Smells like government desperation…

In the days since my last blog, I’ve noticed a proliferation of articles and blogs in the Tory press defending The Gidiot and that Daily Mail article. The sheer number of these articles is not an indication of the government’s confidence but of its desperation.

Suffering from a debilitating mix of fear, anxiety (over UKIP) and anger (at being found out), the collective (yes) mass of Tory hatchet-men have squeezed out blog after blog defending The Mail’s colander-like thesis that the Philpott children died because of their thuggish father’s ‘addiction’ to state benefits. “We need to have a debate”, the Right cried. The words they left out were “on terms controlled by us”. The only people who fall for this trick are the gullible readers of the Mail and the parliamentary Labour party, which has a history of losing its nerve at the wrong time.

However this rash of anti-welfare blogs and articles from the Tory press tells us something: the government is desperate. While some trot out the usual stuff and nonsense about affordability and the myth of a “crowded Britain”, others use this tragic event as an opportunity to mount their hobby horses. Take this one from The Lyin’ King:

It wasn’t the 1945 Labour Government that created the welfare state, that Saturn which now devours its children. The real power-grab came in 1940.

With Britain’s manpower and economy commandeered for the war effort, it seemed only natural that ministers should extend their control over healthcare, education and social security. Hayek chronicled the process at first hand: his Road to Serfdom was published when Winston Churchill was still in Downing Street.

Churchill had become prime minister because he was the Conservative politician most acceptable to Labour. In essence, the wartime coalition involved a grand bargain. Churchill was allowed to prosecute the war with all the nation’s resources while Labour was given a free hand to run domestic policy.

The social-democratic dispensation which was to last, ruinously, for the next four decades – and chunks of which are rusting away even today – was created in an era of ration-books, conscription, expropriations and unprecedented spending. The state education system, the NHS, the Beveridge settlement – all were conceived at a time when it was thought unpatriotic to question an official, and when almost any complaint against the state bureaucracy could be answered with “Don’t you know there’s a war on?”

The welfare state is seen here as evil; a monster created by the Labour party, then in a wartime coalition with Churchill’s Tories. But what’s worse is that Hannan dishonestly connects the welfare state to wartime rationing. How did he do this? It’s magic, I tells ya! Magic! It’s also desperate.

Meanwhile Hatchet-job Hodges tells us that “Labour is panicking over welfare”. The Blairite cuckoo in the nest Born Again Tory tells us,

But then Philpott was convicted, the Daily Mail made the welfare state an accessory to the fact, and Shameless George Osborne moved in for the kill. Labour’s initial response was to downplay the whole issue. Then they lost their heads, and dispatched Ed Balls to launch an hysterical attack on Osborne, driving the Chancellor’s comments to the top of the news bulletins, and making the Labour Party look like they had been employed as Mick Philpott’s defence attorneys.

Now we have the spectacle of  Labour trying to recast itself as the party of welfare reform. Suddenly it’s Labour that wants to “make work pay”, is talking of responsibility at the bottom and threatening to remove people’s benefits. And good for Liam Byrne, because this is where Labour should be.

But it’s too late. Much too late. The welfare debate is over. And Labour has lost it.

Hmmm,  smells like government desperation to me. The Cat thinks Balls was right to attack Osborne for his drawing of a hazy line between a tragic event and a poisoned debate on welfare. That doesn’t make me a fan of Balls or the parliamentary Labour Party, by the way. Hodges, the son of Labour MP Glenda Jackson, goes on to note his agreement with millionaire Liam Byrne’s ideas for welfare ‘reform’ , which is no better than what this government is pursuing. The fact that Byrne has started aping the speech of the government’s  mouthpieces indicates weakness on Labour’s part, not panic.

The Tories, impatient for the arrival of the next General Election, have started their campaign early and, with over two years to go, this is a desperate manoeuvre. A lot can happen in two years.  For instance, there may well be scandals involving government ministers.  After all, this government saw its first ministerial casualty within two months of being elected. There’s also the little matter of the suppressed French prosecutor’s report into the misconduct of the Nazi-fetishist, Aidan Burley. It’s all to play for.

To be honest I’m glad the Tories have done this, now we can sit back and watch as the Tory juggernaut crashes and burns in glorious slow motion. My only concern is this:  should Labour win in 2015, they will fail to repeal all the brutal and muddleheaded legislation enacted by this government.

The Philpott case and the Right’s warped benefits narrative

In the aftermath of the Mick and Mairead Philpott trial, the Right blamed the murders of 6 children on the Philpott’s “addiction” to benefits.  First, the Daily Mail produced its sensational front page (above), then the Telegraph chipped in with its ‘analysis’. Both articles use a tragedy to push the abolition of the benefits system by making use of narrativizations. In other words, this terrible event has been magically transformed into a particular kind of story that fits the neoliberal’s small state discourses .

Let me take you back to 2008 and a mansion fire in Shropshire that caused the death of a family. The perpetrator was Christopher Foster, a wealthy businessman, who had allegedly accumulated massive debts and was staring financial ruin in the face. Foster died in the fire that was intended to mask the shootings of his wife and his 15 year old daughter.

The Guardian says

Police believe Mr Foster killed his 49-year-old wife and 15-year-old daughter at their £1.2m home in the village of Maesbrook, Shropshire, before setting fire to the property. Their burned bodies were found at Osbaston House days after the blaze in August last year.

The hearing at Shrewsbury magistrates court heard that in December 2005, Mr Foster told police his former accountant was blackmailing him over a joint property deal in Cyprus. Two defendants were prosecuted and found not guilty at Shrewsbury crown court in November 2006.

The inquest, attended by Mr Foster’s mother Enid and his younger brother Andrew, was shown photographs of the luxury five-bedroom house before and after the blaze in the early hours of 26 August.

Images of the dining room showed containers of heating oil on the floor. The inquest was told an oil tank used to heat the property was sited in outbuildings and would have been full at the time of the fire.

The body of Christopher Foster was found lying on top of his wife on the floor beneath what would have been their bedroom.

Home Office pathologist Dr Alexander Kolar said Jill Foster died as a result of a gunshot wound to the back of the head, which appeared to have been carried out by another person. There was no indication she was alive during the fire, he said.

Their 15-year-old daughter had a wound to the left side of her head, caused by a high velocity impact. It was likely she died as a result of a gunshot wound, Dr Kolar said, but he could not rule out the possibility that her injury was caused by falling debris.

The court was told alcohol was found in Mr Foster’s urine, indicating he may have been drinking on the night of the fire.

Yet, the Right wouldn’t dare to lazily join the dots between these tragic deaths and Foster’s wealth. Why not? I think we know why not.

On the same day that The Guardian produced its story, the Mail coughed up this sensationalist cack:

But Foster knew a great deal about fires. According to his brother Andrew, he was always fascinated by them. He even set fire to Andrew accidentally when they were boys.

The Mail had its angle but it didn’t blame the deaths on Foster’s wealth.

