Muslims and the elements of political correctness in in their repeated claims that the EDL welcomes all creeds and colours and that they are a human rights organisation. A Machiavellian case can be made that it suits the  British political elite to have a “working class” protest group which concentrates on Muslims (because  it diverts attention away from the general question of mass immigration and its consequences) and plays the multiculturalist tune as it marches.  Such a case could also be made  for the political elite finding it useful to have an ostensibly independent grass roots  political movement opposing Islamist groups as a distraction from the insidious and much more damaging gradual imposition of Muslim ways on British society as the British elite generally give way bit by bit to Muslim demands. A  good example is the recent permitting of Muslim pupils to wear a beard, something  which is forbidden to non-Muslim pupils at the school (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10374528/Bearded-Muslim-schoolboys-barred-from-class-allowed-to-return-because-of-human-rights.html).

But on balance  I doubt whether this is a security front organisation because it simply is too uncontrolled.  If it is a front organisation it has not been very successful in channelling dissident behaviour.  Not only that but  most of the possible advantages for the political elite which I  listed above arise just as readily if the EDL is simply what it says it is, a spontaneous grass roots,  mainly working class movement.

How likely is it that the EDL will have been infiltrated by the police or the security services? You can bet  your life that it will have been.  Will the state  have been controlling the EDL leadership? Quite possibly, not necessarily from the first but at some point when they had found a lever to control the leaders.

There is also the possibility that the  EDL have been or still are controlled/assisted  by foreign security services or private organisations whether British or foreign. In view of the EDL’s concentration on Muslims alone, not immigrants in general,   the most likely sources for such infiltration are the Israeli security service Mossad or  Jewish individuals or groups whether Israeli or not.  Indeed, the EDL have a Jewish Division and have expressed support for Israel. (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/juliankossoff/100059179/the-english-defence-league-the-jewish-division-and-the-useful-idiots/) .  However, it is not easy to construct a scenario involving Mossad or other Israel or non-Israeli Jewish interference with the EDL which would explain the clumsy  resignations of Robinson and Carroll.  What honestly would Mossad or any other Jewish organisation or individual gain from decapitating the EDL at this point? Because the EDL were running out of control?  That was no truer now than it had been all along. Because they believed that Robinson could ally with the Quilliam Foundation and neutralise aggressive Islam? Hardly in keeping with the normal Israeli government  and Jewish activist strategy and tactics, which are generally  pretty hardline in their rejection of any meaningful engagement with Islam.

A strong pointer to what may have  happened is  Robinson and Carroll’s  new association with (but not joined) the Quilliam Foundation, a body  which describes itself as a think-tank tackling extremism in all its forms, although its focus is heavily on Islamicist actors.   When Robinson and Carroll’s resignation were made public they appeared with two of the senior members of Quilliam, the chairman and co-founder Maajid Nawaz (a one time Hizb ut-Tahrir  member)  and Usama Hasan, Quilliam’s senior researcher in Islamic studies. Both Nawaz and Usama come from an extremist Muslim background. The narrative provided by both Quilliam and the two ex-EDL leaders is that it was engagement with Quilliam which led to the resignation of Robinson and Carroll, viz:

Quilliam is proud to announce that Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll, the leaders of the anti-Islamist group, the English Defence League (EDL), have decided to leave the group. Having set up the EDL, infamous for its street protests, in 2009, they wish to exit this group, because they feel they can no longer keep extremist elements at bay……

Quilliam has been working with Tommy to achieve this transition, which represents a huge success for community relations in the United Kingdom. We have previously identified the symbiotic relationship between far-right extremism and Islamism and think that this event can dismantle the underpinnings of one phenomenon while removing the need for the other phenomenon. (http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/press-releases/quilliam-facilitates-tommy-robinson-leaving-the-english-defence-league/).

The fact that Quilliam are involved  is decidedly interesting  because they have been seen by some as Home Office stooges as a result of the large amounts of public money pumped into the think-tank after its foundation in 2008. (http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/12/tommy-robinson-quilliam-foundation-questions-motivation) .  There have also been rumblings about the large salaries drawn by the  senior members of  Quilliam, for example, Nawaz paid himself £77,438 in 2012 (ibid).

Quilliam’s Home Office funding ended in 2011 and its overall income dropped severely putting it into the red (ibid). When the Guardian tried to get an up to date set of accounts  they were ‘told by a press officer: “There is only one print copy and that that has gone missing.”’ (ibid)

The Guardian article suggests that the embracing of Robinson and Carroll by Quilliam may be a ploy to increase funding both through the publicity they are now receiving and because by widening their natural remit to include “right wing extremism”, viz:  “In 2010, when it began to look like Islamist extremism was slightly on the wane and there was an interest in far-right extremism, some people were slightly cynical that the Quilliam Foundation had originally said they were the specialists in Islamism but suddenly started to want to do work on far-right extremism as well. Some people feel that was a cynical land-grab to keep them in the media. But they are a thinktank that has to raise money and has to be visible.” (ibid).  This could well make them flavour of the month again with the Home Office.

What is in it for Robinson and Carroll?  Apart from taking them out of the EDL firing line, assuming they are genuinely worried about that, it could give them, especially Robinson,  an entry into the media and even access to public funds. Imagine a future for them in which they become the “right wing sinner who repenteth”.  Stranger things have happened, think of John Bercow moving from Monday Club enthusiast to his present devout political correctness.  Or it could be that Robinson and Carroll are merely being led to think that they have such  prospects and will be dropped soon, their utility to the politically correct project being judged to be exhausted.

