Majorityrights Central > Category: Oh Tempora, Oh Mores

“Public turns on animal terrorists.  The proportion of people who approve of animal testing is at an all-time high.  Activists have fatally damaged their cause.  People are fed up with protesters’ thuggery.”

So runs the current headline at the Telegraph website.  The YouGov survey which uncovered this development is here.  The supporting articles written for it are here, here and here.

The lesson is simple enough.  After the Wall went down many far left activists looking for somewhere to exorcise their demons migrated into the animal rights movement.  They quickly turned it into animal rights extremism.  Where once it was Red Lion Square it became Huntingdon Laboratory.  But, to modify Newton’s Third Law, in our society extremist activisim unfailingly produces a reaction among ordinary people.  It offends against their inate sense of justice and moderation, and thank heavens for it.

But usually there is a modifier to this: it doesn’t matter.  Reaction is rarely directly transferrable to politics.  Very many issues, and animal rights is one, never arise at election time and thus a reactionary public has no purchase on events.  It must rely on its elected representatives to share its sensibilities.

In our time we have, with the great Marxisation of the zeitgeist since the 1980’s, seen that this does not work nearly well enough.  It is a flaw in the democratic process and it has allowed extremisms other than animal rights - and ethnic interests other than our own - to seize the tiller of our politics.  All the narrow egalitarian “movements” of the last forty years have been anti-democratic in this way, and continue to be so.  What else are the special interest groups, NGO’s and what-have-you but evidence incarnate that democracy has been subborned and the will of the people dismissed?

I really don’t know how much opinion polls like this one by YouGov cost.  More than interested parties such as the BNP can afford, no doubt.  Still, it would be extremely interesting and useful (and novel) to have opinion polled using the language of political freedom.  How would the native English population answer a question that asked, “Do you think it’s right that before the end of this century the English could lose their homeland to people from the Third World?”  Or “Should you be free to speak as you wish, within the bounds of common decency, and to associate with whom you please?”  Or “Should children be taught Marxist ideals at school?”

Any billionaire reader who has tired of the Champagne lifestyle and wants to do something useful for a change could do worse than think on that.

The first young English girl of whose death in Thailand I became aware was Serena Booker, a book researcher and sister of journalist Christopher Booker.  She was murdered in 1982 while back-packing - then an uncommon but by no means unknown pursuit - in the north of the country.  I have a strong suspicion that no one was ever charged.

Down the years I have noted occasional rapes and murders of Westerners in the country, alongside the promotion of Thailand and other far-flung places as suitable destinations for adventurous students in their gap-years.  No doubt I am an over-protective parent, but something about this back-packing lark doesn’t sit well with me.  I am a businessman.  I know what business cares about and what it doesn’t.  A self-interested industry selling a product whose whole point is lack of structure to young people freed of   parental oversight, and who by definition are not schooled in human judgement, is likely to abuse the trust placed in it.  It is likely to deliver the lowest-quality service with which it can get away.

Quite apart from my suspicions as to the motivations and standards of the Thai gap-year industry, I also recoil from the One-Big-Happy-World assumptions that underpin its message to our young.  It is liberal and it is false.  The warm, wunnerful Thai people are chiefly warm ‘n wunnerful, I think, when money is being spent.  Their concerns do not extend per se to the care and protection of large, pallid-skinned, lazy, over-indulgent, immoral, drunken youths from far away.

That job, in the absence of all locum parentis, falls to the British Consulate.  So it was with some interest that I read this quite shocking piece on the BBC News site this evening

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A child aged 10 who had been kidnapped from his family home and held hostage for almost 36 hours was safe last night after being rescued by armed police from a “terrifying experience”.

... Great Peter Street in Victoria was cordoned off for the Friday night police operation, while a search of a further address in Clapham, south London, recovered three guns. Scotland Yard said that four men and a woman had been arrested for questioning on kidnap and firearm allegations.

So reads this news item in the Sunday Telegraph.  It also mentions that the dedicated squad which deals with crimes of kidnap and extortion sees, on average, one “live” or on-going case a week.  What it doesn’t mention is that there is nearer one such crime reported just to London’s

Metropolitan Police every day, but the ransom has been paid and the victim released.  And it doesn’t mention what this article in The Guardian did last June: we are facing here, to quote its headline, “A kidnap a day by foreign gangs in London”.

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Remember Tom Forrest and his good lady?  They own a family guesthouse in the Scottish Highlands and ran afoul of some homosexual activists last July.