Now the argument that the Right would put forward would go something like this: “At least Foster used his own money to kill his family”. That’s a rationalization and it’s this same lazy thinking that allows them to view the Philpott case as one where “my (sic) money was involved” in “subsidizing” a lifestyle. The truth is this: it is not your money that pays people’s benefits.  Furthermore, if one adopts that kind of attitude to benefits claimants, then why don’t they adopt the same position when it comes to MPs ever-increasing salaries and their swollen expense accounts?

The real tragedy is that many British people are unable to think for themselves and allow the press to produce their opinions for them. Pumped with stories of benefit cheats and plied with grog from the trashy, voyeuristic mess that is The Jeremy Kyle Show, these people connect dots and see anyone who is struggling to make ends meet as “subhuman”.

But it wasn’t just The Mail that was guilty of apportioning blame to the benefits system. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Honourable Gideon Osborne, heir to the baronetcy of Ballintaylor and Ballylemon, says in this video that the Philpott case “raises questions” about the welfare state “subsidizing lifestyles like that”.

Even an expensive education has failed to teach Osborne critical thinking skills. The rationale goes something like this: one benefits claimant is bad, therefore all benefits claimants are bad.

In today’s Daily Mail, Tim Shipman, uses his article to take a swipe at the Labour party, which he believes, doesn’t want a “debate” on the welfare state. But it is not a debate that he or the Right wants; they want to control the discourse on benefits: this means lying and smearing those who oppose their warped narratives.

Within hours of his remarks about Philpott, he faced a backlash from Left-wingers who accused him of ‘cynically’ exploiting the tragedy to push the Government’s case for cuts to handouts.

Senior Tories said the reaction of the Opposition is proof that it still fails to grasp the depth of public fury at the way some have abused the benefits system.

If you ever believed that this country had a “free press”,  then now is the time to cast your naive beliefs aside. This country’s “free press” operates, mainly,  as an unofficial Ministry of Information. The manufacture of consent for further cuts and dismantling of the welfare state begins on the pages of the Tory press and the mainstream television channels.

In connecting this tragedy to a poisoned ‘debate’ on welfare, the Conservative know that they can further control discourses on the very existence of the welfare state and, by doing so, pull the so-called “hardworking families” and so-called floating voters into their orbit.  Make no mistake, if the Tories win an outright majority at the next General Election, they will abolish what’s left of the welfare state. They cannot be allowed to do this.

Right-wing clichés (Part 4): There is no poverty in Britain

The Tories would love to see a return of the workhouse.

This is a new cliché.  The Right cannot understand how anyone in Britain can be impoverished – they are in denial.  Whenever I hear some chinless wonder tell us that the real poor reside on the other side of the globe on less than $2 a day, the words that spring to mind are “dishonest”, “blind” and “ignorant”.

Here are some facts from the Child Poverty Action Group  that the Right wishes would go away. We’ll take the top four points.

• There are 3.6 million children living in poverty in the UK today. That’s 27 per cent of children, or more than one in four.1
• There are even more serious concentrations of child poverty at a local level: in 100 local wards, for example, between 50 and 70 per cent of children are growing up in poverty.2
• Work does not provide a guaranteed route out of poverty in the UK. Almost two-thirds (62 per cent) of children growing up in poverty live in a household where at least one member works.3
• People are poor for many reasons. But explanations which put poverty down to drug and alcohol dependency, family breakdown, poor parenting, or a culture of worklessness are not supported by the facts.4

I would like to draw the Right’s attention to the last bullet point. I know they don’t want to see this and would like to dismiss these figures as “Leftist claptrap”, but that would show them up for what they are: liars.  It’s all too easy for the Right to make baseless allegations that the poor of this country fritters their money away on Sky TV and cheap booze and fags, but these people simply cannot afford these luxuries. But if people on low incomes own even the most basic television set, the Right will demand “How dare the poor desire luxuries”? We live in a consumer society where those things that were once considered luxuries are now sold as necessities (Bourdieu, 1986). Whose fault is that? It isn’t the fault of the poor. Besides, everyone – regardless of income and social class – needs some kind of diversion or amusement to make the hell of living under this Tory regime more bearable. Though in the case of the rich, life is always bearable because they have a financial cushion to protect them.

According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the UK has “proportionally more children living in poverty than most rich countries”.

Rising fuel costs have forced many people to make the difficult choice between food and heating.

Next month, the government’s welfare reforms will begin to kick in. Council Tax Benefit will go and the Bedroom Tax will be implemented, which both have the potential of forcing many more people into homelessness and/or destitution.  Again, the Right deny that anyone will be worse off by the changes. This is a kick in the face with a hob-nailed boot  for Britain’s poor as well as barefaced political mendacity.

Daniel Hannan, the Conservative Eurosceptic MEP, has never experienced poverty and uses an image of Wayne and Waynetta Slob from The Harry Enfield Show to make his point (I have a screengrab of the article in case he takes it down).

Hannan thinks this is a true representation of Britain’s poor.

Last year in a blog titled “Rising welfare budgets have failed to cure poverty; it’s time to try something different”, Hannan wrote:

Iain Duncan Smith is the first occupant of his office to recognise that increasing the budget has failed. Since the Second World War, benefits and welfare bills have ballooned, yet there has been no commensurate impact on either poverty or inequality. This is because of something which, when stated, is obvious, but which contradicts the old orthodoxy:poverty is not simply an absence of money. Rather, it is bound up with other factors, including low educational attainments, unemployment, substance abuse, family breakdown and paucity of ambition. It follows that you don’t reduce poverty by giving money to the poor. To take an extreme case, giving £1000 to a heroin addict will not improve his prospects. IDS grasps that, to tackle indigence, you need to address its root causes; and that part of the answer lies in so structuring the incentives that people are determined to find work. As JFK observed more than 50 years ago, the surest way out of poverty is a secure job.

Did you notice how Hannan brought heroin addiction into his ‘argument’? He then closes this paragraph by offering us a quote from John F Kennedy that suggests that the disease of poverty is magically cured by work. But he does not bother to ask two important questions: 1) What if there are no jobs and 2) Shouldn’t people be paid a living wage that allows them to live with dignity? Low paid work actually keeps people in poverty.

For Hannan and his Tory chums, poverty in Britain is created by addicts who have a lack of an education and no ambition. Those who are poor, in the eyes of the Right, do not deserve help of any kind and you will notice the way he says “…you don’t reduce poverty by giving money to the poor”. Translated, this means “If you’re poor, tough shit. Become our slaves or die”.

Dismal Janet Daley claims there is a “poverty lobby”. She tells us, “The poverty lobby – as opposed to those who actually want to put an end to poverty – uses the “poor” as a political weapon in its ideological war against the market economy”.  What this amounts to is a smear on those institutions that work towards alleviating poverty. But what Daley also does is to invite us to avert our gaze from the real causes of poverty: low or no wages (of which poor diet is a symptom), poor housing and a lack of opportunities. Indeed, one’s relationship to capital is what defines poverty.

Daley denies that the market or neoliberal economy does nothing to alleviate poverty. Instead she relies on the notion that the “Invisible Hand of the Market” and “trickle down” will provide. She supports this notion by citing an article written by Philip Booth of the very right-wing Institute of Economic Affairs.

