Thursday’s tranche of local authority elections, which comprised about 37% of the country’s council seats, have delivered a withering if hardly unpredicted verdict on Gordon Brown and his exhausted administration. At 24% of the total of votes cast, Labour is languishing in third place behind the LibDems (25%) and twenty points adrift of David Cameron’s Tories.
In general election terms such dominance could deliver Cameron a parliamentary majority in the range of 150 seats. Labour will now slowly, but slowly come to terms with its two available choices:-
1. The high-risk strategy of dumping Brown within the next twelve months to give young master Balls time to win the public over, or
2. Running with Brown in the knowledge that the 2010 election cannot be won, while accepting that the zeitgeist has shifted away from them and a lengthy period of self-examination must be entered upon before change is made. In this event Harriet Harman would shoulder the task of temporary party leader, as Margaret Beckett did after the sudden death of John Smith in 1994.
I think the party will choose the second option, and I will predict now that the run-off for the leadership will be between Ed Balls and John Cruddas, with David Miliband as the kingmaker.
Either way, it will be Cameron in Downing Street. That is clear.
Three weeks today Londoners elect their Mayor and Assembly members for the next four years. Under the complex party list voting system, any party bettering 5% of first choice votes is thought likely to win one of the 11 indirectly elected seats on the Assembly. No one doubts that the BNP vote will pass the 5% mark. So this will be a significant first for them, and a step nearer to challenging for representation in parliament.
The leader of the London party of the BNP is Richard Barnbrook, and today he was accorded a Q&A interview by the BBC News website. Considering this was the same BBC which sent in mole Jason Gwynne to “report” on the party in 2004, the questioning seems to have been pretty friendly.
This unfamiliar situation begs correction. Accordingly, I have decided to report on the BNP’s steady progress towards electability, as it is expressed in Barnbrook’s bite-sized politics. I’ve cheated a little, of course, by reconstructing the questions and answers from the BBC article.
The BBC: You have said that you want to give the real people of London a voice. Who are real Londoners?
Barnbrook: I mean the indigenous population first, and the post-war immigrants who came over to rebuild Britain, such as Caribbeans who arrived on the Empire Windrush, second.
The BBC: You have said that immigrants arriving in the last 15 years are taking more from British society than they are putting back. Who is to blame for that?
Barnbrook: It’s not immigrants that are at fault here. Never has been. It’s the establishment, our own governing powers and their greed or their ignorance or their simple gutlessness to do anything about it. They feel if they try to look at immigration they will have the finger pointed at them - ‘racist’. This is an easy get out clause - this is bullying people.
The BBC: Is the BNP a racist party?
Barnbrook: We’re not racist at all. We do not perceive one person’s religion, identity, culture or way of life as being better or worse than our own, we are simply different.
The BBC: Would you characterise the BNP as a far right party?
Barnbrook: Not at all - not far right, not far left, not too wrong.
The BBC: If elected to govern at Westminster one day what would your party do on the immigration question. Would you like to repatriate the immigrant population?
Barnbrook: I would like to see a freeze on immigration, which I believe influences all aspects of our existence, from health and crime to water supplies. Legal immigrants would stay, illegal immigrants would go - as would those being released from prison.
The BBC: What is Britishness?
Barnbrook: Britishness is the shake of a hand that is a guarantee, the humility, the honesty and the benevolence - all these elements are what make the British people British. Language, religion, humour and law are around the periphery.
The BBC: Can there be British Muslims?
Barnbrook: The answer is yes, but on the grounds that you follow all of the identities being described of living in this country and benefiting this country. You may have your religion behind your closed doors but you don’t bring it onto the streets. You can be gay behind closed doors, you can be heterosexual behind closed doors, but you don’t bring it onto the streets, demanding more rights for it.
The BBC: Can you win the Mayoral vote?
Barnbrook: Realistically it’s unlikely but who knows? Immigration has moved up the political agenda and the mainstream parties have been adopting issues raised by the BNP. Where we lead, they are following.
If the other parties had done their jobs properly in the first place, this party wouldn’t exist. It’s as simple as that.
For several days now the BBC has been lauding its White season of five programmes. It begins tomorrow night at 9pm on BB2 with “Last Orders”, a documentary about some supposedly plain-speaking nothern lads in an ailing Bradford working men’s club.
I must say at the outset that I watch so little TV, I can scarcely raise the enthusiasm to wade through all this - though I know I probably should, if only to better understand the internet commentary which will flow from it. But I am less interested in the programmes themselves than in trying to understand the Labour Party’s new-minted consciousness of its old client-group, the jilted “white underclass”.
For two years now, since the arrival of the well-aired Dench-Gavron book on the East End, there have been more and more expressions of urban liberal concern. Here’s the BBC executive producer of White:-
The white working classes feel “politically alienated” and frightened to speak out, a senior BBC executive has claimed.
Richard Klein said poorer whites believe they are “threatened economically and stifled socially” and that they no longer have a voice.His latest comments come ahead of a season of BBC2 programmes under the banner White, which he is overseeing and which he believes can play a part in easing the anxieties of that section of the community.
He said: “You don’t hear white, working-class opinions often enough on TV.
“There’s a large group of people who feel politically alienated, threatened economically and stifled socially. They feel they haven’t got a voice.”
He said many people interviewed for the programmes felt they could not say what they really thought for fear of being criticised.
“I wanted to change that. And I think it was important for the BBC to try and have a go at it.”
And here’s a gnashing of teeth from the Guardian in 2006:-
Given the general frenzied tone of most articles covering race or faith related issues, one emerging trend seems to have escaped attention. Last week the Economist carried an article on Britain’s “forgotten underclass”, with a tagline stating: “Muslims and blacks get more attention. But poor whites are in a worse state”.
