Ethnic Conflicts (review)

Tatu Vanhanen

ISBN 978-0-9573913-1-4Ulster Institute for Public ResearchUK £23 hard cover, £18 paperback

By Robert Henderson

This is not a book designed for easy bedtime reading. It is an academic’s work  written first and foremost for academics with a fair amount of statistics in it.   Having said that, if a prospective reader managed to get to grips with, say, The Bell Curve they should be able to absorb the important messages of Prof Vanhanen’s book and understand how he arrives at them.   It is worth making the effort because  he deals with the most fundamental sociological aspect of being human: how do we manage the challenges produced by heterogeneous societies?

The Profesor’s   first  aim was  to measure the relationship  between the ethnic heterogeneity of a society and ethnic conflict..  There are  considerable difficulties in doing this not least  because what may be thought of as ethnic conflict by one person may be seem  by another as conflict based on something else such as class.  For example, an ethnic group which is black and poor and rebels against the better off  in society who are white (a not uncommon state in Latin America) could be represented as being either ethnically motivated or class motivated.

 There is also the  general problem of what constitutes ethnicity.  Prof Vanhanen’s  definition is  very broad and includes racial type, nation, tribe,  language and  religion. While these are undoubtedly all distinctions which cause people to exhibit what might be loosely called tribal behaviour, its breadth  does raise the question of whether   racial type, nation, tribe,  language and  religion are really comparable in terms of how people respond to those inside and outside the group .  For example, it may be that where the ethnic division is one of religion between those of the same racial type and general culture representative government will mitigate ethnic tensions,  while if the division is racial,  representative government may do nothing to stop discord.

There is a further  cause for confusion in that more than one of Prof Vanhanen’s  ethnic  criteria is frequently shared by an ethnic group or even more confusingly by two conflicting ethnic groups.  Muslims are  a good example. In theory there is meant to be no distinctions made between Muslims on the grounds of sectarian allegiance, racial type, tribe  or  nationality. In the real world  there are marked divisions within  the theology  of Islam and tribal and national allegiances which often override the supposed unity of Muslims.  The danger with the very broad definition the Professor uses  is that the process of defining  reduces the world to so many different ethnicities that it becomes difficult to distinguish between ethnic conflict and  non-ethnic violence which he ascribes to the  “endless struggle for permanently scarce resources”.

Having made those qualifications, of which Prof Vanhanen is  well  aware, the project does not utterly founder on them. It is a mistake to imagine that nothing valuable can be gleaned from using  criteria  which have a fuzziness about them.   That is especially so if the sample is large enough because a large sample in social science projects digests anomalies.  As there are few societies now which do not have some basis for significant ethnic conflict the professor is able to cast his net very widely amongst 176 countries, around nine tenths of those currently existing.

But the Professor  wants not only to test whether ethnic heterogeneity  is correlated with ethnic conflict;  he also wishes to see if  ethnic nepotism  is a driver of ethnic conflict: “My argument is that ethnic cleavages divide the population into groups  that are, to some extent,  genetically different.”  (p7).  The concept of ethnic nepotism which  is based on the idea that it is an extension of family nepotism, that those belong to the same ethnic group favour those within  the group  over outsiders. (It is important to bear in mind that  Prof Vanhanen does not claim that ethnic nepotism is the cause of all group based   conflict, merely that it explains why  conflict in many societies is so often based on ethnic divisions).

To test this hypothesis   Prof Vanhanen  devised his own scales of ethnic heterogeneity and ethnic conflict and compares them with non-ethnic measures devised by others  such as the Human Development Index and The Index of Democratisation”.  He found only weak correlations between the non-ethnic measures but  a strong correlation between ethnic heterogeneity and ethnic conflict (p214). In other words his research suggests that  the greater the ethnic diversity in a society the greater the ethnic strife, although there are significant variations between the various traits which he includes in his definition of ethnicity.

I have something of a problem with the concept of ethnic nepotism in the context of  Prof Vanhanen’s definition of ethnicity because it includes non-genetic differences such as language and  religion.  It is true that those who are racially similar will be genetically closer than those who are racially different.  It is also true that those who form a large tribe or a nation in the cultural sense will in practice be genetically closer than those outside the group.   The possession of a particular language  by a group  is also a strong pointer  to close genetic  links unless there is some obvious difference such as race or the language spoken not as a native would speak it.   Religion is more problematic because  that is something that can be  simply acquired. If a man says he is a Catholic or Muslim it does not  necessarily say anything about his genetic connection with other Catholics or Muslims. Nonetheless,  if the Catholic or Muslim comes from the same country or even supranational  area, there is a decent chance that he will have a closer  genetic  relationship with other Catholics and Muslims from the area than would be expected purely from chance.

