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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News.com reports that:

“Risks from cyberattacks are increasing and the consequences are so great that the country needs a “Manhattan Project” for network security, Michael Chertoff, secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The government needs the “best and brightest…”

Why doesn’t Chertoff just bring in a bunch of Indians, Chinese, and Israelis on H-1b visas?

Oh, wait… he is:

“The Department of Homeland Security stepped up to the plate Friday for corporate H-1B visa interests as it changed immigration rules without notice to allow employers to hire an unlimited number of foreign students majoring in science, technology, engineering and math to work in the U.S. for 29 months after graduating with a bachelor’s degree or higher — longer if an H-1B visa is pending — provided they studied in the States for one academic year under an F-1 visa and their employer enrolls in the Department’s e-Verify program. ‘This rule will enable businesses to attract and retain highly skilled foreign workers, giving U.S. companies a competitive advantage in the world economy,’ said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in justifying the change, which the DHS made without notice or comment by exploiting a ‘good cause’ exception that allows procedural rules to be bypassed to prevent ‘serious damage to important interests.’ In explaining its motivation, the DHS cited testimony by Bill Gates (‘I don’t think there should be any limit’) as well as the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation, which counts major H-1B stakeholders Google, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft among its members.”

Read the following article:

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080408/online_sales.html

Now, reflect.  Deduct nearly all residential construction from your Local Serfice (intentionally misspelled) Economy.  Subtract about 95% of new commercial construction. What remains is plenty of existing square footage to supply a declining sector’s needs.  The portion declining fastest will be the part which fits inside a UPS package’s weight & cubic limits.

Now factor the store owners and employees who formerly worked in the boarded up stores out of the equation.

Maguire has been projecting this for quite awhile.  The online ‘growth’ in retail is coming entirely at the expense of the local bricks ‘n mortar store fronts.  Jobs in the Local Service Economies are taking another hit.  For the remaining jobs our Europid underclass will increasingly lose out to mobile, church- and government-sponsored “Hispanics.”  The easy money monetarism of the investment classes demands it!

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Previously, in All the Fountains of the Deep Burst Forth, I outlined a nightmare scenario, predicated on enormous solubility of methane gas in deep stagnant ocean waters, wherein the emerging energy crisis motivated reckless entrepreneurs to “uncork” those enormous stores of dissolved methane gas resulting in a catastrophic release of methane into the atmosphere on a scale that conceivably could extinguish most life as is hypothesized to have occurred during the Permian extinction event. 

Our own GT offered some relief by assuring us that such stagnation is unlikely in today’s oceans as compared to those of the Permian period, when all land masses were joined in one continent known as Pangaea, and the oceans were therefore also radically different. 

It took me a while but I’ve now located additional, and even more compelling relief from the dissolved methane nightmare scenario.

In Methane-driven oceanic eruptions and mass extinctions: COMMENT by Gerald R. Dickens; Department of Earth Sciences, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA; Published Online: January 2004 we see the following phase diagrams which imply that solubility of methane gas in liquid water simply cannot reach the enormous levels hypothesized under the nightmare scenario.  Methane concentration is limited as it precipitates out as solid “methane ice”, which either floats to the surface or is buried in relatively stabilized sedimentation on the ocean floor:

This is a tale of two newspaper articles.  One is a Philip Johnston piece run in yesterday’s Telegraph, reporting on the upcoming report by the House of Lords economic affairs committee into the true economic benefits of foreign workers in Britain.  The other is a Tim Hames piece in The Times, reporting on the stone-cold certainty of a first seat for the BNP on the London Assembly when Londoners go to the polls on May 1st.

The articles themselves were pretty fair.  Philip Johnston has form for bravery on the Great Existential Question.  Tim Hames hasn’t, but he only managed one reference to Fascism.

You can read the articles if you wish.  But my purpose here is not to draw your attention to them, but to their threads.

Both are long for right-wing rags (the Guardian crowd love the sound of their own typing).  Thusfar the Telegraph has reached well over 200 comments, the Times well over 100.  Here are a few examples, among many, of sound thinking.

From the Telegraph:-

“Even putting economics aside, who the hell are you to judge who is and isn’t worthy of a better standard of living, just for having the misfortune of being born in a different country? Why is a British citizen’s well-being so much more important than a Pole’s? Does carrying a British passport somehow make you more worthy? I smell a racist.”  sp0rk in New York

the government is elected by the people of the nation to represent the interests of the nation, that’s really rather simple and fundamental to the way politics work.

We do not owe anyone else anything, if immigration is in the interests of a nation then that’s fine, it becomes a contract of mutual benefit between state and migrant. No nation on earth works anything like you seem to want it to be, nor should it. Why should a migrant hold any nation to ransome and “demand” anything? What use would a illiterate peasant farmer from a 3rd world nation be to a post-industrial, information economy? Yes, no doubt his living standards would improve dramatically, but what do we get out of it having paid for those increased living standards? We already have millions of natives and immigrants, who are effectively unemployable and will be kept on benefits until they die. How would you suggest Western society would function if this numbered billions, which given the practical upshot of your “thinking”, it would be? As a British citizen I cannot unilaterally turn-up and demand to live anywhere other than in the EU by mutual governmental consent, so why should someone else?

How do you expect any nation, even the US to fund equal lifestyles and opportunities for the entire 6 billion around the globe? That’s before you get to the imperialistic tone of “global responsibility”, which I understand is deeply unfashionable these days.