This is a bold statement to make but not without merit. The article briefly examines three issues in turn: education, unemployment and crime; citing statistics to show that while poorer ethnic minority kids are doing their best to get ahead in society, white working-class kids are languishing behind.
What do you think of when you hear the phrase ‘white working class’? Tattoos? Dangerous dogs? Shellsuits? Scratch cards? Chips? Binge drinking? The BNP? It would be no surprise if the images conjured are negative; in the past four decades, the image of the white working class has gone from hero to less than zero.
In these tolerant days, the one underprivileged group that it’s OK to find intolerable is the white working class. In our multicultural society, they’re the unlucky ones deemed to be without a culture. Last year, for example, the editor of Eastern Eye went on television to condemn Channel 4 for allowing ‘illiterate chavs’ on to Celebrity Big Brother. Eyelids remained unbatted. Trevor Phillips was not called upon to issue a statement. The Sky News presenter to whom this comment was made simply nodded his head in silent agreement.
It’s the same story on the right of the governing party. This from the Telegraph, again in 2006:-
Our politicians are so obsessed by race that they have forgotten the importance of class. They agonise about racial segregation, while generally ignoring the exclusion of the white working class from our politics.
Lord Bruce-Lockhart, the head of the Local Government Association, this week recommended ethnic quotas for state schools, to end the division of neighbouring schools along ethnic lines. But, while ethnic divisions are certainly deep in some areas, they are nothing like as widespread – and in many respects nothing like as pernicious – as the scornful treatment by our overwhelmingly bourgeois political establishment of the white working class. While a brilliant campaign has been waged against racial prejudice, prejudice against the white working class has flourished as never before.
And this from the Daily Mail just a few days ago:-
Over the past two decades, Britain has been through a revolution.
The extent of the change, in both scale and speed, has probably been unique in the peacetime history of our country.
Globalisation, mass immigration and economic upheaval have helped to transform the fabric of our nation. Today, we are one of the most culturally and racially diverse places in Europe.
These changes have been the subject of noisy debate within the media, politics and academia, yet it is a curious irony that, in all the heated discussion about the consequences of this revolution, one voice has been largely absent: that of the white working class.
Politicians pontificate and academics argue, yet the voices of the British working-class public have been all but ignored.
Given that they are the people most affected by all this upheaval, this is a bizarre omission.
In case you think this is all just a Fourth Estate issue, take a look at this video, which is the first and, from our point of view, most interesting of a three-part programme on the educational failure of the white working-class. The star of the show is Philip Beadle, a rather extraordinary teacher who has taken it upon himself to enlighten school heads and their staff about the issue. Here he is speaking at the HQ of the National Union of Teachers (it gets interesting from 1 min 46 sec in):-
We are led to believe that mass immigration is a blessing to us, and that only Enoch Powell and a few narrow-minded and prejudiced people have ever seen danger in it. All decent folk of good will, we are told, have embraced this break in our national continuity as a sign of enlightenment progressing to a higher state of civilisation - that of a one-world utopia made up of coffee-coloured persons. It also has been presented as an ideological battle between left and right. But actually it is between people of common sense and, at best, utopian idealists.
Most ordinary people relate to the world by common sense. So the impracticable dream of a multi-racial utopia has had to be socially engineered, which requires totalitarian methods. The Utopians see immigrants as essentially good, and if we are nice to them they will be nice to us.
This utopianism does not engage with human nature, and does not need to. Actually, we find people being brought in as cheap labour, with all the idealism a mere smokescreen. If the high-minded ones are so benevolent and moral, why have their plans been underhand ... and why public infamy for those who foresaw the danger in just letting it happen?
Multi-Racialism follows on from the French Enlightenment in trying to create a society on rationalist principles and ignoring human nature as was the Soviet Union too. Those who wished to preserve our traditional way of life knew how human nature works from their experience of how people treat each other and what they are capable of doing to each other. They learnt from history how different ethnic groups have vied with each other for power and territory and looking at the world around them see that in practice immigration is not assimilation, but the colonisation of our territory. Conversely, Multi-Racialists never describe reality but appeal to a vague future utopia, not facing that if we have been cruel to them in the past then these newcomers could be cruel to us in the future. Further, people from all walks of life have now given warning of the practical consequences which shows the British people as essentially conservative. Some have made crude remarks but most bring common sense to an irresponsible series of idealists who just let things happen with no control. All have suffered and some have been openly persecuted.
Two days after the Empire Windrush docked on the 22 July 1948 with 790 west Indians, J.D.Murray and ten other Labour MP’s wrote to Labour Prime Minister Clement Atlee, asking for legislation to prevent an influx. Atlee replied, that he thought they would “make a genuine contribution to our labour difficulties at the present.” There had been racial battles in 1948 between 31 July and 2 August in Liverpool, in Deptford on the 18th July; and Birmingham between the 6th and 8th of August 1949 but the idealists ignored them as they had in 1919 when after the racial battles in Liverpool and Cardiff Lord Milner wrote a Memorandum of June 23rd “On the Repatriation of Coloured Men.” ”I have every reason to fear, that when we get these men back to their own colonies they might be tempted to revenge themselves on the white minorities there…” ( Panikos Paranyi (ed) “Racial Violence in Britain in the Nineteenth Century.” (Leicester University.1996).
Tonight, far from showing any signs of weakening, the BNP rebels have issued an expanded list of demands to Nick Griffin:-
1. The five sacked personnel to be reinstated and the nullification of the resignations tendered by dozens of local, regional and national office holders.
2. The removal of David Hannam and Mark Collett from their positions.
3. Nick Griffin to remain as political leader of the Party.
4. The creation of a formal management system separating external political matters from internal management issues, enshrined in a redrafted constitution.
5. To make further progress on the implementation of the Voting Member structure, together with the retention of the Advisory Council.
