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.

An hypothesis by a guy named “Baron-Cohen” of autism’s etiology has been getting a lot of press recently.  He blames the increase in autism diagnoses on an increase in assortive mating among people with analytic minds—aka “nerds”.  Recently, the most read techie website on the net, Slashdot (calling itself, “News for Nerds”) carried an article which trumpted Baron-Cohen’s research.  My response is that not only are nerds not reproducing enough to create an explosion of anything but that the data provided by Baron-Cohen is virtually non-existent and is weaker than the data supporting the hypothesis that immigrants from India are causing the explosion of autism.

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If you’ve noticed inconsistencies in feminist politics there’s a reason. It’s not that feminists are irrational or hypocritical or unintelligent. There is a deeper problem: the first principles on which feminism is based generate contradictory aims.

Poor feminists! They are locked into a belief system which can never pass the test of consistency because the starting point of their theory calls for opposing outcomes.

Homeward Bound

A good way to illustrate the tensions within feminist theory is to look at the article Homeward Bound. This was published late last year and was written by feminist Linda Hirshman, a retired professor of women’s studies.

Homeward Bound begins with the question of why women are not entering executive positions in larger numbers. Some feminists blame the “glass ceiling”: they believe that women are held back in their careers by male employers or by unfriendly work practices.

Linda Hirshman disagrees. In 2003 she undertook some interesting research. She contacted the women who had announced their weddings in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times in 1996. These were women who belonged to a well-educated elite and who had prestigious jobs.

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From a fascinating writeup about the cowbird:

“The interior of a bluebird nestlings’ mouth is yellow. A cowbird nestling has a deep pink or cherry red mouth. Apparently an indicator that a nestling has not been fed recently is blood collected around the mouth. After the baby is fed, blood is drawn to the digestive area, and the color of the mouth fades. Thus having a bright red mouth, and the ability (due to earlier hatching and larger size) to reach higher when gaping results in Cowbird nestlings receiving priority for feeding. Also, Cowbird’s eyes open around Day 2 (about 4 days earlier than a bluebird nestling), so they are better equipped to detect the presence of their adopted parents and position and beg more effectively to receive priority for feeding.”

The question has been asked, “What the hell is a right-wing liberal?”

There is an answer to that question.

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