This paragraph is the centrepiece of her article:

In spite of the fact that being in work has been shown repeatedly to be the best (and most permanent) antidote to poverty, the public relations arms of the Child Poverty Action Group and the Rowntree Trust (among many others) have been notably disinclined to support the government’s welfare reform programme even though it is designed precisely to free the poor from the benefits trap. Nor can I recall them campaigning for tax cuts on the low paid: instead of allowing people to keep more of their earnings which would relieve their hardship and give them more independence, they clamour for the continuation of tax credits which subsidise (and perpetuate) low wages, and foster dependence on the state.

But Janet, if people have no work, they cannot benefit from tax cuts. Where is your logic? Furthermore, tax cuts will not make up for the pathetic wages being paid to people.  The fact remains that if people were paid proper living wages instead of peanuts, there would be no need for in-work benefits. Moreover, the structural deficit - that is often conflated by the Right with the national debt – will never go away if the Treasury isn’t making money through taxation. The Right’s calls for welfare cuts is predicated, not only on their ignorance of the lives of the poor, but also on their inbuilt social Darwinian prejudices and their deep-rooted class disgust.

Rather than see things as they really are, the Right would rather view the lives of the poor through the distorted lens of the fictional characters of Wayne and Waynetta Slob.  For them, the poor and the low-waged are pizza-eating, beer-swilling schlubs with no ambitions other than to own loads of bling and watch aspirational crap on their flat-screen tellies, and who also neglect their children as a lifestyle choice. For me, their use of televisually-mediated images and apocrypha to support their morally indefensible arguments perfectly illustrates the Right’s inability to comprehend the causes and definitions of poverty and the solutions to it.  Evidently, they would much rather deal with fantasy than the reality of everyday life. No wonder they’re so fond of nostalgia!

Obsessed with a nostalgic image (I could suggest spectacular image) of the Victorian age, the Tories are currently resurrecting the old Poor Laws. It’s only a matter of time before someone like Hannan demands the reintroduction of the workhouses.

Reference

Bourdieu, P. (1986) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, London: Routledge.

Anyone for right-wing comedy? Not for me, thanks.

Jim Davidson: the archetypal right-wing comedian

Anyone who was listening to Radio 4′s Feedback on Sunday will have heard some listeners complaining about Jeremy Hardy Speaks To The Nation. One listener complained that the show was a “party political broadcast for the Labour Party”. Another listener bemoaned the fact that there aren’t any right-wing comedians on Radio 4. Right wing comedians? Really? Do I really want to hear right-wing comedy on Radio 4 or anywhere else? Needless to say, the complaints weren’t so much about the show rather than an apparent left-wing bias in the station’s comedy content.

Readers, I have read complaints like these before on Telegraph blogs and on The Freedom Association’s (TFA) website. The issue isn’t so much comedy itself, but with what the Right perceives to be the BBC’s “cultural bias” and, in the absence of any salient examples,  they will often cite the employment of what it sees as “left-wing” comedians at the “license payers expense”.

We have seen complaints such as these from the Right since the 1970s. The political fringe theatre companies that were funded by the Arts Council of Great Britain, for example, came under attack from Tories like Teddy Taylor, who singled out CAST for special treatment. CAST, it seems, upset him more than most. He said,

“It is an outrageous waste of money. I’d like all grants withdrawn from this theatre company and intend to make representations to the authorities”.

Taylor had an ally in fellow Tory, Norman Tebbit, who complained bitterly of left-wing radicals practising their subversive arts on the taxpayers’ farthing. Thanks to their efforts, the Thatcher government appointed William Rees-Mogg (father of Jacob) as Chairman of the Arts Council in 1983. Under his command, funding was withdrawn from CAST and many others. Many theatre companies were forced to fold or change. CAST revived the variety form with their New Variety circuit and later at the Hackney Empire. But funding cuts to local government and the abolition of the Greater London Council would threaten CAST’s and the Hackney Empire’s existence until the mid-1990s.

So what is right-wing comedy? If you have a knowledge of right-wing political ideologies, then you will more or less understand the themes and the butts of its humour. In the 1970s, we had  Granada Television’s The Comedians. Jim Davidson, unless I am very much mistaken, is a right-wing comedian and a supporter of the Conservative Party. Davidson used to work for the BBC fronting such programmes as Big Break and The Generation Game. To the best of my knowledge, he has never graced the Radio 4 studios. Just as well, really.

Commissioning editor, Caroline Raphael defended Jeremy Hardy and reminded the complainants that satire can only work if it attacks those in power. This is axiomatic of political satire, but in the mind of the Right such self-evidence is met with derision. Why would anyone want to challenge the powerful? Aren’t they superior because of their social position and circumstances of birth? Although, they may not speak these words aloud, the underlying social Darwinian sentiment is there.

If left-wing comedy (well, political satire) attacks those in power, then right-wing comedy attacks those without power. It regards ethnic minorities, women, gays, lesbians, trans people, the homeless, the working class, drug addicts and others as objects of ridicule. It does not speak to power because it is power. In the master-slave relationship, it is the master. It presents life as a series of banal and insulting representations. It denies history because it seeks to create mythologies in its place. It is a sad day, indeed, when comedians like Jimmy Carr are described as “left-wing” by right-wing commentators.

The truth of the matter is that there are right-wing comedians, but their politics may not be evident in their comedy. Those who sit on the political Right are more likely to come across as ‘apolitical’ and play for the troops in the Falklands or Afghanistan. Judge them not by their words, but by their actions.

One of the complainants opined that “the BBC is a non-political organisation and yet it is paying for broadcasting what appeared to be a party political broadcast for the Communist Party”.  First of all, the BBC is not a “non-political organisation” and this is evident in it news coverage, which displays a right-wing bias. Secondly, those who complain that Hardy’s show was a “political broadcast for the Communist Party” ignore two things: 1) the Communist Party does not and has never made political broadcasts for the BBC and 2) Hardy is not a member of the Communist Party. But then, this is how the Right regards anything that doesn’t conform to their views. Even the Labour Party is “Communist” in their eyes.

But if right-wing comedy is like anything else that they’ve produced (think of nationalist poetry), then it’s bound to be pretty poor. I think it was Hemingway, who when asked if he preferred right-wing poetry to left-wing poetry, replied by saying right-wing poetry was “boring”. Right-wing comedy is bound to be, not only boring, but abusive as well.

Nile Gardiner, the Falkland Islands and Barack Obama

Nile Gardiner: obsessive and paranoid. He could give Dr Strangelove’s General Jack D Ripper a run for his money.

There are two words that I’d use to describe Moonie Nile Gardiner. One is paranoid, the other is obsessive. He can only write blogs about two things: The Falkland Islands and Barack Obama. Sometimes…well, most of the time, he combines his two obsessions into a single blog.

Until Mitt Romney’s defeat last November, Gardiner was one of Mitt’s mutts. His brief was to brief Romney on foreign affairs. He did a pretty poor job of it too. Now he’s back to his day job as the Director of The Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom (sic), a subdivision of the extreme right-wing Heritage Foundation.