Meanwhile, Griffin made his peace gesture some days ago in the form of a weak-tea reshuffle and, in a local party meeting in Bradford, a proposal to reinstate Sadie Graham and Kenny Smith to the party – a proposal seconded by Mark Collett.
Since the failure of this manoeuvre Griffin and Co have moved on to make serious allegations of financial impropriety and spying against Graham and Smith. This appears only to have seriously weakened Griffins position with the rebel half of the party (and it is that big).
So, how will it all end? I see absolutely no sign that this Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again. These people are not going to trust one another, not going to be willing to work together. What has been done cannot be undone.
So here are three of many possible futures for nationalism in Britain:-
While 2007 has seen a variety of political advances for the BNP, the party has to an extent been held back and troubled by a string of leaks and misinformation briefings to political opponents, and by internal rumour-mongering designed to damage morale and confidence in the workings of various party departments, and in the leadership generally. Had this continued the result, whether by accident or design, would have been to disrupt, perhaps fatally, our all-important drive to break through with victory in the London Assembly Elections next year.
Some months ago, a BNP Intelligence Department was set up, with one of its key initial targets being to track down the source of these problems and provide the evidence needed to expose those responsible and put an end to their subversion.
Working closely with several other BNP Departments and following discussions with the BNP’s independent auditor, our Intelligence team – headed by Lance Stewart, a long-standing British nationalist and a former high-ranking officer in the South African Police - have now completed the first stage of their investigations.
As a result, two junior level national officials, Administration Officer Kenny Smith and Group Development Officer Sadie Graham, have today been removed from their posts with immediate effect on the grounds of gross misconduct and now face disciplinary charges over alleged offences against the BNP Constitution and Code of Conduct.
The degree of damage is difficult to assess, but it will go a lot deeper than the two who have been named here, and already expelled.
These two, it is claimed, established a blog titled Enough is Enough Nick with the object of forcing Griffin to fire three others whom they accuse of gross incompetence and bringing the party into disrepute. One of these is Mark Collett, the party’s Director of Publicity, who twice stood trial alongside Griffin and, of course, twice won.
A few moments reading this blog will apprise you of some fairly colourful histories and rumours of histories. American nationalists will recognise the moral template.
I suppose that rumours of MI5 black ops will also now play on everyone’s mind. A second nationalist party may well emerge. There is, of course, room for a second one in England, but not predicated principally on fighting Labour in the Islamic North. Its orientation towards the BNP, therefore, and towards the electorate will tell us whether those black op rumours have any substance. Let us hope not.
Instead of regressing to narrow xenophobia, it is time to build on the Human Rights Act. The aim of our British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities will be to clarify and explain the obligations which come with rights
Jack Straw, writing in the Telegraph subsequent to Gordon Brown’s speech on Thursday announcing this forthcoming Bill of Rights and Duties.
Because liberty as it is pursued today contains not a single seed of European survival, I spend a good deal of my thinking time trying to undermine its centrality to political life. The problem, of course, is that Man is not perfect, and the least perfect of men seem to proliferate among those ambitious for power. Some restraint on power, then, is essential for an equitable life. In feudal Germany there was the Comitatus. In our time there is democracy, and there are the Bills of Rights.
But democracy has spawned a traitorous, internationalist power elite that authors all our political misfortunes. It denies us recognition of who we are or what unites us, so thereby it can remove from us ownership of that true guarantor of survival: our homelands.
In Britain, as Jack Straw states, this treachery is to be codified in a redefinition of the rights enshrined in the English constitution since the Bill of Rights of 1689. Crucially, this redefinition will be cast from the Human Rights Act 1998 - specifically, one expects, from the qualifications to Article 10 on freedom of expression and to Article 11 on freedom of association and assembly, and from Article 14 on prohibition of discrimination.
This will be a highly positive (or governmentally prescribed) dispensation of rights, there being little or no sign of the negative rights enshrined in America’s Bill of Rights. Straw’s reference to responsibilities is perfectly clear. Big government will coerce us to deny our true self as the people of England, and to be, instead, the MultiCult. This is a duty to die – eagerly if possible or, at worst, unknowingly.
Keen to discover more about our forthcoming new duty I consulted the words of the Prime Minister Who Is Not Tony Blair, as they were spoken at the University of Westminster, Thursday 25 October 2007, and appear now on the Labour Party website.
The speech is quite refreshingly free from the usual political-aspirational double-talk. It makes a serious play for academic learning but, happily, is a little too self-serving and reverse-reasoned to succeed. Its historical references are there solely to represent British history as the midwife not only of liberty but all the exotica of postmodern tolerance. Everyone from John Milton to Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs gets pulled into the effort. Thereby the dour son of the manse steadfastly dilutes the heady, 70% proof intoxicant of real liberty - after all, drunkards tend to be free with their tongues, and freedom of speech is something no postmodern Prime Minister can allow. He establishes to his own satisfaction, at least, that England is the home of happy anti-racism and, naturally, we all want much more of it.
Here, in his own words, is how he picks his path to that goal:-
In October 2005 the UK government Actuary released forecasts for medium-term population growth:-
The United Kingdom population is projected to increase by 7.2 million over the period 2004 to 2031, according to a new set of UK population projections released today. The increase is equivalent to an average annual rate of growth of 0.42 per cent, or 12 per cent over the 27 years. In the longer-term, the projections suggest that the population will continue rising beyond 2031 but at a much lower rate of growth.
The UK population will increase gradually from an estimated 59.8 million in 2004, passing 60 million in 2005 and 65 million in 2023,
to reach 67.0 million by 2031.
... The projected total population of the United Kingdom at 2031 is 1.3 million (2.0 per cent) higher than in the previous (2003-based) projections. This is due to a combination of higher
assumed levels of net migration, higher short-term birth rate assumptions and slightly higher life expectancy assumptions.
