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.

By Dr Tomislav Sunic

In a world of media-produced images, reality must be rendered surreal. The historical consciousness of different peoples must become more “historical” than history itself. In order to make their historical narrative about the suffering of non-European peoples more credible historians increasingly resort to paraphrases full of strange adjectives, coupled with selected victims.

This is especially true of the victimhood of African and Asian peoples, which now belongs to guilt-ridden Europeans as part of global memory. It is no accident that along with the loss of their own identity, white Europeans stage saccharine commemorations for non-Europeans. They erect monuments to exotic tribes that they never heard of until the day before last. Days of atonement keep accumulating on the calendar. Every white European or American politician is obliged to pay moral and/or financial tributes to peoples whose identity has nothing in common with his own. While Western media and opinion makers assure us that history is creeping toward an end, we are witnessing a staggering demand for the revival of new non-European micro histories.

Each victimhood requires an expanding number of its dead and its culprits. Culprits, as a rule, are always white Europeans, forced in turn to practice the ritual of remorse. The old sense of the tragic, which until recently was the fundamental pillar of European historical memory, cedes its place to jeremiads for Asian and African tribes. Slowly but surely, the European culture of death is being supplemented by a fixation on the extirpation of distant foreigners. What a scandal if a white European or American statesman fails to display remorse for the past suffering of some non- European people, or fails to accept the latest revised upward moving figures for the victims!

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By Bo Sears

Yesterday the Observer, which is the Guardian in its Sunday best, published an article about Obama and white America by the journalist Paul Harris “in Williamson, West Virginia”.  Mr Harris saw ugliness everywhere he looked in Williamson.

Johnny Telvor was not happy about Barack Obama becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. Not happy at all.

... ‘We’ll end up slaves. We’ll be made slaves just like they was once slaves,’ he said. Telvor, a white Democrat who supported Hillary Clinton in West Virginia’s primary, said he planned to vote for Republican John McCain in November. ‘At least he’s an American,’ he added with a disarmingly friendly smile.

Such racist opinions are a rough antidote to the giddy optimism that has swept through much of America’s chattering classes over the past week ... The United States, they have argued, is finally prepared to elect a black president and absolve its historic sins of slavery and Jim Crow. But the uglier truth is that part of white America remains secretly - or sometimes openly - deeply distrustful of the idea of a black president.

... Was there anything Obama could say during the coming campaign to convince him? ‘Nope,’ Spence replied. Then he broached the one issue many Americans consider off-limits: the potential security threat to Obama. ‘Look, someone will kill him. Whoever Obama picks as running mate will end up being president.’  Spence’s ready smile and chatty manner on the thorny issue of Obama’s possible murder gave little clue as to whether he thought it would be a bad thing or not.

Often such sentiments are dismissed as the ramblings of a few diehards, carrying with them the prejudices of a by-gone age.

... Stanley Little laughed when asked if he could support Obama. ‘I will vote for McCain,’ he said. Little, a maintenance man for local offices, had one simple reason why he too was rejecting his long family history of voting Democrat. ‘McCain is one of us. Obama ain’t,’ he said, leaving little doubt as to who he meant by ‘us’.

... In exit polls of the recent primaries in Kentucky and West Virginia, one in five Democrats confessed to pollsters that race was a factor in their voting choice. ‘West Virginia and Kentucky were just more honest than other parts of the country. A lot of other people know it’s not socially acceptable to mention that sort of thing,’ said Professor Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University and expert on racial politics.

... Gillespie points out that recent studies have shown that white voters in US cities that have elected a black mayor for the first time prove far more willing to elect one for a second term. ‘They realise the sky has not fallen in. That life went on,’ Gillespie joked. If Obama does win the White House, that experience could be repeated on a national scale for all Americans. Few things could be more important in finally drawing the poison of racism out of American life.

But behind such optimism, another America looms. It is an America far from the headlines that have proclaimed Obama’s candidacy a revolution that will atone for a race-tinged history. This is the America where outrageous rumours that Obama is a Muslim are readily believed. It is the America where Telvor is able to voice a sentiment that ‘Obama might actually be the antichrist’ without apparent irony or fear of contradiction. It is a slice of America trapped in the dreadful history of race relations and the legacy of slavery and segregation.

On the streets of towns such as Pikeville and Williamson, and in the minds of people like Little and Telvor, that past lives on. It is kept in the present by poverty, joblessness and a fear of the different. It is also a powerful force that should not be underestimated. It could even decide who will be the next President. ‘McCain will beat Obama. There’s a lot of Democrats around here that will be switching side to vote for him,’ Little said. Behind him a white-washed message in the closed Obama Pikeville office read: ‘Vote Obama 08: change!’ In the brutal summer heat it seemed a forlorn hope. It was asking for the overthrow of generations of entrenched prejudice.