In the last month, I’ve lost count of the number of Gardiner’s blogs that mention or feature Obama and The Falklands. It’s clear that he desperately wants some kind of confrontation between Britain and Argentina. He’s nostalgic for the glory days of 1982 and he doesn’t really mind if people get killed just as long as the Falklanders maintain their dubious ‘sovereignty’.

Take yesterday’ blog titled, “British Ambassador to Washington calls on Obama to back rights of Falkland Islanders”, in which he conscripts the ambassador to fight his corner. He writes,

Sir Peter Westmacott, the veteran British Ambassador to Washington, has an excellent piece in Politico today in advance of the Falklands referendum which is taking place on March 10 and 11. Aimed squarely at US policymakers, the article outlines why Argentina’s claims over the Falklands are unfounded, and why the future of the Falkland Islands must be decided by the inhabitants of the Islands themselves. It is a clear-cut case of self-determination. As Sir Peter writes, invoking the spirit of the American Declaration of Independence:

My bold. He’s got this all wrong. How on earth can he compare the Falklands – a British colony  Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic – to the 12 states that rejected British rule in 1776? His understanding of history is faulty. Here’s what the ambassador wrote,

The Argentine government claims sovereignty over the islands based on events that took place more than 180 years ago when the archipelago was little more than an isolated outpost with almost no permanent population. But according to the most fundamental principles of international law, accepted by all nations for the past 60 years, it is for the inhabitants of a territory alone to determine how they are governed — the fundamental principle of self-determination, which received its most eloquent expression in Philadelphia in 1776.

… Kirchner and her government seek to portray the Falklands’ status as an example of British colonialism. But what could be more colonialist than seeking control of a territory — over which you have never exercised sovereignty and which your country accepted was British more than 160 years ago — against the wishes of the people who lived there?

Britain, as it has done so many times, stole the islands from under the noses of the nascent Argentina.  The islands were formally colonized by Britain in 1840. But the word “colonialism”, which has been used by Cristina Kirchner, is contested by Gardiner and his buddy, Westmacott.  But the facts speak for themselves: the Falklands are one of the last vestiges of British colonialism along with the troublesome Pitcairn Islands and tax havens like the Cayman Islands. The title “British Overseas Territories” is highly misleading because these territories are colonies in all but name; their inhabitants are considered British citizens but have no political representation in the ‘mother’ country as is the case with French overseas territories or DOM-TOM. Most of these overseas territories have strategic value or are located adjacent to some natural resource or other. Hence the reason why they remain British.

But what about this referendum? Isn’t it a foregone conclusion that the Falklanders will vote to remain, er, ‘British’? So what’s the point of it? It’s simple: Britain or, at least, the Tories and perhaps UKIP, want to rattle sabres with Argentina. Both parties are nostalgic for the long-dead British Empire and both parties gush over the memory of Thatcher’s triumph over the beastly Argies.

In the previous blog, the Moonie writes,

As readers of this blog will know, the Obama administration has a long track record of knifing Britain in the back over the Falklands issue. It has consistently sided with Cristina Kirchner’s calls for negotiations between London and Buenos Aires over the sovereignty of the Falklands, and will not recognise the right to self-determination of the Falkland Islanders. The Obama White House and State Department have refused to condemn the Kirchner regime’s campaign of intimidation against the Falklands, a self-governing British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic, including the boarding of fishing vessels bearing the Falklands flag, and threats to mount a naval blockade.

“The Obama administration has a long track record of knifing Britain in the back over the Falklands issue”? The Obama administration has only been in place a little over 4 years. But here’s a question: how has Kirchner “intimidated” the Falklanders? He does not say. Knowing Gardiner, as I do, I would suggest that he’s come over all dramatic like a pantomime dame. I urge you to look at the blog title. It’s typically hysterical.

He provides a video produced by The Heritage Foundation… well, there’s a surprise.

The narrative advanced by this video ignores the fact that sovereignty over the islands has always been disputed. The reason why Britain colonized the Falklands was because of sealing and whaling. Both animals provided oil for lighting, heating and domestic products. Now oil of a different kind has been found offshore.

The Eastleigh by-election, in which the Tories came fourth behind UKIP, is shamelessly used by Gardiner to have another feeble pop at Obama.  He only mentions Obama once in this blog and it’s in the final paragraph. He tells us,

David Cameron needs to look to the Iron Lady, and not Barack Obama, for inspiration if he is to have any hope of winning in 2015. A conservative party can only win if it sticks to conservative values. Otherwise it becomes an empty shell that succeeds only in alienating its own base and destroying its very identity.

Ridiculous. Is there any sign of the men in the white coats yet?

The day before Eastleigh, the ever-paranoid and shrill Gardiner tells us that Obama’s presidency is “A nasty, brutish, imperial presidency”. So why is that, Nile?

Thomas Hobbes wrote that the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Today’s White House definitely isn’t poor, lavishly feeding off the wealth of the American taxpayer, and the current presidency certainly isn’t short, with nearly four more years to run. But it is undeniably nasty and brutish, as veteran Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward has found after questioning President Obama’s narrative on the sequester issue.

A quote from Hobbes? Great. Just what we needed. There’s more,

Woodward, one of two reporters who broke the Watergate story that led to Richard Nixon’s downfall (immortalised in the 1976 Oscar winner All The President’s Men), has revealed to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that the White House warned him that he would “regret” his recent remarks on the sequester, made in a Washington Post column. (Read the exchange of emails between White House economic adviser Gene Sperling and Woodward posted by Politico here.) Woodward is hardly a conservative, and has been at the heart of the liberal media establishment for decades. He is, however, not afraid of challenging the status quo, as he did with his 2010 book Obama’s Wars. Woodward is not alone. Lanny Davis, another liberal columnist and former special counsel to Bill Clinton, who has penned several pieces critical of Obama’s policies, has also spoken out against similar White House tactics.

So Bush’s presidency, in which the PATRIOT Act was enacted, doesn’t count?

We get to the point of the blog towards the end,

Will American liberals now stand up to the Obama White House and condemn its blatant attempts to suppress criticism and free speech? I doubt it. The Washington Post has provided relatively little coverage of the story, despite the fact that one its own star writers has been targeted.The New York Times is, unsurprisingly, completely silent (with the exception of a small mention in a single blog) on the issue. Ironically, most of the reporting of the White House’s attempts to intimidate liberal critics has come from the conservative press, led by the Drudge Report, which has propelled the story to national prominence. Both conservatives and liberals should be rallying to the defence of free speech and freedom of the press, holding the Obama presidency to account. All Americans should be concerned by government attempts to stifle press criticism in the land of the free, tactics which undermine the very foundations of liberty.

The first sentence of this paragraph reminds me of Louise Mensch’s outburst on Twitter when she demanded that the Labour Party condemn those who wished Thatcher dead. It’s a right-wing trick designed to claim the moral high ground over their opponents.

I would continue with Gardiner’s obsessions but I’d be here for months. Why not have a look at this page on Telegraph blogs? You’ll notice that the Moonie has little else to write about. He even manages a rather bitchy attack on Michelle Obama.

Now I’m not a fan of Obama but I find Gardiner’s fascination with him bizarre to the point of being pathological. He’s a cheerleader for war, death and destruction. His idea of freedom, like that of The Freedom Association, is Orwellian.

