Majorityrights Central > Category: British Politics

This link will take you to the BBC-televised Q & A session held by the Mayor of London.  Basically, once every month Boris Johnson fields business questions from the twenty-five members of the London Assembly.  One of these is the BNP’s second-greatest “asset”, Richard Barnbrook.

He is evidently having a fairly torrid time in the Assembly, which is to be expected.  Bravery and doggedness, both of which Barnbrook possesses, are admirable qualities for, say, an army corporal or a even a warrant officer.  But other qualities are required in representative politics - all the moreso when one carries on one’s shoulders the burden of representing the truest interests of every native Londoner.

Click on the BBC link and slide the programme forward to precisely 2:16.07.  You will hear Barnbrook being called to ask his question of the Mayor.  But you won’t see him on the screen - presumably because he cannot bear to take his seat in the Assembly chamber without his party apparel (“banners, posters, materials, props”), although the consequences of doing so have been explained to him.

The question he wants to ask is an important one about the harm to London caused by the riotous, costly and dangerous Notting Hill Carnival.  This is the first mayoral questions since the Carnival, and no other Assembly member has the principle, never mind the political independence, to question it.  It is a right and proper use of mayoral questions to do so.  The aura of smugness of the political Establishment in London deserves to be elegantly skewered on this and a great many other issues.  But Barnbrook cannot do elegance.  He cannot even follow the precedent of the other Assembly members of all parties, and address the Mayor in a non-partisan way.  He cannot organise his own thoughts.  He quickly loses the thread, finishing without asking a proper question at all.  Naturally, he doesn’t engage Johnson for one moment.  He is easily ridiculed and very brutally despatched, to general laughter and applause.

He is a wire terrier by nature.  He will come back as game as ever, bristling with BNP indignation, having learned nothing from this or any previous encounter ... and certainly not having learned how to square up, within Assembly rules, to a class political act like Johnson.

The 130,714 Londoners who voted for the BNP on May 3rd deserve something better than this.  We all do.

Excerpts from the leaked Home Office Report “Resounding to Economic Challenges”:-

We can expect additional pressures on acquisitive crime, police finances (and officer numbers), citizen attitudes to migration, and pressure on our fee income.

Our modelling indicates that an economic downturn would place significant upward pressure on acquisitive crime and therefore overall crime figures.

Cost pressures, such as high fuel costs and rising salaries, might leave forces facing financial pressures and require difficult decisions over officer numbers and priorities.

In an economic downturn we expect a significant increase in smuggling in particular of fuel, alcohol and tobacco, but also across a wider range of goods.

An economic downturn could mean an increase in illegal working if migrants’ opportunities for legal working decline and employers are seeking to save costs.

There is also a risk of a downturn increasing the appeal of far-Right extremism and racism, which presents a threat as there is evidence that grievances based on experiencing racism is one of the factors that can lead to people becoming terrorists.

… a real or perceived sense of disadvantage held by individuals.  Grievances based on experiencing racism is one of the factors that can lead to people becoming terrorists.

We are confident that we have the right systems in place to respond flexibly to changing economic needs, and are well positioned to face future challenges.

We have record numbers of police officers and commensurate supporting investments such as police and community support officers.

In the last 11 years crime has fallen by 39 per cent while violent crime is down 40 per cent.

So let’s pull together some of the pieces on the board.

This year two populations forecasts for Britain - one by the Office of National Statistics and the other by the Eurostat - have seriously alarmed the turkeys.

Integration is failing.  Talk of enrichment is a thing of the past, even for a Holocaust survivor!  The stabblings continue unabated:-

… a violent feud had rumbled on in Hackney between a gang from the London Fields area and a group from the E9 postcode.

“This isn’t a feud - it’s a war now,” he said.

“This all goes back to the (Notting Hill) Carnival 2006.

“There was a fight between one of the youngers from London Fields and an older from E9.

“The olders saw it as a disrespect thing.

“It’s gone from fist fights to knives to guns and back to knives.”

