A meeting in ghastly, characterless Birmingham of 300 offended people with itchy beards - rumoured to be all males - has produced a demand for changes to the Race Relations Act and the Press Complaints Commission code.  Specifically, the newly-formed Muslim Action Committee wants the same right in law to be offended as infrequently, apparently, as Sikhs and Jews.  And this is notwithstanding the fact that only last week Parliament neutered Charles Clarke’s guileless attempt at this sort of thing.

To demonstrate the monumental capacity these, of course, vibrant scholars have to get offended, effendi, they are organising a march in ghastly, non-white London on February 18th.  Let’s hope they get themselves a decent signmaker this time.  Between 20,000 and 50,000 marchers are expected to attend, almost all of them offended.  But some may be very angry indeed.  Some may even be ballistic.

I can’t help but wonder if non-European Caucasians aren’t altogether too excitable for boring old, unexciting Britain.  If they just don’t get free speech at all - and they don’t - maybe there’s a better, more sandy place where they can practise their humourlessness and dedication to outrage as much as they like.  Five times a day even.  Ten, twenty, I don’t mind.

It is late 1943. It is clear that Germany will lose the war. Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt have just attended a conference at Tehran to plan the future of the war and Europe.

What would an English traditionalist have made of the situation?

On 9th December J.R.R. Tolkien, future author of Lord of the Rings, wrote a letter to his son Christopher, who was training in the R.A.F. This is how he observed the situation:

“I must admit that I smiled a kind of sickly smile and ‘nearly curled up on the floor, and the subsequent proceedings interested me no more’, when I heard of that bloodthirsty old murderer Josef Stalin inviting all nations to join a happy family of folks devoted to the abolition of tyranny & intolerance!

“But I must also admit that in the photograph our little cherub W.S.C. [Churchill] actually looked the biggest ruffian present. Humph, well! I wonder (if we survive this war) if there will be any niche, even of sufferance, left for reactionary back numbers like me (and you).

“The bigger things get the smaller and duller and flatter the globe gets. It is getting to be all one blasted little provincial suburb.

“When they have introduced American sanitation, morale-pep, feminism, and mass production throughout the Near East, Middle East, Far East, USSR, the Pampas, el Gran Chaco [etc] ... how happy we shall be.

“But seriously: I do find this Americo-cosmopolitanism very terrifying. Qua mind and spirit, and neglecting the piddling fears of timid flesh which does not want to be shot or chopped by brutal and licentious soldiery (German or other), I am not really sure that its victory is going to be so much the better for the world as a whole and in the long run than the victory of———

“I need to you hardly add that them’s the sentiments of a good many folk - and no indication of a lack of patriotism. For I love England (not Great Britain and certainly not the British Commonwealth (grrr!)), and if I was of military age, I should, I fancy, be grousing away in a fighting service, and willing to go on to the bitter end - always hoping that things may turn out better for England than they look like doing.”

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From Reuters (but at least American public health researchers are willing to tell the public what they need to know):-

Just over half of new infections with the AIDS virus in the United States are in blacks, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

A study of detailed data from 33 states shows that of 156,000 new cases of HIV infection between 2001 and 2004, 51 percent were in non-Hispanic blacks—although blacks made up just 13 percent of the population in those states.

“The rates are extremely high for African-Americans,” Tonji Durant of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who led the study, told a news conference.

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More information has come to light about the latest beach violence in Sydney. Predictably it began when some local men defended two teenage girls who were being harrassed by three men “of Middle Eastern appearance”. The Lebanese men left but returned armed with knives a few minutes later. What happened next is vividly described here.

Readers might be interested in this comment from a Sydneysider at an Australian site:

Pretty standard behaviour at Bondi as I recall. One or two ‘men of Middle Eastern appearance’ sporting Adidas trackies and a rude haircut, would loudly call a girl a “slut” or a “pig”. If the girl’s boyfriend or husband should so much as look at the perpetrator, they would feign offence “what you looking at?” and all of a sudden ten of his mates would back him up, and it was on as they practiced this week’s kickboxing moves. Additional carloads were always a phone call away, making a cellphone a dangerous weapon.

Last month journalist Peter Whittle wrote an article for The Sunday Times titled “How my neighbourhood was lost to the multiculture”.

It’s the story of the transformation through foreign immigration of the London suburb of Woolwich. Whittle writes eloquently of how such immigration undoes a sense of community and undermines the particular attachments which individuals have to the places they inhabit.

According to Whittle, in the 1970s the area,

“had something that amounted to a collective identity.

“Now it appears to me fragmented, with different ethnic communities existing side-by-side, sometimes uneasily, sometimes violently and always with a sense of nothingness in the air ...

“Sometimes now, in streets I’ve used since my Sixties boyhood, I’m struck by the sense that this place no longer provides my identifiable roots, that now I am simply one of many who happen to live here, with no greater claim to it sentimentally or historically than the next man.”

Such anonymity might be what people are looking for when they choose to live in the teeming metropolitan centre, but in a suburb that has shaped much of your life, it’s a hard feeling to negotiate.”