In answer to this entrenched anti-white prejudice Resisting Defamation mailed the following letter to The Observer:-

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By David Hamilton

City drugs turf war

DOZENS of extra police officers patrolled the streets of a Sheffield suburb last night after yobs from rival gangs armed with sticks and swords clashed in a drug-related turf war and a man was stabbed in the city centre.

The trouble between the Afro-Carribean and Somali gangs has been simmering all week but finally spiralled out of control when youths armed with sticks and swords fought on the streets of Broomhall on Thursday night and a man was stabbed outside Primark in Sheffield city centre yesterday morning.

Today Ch Supt Jon House, Sheffield district policing commander, said ... ““We now feel, following conversations with the leader of the council and the leader of the Labour Party, a more robust stance of stop and search must be taken to reassure members of the public.”

... Coun Mazher Iqbal, former Sheffield Council cabinet advisor for community safety, said the city centre stabbing followed problems starting last weekend. “It started as a dispute between Somali and Afro-Caribbean youths but has escalated and involves two gangs. We’ve had people carrying serious weapons, baseball bats, knives and pick-axes.

From yesterday’s Sheffield Star

The following article was published at

http://www.cdall.net/ on 2nd August 2007.

TAMING GANGS - THE SHEFFIELD SOLUTION

History is exciting narrative and can also guide us with contemporary problems. It does not repeat itself exactly but similarly and study can clarify present disorders. A major problem for decent people living their everyday lives is the take over of our towns and cities by violent gangs that have been allowed here by the authorities. A precedent 1920’s Sheffield, England, was terrorised by gangsters. They lived in cramped back to back houses in courtyards which sociologists use as the excuse. But joining a gang gives power, a sense of importance, of belonging to something, money, possessions, prestige and women offering themselves to you. It gives identity as most gangs are formed on Ethnic lines and based on a territory.

These gangs gambled. Bookies operated outside factory gates with “runners” inside collecting bets for them and one made £75 to around a £100 each day even though it was illegal. Another popular form of gambling was “pitch and Toss.” This was a simple form of betting that required no equipment to pack up and carry away. It was tossing 3 coins into the air with the two forefingers and betting on the proportion of, say, heads that turned up. The biggest and most profitable “Pitching” site was on “Sky Edge” a promontory that gives a panorama over the city and with well-placed lookouts or “Crows” raiding policeman could be spotted from afar.

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Today I came across a video slice of a Henry Kissinger interview about the troubled and troubling process of European integration.  The interview was conducted by Peter Robinson for National Review Online, and it’s dated 22nd April 2008.

Kissinger was an academic connected to the Council on Foreign Relations in the late 1950s while the Treaty of Rome was being planned.  His specialism was security, with reference to nuclear weapons.  Obviously, one of the major strands in the European project was the prevention of a third 20th Century war, so he may well have contributed to the CFR’s adumbrations on the subject, and the somewhat royal “We” he employs in the interview is more than likely justified.

In any event, at one minute in, the old thaumaturge relieves himself of the following remark:-

Did we make a mistake?  Probably not, because Europe was strained by two world wars, and the European nation state was no longer in a position to carry out the global responsibilities which used to be characteristic of Europe.  We over-estimated, however, what could be achievable.  We thought you could transfer the loyalties of the nation state to the greater organisation that was being created, and that has turned out to be wrong or not feasible.  So Europe, in a way, is now suspended between its past, which it has partially given up, and it’s future which it hasn’t yet reached - and maybe never reach.

Next Thursday 12th June, the Irish electorate will go to the polls as the only member nation of the EU to vote on the Lisbon Treaty.  Last week the Irish Times published an opinion poll which showed the swashbuckling “No” Campaign ahead for the first time:-

35% No (up 17%)
30% Yes (down 5%)
35% Don’t Know (down 12%)

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As a follow-up to a prior post:

At 3:05 into the above video, the chairman of the Washington State Republican Party (WSRP) Convention mentions “Jim Bowery” as the author of the resolution, that passes the convention, to require the House to formally declare war before committing troops.  That’s the plank passed by the Skamania Convention.  I strengthened the language for the resolution at the State Convention.

You can see the McCain delegates filing back in in response to the passage of that resolution, their gambit to disestablish a quorum having backfired.

I’m on some lists now for sure…

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“During the Cold War, a group of Russian journalists toured the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their hosts for their impressions.  “I have to tell you,” said their spokesman, “that we were astonished to find, after reading all the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the vital issues were, by and large, the same. To get that result in our country we imprison people. We tear out their fingernails. Here, you don’t have that. What’s the secret? How do you do it?”

... During the 1970s, I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed members of the dissident group, Charter 77. One of them, the novelist Zdener Urbanek, told me, “We are more fortunate than you in the West, in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and watch on television, nothing of the official truth. unlike you, we have learned to read between the lines of the media. unlike you, we know that that real truth is always subversive.”  By subversive, he meant that truth comes from the ground up, almost never from the top down.