The future of the EDL

The EDL website has a remarkably sanguine official view of the resignations , viz:

“We are grateful to Tommy and Kev for their hard work and dedication in helping to set up such a large and strong organisation as the EDL four years ago. We can easily appreciate the pressures and strain their leadership of the EDL has placed upon Tommy and Kev, not just personally, but also on their families and those dear to them. Not many people could have stood firm in the face of death threats, assaults, police intimidation and state interference. While we regret their decision to leave the EDL, we can understand their reasons and we respect them, as we hope everyone else will.

The EDL was founded for a reason. We had a cause in the beginning and we continue to stand by that cause now. We cannot at this moment say with any confidence what form the EDL will take in the future, but we can say with firm conviction that the EDL will continue to oppose militant and extreme Islam. We will further endeavour to apply our Code of Conduct and reject all Nazis, all extreme right wing organisations, and those who express racism either on our Internet forums, our Facebook pages or on the streets at our protests.

In these times of change, we are determined to fulfil our declared mission and carry on. Our next demonstration in Bradford will therefore go ahead as planned, with a number of guest speakers as well as the regular speakers and including ex-members of our armed forces. The EDL will continue its ideological struggle against Militant Islam and we collectively will not Surrender!” (http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/tommy-and-kevin-resign-from-the-edl/).

To put it mildly that is not a viewed shared by many EDL members judged by the comment on the various social media.

But the flight of Robinson and Carroll  from the EDL is not the main problem for the movement. The main problem is that EDL has always been ideologically confused. This is because the party tries to fit its aims within a politically correct envelope on anti-racism. Here is an extract from their mission statement:

“The English Defence League (EDL) is a human rights organisation that was founded in the wake of the shocking actions of a small group of Muslim extremists who, at a homecoming parade in Luton, openly mocked the sacrifices of our service personnel without any fear of censure. Although these actions were certainly those of a minority, we believe that they reflect other forms of religiously-inspired intolerance and barbarity that are thriving amongst certain sections of the Muslim population in Britain: including, but not limited to, the denigration and oppression of women, the molestation of young children, the committing of so-called honour killings, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and continued support for those responsible for terrorist atrocities.

Whilst we must always protect against the unjust assumption that all Muslims are complicit in or somehow responsible for these crimes, we must not be afraid to speak freely about these issues. This is why the EDL will continue to work to protect the inalienable rights of all people to protest against radical Islam’s encroachment into the lives of non-Muslims.

We also recognise that Muslims themselves are frequently the main victims of some Islamic traditions and practices. The Government should protect the individual human rights of members of British Muslims. It should ensure that they can openly criticise Islamic orthodoxy, challenge Islamic leaders without fear of retribution, receive full equality before the law (including equal rights for Muslim women), and leave Islam if they see fit, without fear of censure. “(http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/mission-statement/)

There are two problems with this stance. The first is what constitutes a moderate Muslim, not merely as things are,  but in a future in which the Muslim population of Britain will almost certainly be considerably larger,  both absolutely and as a proportion of the British population.  For any sincere Muslim there can be no question of moderation as we would understand the term in Britain, no equivalent of faint hearted Anglicanism where to mention God is felt to be decidedly vulgar,  nor a ready acceptance of criticism of religion.

There will be Muslims who eschew violence and Muslims who embrace it, but many of both the violent and non-violent would be comfortable with a state in which Islam was the faith of a majority of the population and in consequence placed in a privileged position. There would not have to be a formal Islamic theocracy, as there is not in Pakistan,  merely Islam as the majority religion with the state turning a blind eye to the oppression of non-Muslims.

The implications of this is that there could never be a movement which is simply opposed to the most extreme Muslim elements, because  potentially all Muslims will support the imposition of Islam as  not merely the dominant religion but the dominant way of life.

The second difficulty is why just Islam?  Islam may be the most aggressive and high profile minority  group at present, but they are far from being the only threat to the British way of life. Mass immigration generally constitutes such a threat, for heavy settlement of particular ethnic and racial groups, aided and abetted by the pernicious embrace of multiculturalism by the British elite, has produced what are in effect colonies in Britain of groups who have no wish or intention of assimilating or even integrating to a substantial degree.  Each of these groups seeks privileges for itself  which it frequently receives from an increasingly frightened political elite who fear any honest public discussion of what has been done through mass immigration will result both in inter-ethnic violence and public anger directed at themselves.

Many who have been drawn to or will be drawn to  the EDL  in the future will be generally hostile to mass immigration and its effects. Thus, it is improbable that the EDL will ever be able to be a single issue– anti-Islamist movement   promoting the multicultural message.

How will the EDL develop? It could simply become an increasingly marginalised group such as the BNP of National Front. However, it differs from  such groups in one potentially very important respect, namely, it is overtly representing England. That could give it greater staying power than the likes of the BNP  because it is filling a very real political void, that of a grass roots movement representing,  however imperfectly,  the resentments and fears of the English.

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*There is considerable dispute over Tommy Robinsons’s name. It is definitely not his true name, but whether his true name is  Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Andrew McMaster or Paul Harris is a matter of some debate.  Yaxley-Lennon is probably his true name. For the purposes of this essay I shall  call him Tommy Robinson.