Perhaps the first point to make here is that the government actuary has apparently missed some factors trending to a shortfall in housing supply, among them the later age of marriage and the trend towards smaller houses. However, the picture was bad enough. It backed up the long and largely failing struggle John Prescott has had to force a major housebuilding programme on councils in the South-East (which, with London, receives 75% of all migration to the UK). Gordon Brown made it clear earlier this month that there would be no more failure.
Gordon Brown has set out his ambition to build three million more homes across the country by 2020 to address a crisis in the supply of affordable homes.
The figure was 250,000 higher the Government’s previous target and reflects Mr Brown’s determination to make housing a top priority.
And this morning the papers carried the news that the Green Belt, that stubborn, beautiful rural abutment to urban sprawl, must begin to be sacrificed:-
The BNP was vigorously chasing new writers a few months ago. I know of two whom they approached, only to be turned down. Here is a sample of the writing that meets the required standard of intellectual enquiry:-
The suggestion that a French President, who is of second generation Hungarian Jewish origin may be an (admittedly), unlikely candidate to receive the accolade of the most nationalist head of state, will doubtless seem controversial to the many adherents of the old style nationalist parties across Europe, who have regrettably inherited and furthermore institutionalised some degree of anti-Semitism.
However the BNP looks forward, not backward and looks beyond such blinkered vision and while acknowledging that President Nicolas Sarkozy was elected on a populist patriotic nationalist platform at the expense of the BNP’s friends in Le Pen’s Front National, there is no doubt that Le President is continuing to deliver the goods to the long suffering voters of France.
... President Sarkozy is definitely one to watch. As all of Europe faces the common enemy of militant Islam; the scourge of Marxist-liberalism; the interference of the unelected European Commission and the widespread decline of an industrial economic base, it remains to be seen whether Sarkozy’s actions are merely headline grabbing window dressing or genuine action to rescue a nation under threat from within and without. How France responds to these issues could set the scene for replication across all of Europe, including the UK.
Well, style aside, let’s strip away one or two layers of this so very forward-looking nationalist substance, and see what lurks beneath.
Doreen Lawrence, OBE, mother of Saint Stephen, speaketh mutlicultural wisdom and the world doth quake:-
Boris Johnson is not an appropriate person to run a multicultural city like London. Think of London, the richness of London, and having someone like him as mayor would destroy the city’s unity. He is definitely not the right person to even be thinking to put his name forward.
Those people that think he is a lovable rogue need to take a good look at themselves, and look at him. I just find his remarks very offensive. I think once people read his views, there is no way he is going to get the support of any people in the black community.
So Boris Johnson is aiming to defeat the racial Marxist and white self-hater Ken Livingstone, and become Mayor of my sad, meaningless capital city. Fine. But let’s get one thing straight. Boris is a liberal Tory. He is on message. Really. His campaign team said so:-
[He] loathes racism in all its forms.
Naturally. Don’t we all flop down and loathe, loathe, loathe five times a day, just like the jihadis? Except one faces Eltham, of course.
Not that it does Boris any good. He just can’t flop down enough for the likes of Labour’s black female MP’s:-
Dawn Butler and Diane Abbott, Labour MPs for Brent South and Hackney North respectively, said his views on race harked back to the 1950s.
... Ms Butler highlighted a 2002 article in which Mr Johnson referred to the Queen being greeted in Commonwealth countries by “flag-waving piccaninnies”.
She claimed he also said that he expected, during a mooted visit by Tony Blair to the Congo, that “the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief”
Ms Butler, whose Brent South constituency is the most ethnically diverse in the UK, said: “These are disgraceful comments that shame Boris Johnson and shame the Conservative Party.
“This is the most offensive language of the colonial past and it shows that the Tory party is riddled with racial prejudice.
“No one with such views can be the mayor of a city with the largest black population in Britain.”
Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, said: “David Cameron is fooling himself if he thinks that Boris Johnson’s 1950s attitudes to race will be acceptable to Londoners, both black and white.”
Well, keep shouting, girls. Keep pushing the racial unity line at the top of your testosterone-modulated voices. Let’s see if you are right that English London loves its NuLab vibrancy as much as you say. First signs are not encouraging. The Independent leader reported a poll that gave Boris a clear lead over Livingstone.
I am fast coming to the conclusion that, Jewish activists aside, the British political Establishment does not know what it is doing about race and the future ... does not know the real precondition for a victory over the blood of its own people.
I don’t mean that it is making this up, this attack by migrant proxy, as it goes along. It is following the general policy of the global elite. But it is not the global elite itself, merely the executive at national level. To paraphrase Irving Krystol, it is operating under “truths appropriate for educated adults”, not the global elite’s “truths appropriate for highly educated adults”.
There is an inherent instability to this arrangement that it is our task and privilege to exploit. The means to do that is a real debate about the blood-reality of Establishment politics. As the extremis mounts, it should not be, must not be beyond us to organise to that end.
The desire of the Establishment, then as now, will be for guilt-avoidance. It will evade the terrible meaning of its politics by sheltering behind the barrier of abstract thinking. That way “race” is an abstract, and so nation, so tradition, so everything. It works for them today: our arguing from realities declared abstract necessarily consigns us to frustration. This pattern we must break. The protective outer layers of liberal self-justification, the faux-moral public breast-beating about fairness, equalness, tolerance etc, must be winnowed away. A real debate in this context is a debate solely about ethnic survival, about real life and real death. It is a debate in which, for example, English advocates of race replacement must be forced to answer in terms which it is by no means unrealistic to call genocide.
For this is our ground, our frame of reference in which the Establishment must defend itself against our charge of blood betrayal. We have understood that this is a blood issue. We have always done so ...
We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.