Members of the London Fields gang would travel to E9 to attack teenagers simply for hanging out in that area, he said.

“When I was younger they tried to come down and shoot us nearly every day, but people like me got older and got tired of it,” he said.

Shaquille’s murder was likely to provoke revenge attacks, he said.

“We don’t know exactly who did this but we know it’s London Fields,” he said.

“They will do something to every one of them till they find out who stabbed Shaq.”

Meanwhile, “Moderate Islam” is still a government project.  But the government is clinging to the fantasy that white racism, rather than Saudi Wahhabism and Western actions in Moslem lands, is the cause of the terror attacks.  In fact, nobody wants to make a sound about the religion - and the religionists - of peace in case this important electorate takes its support elsewhere.

Then the Chancellor of the Exchequer of the least popular Labour administration in history tells the country that the economy is going to go all to hell.  We know it, of course.

And, finally, the Home Office responds with this conveniently leaked report, which should have been titled “Welcome to the Gangathon”.

It’s not a pretty picture - unless, of course, you happen to be selling security solutions.  Or nationalism.

Could Nick Griffin ask for a kinder set of circumstances?  Quite amazing.  So, if he can’t make some sort of breakthrough now, one is bound to ask what kind of extremis will be necessary for him to do so.

Lord Salisbury, three times a Conservative Prime Minister and a political giant in a more enlightened age, once remarked, “English policy is to float lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boathook to avoid collisions.”  English, no less!  But I digress.

To illustrate the Anglo-centric point a little further, here’s what the New York Times reported on 4th March 1900:-

Regarding Lord Salisbury’s point of view, for some time past he has taken little interest in American politics, and he is averse to any form of an Anglo-American alliance, believing that the Constitution of the United States is unsuited to such a bond.  To use the words of one who is in the closest confidence of the Premier, “the politics of America have such an influence on foreign policy, and render the duration of supreme power so uncertain, that any alliance would kill itself quicker than any one could kill it.”

Lord Salisbury feels under no obligations to foster pro-British sentiment in the United States.  In fact, for the most part he remains in profound ignorance as to the trend of American public opinion.  His idea, as represented by the speaker just quoted, is to trade fairly and squarely without embroiling himself with any extraneous matters ...

Today, though, English politicians - if that is what they really are - have an altogether different view of their and our priorities.  Here’s Boris Johnson, Mayor of London and currently the most powerful Conservative politician in the country, talking to a reporter from Square Mile magazine about Barack Obama:-

“I was looking at him on the news and just thinking what an amazing moment this is, watching his speech in Berlin and thinking what a critical moment this is for America and for attitudes towards what they can achieve amongst the black community.

“If Barack Obama can do it, it will be the most fantastic boost, I think, for black people everywhere around the world.

... I think a Barack Obama victory would do fantastic things for the confidence and the feelings of black people around the world - that they can win.”

Unfair comparison? The last of the great Conservatives ... and Boris. With a friend.

Asked if his words consituted an endorsement of the Democrat hopeful, Mr Mayor said pithily, “Yes”.

Well, I’m just wondering what a time-travelling Salisbury might have thought about Obama and the American body politic, and the “feelings of black people around the world”.  Presumably, he would have held on harder than ever to his boathook, and to English national interest.  He was flatly against what he called “black men” in the English Parliament, and opposed the Liberal candicacy of Dadabhai Naoroji at the 1892 General Election (Naoroji was elected nonetheless and became the first Indian sitting at Westminster).

Salisbury happens also to have been the man who set up the first city-wide authority in the capital, London County Council - something he later came to regret as “the place where collectivist and socialistic experiments are tried. It is the place where a new revolutionary spirit finds its instruments and collects its arms.”  And, these day, puts them around the nearest example of “black people”, apparently.

In any case, the time-travelling Salisbury would be able to judge from the incumbent at City Hall how completely successful those revolutionaries have been.  We are all MultiCultists now.

David Davis MP, the Conservative Shadow Home Secretary and runner-up to David Cameron in the party leadership election in December 2005, stunned the House today when he resigned in protest at yesterday’s passage of the 42-day terror law.