Mitt Romney lost the presidential election. Gardiner is still bitter that his man choked it. Now he spends his days churning out blog after blog about Obama. He also has the Falklands to use as a stick to smash his favourite target over the head. Obama will be in the White House for four years, but I suspect Gardiner will still write blogs about him long after he is gone.

Life on Hannan World (Part 8)

On Sunday, the Lyin’ King claimed that it was right for British slaveowners to have been compensated millions of pounds for the loss of their slaves. Whereas the victims of this crime – the slaves themselves, got nothing. he admits this was bad but his admission is uttered through gritted teeth.

As one would expect for a Telegraph blog about ‘race’ and slavery, this piece prompts the usual chorus of racist voices to slap Hannan on the back and shout “Bravo”!

Was it immoral to compensate slave-owners at the time of emancipation? That is the implication of most of the media comment that has followed the publication of a study of the records by UCL, showing that several prominent British families received vast cash payments. The Independent on Sunday calls it ‘Britain’s colonial shame’. Trevor Philips thinks it ‘the most profound injustice that probably you can identify anywhere in this country’s history’.

The very mention of Trevor Philips is guaranteed to get his readers frothing at the mouth.  Hannan carries a torch for the British Empire and like so many of his fellow Tories and UKippers, he believes that the only way forward for Britain is to return to its brutal past. He continues,

I can’t for the life of me see why. The fact that people were prepared to pay to abolish the monstrosity of slavery is surely a cause for satisfaction rather than shame. It is one thing to say, in the abstract, ‘slavery is a bad idea’; quite another to say, ‘slavery is so wicked that I am prepared to make a personal sacrifice to help do away with it’.

Slave-owners were compensated because the government were members of the same social class. It had nothing to do with heading off a potential revolt. White slave-owners were seen as superior to black slaves. It’s as simple as that.

The general thrust of his argument is supportive of the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s (LvMI) and  Ron Paul’s claim that the US Civil War needn’t have happened if the Federal government had compensated slaveowners in the aftermath of emancipation.

Here he  sweeps aside the US’s unique brand of chattel slavery and tells us that,

Although slavery sometimes had an ethnic basis, it was no great respecter of race. Muslim slavers traded in Christians: Georgians, Circassians, Armenians and others. Christians, for their part, enslaved Moors: as late as the sixteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Muslim slaves toiled on Spanish plantations. On the eve of the American civil war, there were 3,000 black slave-owners in the United States.

Hannan forgets that slavery – as practised by other groups – did not use race as the basis for enslaving others. In many cases, people were enslaved by conquering armies: they were not seen as chattel. Chattel slavery was instituted in the late 17th century when the notion of race was first mooted and Africans were mainly seen as subhuman and only fit for manual labour. Indeed, this idea of racial supremacy was later given a Biblical justification in the shape of the so-called Curse of Ham.

Hannan mentions the “3,000 black slaveowners” in the United States but doesn’t explain why black people held slaves. Instead, he uses this fact as a deflectionary tactic that has it origins in the LvMI’s historical revisionism of the American Civil War.  Those “black slave-owners” that he talks about were mainly mixed race. Furthermore, the vast majority of those black slave-owners had purchased slaves with the intention of setting them free. But free blacks were also considered a threat to the socio-ethnic order and were often suspected of harbouring fugitive slaves – this gets no mention. We must also remember that the so-called “One-Drop Rule” posited that if anyone had any degree of mixed ancestry, they were considered to be black in the eyes of the law. While there were free blacks, these people did not enjoy the same rights as whites. There is no mention of this either, nor is there any mention of the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws that were passed in many states.

Robert Higgs of the LvMI attempts to defend the institution of slavery and tells us that slavery is “natural”.  Here’s a taste of his article,

Slavery is natural. People differ, and we must expect that those who are superior in a certain way — for example, in intelligence, morality, knowledge, technological prowess, or capacity for fighting — will make themselves the masters of those who are inferior in this regard.

The LvMI has been at the intellectual forefront of the neo-Confederate movement for a number of years. It denies that it is racist and revisionist. It tries to claim that the American Civil War was fought solely over the issue of tariffs and it defends the institution of slavery. Hannan’s speeches, blogs and articles are regularly featured on the LvMI website.

Hannan is a fan of self-styled libertarian, Ron Paul, who has previously been accused of racism and is a supporter of the neo-Confederate movement. Casey Gane-McCalla of Newsone  says,

Ron Paul is a neo-Confederate, and proud member of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, which has been labeled as a neo-Confederate organization. In the video he claims that the North should have paid to buy slaves from southern slave owners to avoid the war, rather than the South renouncing slavery. Paul also fails to bring up the fact that it was the South that started the war by attacking the North in 1861.

Ron Paul was also was the only member of congress to vote against honoring the Civil Rights Act Of 1964 on its 40th anniversary in 2004. Paul would also claim that he wouldn’t have voted for it at the time, putting him on the side of the racists in both the fight against slavery and the fight against Jim Crow segregation, the two defining struggles of Black people in America.

Hannan describes Paul as “principled” but here’s a video of Paul speaking to the LvMI with the Stars and Bars draped in the background.

As if to echo Paul’s position, Hannan tells us,

Instead, a terrible war was fought, whose legacy of racial bitterness endured for another century and more. Yet, when Ron Paul suggested that it might have been better for everyone had the Americans adopted the British approach, buying out the slave-owners peacefully, he was pilloried.

Yet, there is no evidence to support the claim that there would have been a civil war in Britain had British slave-owners not been compensated for the loss of their ‘property’.  As is often the case with right-wing libertarians, racism is rationalized by using plausible-sounding economic terminology. This has the effect of masking the racism and making it more acceptable to those people who do not wish to be seen as racist. Now they can feel vindicated. They can tell all and sundry that the American Civil War was a “tariff war” and that Civil Rights legislation was wrong because it denied racist diner-owners of the right to refuse service to those whom they believed to be inferior. Remember, if you’re a ‘libertarian’ nothing must get in the way of making a profit.

Hannan may not consider himself to be a racist but he flirts with those whose ideas about difference mark them out as racist. Ron Paul may also deny that he is a racist and a homophobe but the evidence speaks for itself.

Meanwhile the practise of slavery continues in Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Chad. I wonder if Hannan and Paul would demand compensation for those slave-owners if they were forced to relinquish their slaves? I very much doubt it.

Life on Hannan World (Part 7)

This morning as I was looking at my Twitter timeline, I saw a retweet that contained the following words, “Nazis, socialism, left, Dan Hannan” and I thought to myself, “The Lyin’ King is at it again”. To be honest, Hannan does this sort of thing at least once or twice a year to bait the Left. Yet, it is his fellow Tories that have often enjoyed fraternal relations with members of extreme right-wing parties. Some members of the National Front even drank at Conservative Clubs. Don’t tell Hannan or his simpleton friends that, because he’s the sort of person who would threaten to sue you for telling the truth.