Enoch Powell, from his speech to the Annual General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre, Birmingham, April 20, 1968. It remains the last occasion on which a major public figure speaking on race has used the words “we” and “nation” to mean “we the British, owners of these isles”. There have been no greater British patriots since, and today no man more commands the respect and affection of the aware and the loyal.
I have been trying to get some perspective on the two bodies announced over the last few weeks by little Labour big man, Liam Byrne. He is the Irishman appointed by Irish-at-heart John Reid to succeed Irishman Tom McNulty in keeping English race replacement running smoothly. This is a job also known as Immigration Minister. McNulty succeeded Scot Des Browne who succeeded the disgraced but apparently English Beverly Hughes who succeeded Irishman Mike O’Brien who succeeded Jewish floodgate operative Barbara Roche ... hope I didn’t miss anyone.
For six years after New Labour’s dash for Third World genes got underway, Ministers blithely and, as it turned out, wrecklessly expected multiculturalism to deliver a smooth transition to a white minority. They have had to face a few unpleasant and unavoidablerealities since.
Multiculturalism was laid to rest by Trevor Phillips in 2004. After that, there was only the counter-terrorism route and three political policy tracks for the government to follow:-
Track One: Increase pressure on aliens to integrate (at the same time finessing into existence a civicpatriotism to accomodate them).
Track Two: Do everything possible to induce greater passivity among the natives.
Track Three: Professionalise government handling of all initiatives to the above ends.
In the English local authority elections of May 2006 the BNP scored a phenomenal success in Barking & Dagenham, a much-enriched district on the eastern edge of London.
The local Labour MP, Margaret Hodge, picked up a good deal of the blame for the BNP’s performance. Instead of refuting its line on preferential housing allocation for migrants, she had managed to make it almost respectable for English residents to vote for the local BNP candidates. There were calls - unheeded, naturally - for her to resign from her government post in the Department of Trade and Industry.
Now, hard on the heels of Gordon Brown’s little eco-stratagem - the planned building of thousands of new council houses - Ms Hodge has outraged Labour supporters in the same way again. Writing in the Observer she declares:-
A message to my fellow immigrants
In our open, tolerant country, there are, thankfully, few issues that remain taboo. But, motivated by the fear of both legitimising racism and encouraging the extreme right, migration is one. Yet for many voters, it continues to be a top issue.
My constituency of Barking in east London has experienced rapid change, moving from predominantly white neighbourhoods to many multiracial neighbourhoods. At the same time, my constituents are facing other challenges. Young families on low wages cannot afford to buy a home and the council house stock has shrunk with tenants exercising their right to buy. These young families enjoy few choices.
... For some, it is easy to blame the new families for the frustrations they feel. As people living in Barking see new faces and hear new languages, they often link the problems in their community with the migratory changes. Unless we listen, we shall be unable to convince people that we are on their side as they learn to live with new neighbours in the tolerant and strong multiracial society we on the liberal left desire. This stifled debate means we have missed the opportunity to articulate more clearly the huge benefits to our economy, our culture and the evolving nature of our Britishness that migration brings.
There have been two posts on the BNP website covering last week’s election results. One of these is a very brief region-by-region round-up. The other is a Nick Griffin essay dealing with causal factors and forward-strategies. Griffin is good value and worth a read, particularly this:-
So here’s the bottom line: Several years ago our improvements in our own electoral machine caught our opponents off guard and gave us the string of victories that made us the story of successive elections. But the shock and humiliation of losing to the BNP forced the other parties to up their game. So from shock firsts we’ve been forced down to good but shell-shocked seconds. And that is where, by and large, we will stay unless we learn the lessons of May 2007 and take our game up a level as well.
Labour and the LibDems have learnt to concentrate on mobilising their own core vote (the elderly, ethnic minorities and the local functionaries of Brown’s welfarist empire), while their leftist allies combine expensive smear sheets and phone calls targeted at especially at postal voters to depress our vote. This is why, from key seats up and down the country we got reports of sitting Labour councillors trudging round the streets putting out their election addresses by themselves. Their activists weren’t sitting on their hands, they were manning telephone banks to identify pro- and anti-BNP voters and work on them accordingly.
As one would would expect, Griffin was not alone in giving his opinions to fellow nationalists. Variousnationalistwebsites have been offering interesting interpretations of the results. There is some optimism, some stubborn pride. But the overall tenor is undeniable disappointment. After all, the omens had been so good. The candidates in their canvassing and the leafletters on their rounds were providing plenty of positive feedback. The customary barriers to the Party - a blackened reputation and the power of the main parties on the ground - seemed less formidable. Nationally, the Labour Party was weaker than at any time since the Foot era.
But it all went ever so slightly sour. An uneasy feeling stalks the nationalist right that something systemic, something not ameliorable is at work in all this. Sure, practical explanations like Griffin’s - all those Labour activists “manning telephone banks” - are comforting. They offer a way forward in an “anything you can do ...” sense. But they reduce everything to the level of engine room politics. Are electoral mechanics really where success for the Party resides? Is that, as a world-weary Peggy Lee once sung, all there is?
Young immigrants from violent and war-torn countries are fuelling mayhem and murder on London’s streets, according to a new report.
Research from Scotland Yard says increasing numbers of youths with significant post-traumatic stress are having a negative impact in the city.
There are currently 171 street gangs operating in London says the report.
... Some 43% of gangs are estimated to have more than 20 members, while 18% have more than 50 members.
Although 90% of gang participants are male, there are believed to be three female gangs operating in London, and women are often used “to mind weapons” for brothers and partners.
The document states that half of gangs identified by police intelligence are based in the African-Caribbean community.
Now, I checked the Met’s website to see if there was a press release about this rather interesting new research. There wasn’t. But there were seven “news headlines” listed to the right of the front page, on each of which I clicked. The first link was to an all too typical “triple success story”. That was followed by two links to the jailing of the Crevice terrorists, then one to another six charged with terror offences, one to a top-brass speech on counter-terrorism, one to the jailing of four bank-robbers and, finally, one to a typically surreal PeeCee campaign the Met is running under the name of Communities Together.