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“A jury at Leeds Crown Court has cleared BNP leader Nick Griffin of two racial hatred charges and BNP activist Mark Collett of four others.

The jury has been discharged after failing to reach verdicts on the remaining charges - four against Mr Collett and two against Mr Griffin.”

BBC News report.

So, after decades of relentless misrepresentation and high-moral opprobrium from mainstream politics and the media, with never a word gain-said, twelve ordinary men and women could not be relied upon to convict Nick Griffin and Mark Collett of race hate.  The BNP pair left Leeds Crown Court this evening as free men - and men freed to speak freely on easily the greatest and most officially ignored social change in a thousand years of our history.

The Crown Prosecution Service now has to consider whether to reintroduce the two charges against Griffin and the four against Collett on which the jury could not agree.  It should take them all of twenty seconds.  The prosecution case was, frankly, feeble, relying on only one witness - Jason Gwynne, the undercover “journalist” who recorded Griffin and Collett’s speeches for the BBC documentary, The Secret Agent.  It isn’t going to get any stronger second time around.  And while this prosecution might have seemed to Labour politicians like a shot to nothing, another would plainly be malign.  The costs of a second failure would be just too great.

The long-term effects of the trial outcome will all be beneficial.  First, a little healthy respect for the instincts of jury members ought to percolate through to the Pee-Cee-addled brains of our liberal elite.  Their idea that something called “racism” is necessarily the most grievous crime imaginable is not shared by the public.  We are well into the process of seeing this toxic little word devalued.  Now, whenever it is hurled at a defender of Western Man the reply should be, “What, you mean like Griffin and Collett?”

Second, actual speech will be a little freer as a result of failed prosecution.  The precise limit of what can be safely said remains unclear, and the passage of even a damaged Religious Hate Crimes bill onto the statute books further complicates the issue.

But the importance of even partial free speech in an otherwise unfree situation is impossible to over-emphasize.  Anger exists and it is righteous.  If and when it becomes possible to publicly condemn, say, Ken Livingstone when he responds to 7/7 by praising those who come from all over the world to take the places of the dead, the left will truly be on the slide.  All suggestions of a superior morality will depart from it and the political winds will slowly change.

Third, the BNP has had the best possible lesson in discipline and been handed a political prize.  Advocating the rights of the native majority need plainly no longer be seen as mean or hateful. It is just.  The job is getting easier.  Whether the Party can capitalise on this windfall will be revealed at the May council elections.

For now, I am very glad that Nick and Mark are free men and very pleased to congratulate them accordingly.

Back on News Years Day 2005 at, I see, the civilised hour of 11.33 am I posted a short piece on the political future of Russia.  The core of the article was an interesting prognostication by Telegraph journalist, Niall Ferguson.

His argument was intriguing, and provided several striking parallels between Weimar Germany and present-day Russia.  He concluded like this:-

We must all hope that events in Georgia and Ukraine will inspire a democratic revolution in Russia itself. But the Weimar parallel is not encouraging. Germany’s descent into dictatorship went in stages: there were three more or less authoritarian chancellors before Hitler, each of whom sought to rule Germany by decree.

The question that remains open is whether Putin is just a more successful version of one of these authoritarian warm-up acts, or a fully-fledged Russian führer. Either way, he is fast becoming as big a threat to Western security as he is to Russian democracy.

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From The Times:-

Tony Blair suffered a humiliating blow to his authority tonight as the Government slumped to a shock double defeat over its plans to combat religious hatred.

And, in further embarrassment for the Prime Minister, it emerged later that he did not vote in the second division - which the Government lost by just one vote.

The results, after a sizeable Labour backbench revolt, were greeted by loud cheers from the Tory benches and cries of “resign!”.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke quickly announced the Government was bowing to the Commons’ will and the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill would go for Royal Assent to become law as it stood.

“The Government accepts the decision of the House this evening. We are
delighted the Bill is going to its Royal Assent and delighted we have a Bill which deals with incitement against religious hatred,” he said, to Tory jeers.

Mr Blair suffered his first ever Commons defeat only two months ago when MPs voted down plans for a 90-day detention period under the Terrorism Bill and opted for 28 days instead.

Peers inflicted a series of defeats on the Racial and Religious Hatred Bill in a bid to safeguard freedom of speech with an amendment restricting the new offence of inciting religious hatred
to threatening words and behaviour rather than a wider definition also covering insults and abuse.

They also required the offence to be intentional and specified that criticism,
insult, abuse and ridicule of religion, belief or religious practice would not be an offence.

Ministers urged the Commons today to reject the Lords’ amendments and back instead a Government compromise. Home Office Minister Paul Goggins insisted only those intending to “stir up hatred” would be caught under the Government’s plans.

But in the first test of strength, MPs voted by 288 to 278, majority 10, to back the Lords. Mr Blair was recorded as voting with the Government line in this division, while 27 Labour backbenchers rebelled and at least two dozen others did not vote.

In the second vote, MPs voted by 283 votes to 282, majority one, to back the Lords.