Today’s blog is the usual drivel about how the Nazis were socialists because their name contained the word “socialist”. The blog title is “So total is the Left’s cultural ascendancy that no one likes to mention the socialist roots of fascism” and reveals in the author a desire for total right-wing hegemony that will displace what he sees as “Leftist control of culture and the media”.

The third paragraph contains the by now usual tropes presented as substitutes for solid evidence. The headline is also revealing for it indicates a desire on Hannan’s part to control discourse as well a culture. But cultural production in Britain is hegemonic. There is no getting away from it. Mainstream cultural output is controlled by an elite of Oxbridge graduates and former public schoolboys…like him.

Almost everyone in those days accepted that fascism had emerged from the revolutionary Left. Its militants marched on May Day under red flags. Its leaders stood for collectivism, state control of industry, high tariffs, workers’ councils. Around Europe, fascists were convinced that, as Hitler told an enthusiastic Mussolini in 1934, ‘capitalism has run its course’.

You’ll notice how he opens this paragraph with “Almost everyone” – it’s so dishonest. It’s funny how he ignores how the Nazis smashed up socialist and communist meetings. For him the fact that Nazis claimed to be anti-capitalist is proof of their ‘socialism’. Naturally he ignores how the Nazis used the Jews as scapegoats and would often employ phrases like “International finance” as a means to link Jews with banking and capitalism. The Nazis were more than happy to support capitalism. IG Farben? Volkswagen?

One of the most stunning achievements of the modern Left is to have created a cultural climate where simply to recite these facts is jarring. History is reinterpreted, and it is taken as axiomatic that fascism must have been Right-wing, the logic seemingly being that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and fascists were nasty. You expect this level of analysis from Twitter mobs; you shouldn’t expect it from mainstream commentators.

This reads like paranoid nonsense. The point of this blog, as with so many others that he’s written, is to claim that the Nazis were never right-wing because – and he will never admit to this – they are on the same part of the right/left divide as his beloved Tory party and this will not do. It’s a toxic mix of wilful ideological ignorance, political immaturity and historical revisionism.

When did you last hear a reference to the BNP on the BBC without the epithet ‘far Right’? The terminology is deliberately tendentious. It doesn’t make anyone think any less of the BNP; but it does make them think less of the mainstream Right, because it implies that the BNP manifesto is somehow a more intense form of conservatism.

My bold. That’s because the BNP is a far-right party, Danny Boy. I wonder if he realizes how close the National Front and the Monday Club were in the 1970s and 1980s?  In 1973, the NF were moving to take over the Monday Club. Thatcher even stole some of their policies on immigration. Does that sound like socialism to you? No, it doesn’t to me either.

Just to sum up how confused his argument is, here’s the penultimate paragraph of this tour de merde.

Am I saying that the BNP is simply another form of Labour Party? No. That would be to repeat the error of the Twitter mob, only the other way around. There are obviously huge differences between what Nick Griffin stands for and what Ed Miliband stands for. Yes, the BNP has some policies in common with Labour, just as it has some policies in common with the Greens, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives. Coincidence of policy does not establish consanguinity of doctrine.

The Cat gets the feeling that some tool on Twitter called The Lyin’ King and his government’s policies fascist and he got upset by this. To that, I would say: grow up.  But then, I would also ask him what other party has attacked the disabled in the way the Tories have? I can only think of one party: the Nazi Party. This paragraph, much like the rest of the blog is sophistry.

I just hope that Lefties who have read this far will have a sense of how conservatives feel when fascism is declared to be simply a point further along the spectrum from them. Whenever anyone points to the socialist roots of fascism, there are howls of outrage. Yet the people howling the loudest are often the first to claim some ideological link between fascism and conservatism. Perhaps both sides should give it a rest.

Again, Hannan wants to claim that the Nazis and fascists are not further down the political spectrum from the Tories. The left understands only too well that Stalinism is on the same side of the left-right divide as they are. It doesn’t mean that they’re the same, they just happen to be classified as “left-wing” for many reasons. The connections between the Tories and big business is little different to the Nazi’s corporatist policies. Indeed, Nazism is a marriage of state and corporate power. In socialism, there is no corporate power because all the means of production are owned by the workers. Under Nazism, trade unions were banned and socialists and communists were arrested and sent to work camps. I would wager that there are members on the government benches who would quite happily propose work camps for those who oppose them. When Thatcher was in power, she legislated the metropolitan councils out of existence, simply because they opposed her. I don’t recall a Labour government behaving in this way.

Finally, I wonder if The Lyin’ King spoken to his fellow Tory, Aidan Burley? I mean, why would someone on the Right fetishize Nazi iconography if the Nazis were “left-wing”? Over to you or one of your sock puppets, Danny…

Here’s an interesting link to an article about Eric Pickles and his time as Leader of Bradford City Council. It would seem the local branch of the Monday Club was more than happy to invite members of the BNP to one of its meetings.  Here’s a snippet,

That meeting attracted various eccentric far right factionalists, including members of John Tyndall’s neo-nazi British National Party. One particularly bizarre creature had come up from London in order to canvass support for the Monday Club’s governing council elections. He described black people in this country as “leeches, slugs and cockroaches, sucking off the blood of the country without sharing the Teutonic traditions of the British nation”.

The meeting also produced evidence of Murphy’s attempts to build links between the Monday Club and other far right groupings. Leaflets for the “English Solidarity Movement”, led by arch racist Lady Jane Birdwood, were made available to the audience. Birdwood is an ex Monday Clubber with links to the National Front and the British National Party.

Read it and weep, Danny!

Life on Gilligan’s Island (Part 48)

East London Mosque, the site of sustained attacks from Andrew “Bomber” Gilligan.

Kennite was forced to announce on his Telegraph blog that he was about to be hired as Bozza’s cycling “tsar”. For this role, he will be paid £38,000 for 2 days work. A nice little earner. On that blog, he told us the following,

It’s part-time; I’ll continue in my day job, covering national and international news for the Telegraph, though I will no longer be called London Editor or cover any matter related to City Hall or Boris Johnson.

He will no longer be called “London Editor”. These are weasel words. He will still comment on London matters, particularly those that relate to Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman and Ken Livingstone. In a second blog about his new appointment, he said,

There was inevitably a second group of reactions. A small number of people who could fairly be described as partisan, such as Labour’s Len Duvall and the Ken Livingstone blogger Sunny Hundal, have damned itas “cronyist.” But as Mayorwatch’s Martin Hoscik – another man who could never be described as a patsy for the mayor – points out, all mayors are entitled to appoint political supporters to political jobs, and do so routinely without controversy. Nobody would or should call, say, the Labour assembly member Val Shawcross a crony because Boris’s predecessor appointed her as chair of the fire authority.

Such dishonesty. But notice how he gets in another dig at his favourite bogeyman, Ken Livingstone. He just can’t help himself.

In yesterday’s blog, Kennite attacked East London Mosque, which he has described, in the past, as a hotbed of extremism (or words to that effect).

I was offered the “Muslim patrol” story in Tower Hamlets, where self-proclaimed “Muslim vigilantes” filmed themselves verbally abusing and intimidating a gay man. Perhaps wrongly, I didn’t use it because I wasn’t sure whether a few kids on YouTube had national importance. I am glad, however, that the local police appear to be taking it seriously for once – in contrast to their lamentable attempts to ignore, downplay and cover up previous acts of “Islamic enforcement” and bigotry in the East End.