Meanwhile, the BBC website’s leading front page news story concerns growing pressure for a public enquiry into MI5’s handling of 7/7 intelligence. The lead story on the “England news page” ventures outside the capital to vibrant and unhideous Gorton in Manchester, where a “youth” managed to kill his 12 year old sister by shooting her in the head.
Alone against this relentless torrent of diverse horrors, the BNP is putting up 880 candidates across the 10,500 council seats to be contested this Thursday in 312 English local authorities. That is immeasurably morerealistic than the 1,000+ claimed by UKIP and the 1,419 of the Greens, and, of course, only a fraction of the effort being mounted by the three diversity-celebrating, mainstream parties. But it still represents a great step forward from the 363 who stood a year ago in that tranch of Britain’s 21,892 council seats where elections were then due.
Media-wise, there has been some speculation that BNP councillors in Sandwell could increase from four to ten, and maybe snatch control of the council in the process. But by and large the concentration of the press and TV has been elsewhere, and little has been said about Nick Griffin’s boys and girls. The party itself, though, is brim-full of confidence from the warm public response it is receiving - even to the extent of running an article on its website advising giddy activists to keep their feet on the ground.
Just forty-eight hours of campaigning remain for the candidates in Super Thursday’s three elections in Britain. So this is as good a time as any to hazard a guess as to the outcomes.
Or possibly not. There aren’t many experienced pundits prepared to do so because of complications inherent in all three elections. The council elections in England are horribly complicated because parties stand in some areas but not in others. Labour has candidates in only about half the seats on offer. No party is standing across the board.
But the list systems employed for the Scottish and Welsh Assembly elections don’t make prediction easy, either. They were plainly designed to maintain the liberal-left pro-Westminster status quo, and to prevent nationalism (that’s the constitutional variety, of course) from ever placing a hand on the tiller.
In Scotland, 73 of the 129 MSPs are elected to single-member constituencies and 56 are chosen for one of eight regions using proportional representation. The cost of this system to its architect, the late Donald Dewar, was the Genscherisation of Scottish politics. Labour, as the eternal largest party in Scotland, may never be able to govern alone. A permanent place at the governing table was, therefore, the Scottish LibDems for the asking.
When I last ventured into Scottish political punditry, on January 13th I presumed that the SNP would be forced to make common cause with the Scottish Conservatives. At the time Labour and the SNP were pretty much neck and neck in the polls, but headed in opposite directions. So I predicted that the real poll would give the SNP 35% and Labour 30%, and these figures are now reported by the major polling organisations.
But I also predicted that sufficient shy Conservatives would support David Cameron and his Scottish leader, Annabel Goldie, in the voting booth to make an SNP/Con coalition viable. In fact, the opinion polls have not been kind to the Conservatives, and it seems unlikely that they will gain on their 18 MSPs from the last Parliament. Meanwhile Labour is eyeing a “traffic light” coalition with the Scottish LibDems and Greens.
The LibDems, however, are not to be trusted. They will want more from Alex Salmond than the Environment portfolio that would go to the Greens in the Labour’s three-party arrangement, and they will get it.
One thing is certain. Whichever way the LibDem’s eventually go they will try to present the decision as one of high principle. Re-enter an administration with Labour and they are acting on their first duty is to preserve the Union. Go with Salmond and Co and they are acting on their first duty to the Scottish electorate, who made the SNP the largest party in the new Parliament.
So, am I going to predict what evil little thoughts are spinning round and round inside LibDem brains? Surprisingly, yes. It is always possible to seek “assurances” and “guarantees” on a referendum three years in the future. But how, if such are forthcoming and are demonstrably reasonable, can the LibDems reject them and face the electorate again without bringing the entire system into disrepute, and risking grave and lasting damage to themselves?
No, they will follow their ultimate self-interest. It will be Salmond who leads the next administration at Holyrood. And everything else I wrote about on January 13th, including the forthcoming death of the Labour Party (to the lasting benefit of the BNP), will come to pass in the fullness of time.
Today the Times ran a lengthy and entertaining interview of Nick Griffin. It was conducted on the hoof by Martin Fletcher, and gives a generally fair flavour of the man, his views and his supporters.
Griffin has earned his £1,800-a-month BNP salary. The party won three council seats in Burnley in 2002. It now has 49 nationwide, and on May 3 Griffin expects to win many more in what he sarcastically calls “enriched” areas such as inner Essex, the Black Country, West Yorkshire and Lancashire.
The party will also be contesting seats in blue-rinse towns such as Harrogate, Bath, Windsor and Torbay. One recent poll suggested that 7 per cent of the electorate would consider voting for it.
Griffin says that membership has risen from 1,300 in 1999 to 10,500, boosted by home-grown Islamic terrorist plots, globalisation and his dramatic acquittal in last year’s race-hate trials.
... He is not racist, he argues. He does not believe that whites are superior. He believes that races are different and that multiculturalism is a recipe for disaster. He opposes miscegenation “because most people want their grandchildren to look basically like them”. If the liberal elite had its way, the world would become “a giant melting pot turning out coffee-coloured citizens by the million”.
... In Ripon the meeting point is the town square, where the local BBC radio station interviews Griffin. Ripon and Harrogate are “lovely English towns and we believe they should stay that way. They can’t if there are high levels of immigration,” he says. On our way to the meeting we pass a painting of a black inmate outside the Workhouse Museum. Griffin splutters. It was poor whites who suffered in workhouses, he says.
My thanks to a seriously untangled guy named Smith for this hard-to-find story from The (Glasgow) Herald:-
Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission of Equality and Human Rights, said there was a clear choice facing communities who are witnessing an influx of migrants.
