As previously discussed in Entering the mainstream:  Hyperinflation within a year? (October 23) and Hyperinflation within a year? before that (July 16), it is reasonable to ask whether we might expect the first signs of hyperinflationary pressures by next July.  The Drudge Report may not be mainstream but when it headlines a story, as it did today, titled:

DOLLAR PLUNGES TO NEAR 15-YEAR LOW

Less than halfway to the prediction of next July, one is entitled to wonder if my question posed last July is going to be mainstream even before next summer. 

Some other stories since my October 23 revisit follow…

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Proposition 1

The flight of the middle classes from the inner cities is threatening to undo 30 years of progress that has made Britain the best place in Europe for ethnic minorities, the country’s race equality chief said yesterday.

Trevor Phillips, the outgoing chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), said increased polarisation and segregation in areas deserted by the better-off was “the great threat” to the development of a diverse and harmonious society.

From today’s Daily Telegraph, reporting another speech by the first among equals.  This time he wowed a conference in London to mark the 30th anniversary of the dratted Race Relations Act.

Proposition 2

As members of the Kensal Green Tribe, a gang which robbed victims at knifepoint, Donnel Carty and Delano Brown thought themselves untouchable.

Their faces concealed by hoods, they terrorised late-night London Underground passengers, demanding their phones and money — a practice known as steaming.

The attacks were fast, lasting no more than 90 seconds to ensure they were completed before the train drew into a station.

Those who stood up for themselves were punched, kicked or threatened with weapons, often knives. If they continued to resist, they were “juked” — stabbed in the leg for showing disrespect.

... As the attacks multiplied, the gang grew increasingly confident of being able to operate without being caught. By the end of last year, it was out of control, having targeted 90 people in two months.

“They were easily one of the nastiest steaming gangs we’ve ever come across,” said a police source. “They were becoming more and more violent, acting like a pack of wolves. No one was safe. They attacked both men and women — anyone who had something they could take.”

From today’s Daily Telegraph, reporting on the pair of “teenagers” found guilty yesterday of the murder of London solictor Tom ap Rhys Pryce.  They were handed down sentences of 21 and 17 years.

Trevor Phillips is also seeking a life sentence for the English middle-class.

“This is alarming new evidence of the deep-rooted Tory failure to understand we don’t make remarks about people of different races without fuelling prejudices in the general population.”

These are the words of Dennis McShane, former Labour Europe Minister, as he comes barrelling out of the darkness like a Polish funnel web.  But in the process he inadvertently explains the corrupt motive of the political Establishment to which he belongs.  There is no attempt to explain away black criminality through some original sin of the English.  Nope, forget that.  It’s rubbish anyway.  Eradicating racial prejudice is the great shibboleth.  Everything obeys that.

Spider Man’s venomous moment was, in fact, an attempt to silence the (all-too) plain-speaking Tory MP Bob Spink, member for Castle Point in Essex.  Spink had the stupidly to put himself:-

... at the centre of a race row after insisting the majority of criminals are black.

Mr Spink made his claim in an exchange of emails with a constituent.

He was asked: “Are you saying that a lot more criminals are black than white - or that there are more black people in jail than white because they are stopped more often?”

The MP replied: “The former and that’s what people don’t seem to like. But I didn’t enter a beauty contest when I became an MP!!!!”

Mr Spink 58, MP for Castle Point, Essex, went on to say the problem was being ignored because of “political correctness”.

Yesterday, Mr Spink strenuously denied he was a racist.  He added: “Ministers have told the Commons that pro rata more young black people are known to the criminal justice system than white people.  It is a fact.

“The main parties have to address where the crime is coming from and stop that crime for everybody’s sake, particularly the black community.  It is about telling the truth.  I completely deplore racism of any kind but we need to identify the sources of crime.”

Only the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror carried the story.  And true to Mr McShane’s liberal agenda, the Mirror website does NOT report the end of the trial today of the two black killers of London solicitor, Tom ap Rhys Pryce, 31.  But The Times does, under the headline “Teen muggers found guilty of murdering City lawyer”.  The Guardian does, too, under the headline, “Teenagers guilty of murdering lawyer”.  The Independent goes with “Teenagers convicted of young lawyer’s murder”.  The Telegraph website doesn’t carry the story thusfar.  But the Daily Mail leads with, “Teenagers guilty of killing City lawyer”.  The Mirror’s competitor, The Sun, avoids words with nine letters if possible and just makes do with “Teens guilty of lawyer murder”.

Most of the reports carry the mugger’s mugshots.  So we can see that Donnel Carty and Delano Brown are, erm, of the race to whom Mr Spink was referring.  But then there’s the problem of what to write about them.  I mean, they’re black.  No, yes ... prognathicity ... heavy brow ridges ... wool ... yep, definitely black.  So at once we have a terrible moral problem.  How does a conscientious hack avoid the Spinkist fuelling of prejudices in the general population?

Of course ... these two young ragamuffins are teenagers, just.  That’s what is most noticeable about them.  That will get him off the hook.