Really? The police “covered up”, “ignored” and downplayed “Islamic enforcement in the “East End”? The East End is a big place, by the way. But you know where this is leading, don’t you? Oh yes, it’s another smear job on the East London Mosque.

One Tower Hamlets organisation of undoubted national importance that continues to laugh up its sleeve at us is the East London Mosque, the capital’s largest. The mosque’s PR machine lost no time cranking out a statement condemning the “vigilantes” and claiming that the mosque was “committed to building co-operation and harmony between all communities in this borough. The actions of this tiny minority have no place in our faith.” This claim has been trustingly repeated by various journalists in the coverage this week. But, as the most cursory investigation would show, it is a brazen lie.

The only reason why Kennite doubts the ELM’s statement is because it’s been issued by a mosque, which by definition means they’re also Muslim. There is no other reason.

Then, in the next paragraph, Kennite gets into a bit of a tangle.

There is no evidence that the East London Mosque is directly involved in the latest attacks. But at least one activist in the Islamic Forum of Europe, the Islamic supremacist group that runs the mosque, has previously threatened and intimidated people for violating “Islamic norms,” using the IFE’s name.

Notice how he mentions the Islamic Forum for Europe, whom he accuses of threatening and intimidating behaviour and draws a lazy link between the self-styled vigilantes, the ELM and IFE. I’m only surprised he hasn’t mentioned al-Qaeda.  The English Defence League also have a penchant for intimidation. They also make the same noises about the ELM and the IFE. Coincidence?

He continues his rant,

And as this blog has repeatedly documented, the mosque itself and its annexe, the London Muslim Centre, host a constant stream of viciously homophobic and other hate preachers. In June 2011, after coming under particular pressure on the subject, the mosque promised: “Any speaker who is believed to have said something homophobic will not be allowed to use our premises.”

And certain members of UKIP have made “viciously homophobic” statements. But they’re mostly white and possibly Christian, so they don’t count. Eh, Kennite?

At the end of the blog, we find this,

Hat-tip to Harry’s Place for the adverts and one of the videos.

Ah, Harry’s Place, that fount of tolerance and understanding. Reading the blogs on that site is a little like splashing your eyes with nitric acid.

So, while Kennite has apparently surrendered his role as the Torygraph’s London Editor, he will continue to churn out smear jobs about Rahman, Livingstone and anyone who defends them or challenges his narrative. It’s business as usual.

Census 2011: can you feel the hate (and hear the lies)?

Douglas Murray: bigot and warmonger who does a nice line in Zionist apologia.

The results of the last census have been released and give the racists something to complain about. Religion is on the wane, immigration from Eastern Europe and the Indian subcontinent has increased and the numbers of people who identify as mixed race is on the rise.

I expected to see (Fr)Ed West complaining about the numbers of mixed race people. But he’s been quiet. Last night, the ever-hysterical Douglas Murray was part of a panel on last night’s Newsnight and, as you’d expect, he wasn’t pleased. This morning in the Daily Heil, he writes,

The 2011 census shows that white British people are now a minority in the capital city, London, the first time this has happened in any major region in Britain.

This sets the tone for the rest of the article.

For the first time, too, less than 90 per cent of the country is white, while the population is increasing in size at an unprecedented rate as a result of immigration.

Of course, it is vital to point out, as those of us critical of the immigration policies of successive governments always have done, that immigration is not in itself a bad thing. On the contrary, if conducted in a controlled manner, immigration brings huge benefits to the life of a country.

Yeah, but it’s those damned coloureds, Doug, they’re taking over! Here’s some more,

For countries to cohere and for people to feel any common bond or purpose, it is vital to have common points of cultural and historical reference.

This is revealing: he talks here about a “common bond or purpose”. The reason why nation-states exist is to fight wars; these are wars that Murray wouldn’t fight personally, though I am sure he would be more than happy to see working class kids go off to kill people with different religions and darker skin in the name of “freedom” and “democracy”. That’s the kind of guy he is.

The truth is that immigration has happened at such a rate that, far from augmenting and enhancing our national life as it did in days gone by, it has completely changed it.

This is pure sophistry: immigrants have not always been welcomed in Britain nor have their contributions always been recognized. Murray is talking about a particular kind of immigrant and not one that has dark skin or speaks in an Eastern European accent either.

You may — like so many of our politicians — feel joy that this change has been brought about. Or you may — as some of us do — feel sadness about it. Sadness that we were never asked about this change. Sadness that our concerns were never listened to.

And sadness at the realisation that it is now probably too late to do anything to prevent Britain from becoming so very different a country.

Murray is an odd creature: paranoid and shrill, he couches his deep-seated prejudices in the language of social concern. He talks about “cohesion” but only in the context of forcing an constructed culture onto others. It should come as no surprise that Murray is now involved with the Heritage Foundation, an American right-wing think-tank and is the Associate Director of the warmongering Henry Jackson Society.

The Telegraph leader column, like the party it supports, blames the last Labour government for “unchecked immigration”.

Labour’s decade of virtually unchecked immigration has seen the number of foreign-born residents rise by nearly three million – to 7.5 million – since the 2001 census. It has left this country less white, more ethnically diverse and less Christian. More than one million households do not use English as a first language. The white British make up 80 per cent of the population of England and Wales and in London are now in a minority. There are a million Muslims living here, while the number of self-professed Christians has fallen by four million. All the while, social structures are changing rapidly. For the first time, fewer than half of households contain a married couple.

This would have happened with or without a Labour government. Again, we see Murray’s paranoia vis a vis religion, which is on the wane. But it’s not the decline in religious observance that upsets the right, it’s the kind of religion that appears to be replacing Christianity that irks them.

The Sun repeats Murray’s line about immigration but the article is confused. First it says,

Immigration can be a sign of a dynamic society. The South East in particular would grind to a halt without industrious foreign workers.

Yeah? So what’s the problem?  As if I couldn’t guess…

Controlled immigration of talented newcomers is welcome, and the Olympics showcased the friendly and positive side of the new-look Britain.

Get to the point!

But the sheer scale of the influx, and its pace, raise serious questions.

Labour, who recklessly threw open our doors to the world, never asked Britain if it wanted such a level of immigration.

We were never asked if we wanted our public services privatized and here is The Scum complaining the British people were “not asked” if they wanted these levels of immigration. Talk about priorities!

Nor did it consider how public services such as housing, hospitals and schools would cope. They can’t.

And unlimited cheap foreign labour is frustrating the Government’s attempts to make work pay better than benefits.

What nonsense. Workers in this country, whether they be native or foreign born have never been paid a living wage.  Wages are deliberately depressed for the majority in order to provide business for the banks, the credit card companies and legalized loan sharks like Wonga. If people were paid proper wages, they wouldn’t need benefits to help them survive in this cruel and often barbaric country. The Sun doesn’t understand this nor does it want to, because it colludes with the state in lying to the people.