Speaking at the STUC annual congress in Glasgow he said the choice was between welcoming people or fearing newcomers.
He urged people to turn their backs on racists in communities and at the ballot box and showed his contempt for the British National Party by saying they should be treated as “less than human”.
He said: “We will see communities standing up for asylum seekers who want to live as part of that community. We will see the Scottish government welcoming them as part of the fresh talent initiative.
“But we will also see the ugly face. We will see those who will assault a woman and baby simply because they are foreigners.
“We as a society have a choice. In England we have the BNP. The path is to keep them out. We need to change in an inclusive way.”
I haven’t heard about any dramatic breakthrough yet in the search for those who will assault a woman and baby simply because they are foreigners. But let that pass, because the big news is that Mr E has pulled off another of those smooth political hip wriggles for which he is so famous. “Less than human” he says, is how BNP members should be treated. A real headline grabber, one would think. And surely that was what Trevor was hoping.
But, was he legal? Can you imagine Nick Griffin and Mark Collett getting away with such a statement about Pakistanis? If they were worth twice prosecuting for calling Islam “a wicked, vicious faith”, surely they would have been lynched for saying what Phillips just did.
The lead story in today’s Times may prove the last Labour straw for the middle-class.
Secondary students will be offered cheap school transport under plans to open up popular schools in wealthy areas to pupils from poorer neighbourhoods, as well as to promote eco-friendly travel.
Pupils will be charged a maximum of 50p a journey for travelling on school buses or chartered coaches, or for passes for public buses or trains, the Department for Education will announce today. The subsidised travel will be available from September 2008 to all secondary school pupils in 20 pilot local authorities, regardless of ability to pay. Poor children will not have to pay at all.
The plan is part of a move to end the middle-class stranglehold on popular schools in expensive areas and to encourage sustainable travel for pupils by reducing the number of cars on the school run.
In the Scotsman an ICM poll has revealed the continuing hardening of SNP support and the softening of Labour’s. The speculative scenario I suggested on January 13th - an SNP government in May, a carried vote on independence in 2010, followed by the grisly death of the Labour Party nationally - is coming ever closer to fruition.
From the Scotsman:-
Under the poll results, Labour would have too few MSPs to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats and would have to try to rule as a minority government or patch together an unlikely coalition with the smaller parties to get into government again.
Translated into seats, the poll would give the SNP 44 to Labour’s 41 - a major turnaround on 2003, giving the SNP 17 more seats than they won then and Labour nine fewer.
The Liberal Democrats would also see a big improvement, with 23 MSPs gaining an extra six seats on the 17 they won in 2003, while the Conservatives would be down slightly, with 17 seats, not the 18 they won in 2003.
According to the poll, the SNP is in line to win 34 per cent on the constituency vote, up 1 per cent on last month, and 32 per cent on the regional vote, down 1 per cent.
The Scotsman still predicts a minority Labour administration. But there is a grim 70-day slog ahead of Blair and McConnell, in which they can only lose more ground. The potential for a highly significant moment in Britain’s political history is decidedly there.
The BNP put up a short piece on its website yesterday about Mark Collett’s appearance at a BBC local radio debate on the wonders of multiculturalism in the city. Without him, in truth, it wouldn’t have been much of a debate. There were only a couple of rather weak dissenting voices besides his own - neither of them armed with much in the way of argument.
The format was a panel answering points made or, sometimes, questions raised by an invited audience. Collett, who was born and educated in the city, was among the invitees - which is certainly progress for a party that is still formally denied a media platform.
The panel of wise multicultural elders consisted of:-
* Wolde Selassie - Chair, Leicester African Caribbean Arts Forum and Leicester Black History Season consortium
* Prof Richard Bonney - formerly Professor of Modern History at the University of Leicester, now Emeritus Professor and Chairman of the Europe-Islamic Organization
* Riyaz Laher - youth worker and teacher
* Sir Peter Soulsby - Leicester South MP (Labour, naturally)
Collett was given a fair crack of the whip. He spoke from his place in the audience on, I think, three occasions. He is, of course, the BNP’s Head of Publicity, and the most striking aspect of his contribution was its careful avoidance of anything too controversial or shocking to the assembled black and brown folks and white ethno-suiciders.
You can listen to the whole debate here, though I found the rampant suicidalism on so very eager display too much for my taste. The BBC, however, kindly acknowledged Collett’s unique appeal on the evening with some links to a post-debate conversation recorded with some young or, certainly, youngish Moslems. The links are here, here and here.
It is disquieting to hear a senior BNP official apparently predicating Moslem integration on the wearing of the hijab rather than the full-face veil. But this is politics, a game the BNP are learning how to play. Winning trumps sincerity.
I guess he did at least bag the best line in the debating chamber, rounding off with the ringing declaration that the panel represented all manner of ethnicities, but none of them included the white native population. The BNP alone represented them.
After much Hiltonian leaking yesterday Da’ud al-Khamouron, leader of the Prophet Mohammad’s (PBUH) Loyal Opposition, has spoken of his vision for our not very British future. It surpasses the obvious to say that he really is not, not a Conservative. He is a thorough-going Guardianista.
David Cameron has called on the people of Britain to resist extremism, and work flat out to tackle the ‘five barriers’ dividing society and blocking cohesion in the community
And these five pillars of Islamo-British disunity are:-
1. Extremism: Here the Tough-Love Kid gets to conflate Muslims who don’t like Western decadence with the BNP, who don’t like Islam. I bet he enjoyed that poke at “the Far Right” (who simply never read the Guardian and wouldn’t know polenta from that Polish teagirl at the Reform). Of course, David believes that there is a moderate centre hanging around out there, waiting to be fashioned out of Muslims who hanker after a bit of Western decadence and Brits who admire the noble, manly life of the Bedouin and often holiday in the Rub’ al Khali. But does anyone who isn’t a liberal politician believe that?