If you smell racism, may I suggest an appointment at your local, ear, nose and throat clinic might be of benefit?
Posted by Peter B on March 31, 2008 8:01 AM

The main aim of uncontrolled immigration is to destabilise the indigenous population economically, politically and psychologically. People can then be afraid for their jobs, their standard of living and their security. In this situation it is imagined that the population will then have to rely more heavily on the state to provide, indeed it is the state that has caused the situation to exist. Problem - reaction - solution. Hegel couldn’t have done it better. Reports and criticism are just fleabites to the government, they scratch and then move on to the next agenda.
Posted by Michele, Saumur, France on March 31, 2008 9:18 AM

Since God chose Israel as his chosen people…how come he is not accused of racism…

Racism is an invention of racists to further their own undeserved interests…and its been working really well for fifty years.
Posted by Hugh E Torrance on March 31, 2008 9:32 AM

Repatriate about ten million immigrants especially those on benefits or who cannot speak English. Then we would no longer have crowded roads and trains, no heavy demands on electriciy and so no need for the blight of wind farms, no need for three million new homes or for “eco new towns” (which is a misleading term anyway) all eating up our countryside. Then England would become English again and most of our problems would be solved.
Posted by Arnold on March 31, 2008 10:00 AM

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Max Keiser, the engaging and extremely well-travelled financial journo at Al Jazeera, on the clear implications of central bank support for dumb and busted speculators:-

The money quote - sorry for the pun - comes right at the end.  “In this globalised financial world the profits have been privatised and the risks have been socialised”.  In other words, the bankers can’t feel the effects of their crazier speculations because government simply shifts the losses to the taxpayer.  In effect, the more crazy the speculation and the more spectacular the losses, the more certain it is that government will insulate the errant banker from the pain he causes.  Government actually condones his most irresponsible speculation.

How sustainable this nonsense is, we are now engaged in discovering.  Economic common sense dictates that it isn’t sustainable at all, and the longer it takes for the cost to return to source, the more likely the financial system will not be able to accomodate it, and will collapse.

Another very good financial dissection by Keiser, this time on what the yen carry trade is doing to Iceland, is available here.

The removal of Fitna.  Official LiveLeak statement.

Following threats to our staff of a very serious nature, and some ill-informed reports from certain corners of the British media that could affect the safety of some staff members,  LiveLeak has been left with no other choice but to remove Fitna from our servers.

This is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net but we have to place the safety and wellbeing of our staff above all else.  We would like to thank the thousands of people from all backgrounds and religions who gave us their support.  They realised that LiveLeak is a vehicle for many opinions and not just one.

Perhaps there is still hope that this situation may produce a discussion that could benefit and educate all of us as to how we can accept one another’s cultures.

We stood for what we believe in, the ability to be heard, but in the end the price was too high.

LiveLeak.com

BUT IT’S STILL ON YOUTUBE

Yesterday’s original post ...

Geert Wilders’ has now found a host on-line for his much trailed and relentlessly tragic film, Fitna the Movie.  It is in Dutch, but scarcely needs translation.  It is too uncomplicated for that. [Actually here is the English-language version, with my thanks to Hibernia Girl - Ed]

Let it be said that Wilders’ message of Islam’s alien-ness and its implacable opposition to Western liberal democratic values is unmoderated by any political context.  OK, one wouldn’t expect too much of a critique of those values in a short film like this.  But the responsibility for transferring Moslem populations into Europe - and apparently they now stand at 57 million - goes totally unaddressed.  The viewer is left to assume that it’s simply a product of Islam’s expansionist ambitions.

Likewise, no attempt is made to investigate the nature of Moslem anger towards the West.  The vast offence that Moslems feel at America’s machinations in the dar al-Islam and the humiliation occasioned by Israeli aggression are not touched upon.  All the blood-letting is portrayed as a product of the “problematic” surahs.

We all know Wilders has a penchant for populist anti-immigration politics.  But Wikipedia helpfully explains that he also has a very special feeling, not to put too fine a point on it, for Israel:-

In the past twenty five years Geert Wilders has visited Israel about forty times, he says. According to his own sayings, he has met Ariel Sharon (“many times”) and Ehud Olmert, among others, in Israel. Furthermore, he claims tight connections with the Mossad.

... More than a few members of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy suspect Wilders of taking guidance from the Israeli Embassy in the Netherlands

... in 2005 Wilders proposed implementing Israel’s administrative detention in the Netherlands, a practice heavily criticized by human rights group Amnesty International. Also, at the time Wilders was member of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, he had an employee who directly came from the Israeli Embassy.

So perhaps Wilders is not all that interested in telling his own people that, fundamentally, Moslems are in Holland for the same reason that 1,350 Dutch soldiers are in Iraq.  Perhaps his pro-Israel sensibilities baulk at the very notion of a mutual separation - them from us and us from them.  After all, no employee in the Israeli Embassy would want to see a Dutch Holland or a West careless of its “duty” to the Jewish state.

View Fitna, with all its shock value, as an agitprop vehicle for an ambitious and energetic politician.  A serious contribution it aint.

I am indebted to onlooker for the following story, which is also the story of European Man’s questing mind.  On another thread onlooker posted a link to an innovation blog where the tale - perhaps tall, perhaps not - was told of John Kanzius and his radio frequency transmitter.

In an important sense it does not matter whether Kanzius’ little idea has at a single stroke cured every cancer and solved the energy crisis.  He is demonstrating the daring of the Western intellect.  Tens of thousands of men like Kanzius - not necessarily geniuses or giants of the scientific world - have set their eyes beyond the known horizon, and started walking.  Enough of them have found something new and useful to make our civilisation what it is, and set it far above all its forebears.  Half the world would rejoice in its destruction, such an affront to their self-respect is our ascendency.

The creativity of a Kanzius defines us.  We are not as spiritual as the Indian or as given to faith and hope as the Arab.  We are not as ethnocentric as the Jew, or as rooted in tradition.  We are not as bound to instinct as the African.  We are innovative.  We are restless.  We are takers of risks, albeit ones calculated to free us from sorrow, and raise this extraordinary European life still higher.