The difficulty is that although a significant genetic linkage will commonly exist because of the way human beings live in groups,  whether that is a small band or a modern nation,  it does not automatically follow that the genetic similarity is what causes the ethnic nepotism. It could be that the simple fact of growing  up with people creates a tribal feeling rather than genetic closeness.  Moreover, what are we to make of the “imagined community” of any group where the numbers are too great to allow personal knowledge of all those in the group?  I do not doubt that differences of religion, nation, tribe, language  and  race do act as triggers for the separation of groups in competing entities, but  with the exception of race I cannot see that  genetic  influence is proven to be other than accidental.  Where there are divisions in a society based on clear racial lines that is a different matter because there is self-evidently a genetic cause for the preference for one class of person in a society over another class of person.

The book ignores what I would describe as the most basic ethnic conflict, that is,  the behaviour of individuals to disadvantage someone of a different ethnicity without there being any deliberate group decision or action. A good example is the grossly disproportionate number of  black rapes and murders of whites in the USA.   That situation is clearly driven by racial feelings with blacks either harbouring a general resentment of whites or simply seeing whites as outside their group and thus not of consequence. However, the latter explanation does not hold much water because blacks do not attack Asians  with the same frequency.

Are there remedies for ethnic strife? Prof Vanhanen suggests four: biological mixing, institutional reforms, democratic compromises and partition.  Of these only partition even in theory offers a complete  solution to ethnic strife with the prospect of a completely ethnically homogeneous society or at least one in which the minorities are so small as to barely matter.  The problem with partition is that it is probably never possible to simply divide a territory because mixed populations are generally not neatly parcelled up in convenient parts  of the territory.

By institutional reforms he means most particularly the legal and democratic structures which ostensibly protect the interests of each ethnic group and by democratic compromises the satisfying of each ethnic group’s  aspirations to at least a point where violence is avoided.  The Professor finds   some evidence that democratic institutions  can reduce  the amount of ethnic violence, although he allows that “the willingness of competing ethnic groups to solve their interest conflicts by democratic compromises and power-sharing is limited” (p227).

The fourth of his remedies – biological mixing – is the one I have the most difficulty with.  He  claims (p222)  that  biological mixing would reduce ethnic violence  because it would “undermine the  basis and importance of ethnic nepotism”.     He further  observes “ My argument is that the relatively low level of ethnic violence in most Latin American countries is causally related to the fact that racially mixed people constitute a significant part of the population in these countries”. (P221).

I think most people would be surprised  at his judgement that there is a “relatively low level of ethnic violence in Latin American countries”.  I am very dubious indeed about the idea that many of the conflicts which arise in the region are often not ethnic in origin using the Professor’s own definitions. To take just one example:  amongst those with black ancestry, whether that is wholly black or black mixed with other races especially the white, there is in Latin America and Caribbean a customary  hierarchy of  colour with the lightest  skin signifying   standing at the top of the social status ladder and the darkest at the bottom.  Look at Brazil as an example. This country  is beloved by white liberals as a prime example of  a colour-blind country.  The reality is that the reins of power and privilege are still held overwhelmingly by whites. The great Brazilian footballer Pele complained publicly about this some years ago.

The likely outcome of biological mixing on any scale would be for those of mixed parentage to find their natural group amongst those from who most resemble themselves.  This is actually what happens in practice. In Britain the children of one black and one white parent almost invariably represent themselves as black.  It would at best simply change the balance of races within a society and at worst add to ethnic conflict with  those of mixed parentage added to the groups competing within the same territory.

Professor Vanhanen’s overall conclusion is a gloomy one: “The central message of this study is that ethnic conflict and violence, empowered by ethnic nepotism and the inevitable struggle for scarce resources, will not disappear from the world. It is more probable that the incidence of ethnic violence will increase in the more and more crowded world” (p230).

The moral of this book is beautifully simple: ethnically/racially heterogeneous societies are a recipe for discord and violence.   That should give the propagandists of mass immigration pause for thought.

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Published orignially in the Quarterly Review http://www.quarterly-review.org/?p=1610

NB The Quarterly Review is now an online journal only. RH

Margaret Thatcher and the cult of personality

Robert Henderson

Two Cults

Margaret Thatcher was the subject of a cult of personality. This was not the result of calculated  propaganda, but simply the creation of her extraordinary personality. Because the cult of personality developed not in a totalitarian state but a country where public opposition was possible, there were two cults of personality attached to her in a relationship which mimicked the matter/antimatter duality. These were the Thatcherite religious believers fulfilling the role of matter and the Thatcher-hating Left  acting as the antimatter.

Both the matter and the antimatter Thatcher cults were  potent.  The religious believers  bowed down before the great god MARKET (and Thatcher was his prophet) and, when things  went wrong,  did what all religious believers do until they lose their faith, denied reality by simply pretending something had not happened or by giving a calamity some  absurd spin to ”prove” the god had not failed.