Last July Stephen Nock, a homosexual living in London, tried to book a room with double bed for himself and his boyfriend at a “Bed & Breakfast” in the wild and mountainous North-West of Scotland.  Now, the b&b – Cromasaig in Kinlochewe, Wester Ross – is a family home.  The owners, Liz and Tom Forrest, didn’t want that kind of trade.  Renting a double bed to two homosexuals entailed a certain complicity in an act which Liz and Tom saw as a perversion.  And that is what Tom perhaps somewhat bluntly said to Mr Nock in an e-mail extending his hospitality if the two homosexuals settled for a twin-bed room.

Evidently, Mr Nock didn’t appreciate the offer because the result, in Tom’s words, was that in no time he got “stitched up”.  Homosexual political activists and a prurient press began to shit upon him from a very great moral height.

A weak man would have buckled.  Tom Forrest is not a weak man.  When he was accused of homophobia he replied, “I have no hatred or fear of poofs.  I just do not approve of unnatural acts being performed in my home.” Even when a woman from the National Tourism Board of Scotland arrived to re-educate him - Cromasaig was listed on its website so presumably she thought she had a duty to do so – he remained true to his down-to-earth principles.

Well Tom is not only not weak, he is fiercely independent of mind and industrious, too.  He and, one must suppose, some like-minded, sturdy Scots of conventional taste and good conscience have launched a website pointedly titled Normal Scotland.  Well, quite.  So far there are fifteen or so normal Scots hoteliers listed there, which looks like a pretty good beginning.

Every social conservative, every libertarian, everyone who despises the politically correct and the gaily political should give it up for the man from Cromasaig.  He deserves a fortune to favour his bravery.

Hat-tip to Laban Tall for the story

I’m not making this up:

A bitterly disputed, government-sponsored study has concluded that rape and sexual assault behind bars may be rampant in movies and books but are rare in real life.

“Prison rape worldview doesn’t interpret sexual pressure as coercion,” he [Mark Fleisher: the government’s principle investigator - JAB] wrote. “Rather, sexual pressure ushers, guides or shepherds the process of sexual awakening.”

Here’s a picture of Mark Fleisher:

Isn’t it wonderful the government helps white guys “awaken” to their gayness by having them “sexually pressured” by black and hispanic prison gangs?  After all, we all know gays are born—not made don’t we?

Sir Iqbal Sacranie, Blair’s favourite “moderate Muslim” is only to be pitied for saying during an interview for BBC Radio Four’s PM programme on Jan 3rd:-

“If you look into the scientific evidence that has been available in terms of the various forms of other illnesses and diseases that are there, surely it points out that, where homosexuality is practised, there is a greater concern in that area.”

Asked if homosexuality was harmful to society, he said: “Certainly it is a practice that doesn’t, in terms of health, in terms of the moral issues that comes along in a society - it is. It is not acceptable.”

Inevitably, a complaint was received by police from some homosexual activist, and now Sacranie is under investigation for his role in “a homophobic incident”.

There are three messy little ways this unnecessary timebomb can explode, and each has something interesting in it.  The first way, of course, is very much the more likely to predict reality.

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One of the meagre amusements in watching one’s country slip by degrees into the clutches of unassimilable aliens is the complete hash they make of claiming to be, in any meaningful way, “British”.  No attempt at it really.  Nothing that rises above the derisory, anyway.  Nothing remotely sufficient, for example, to justify the most brazen and comical claims they make to my heritage - while at the same time advancing quite the most outrageous and perfectly conflicting demands on my tolerance.

But then for my sins I don’t expect anything else.  Rumours abounded during my long-past formative years that the, shall we say, personal probity of Arab and Indian sub-continental gentlemen was not always of the highest.  Something regrettable probably stuck and, today, all the experience of said gentlemen garnered by my clearly racist if not actually Nazi, colonial forefathers must be poisoning my narrow, unworthy mind.  I am quite blinded to the precious worth – nay, more – the cultural equality of these splendid persons and their splendid, burqa-encased person—females (and my, how grateful I am to be saved by their modesty from my base lust).

But it isn’t all bad news.  When the hopelessly correct BBC, an “equal opportunities employer”, cannot elicit an end to the confusion even a right-wing dinosaur like me may allow himself a brief moment of ecstatic celebration.

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Mira is an Albanian who has not seen her family in Albania for six years but whose earnings in the UK are their chief source of support.

Her friend, Lisa, adds: “The last time the police raided us, they said ‘you didn’t get a British passport to go on the game’. But I say that it’s my body and I’ll do what I want with it.”

That’s a passage from an article by Jon Silverman that originally appeared in the Guardian on 18th February, 2003.  It was titled Sex workers say “let us stay”.

This touching plea was augmented by an interesting quote from someone called Nicci Adams of Legal Action for Women.  She claimed that “the authorities can be anti-prostitution and anti asylum-seeker at the same time.  What could be more perfect?”

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