John Pilger explaining the power of journalism in the West to an audience at Columbia University in April 2006.

Pilger, now 68, has devoted his entire journalistic life to speaking for the (mostly Third World) exploited, degraded or slaughtered victims of the machinery of global power.  The precise targets of his withering fire are the Western governments, the Western political system, his so often supine fellow journalists and, most of all, the rapine corporate and financial elites.

The [US presidential candidates] are as one in their support for America’s true deity, its corporate oligarchs. Despite claiming that his campaign wealth comes from small individual donors, Obama is backed by the biggest Wall Street firms: Goldman Sachs, UBS AG, Lehman Brothers, J P Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, as well as the huge hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. “Seven of the Obama campaign’s top 14 donors,” wrote the investigator Pam Martens, “consisted of officers and employees of the same Wall Street firms charged time and again with looting the public and newly implicated in originating and/or bundling fraudulently made mortgages.”

A report by United for a Fair Economy, a non-profit group, estimates the total loss to poor Americans of colour who took out sub-prime loans as being between $164bn and $213bn: the greatest loss of wealth ever recorded for people of colour in the United States. “Washington lobbyists haven t funded my campaign,” said Obama in January, They won’t run my White House and they will not drown out the voices of working Americans when I am president.” According to files held by the Centre for Responsive Politics, the top five contributors to the Obama campaign are registered corporate lobbyists.

What is Obama’s attraction to big business? Precisely the same as Robert Kennedy’s. By offering a new, young and apparently progressive face of the Democratic Party, with the bonus of being a member of the black elite, he can blunt and divert real opposition. That was Colin Powell’s role as Bush s secretary of state. An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.

This is good stuff, from an essay published last week in the New Statesman.

Of course, Pilger cannot process the case for Western survivalism.  He stands politically, I think, with the global justice movement, which is an outcrop of the post-communist left.  But the older I get the more I realise that dissonance is not a good enough reason to accept the role allotted to us of endlessly quarrelling with the left.  There is no left and right in the harsh light of day.  There is plutocracy and there is victimhood everywhere that plutocrats reign.  There is knowledge and there is ignorance.  There is sleep and there is waking.  There is the capacity to discriminate human values and there is the absence of it (it’s absent in the left).

In so far as the left leaves us alone to state and restate our own values and to pursue our own cause, we should not quarrel with it for desiring to tend to the poor in the Third World.  Ultimately, both our concerns and theirs are just, and both flow from the same hearth of evil.

That’s the lesson I take from reading Pilger’s largely very good material.

Tom Sunic circulated an alert today to the appearance of a fresh volume of some 89 poems by Joe Pryce, titled The Mansions of Irkalla.  Pryce, a New Yorker, is a poet of the Promethean spirit, that long reclusive self of the mythic European past.

Tom wrote:-

In this important book of poems, Joe D. Pryce revives the traditions of 19th century verse of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire. Very much in the footsteps of the French symbolists, he depicts the horrors of the modern liberal system, thus adding his own poetic flavor to the cultural-political arsenal of modern conservative-revolutionary thought. His poems are an attempt to resuscitate American poetry and to realign it with a Euro-American giant, Ezra Pound. His unsurpassed sense of the English language, teeming with surreal metaphors and strange antediluvian imagery, guides the reader to that primordial quest for the meaning of time and being. Pryce’s poems are an invaluable contribution to the heritage of European Prometheism, which has lain dormant since World War II.

I thought I should reproduce a couple of Pryce poems.  They predate the new collection, but illustrate well what Tom is getting at.

Maidens & Guardians
We sing our lays
Of distant days
Of honeyed springtimes
In an Age of Gold.

But we the warriors work on in shadowy remoteness
Recollecting tragedy whilst forging treasures of the spirit
In a pensive pondering, anigh the maidens caroling
Through noontide’s mellow and yet vibrant gleaming
For an awesome advent is approaching
Gathering its might upon the heavy wings of autumn.

Still this dithyrambic choir of maidens,
Is rehearsing, warbling, for its festival.

An elaborately interwoven and precisely draughted world
Of slow and sweet decline
Its palette slightly muted as to color
Seems in our eyes slowly now to dim
And languish, as if knowing that
These sweet chansons accompany
Their dark avengers
As we forge our racks
And craft our fearsome Iron Maidens.

Sad, yet richly apprehensive
Of the wondrous wizardry of the declining,
Meltingly alluring world advancing ineluctably upon us.

More than merely Autumn slithers up the steep declivity, and so,
We now go off to deal out savage preludes
To unspeakable massacres beyond which we must
Deal out condign pain to many more who sha’n't tell aught of it.
For now is the bright hour of our returning come among us:
And we all are ready.

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