For the Thatcher-hating Left she was the personification of the Devil and consequently credited with all manner of evil,  but, as is the way with personifications of the Devil, never portrayed as anything but powerful, a being possessed of a political juju (doubtless ensconced in her handbag) which could wreak any degree of havoc  with all that the Left held dear is if she so chose.   Like all those who believe in evil spirits the Thatcher-hating Left ascribed every act of ill fortune to her.

The attitude of both bands of cult followers was essentially superstitious, attributing powers to the woman which she did not, and often could not,  have.  The religious Thatcherites imagined she could  speak the spells which would miraculously convert Britain from a  country making silly old fashioned things such as steel, ships and cars and mining coal to a country stuffed to the gunnels with entrepreneurs creating new non-unionised service industries; the Left saw her as a witch practising black magic to contaminate and transmogrify the world they knew.

Because the Thatcherite religious believers  and her leftist haters  could not and still cannot see past the woman’s   gigantic political personality,  they made and continue to make the same mistake, namely, seeing the two cult figures as the reality while ignoring  her actual policies and their outcomes.

The reality of Thatcher

The reality of Thatcher is that objectively she achieved little if any of her wishes. It is a bitter irony for the woman (and Thatcherites generally)  that her policies were of a nature which  undermined the  ends  she espoused.  Perhaps the prime example is Thatcher’s  avowed wish to see a strong and wealthy Britain  whilst creating through her  commitment to laissez faire economics the very circumstances that would weaken the country. Under her economic regimen and its lingering aftermath ever since Britain  has become ever less self-sufficient in strategically important economic activity such as the production of  food and energy  and vast swathes of British business were  either bought up by foreigners or ceased to operate from Britain because of offshoring and the absence of government action to protect our own economy.   She simply did not understand that you could not have laissez  faire in both the domestic and international economic sphere and have a strong nation state.   Had Thatcher  known any economic history she would have realised that, but even without such knowledge  common prudence should have told her that a country which is dependent on others for necessary goods and services is a weak country.  Moreover, one of her claimed tutelary heroes Adam Smith readily understood there are things which are either strategically important such as armaments or social goods which are  never going to be supplied universally by private enterprise such as roads.  Thatcher never gave any indication of realising that Smith was not the unrelenting free marketer of her imagination.

Thatcher’s  failures in making policy to  achieve her ends were legion. She  destroyed much of British heavy industry in the belief that those made unemployed would rapidly be re-employed in private sector jobs. The new jobs did not materialise and she was reduced to presiding over massive and long lasting unemployment  which she funded with North Sea oil and gas tax revenue and the receipts from privatisation, whilst fiddling the unemployment figures shamelessly. She sold off state owned  services  (which belonged to the community as a whole not to the government)  in the belief that service would  be improved . It was  not. Instead vital services such as the railways and the provision of energy and water became ever more expensive whilst providing poorer service and less employment. She introduced so-called private business methods into the NHS and higher education in the belief that they would become more efficient. The result was massive increases in  bureaucracy and an ever climbing  cost of  both the  NHS and higher education and a substitution of the pursuit of  money for the public service ethos because money was attached to individual patients and students. She introduced the Community Charge or “Poll Tax” in the belief that it would be fairer than the old domestic rates. The result was widespread unfairness because it took no account of an individual’s means  and  provoked the nearest thing to a national movement dedicated to the non-payment of taxes known in modern times.  She raged against  EU interference in British affairs but signed up Britain to the Single European Act (SEA)  in the belief that it would create a genuine single market within the EEC.  It  did not create such a market and merely presented the EEC with an open goal for ever more audacious sovereignty grabs.  A supposed opponent of further mass immigration, her signing of the SEA also opened the door to free movement within the EU, a situation worsened by her strategy of dramatically widening the EEC.  She signed Britain up to the  She embraced “Care in the Community” for the mentally ill or disabled on the grounds that it was more humane than keeping  such people in long-stay institutions. The result was thousands of people left to largely fend for themselves in the outside world who were quite incapable of doing so. She sold off great swathes of social housing (which belonged to the community as a whole not to government) to tenants in the belief that this would result in a “property owning democracy” whilst more or less ending the building of new  social housing.  The eventual result was the growing housing emergency we have today. She instigated the disastrous “light touch”  regulation of the financial services  industry by abolishing credit controls and  failing to meaningfully regulate the  industry meaningfully after “Big Bang”  in 1986  which  effectively de-regulated the London Stock Exchange to bring in a brave new world of free trading (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financialcrisis/8850654/Was-the-Big-Bang-good-for-the-City-of-London-and-Britain.html)  with the dire results with which we are now living.