Here is the full text of his resignation speech, delivered outside Parliament to the press:-

The name of my constituency is Haltemprice and Howden - Haltemprice is derived from a medieval proverb meaning noble endeavour. Up until yesterday I took a view that what we did in the House of Commons representing our constituents was a noble endeavour because for centuries of forebears we defended the freedom of people. Well, we did, up until yesterday.

This Sunday is the anniversary of Magna Carta, a document that guarantees the fundamental element of British freedom, habeas corpus. The right not to be imprisoned by the state without charge or reason. But yesterday this house allowed the state to lock up potentially innocent citizens for up to six weeks without charge.

The Counter-terrorism Bill will, in all probability, be rejected by the House of Lords very firmly. After all, what should they be there for, if not to protect Magna Carta? But because this is defined as political, not security, the Government will be tempted to use the Parliament Act to overrule the Lords. It has no democratic mandate to do this since 42 days was not in its manifesto. Its legal basis is uncertain to say the least but, purely for political reasons, this Government is going to do that. Because the generic security argument relied on will never go away - technology, development complexity, and so on - we’ll next see 56 days, 70 days, then 90 days. But in truth perhaps 42 days is the one most salient example of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedom.

And we will have shortly the most intrusive identity card system in the world. A CCTV camera for every 14 citizens, a DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has, with thousands of innocent children and millions of innocent citizens on it. We have witnessed an assault on jury trials, a bolt against bad law and its arbitrary use by the state. And shortcuts with our justice system, which will make our system neither firmer nor fairer and a creation of a database state opening up our private lives to the prying eyes of official snoopers and exposing our personal data to careless civil servants and criminal hackers. The state has security powers to clamp down on peaceful protest and so-called hate laws to stifle legitimate debate, whilst those who incite violence get off scot-free.

This cannot go on, it must be stopped, and for that reason today I feel it is incumbent on me to take a stand. I will be resigning my membership of this House and I intend to force a by-election in Haltemprice and Howden. Now I will not fight it on the Government’s general record. There’s no point repeating Crewe and Nantwich. I won’t fight it on my personal record - I am just a piece in this great chess game. I will fight it, I will argue this by-election against the slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms by this Government.

Now, that may mean I have made my last speech to the House. It’s possible. And of course that would be a cause of deep regret to me. But at least my electorate and the nation, as a whole, would have had the opportunity to debate and consider one of the most fundamental issues of our day. The ever-intrusive power of the state on our lives, the loss of privacy, the loss of freedom and a steady attrition undermining the rule of law. And if they do send me back here, it will be with a single, simple message - that the monstrosity of a law that we passed yesterday will not stand.

The Liberal Democrats, who opposed the 42-day bill, will not stand a candidate in the by-election.  There are signs that the Labour Party, not wanting to submit to the inevitably kicking, may not do so either.  Doubtless they are calculating even now whether they would be more despised by the nation for ducking the issue, and leaving Davis to stand alone on election night, than for trying to defend the indefensible.

They do at least have something to work with electorally, namely that Davis’ slippery leader has refused to campaign at the next General Election to repeal the 42-day law (a decision he has probably had ripped away from him by Davis today).  Anyway, I hope the Labour leadership will realise that it has no choice but to appear, at least, to have the courage of its convictions, and to take what’s coming at Haltemprice and Howden.

What’s coming more generally may be considerably enlivened by Davis’ novel action.  He has created an opening to like protest by senior Members, on matters, of course, of suitably high import.  The Lisbon referendum issue is one.  But Davis himself used the phrase “so-called hate laws to stifle legitimate debate”, and that points clearly enough to another.

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.

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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.

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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 class feels alienated, threatened and voiceless,’ says BBC boss

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:-

Who has failed the white working-class?

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.

And just this week, also in the Guardian:-

How Britain turned its back on the white working class

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:-

Why is the white working class so roundly despised?

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:-

White and working class ... the one ethnic group the BBC has ignored

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):-

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by David Hamilton

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).

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