British law and the Malteser that melted

Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 14 July 2006 11:53.

... in tears, as it happens.

A branch of one of the world’s biggest banks has been found guilty of racism after a senior member of staff told a colleague she would be voting for Robert Kilroy-Silk at the last general election because she said he promised to “get rid of the foreigners”.

The remark was overheard by another employee, who sued the bank, HSBC, for race discrimination. Ruby Schembri, 35, a Maltese national, reported the remark. This week an employment tribunal ruled the remark could be construed as racist and ordered HSBC and the supervisor to pay compensation. The case is one of the first to find that a comment not directly made to another person can constitute racism.

This exciting, go-ahead development in the great fight for individual liberty means that criticism of immigration is steadily becoming impossible in the British workplace. You may perhaps consider such an affront to grown-up living came about only through the wilfull exploitation of some pretty disingenuous behaviour, to whit:-

Ms Schembri added: “I found Debbie’s racist comment to be offensive and very hurtful. I left the room and was on the counter. I began to cry.”

But moral fibre has no place in the modern British courts. And it sure can’t when self-professed race lawyers and victimology artists boast about “Fearless & Innovative Litigation” and about winning “the largest race claim in the history of the UK”, all via “affordable representation, whatever the actual cost to our firm”.

Oh for the days when an employer could turn around and say, “Look, sweetheart, if you can’t handle that you’d better find yourself somewhere else to work”. This one, I should add, felt obliged to send the benighted Kilroy-Silk supporter to race awareness classes.

Of course, as an MRer I believe we should all be made fully aware of race. But I doubt if that was quite the intention in this lady’s case.

Tags: Law

Comments:

Posted by Calvin on Fri, 14 Jul 2006 18:56 | #

I circumvent all of this PC crap by positing my opinions as hearsay. For example, at the time of the Cronula “riot”, everyone was spouting on about how “racist” Australia was (and feeling smug about not being low status “racists” themselves), I invented a brother who lived in Australia who said, ” Actually this protest was not racist. Australians get along very well with most immigrant groups and this seem to be a conflict that was specifically between Lebanese immigrants and White Australians”. I pitched in with some other information my “brother” had told me about the Sydney rapes just to stir the pot a little. Every Australian and everyone who had visited Australia then chipped in with their (low, low, low) opinions about the Lebs and did so a far more forthright manner than I had.

At the time of the Irving persecution I informed workmates about some “crazy” German called Toben who had taken GPR to Treblinka and had claimed to have found zero evidence of mass graves. Be creative. We are clever than them. What’s the average IQ of a sheep?

Posted by Al Ross on Sat, 15 Jul 2006 01:00 | #

HSBC is the acronymic successor to the old HongKong and Shanghai Bank which was founded during the days of empire by a group of expatriate Scottish merchants. If these Victorian gentlemen were to return to contemporary Britain and witness the terminal stupidity embodied in this case’s ruinous outcome, they would reasonably conclude that the country has taken permanent leave of its collective senses.

I am a customer of HSBC and, some years ago, during one transaction in Penang, I overheard a female teller’s referring to me, in the Chinese dialect, Hokkien, as ‘gweilo’, or foreign devil. No offence was taken by me as no malice was intended and some time later I met the bank’s regional director, a Scot, in the Penang Club bar and we laughed about the incident. We agreed that the Chinese, like the Scots, ‘had a good conceit of themselves’.

Posted by Kulturkampf on Sat, 15 Jul 2006 08:06 | #

As someone with some Maltese blood myself, I find this woman’s reaction fairly pathetic. But please note that beneath the soft chocolate exterior of the Malteser, there is a reliable honeycomb centre:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Malta_(1565)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Malta_(1940)

If this woman is hurt by remarks about foreigners, she would do well to read a little history - or the news:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5145168.stm

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 15 Jul 2006 18:22 | #

From the BBC News article linked by Kulturkampf:

The government of Malta says it has no more capacity to deal with illegal immigrants [...]. Almost 1,000 immigrants have landed on the small island since January - the equivalent, [it says], of about 30,000 immigrants arriving in Spain. [...] Malta is now demanding immediate EU help to deal with the problem. [...] The [facilities housing the illegals have] sanitary and health problems because [they are] massively overcrowded, full of young African [Negro] men [...]. Maltese Foreign Minister Michael Frendo says his country now faces the greatest immigration problem in the EU. “If the Spanish have had 10,000 in the Canaries, we can say we have had the equivalent of 96,000 [...] and we are now at the limits of our capacity. Malta desperately needs help to deal with the people here and to stop more from arriving. And if it doesn’t get it, many Maltese people fear the effects the immigrants will have on their small, homogenous nation,” Mr Frendo says.

Malta, of course, can get rid of these illegal and unwanted African Negroes any time it wants by putting them on outbound ships—whether its own or someone else’s—but, instead of acting, throws up its hands helplessly and begs for sympathy, understanding, and “help” from the E.U. What’s going on here? What is Malta afraid of, or why is it impotent? It’s as if a flying saucer had flown over Malta and shone a special paralysing ray on it, rendering it incapable of acting. What, exactly, is the nature of that special paralyzing ray that’s been shone on Malta? The E.U.? Fear of international criticism and accusations of “racism”? The Maltese woman’s vote? Modernism? The influence of Christianity? The influence of diaspora Jewry? Wall Street (half of whose executives are Jewish)? The way to respond if the Catholics open their yaps is to send these Negroes to Vatican City and if the Jews open theirs, to the port of Haifa.

Governments of western countries are capable of acting when they want. If a bunch of former Nazi concentration camp guards or former Nazi SS men landed illegally or even legally in some western country does anyone doubt for a second they’d get deported in about five minutes?

Why the paralysis, the begging for help, in the case of African Negroes? What’s holding the Maltese government back from simply acting to rid itself of the problem?

Posted by Fred Scrooby on Sat, 15 Jul 2006 18:32 | #

” ‘I left the room and was on the counter. I began to cry.’ “

Let’s see if she begins to cry when placed aboard a jetliner bound for Johannesburg with a one-way ticket in her purse. I’ll even donate a box of Kleenex—a kingsize box ....