Majorityrights Central > Category: British Politics

I don’t do much in the way of copy ‘n paste posting.  But this story, following on the heels of the BNP’s fine showing in yesterday’s four council elections, is politically interesting.  It appears to represent something of a breakthrough in that government has admitted not only that racist attacks by foreigners are committed in our schools, but also that school, police and legal authorities try to look the other way.  In other words, they are institutionally racist.

Swindon school faces inquiry after brutal ‘racist’ attack by Asian teenagers

It has taken two years, a sustained lobbying campaign and an exhausting round of letter writing for Liz Webster to get some justice for her 17-year-old son.

In January Mrs Webster, 44, met schools secretary Ed Balls, who recommended an inquiry into the savage attack, on school premises, on Henry Webster by a group of Asian teenagers.

It was January 11, 2007, when Henry, then 15 and a ginger-haired star rugby player, popular with his class mates and with no history of being disciplined for poor behaviour, arrived at the tennis court at The Ridgeway School in Swindon to settle, “one on one”, an argument with a fellow pupil. Only it was a baying mob and not a single opponent waiting for him.

What happened next, witnessed by more than 100 pupils – and even filmed by one on a mobile phone – was an ambush so vicious that, at the subsequent court case, the judge described it as a ‘‘savage and sustained attack”.

It was, said Judge Carol Hagen when she passed sentence on 13 boys and young men who set upon Henry, a ‘‘miracle’’ that Henry had survived.

Though the 13 Asian teenagers and young men who attacked Henry – all members of a gang who called themselves the ‘‘Asian Invaders’’ – were given sentences of between eight months and eight years for grievous bodily harm and conspiracy to commit GBH, no independent inquiry into how Henry was brutally assaulted, while at school, in an attack that was described in court as ‘‘something out of a Quentin Tarantino film”.

During the trial, Judge Hagen was highly critical of the school, asking why there were no staff present in the tennis courts at the end of the school day, since it was known there had been trouble earlier in the day.

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Peter Mandelson, already a resignation veteran, the architect of New Labour and of spin in British politics, and possibly the most despised politician of recent times, is returning to the cabinet.

Normally, I would attempt to formulate some sort of response of my own, beyond the obvious single word offering of “Gobsmacked”.  But the Guardian’s on-line Labour-lovers are coming up with much more jaw-dropped, wide-eyed bemusement that I ever could, all in answer to a Mandelson eulogy by another despised spin-person, Derek Draper (yes, the guy who once boasted “There are 17 people who count in this government, and to say I am intimate with every one of them is the understatement of the century”).

Enjoy the thread here.

One slightly wierd side-note ... a commenter named Pinktaco sensibly asked how Mandelson, who is not a member of either house, could serve in a cabinet post.  The comment was removed by the moderator.

For a fleeting moment this morning I was stopped in my tracks by a single sentence from a Guardian interview given by Shadow Home Secretary Dominic Grieve MP QC:-

“We’ve actually done something terrible to ourselves in Britain.”

But then came this intellectually flabby, depressingly predictable explanation:-

“In the name of trying to prepare people for some new multicultural society we’ve told people, particularly long-term inhabitants, ‘Well your cultural background isn’t really very important, or it’s flawed, or you shouldn’t be worrying about it’. And then we’ve been shocked that far from producing the new model citizen who easily adapts to multiculturalism, people are very resistant, very fearful and very lacking in self-confidence.”

So, the English are “long-term inhabitants” (the Third World invaders are “second- and third-generation immigrant communities”).  I’ve been called a few things in my time, but never a “long-term inhabitant”.  What kind of idiot thinks like that?  Apparently, one that, if the polls are to be believed, has a very good chance of becoming Home Secretary in the next year or so!

To compound matters, he doesn’t even appear to have noticed the culture war that was fought by the Birmingham Schooled left from the 1980s onward.  It was only preparing people for “some new multicultural society”. So that’s alright, then.

It’s enough to want to grab him by his expensive lapels and bellow, “Look, you clueless prat, what has been done to us is a crime against humanity ... an effing genocide!”

But he would only think that I lack self-confidence.  Obviously.

He says:-

“In this vacuum, both the BNP and Hizb ut-Tahrir rise. They are two very similar phenomena experiencing a form of cultural despair about themselves and their identities. And it’s terribly easy to latch on to confrontational and aggressive variants of their cultural background as being the only way to reassure themselves that they can survive.”

So the BNP is the moral equivalent of a radical Moslem organisation that, only last year, David Cameron asked Brown to hurry up and ban.  And, of course, it’s all about despair.  We are just in need of a bit of good old reassurance.  Something like: “You long-term inhabitants have absolutely nothing to complain about as your precious homeland passes slowly and irrevocable into the hands of much shorter-term inhabitants.”  No, nothing at all.  Dominic has it all worked out.  All we have to do is to be tolerant since, as everyone knows:-

“Our country has adapted because people have been tolerant, which has often required a lot of forbearance and acceptance of things they didn’t like. That is how Britain has evolved.

You see.  Government-organised race-replacement by negroes and Moslems isn’t genocide at all.  It’s evolution.

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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