2. Multiculturalism: David says:-
“multiculturalism has been manipulated to favour a divisive idea - the right to difference”
But that’s just not right. Multiculturalism didn’t need to be manipulated. It was simply never intended to produce a cohesive society. Its supporters didn’t care if the end-result was a train-wreck. The point was to destroy the cultural hegemony of the native English, Scots and Welsh.
David doesn’t see that stopping this process will necessarily provide native hegemony with a certain isostatic recovery. That alone will make it more difficult, not less, for aliens to integrate. Put another way, if multiculturalism required us natives to “celebrate diversity”, ending it will cause us to celebrate ourselves, won’t it?
3. Uncontrolled immigration: David says:-
“We can only live together if there is proper integration. You can’t have proper integration if people are coming into Britain at a faster rate than we can cope with”
But immigration in Britain has always been at a faster rate than we can cope with. That’s why it was called mass immigration. And, then, any genetically-distant mass immigration is by definition impossible to cope with. That’s why it was called Commonwealth immigration, and why all those blacks and browns squeezed together in their own little - now quite big - corners of the country. They did not want to integrate with us, and we did not want to integrate with them. White flight mean anything to you, David? Probably not part of your aristocratic experience.
4. Poverty: Well, the mean IQ of Pakistan is 81. What can one expect? But David, who cannot be unaware that his ideas have all been tested up to and beyond destruction in America, Holland or France, blithely asserts that:-
“the most effective way of beating poverty in the long run is to give people in deprived areas decent schools”
5. Poor educational standards: The mean IQ in Pakistan is 81. What can one expect?
So much for the young hero’s prescription for a less British, more exotic life of colour-blind togetherness. The “extremist” BNP, unwilling to consign us into the tender care of the muezzin, passes it’s judgement on Cameron here. I suppose it won’t be long before we receive a reply from the extremist Muslims.
So farewell then, multiculturalism, dumped like prog rock and fondue sets in that dustbin for fads, the 1970s. Shall we kill it off? asked the man from the Times. “Yes, let’s do that,” replied Trevor Phillips, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality. “Multiculturalism suggests separateness. We are in a different world from the 70s.”
Just four years ago Phillips served on the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain that produced a blueprint for multiculturalism. But now, in an instant, the inviolable wisdom of a generation of liberals is buried. Confirming the sudden passing of the idea, Polly Toynbee, writing yesterday in this paper, congratulated Phillips: “[He] breaks with unctuous, unthinking platitudes about the richness of all diversity in a multicultural society, as if any difference was a self-evident asset.”
...in 2004. Funny thing, multiculturalism. You say goodbye to it one day, decide never to have anything to do with it anymore, and in two years’ time you find yourself still doing it, and having to go through the whole process again! It’s almost like we’re addicted to it. Or our leaders are at least, and like all addicts they aren’t really being honest when they say they plan to drop their habits. I didn’t believe them two years ago and I don’t believe them now.
I’m angry. No point in pretending otherwise. Today, I listened to a man getting away with treason. In public and without any attempt to disguise or ameliorate the crime.
Why should he? Anthony bleedin’ Blair – English-hater, Surface Man, Bilderberg bum-boy – is all for celebrating the destruction of my people and the slow, ineluctable theft of my homeland. He doesn’t care. He thinks it’s OK. He tells himself - and us - that we don’t care either … that we are all progressing together to that happy la-la land where Trevor Phillips’ racist dreams come true. Or dream singular, to be exact. For the dream of blacks and Jews and the traitor class is one. The dream of all the Western nation-haters is one.
Last week the Scottish Labour Party held its annual conference in Oban. Scots-fathered, Fettes-educated Antony Charles Lynton Blair, born in Edinburgh on 6 May 1953, was the main speaker (notwithstanding the Man of Gloom).
His speech, touchingly titled Together not apart, confirmed the fears running through the Labour left that on Thursday 3rd May 2007 they will lose control of the Scottish Parliament, and thus over the fate of the Union ... and thus over the fate of England.
Today, a staggering ICM poll appeared in the Telegraph (interestingly titled “England wants its independence” for most of the morning, before mysteriously switching to “Britain wants UK break up, poll shows"):-
A clear majority of people in both England and Scotland are in favour of full independence for Scotland, an ICM opinion poll for The Sunday Telegraph has found. Independence is backed by 52 per cent of Scots while an astonishing 59 per cent of English voters want Scotland to go it alone.
There is also further evidence of rising English nationalism with support for the establishment of an English parliament hitting an historic high of 68 per cent amongst English voters. Almost half – 48 per cent – also want complete independence for England, divorcing itself from Wales and Northern Ireland as well. Scottish voters also back an English breakaway with 58 per cent supporting an English parliament with similar powers to the Scottish one.
Now, the sap of nationalism that is rising here is of the constitutional kind, not racial. It is about the ending of governance from Westminster. Scots and Welsh have traditionally defined themselves against their English neighbour, and for years noisily protested that Westminster was too remote and too London-centric to serve their respective needs. But until devolution in 1998 it was very hard to get an Englishman to think of himself as other than just British, and of Westminster as other than just his Parliament. That is changing now in an organic and impressive way, and it threatens not just to deprive the Labour Party of power for a time in Scotland and perhaps permanently in England, but to destroy it root and local branch.
So one would certainly expect that when the Prime Minister came to the dais in Oban last week for his very last speech to the Scottish Conference, he came armed with the most persuasive and powerful arguments for the status quo that man - or political speech writer - can muster. Here they are, and when you read them think not just of the threat to Labour from constitutional nationalism ... think of a future time when the liberal elite as a whole has to defend its interests against a racial nationalism - against the real thing.