Well, these hacks are all utter cowards.  An evil precept makes liars of them, and cynics of the readers they are unworthy to serve.

I don’t think we are widely read by MSM journalists or Tory MPs.  But in case one drops by, this is my no doubt simplistic and impertinent advice: Tell ... the ... truth.  Always.

Last week the Scottish Labour Party held its annual conference in Oban.  Scots-fathered, Fettes-educated Antony Charles Lynton Blair, born in Edinburgh on 6 May 1953, was the main speaker (notwithstanding the Man of Gloom).

His speech, touchingly titled Together not apart, confirmed the fears running through the Labour left that on Thursday 3rd May 2007 they will lose control of the Scottish Parliament, and thus over the fate of the Union ... and thus over the fate of England.

Today, a staggering ICM poll appeared in the Telegraph (interestingly titled “England wants its independence” for most of the morning, before mysteriously switching to “Britain wants UK break up, poll shows”):-

A clear majority of people in both England and Scotland are in favour of full independence for Scotland, an ICM opinion poll for The Sunday Telegraph has found. Independence is backed by 52 per cent of Scots while an astonishing 59 per cent of English voters want Scotland to go it alone.

There is also further evidence of rising English nationalism with support for the establishment of an English parliament hitting an historic high of 68 per cent amongst English voters. Almost half – 48 per cent – also want complete independence for England, divorcing itself from Wales and Northern Ireland as well. Scottish voters also back an English breakaway with 58 per cent supporting an English parliament with similar powers to the Scottish one.

Now, the sap of nationalism that is rising here is of the constitutional kind, not racial.  It is about the ending of governance from Westminster.  Scots and Welsh have traditionally defined themselves against their English neighbour, and for years noisily protested that Westminster was too remote and too London-centric to serve their respective needs.  But until devolution in 1998 it was very hard to get an Englishman to think of himself as other than just British, and of Westminster as other than just his Parliament.  That is changing now in an organic and impressive way, and it threatens not just to deprive the Labour Party of power for a time in Scotland and perhaps permanently in England, but to destroy it root and local branch.

So one would certainly expect that when the Prime Minister came to the dais in Oban last week for his very last speech to the Scottish Conference, he came armed with the most persuasive and powerful arguments for the status quo that man - or political speech writer - can muster.  Here they are, and when you read them think not just of the threat to Labour from constitutional nationalism ... think of a future time when the liberal elite as a whole has to defend its interests against a racial nationalism - against the real thing.

Blair said:-

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Here are the hotspots of a rather interesting, suitably fawning Telegraph article about the demographic crisis of Diasporic Jewry.

Is this the last generation of British Jews?

It is 350 years since Oliver Cromwell readmitted Jews to Britain, but a leading Israeli rabbi warns that Judaism here is now in imminent danger of extinction.

Leading figures from Britain’s Jewish community will join the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh this week at a glitzy ceremony at St James’s Palace to mark the 350th anniversary of Cromwell’s decision to allow Jews to return to these shores.

It is hard today to envisage British society without Jews. It is more than 100 years since Benjamin Disraeli became prime minister and there are Jews prominent in every profession and in every corner of British culture: from Lucian Freud, the artist, to Sacha Baron Cohen, the comedian; Harold Pinter, the playwright, to Harry Woolf, the Lord Chief Justice.

As the Government has conceded that it is time to reconsider the success of the multicultural experiment, Jews in Britain have provided the perfect example of an immigrant people able to retain their identity while playing a full part in society.  However, their very success in assimilating into British life now appears to be threatening their survival in this country.

Earlier this month, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, the world’s leading Talmudic scholar, on a visit to Manchester from his home in Jerusalem, delivered an apocalyptic vision of Anglo-Jewry, warning that a once thriving community faces extinction.

“The Jewish community in England, as in other parts of Europe, is demographically unviable,” he said. “It is a dying community, without even counting assimilation. They say that in order to remain stable, a community needs to average 2.2 children. I don’t think this is the case in Anglo-Jewry. Whatever the figure, when you add the devastating devaluation of assimilation and intermarriage, it is becoming smaller all the time.”

And here’s the Rabbi’s Manchester speech reported - minus the salad dressing - in the Jewish Telegraph.  At the close are some brief but interesting observations on the native majority:-

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Still needing to be admired by the liberal elite, Vanity Blair - the Jesus of Shallow - will use “British” black newspaper New Nation to make his tired pitch for sainthood:-

It is hard to believe that what would now be a crime against humanity was legal at the time.  Personally I believe the bicentenary [of Wilberforce’s Abolition - Ed] offers us a chance not just to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was - how we condemn its existence utterly and praise those who fought for its abolition, but also to express our deep sorrow that it ever happened, that it ever could have happened and to rejoice at the different and better times we live in today.

... According to notes seen in the possession of Baroness Amos, the Lead of the House of Lords, earlier this month, the Prime Minister wanted to make a bold gesture that will be ‘internationally recognised’. He will back a United Nations resolution by Caribbean countries to honour those who died at the hands of international slave traders.