But the ethnic make-up of the country doesn’t exercise the minds of all right-wing commentators, Andrew Lilico writing for Conservative Home (some people don’t have homes), focussed his ire on what he called the “housing shortage myth”. Divining from sets of graphs that accompanied the census results, he says rather unconvincingly,

Thus was born the notion that there was a “housing shortage” in London and the South East of England.  As house prices began to spike upwards in the early 2000s, that was widely attributed to the housing shortage.  It was claimed that house prices were rising because people were desperately out-bidding each other simply in order to have somewhere to live.  The government established the Barker Review of Housing Supply to investigate how housing supply could be increased, and the Communities Plan for increased housebuilding.

He closes with this,

Does any of this prove that UK planning policy is perfect?  Obviously not.  Ought the UK debate about housing to have been transformed by the 2001 Census data?  Surely.  Will everyone stop talking about a “housing shortage” now, having done so wrongly for about 15 years?  Surely not.  But one day the discussion will catch up with the facts.

Lies, damned lies and statistics. Lilico, like his Tory chums, is in denial about the housing crisis. There is a major housing shortage that was caused by Thatcher’s ruinous Right to Buy policy, which hasn’t been addressed by either the Tories or Labour, who seem wedded to the rather vague notion of “affordable housing”. The only homes being built are those which make a profit for developers. One thing to have come from the Census is that fewer people now hold a mortgage. This tells us that Thatcher’s idea of near-universal home-ownership has failed and catastrophically so. Will Lilico and his mates realize the game is up? Probably not. The government is actively encouraging people to buy their own homes – even if they can’t afford to do so. The words “sub prime” seem to have been entirely forgotten.

The 2011 Census was always going to get the right foaming at the mouth. Religious observance has been in decline for the better part of 30 years. There are more mixed race people in the country than there was when I was young.  I can remember being the only mixed race or, for that matter, brown-skinned kid at Monksdown Primary School in Norris Green, Liverpool in 1963/4. The name-calling was relentless and hurtful. I’m so glad that mixed race children don’t have to put up with what I had to deal with.

Countries do change over time and the right has been slow to understand the nature of human migration. What never gets talked about are the numbers of people who leave Britain every year to seek better lives for themselves and their families. Instead, we are treated to a never-ending stream of paranoid bigoted crap from the likes of Murray, West et al about how this country is being “contaminated” by immigration.

Britain is a multi-racial, multicultural society, get used to it.

UPDATE: 12/12/12 @ 1223

As predictable as clockwork, Fred Ed West has squeezed out a blog about the “evils” of immigration. He also tells us that he has written a book about the subject, which is due out in the New Year. Here’s an excerpt,

But you can have too much of a good thing, and liberalism is a fragile prize. The main cornerstones of liberalism, things such as the jury system and parliamentary rule, are themselves products of very mono-ethnic societies, namely England, Denmark and the Netherlands, where people felt a lot of trust for fellow citizens. The Left likes “diversity” because it hates racism, and because immigrants overwhelmingly vote for the Left, they assume it can only make the country more liberal. But what I suspect (and perhaps fear) is that this demographic experiment our leaders have embarked upon (without asking whether or not we wanted it) is going to make us less liberal. All the evidence, from social sciences and from history, tells us that that highly diverse societies tend to be less trusting, less free, more unequal and more corrupt. These are not the sorts of societies where people will willingly pay for each other’s housing when hard times fall.

That’s probably not what people in nicely diverse middle-class areas of London want to hear, because tolerance is so highly prized. But tolerance is not a faultless good; it can also be the flipside of apathy and selfishness. That’s why “celebrating diversity” is so easy to do.

My bold. What “evidence” is he referring to? It isn’t obvious. I suspect that when he talks about “social sciences” he’s referring to Francis Galton and others.

UKIP, Rotherham and lies

Honestly, it was this big!

Have you noticed how quickly the row over the Rotherham Fostering incident died down? Funny isn’t it? I’d  always thought there was more to this story than UKIP or the Tory press was telling us. Gove was quick to make political capital out of the whole business but it looks to have failed him completely.

Last week this story appeared in The Guardian.

The placement with the Ukip-supporting foster couple was not intended to be long-term. It was an emergency move amid allegations that the children’s birth father had sexually abused two of his daughters and had held a knife to his wife’s head while she was holding their baby. According to the birth parents, the children were taken in a raid by police and social workers earlier this year.

There were also fears the children’s birth parents knew or might be able to find out where the foster parents lived. Though both the birth mother and father claim to continue to have supervised contact with some of their other children, it is believed social workers do not want the parents to know exactly where the children are living because of safety concerns.

There was also tension between the council and Rotherham’s 3,500-strong Roma population, almost all of whom moved to the South Yorkshire town since EU enlargement in 2004.

Interesting. Let’s continue reading,

A meeting was held after Czech and Slovak media reports claimed that Roma children were being “sold” to white couples in Britain under the guise of adoption. A community worker present at that meeting said relatives of the children in the Ukip foster case had harangued the council , asking why the children had been taken away and stripped of their language and heritage.

The children’s parents, Roma who moved to Rotherham, told the Guardian they have been in and out of family courts trying to get their children back after they returned from an earlier foster placement unable to speak their mother tongue.

The parents claim the children had been taken away after one of their sons had been found wandering the streets of Rotherham at 2am shortly after arriving in Britain. They said social workers also had concerns about overcrowding: at the time the family were living in a house that was infested with mice.

Social workers wanted the children to be permanently removed from their parents, concerned after discovering the father had been accused of sexually abusing his wife’s daughter from a previous relationship. A social worker from Rotherham Borough Council had travelled to their hometown to try to find out more about the family, and co-operated with the local social services department.

There’s more,

But a family court judge ruled three of the children should be returned to the parents after the birth parents successfully argued that the council had failed in their duty to ensure the children enjoyed the linguistic right to learn and speak the language of their birth. In an interview, the father, along with his wife, told the Guardian the claims of sexual and physical abuse were unfounded. “We just want the children back and the social services to leave us alone. We just want to live as a normal family,” said the father.

He said he was “disgusted” to learn that his children had been placed with foster carers who were members of a party opposed to eastern European immigration.

The man said he only found out his family was at the centre of a political and media storm when his barrister told him at a court hearing this Wednesday.

My bold. UKIP didn’t want anyone to know about this. They presented this as a clear cut case of political persecution. It wasn’t.

But Gove and the Torygraph weren’t the only ones to cry foul. Bullshit blogger, Guido Fawkes published this dreck.

There is no doubt that the children removed from the foster care of a UKIP supporting couple are just the latest victims of the culture war being waged by so-called “progressives”. Marxists and Fabians have long waged war on the traditional family since the days of George Bernard Shaw when he wrote in “Socialism and the Family” that socialism…

Shame none of that is true. Eh, Guido? Notice how he uses the opportunity to regurgitate the “cultural Marxism” myth. You could say that Piss Staines’s blog is a sort of one stop shop for your two-minutes of hate. Have a look at the comments for examples of swivel-eyed, spittle-flecked rage if you dare.

If Gove wants to get rid of qualifications for teachers, you can imagine what his views on social workers are like.

There’s another take on this on Zarathustra’s blog.