The notes suggested that Blair was willing to accommodate the requests of many campaigners and is ‘prepared to go further than [he is] being asked to’ on the issue of an apology.

One of the aforementioned campaigners is Rendezvous for Victory.  Two years ago these people announced that they were intending to lean on Her Majesty the Queen for an apology.  Evidently, they meant Her Majesty the queen of Downing Street.  But it isn’t an apology for the past they want.  That’s not enough.  It’s an apology, and more, for the present:-

... joint co-ordinator, Kofi Mawuli Klu, said he was disappointed by Blair’s suggestion that slavery is a thing of the past: ‘He’s missed the point. They do not understand contemporary enslavement. There is nothing in this statement about the enduring legacy of slavery in terms of racism and global injustice.’

Klu criticised the absence of the word ‘sorry’, claiming: ‘It’s adding insult to the lingering injuries of the enslavement of African people by the European ruling classes. The message is that if you commit crimes against African people you cannot be held responsible; even when you acknowledge that you have done wrong, you do not feel it necessary to apologise.’

Contemporary enslavement!  With all due allowance for his ignorance of English, Klu’s clucking can only be read as a desire to apply an eternal half-nelson on the European and white American conscience.  He is a race warrior politic enough to confine his remarks here to the European ruling class.  But those guys were laid to earth two or three centuries ago, and the modern Jacobins are hardly a shoe-in for Klu’s “You”.

“You”, of course, means good old you and me.  As Michael Wharton’s Prof Kiosk would scream, “We are all guilty.”  Blair can don the shining raiment of pure conscience and regard himself in the mirror of international plaudit.  But he is only encouraging blacks to believe that their lowly circumstance in Western society was, is and always will be the white man’s doing.  It’s the perfect environmentalism of victimhood ... an escapist illusion where none of the heritable prolixities and capacities we see in blacks all the time can intrude, and where, therefore, there is no end to the sacrifices we must offer until we simply cease to be.

With all the idiocy about some spy who someone killed saturating the news (apparently for no better reason than some Jewish criminals care about him) it is easy to miss another, far more important piece of news involving Russia and Putin:  Ukrainians are petitioning the UN to recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide and Putin’s Russian-nationalistic regime is fighting it.  I’m sympathetic to Putin’s regime’s struggle to fight off the on-going genocide against the Russian nation—genocide which is denied continually—but Putin is in error here.  It was not “Russians” that committed the Holodomor genocide, it was Communists—a viciously anti-nationalist gang that took their ideology of destroying nations (the real definition of genocide under the Geneva Convention) to the extremes represented by the Holodomor—and quite probably trigged Hitler’s rise to power in nearby Germany.

Putin needs to simply repudiate the genocidal antinationalists of the world, including Stalin, and continue the very difficult work of saving his Russian nation from the current genocide.

The Litvinenko poisoning has, and with what terrible, slow inevitability, become the Litvinenko murder, and is well on its way to becoming the Litvinenko Affair.

How much the public will be told from herein is, to say the least, moot.  Both the British and Russian secret services have become involved, we are told.  Both involvements, though, may be more diversionary than truly investigative.

Mr Litvinenko himself was in no doubt as to who his killers were, and then there is this:-

Chemists said that a fatal dose of polonium could only be produced artificially, by a particle accelerator or nuclear reactor.

“This is not some random killing. This is not a tool chosen by a group of amateurs. These people had some serious resources behind them,” Dr Andrea Sella, a lecturer in chemistry at University College London, told Reuters.

So what, in the shark-infested waters of international diplomacy, does the Litvinenko murder portend?

Probably not that much, after all the cloak and dagger stuff has receded from the headlines.  It isn’t in Britain’s national interest to humiliate Putin and find a radioactive FSB hand in the killing.  An effective police investigation could prove disastrous.  One can already hear the seasoned Foreign Office Russophiles proclaiming, “What, just so Blair at the Met can claim to keep the streets of London free from the FSB!”  No one will reply that Russian state gangsterism impacts on our global interests - consider the dioxin-scarred features of the Ukrainian leader, Victor Yushchenko - and now there is some leverage against it.

The plain truth is that we need considerably greater cooperation with Mr Putin, gangster or no.  Our main interest is energy.  Until recently Britain imported only modest volumes of gas from Russia.  That will almost certainly change if security of supply can be established.  If.  The Ukrainian experience in January 2006, when the pipeline from the east was shut down for purely political reasons, is holding us back now.  Only a reliable, cooperative Russia can encourage our trust, but Russia itself must be encouraged to that end.

Then there is the Iranian nuclear problem, and the question of a regnant Iran regardless of that.  Being America’s second best little buddy doesn’t auger very well for influencing Nejad.  Russia has influence in Tehran.  It is also a vital ally in resisting terrorism, for which sound working relations with the FSB are a prerequisite.

So all in all we shouldn’t expect too much clarity from the Litvinenko investigation.  It will, I believe, leave a bitter taste in many mouths.  But diplomacy was ever thus.