Even in the few areas where she was ultimately successful such as the Falkland’s War she was at best negligent in ignoring warnings from the Foreign Office of a growing threat to the Falklands  in the months leading up to the invasion and even after the expeditionary force had been dispatched  she agreed to a US organised plan which would have not offered the Islanders either self determination of or any meaningful security (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/margaret-thatcher/10008116/Margaret-Thatcher-how-she-took-on-the-men-and-won.html).

There were also acts of omission and collusion with policies with which she supposedly fundamentally  disagreed.  Most importantly, Thatcher failed utterly to carry her strong views against further mass immigration into her period in office. Not only that but, as already mentioned,  she made things much worse on that front by signing up to the Single European Act. She agreed to the institutionalisation of political correctness in public life, especially in the Civil Service, schools and universities. In addition, she allowed the “progressive” educational establishment to destroy a first rate  school examination system  by swopping the certificate of Secondary Education (CSE) and O(rdinary) Levels  for the dangerous absurdity of the General Certificate of Education (GCSE), an exam   supposedly for all 16 year olds but which was in reality two exams masquerading as one.  Despite the fact that Tory support rested heavily on the countryside  she allowed the de-regulation of rural bus services to occur  which reduced them so  severely that to live in countryside meant owning and driving a vehicle or at least having access to someone who did.  To make matter worse, this was done in tandem with a wilful neglect of the then nationalised railways.

The protests after her death were unsurprising

Just based on her economic disasters the uproar surrounding her death is unsurprising.  In the space of a few years she raised the unemployment  pay claimant count from 1.4 million when she took office in 1979 to 3.2 million by 1986 (http://www.economicshelp.org/macroeconomics/unemployment/measuring_unemployment.html) That bald figure is startling enough but the reality  is ten times worse. She  must have known her policies would result in mass unemployment,  at least in the short term, when she removed the financial support of taxpayers from nationalised industries or sold them off in the belief that private business would be able to do the job more efficiently with  much smaller workforces.   Further, as these industries were concentrated in areas where they were by far the dominant employer she should  have realised that structural unemployment would be created  in many parts of the country.  To imagine, as she did, that new jobs would rapidly sprout in the areas showed  a  shocking lack of understanding of economic history which has no example of such a thing happening on the scale required in 1980s Britain.

What is certain is the fact that she had no doubt about the destructive possibilities of laissez faire economics, viz:

“Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ is not above sudden, disturbing, movements. Since its inception, capitalism has known slumps and recessions, bubble and froth; no one has yet dis-invented the business cycle, and probably no one will; and what Schumpeter famously called the ‘gales of creative destruction’ still roar mightily from time to time. To lament these things is ultimately to lament the bracing blast of freedom itself.” — Margaret Thatcher, Statecraft P. 462

A politician of conviction?

The idea that merely having convictions is praiseworthy is a rum one. Hitler, Stalin and Mao had convictions. But even  if the  quality of a person’s convictions is ignored, this is one of the most mystifying of myths attached to Thatcher.  The reality was she frequently changed her position on the most important issues she faced or adopted methods which went against her avowed policies when she had created a mess, most notably with the massive rise in unemployment resulting from her slash and burn approach to the British economy which greatly  increased the benefits bill for many years and left people unemployed for years, in many cases for decades.

The most significant publicly  admitted changes of policy  were on immigration, the Europe and global warming.  Before the 1979 election she had spoken of the need to control immigration  because the country was in danger of being “swamped”:

‘If we went on as we are then by the end of the century there would be four million people of the new Commonwealth or Pakistan here. Now, that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.’

She went on to say, ‘The British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in.’

 ’If you want good race relations, you have got to allay peoples’ fears on numbers. […] We do have to hold out the clear prospect of an end to immigration…’ (http://www.runnymedetrust.org/histories/race-equality/59/margaret-thatcher-claims-britons-fear-being-swamped.html)

Once in office she did nothing despite still feeling strongly about the subject in private  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/margaret-thatcher/6906503/Margaret-Thatcher-complained-about-Asian-immigration-to-Britain.html).

On Europe she went through the following metamorphosis:

-          1975 she campaigned and voted for Britain to remain within the European Economic Community (EEC – the EU was only formed  by  the Maastricht Treaty in 1993).

-          By 1980 she was convinced that the EEC was not  acting in Britain interests.

-          By 1986 she had  signed the Single European Act giving the EEC immense powers to interfere  with Britain’s sovereignty.

-          In the late 1980s she adopted the policy of enlarging the EEC which meant that a vast new swathe of workers from poor countries would be allowed free movement within the  EEC.  The effects of this also allowed the federalists to press for things such as Qualified Majority Voting on the grounds that the EEC/EU had become too unwieldy to operate under the original  rules and to generally press forward with the creation of a United States of Europe.

-          In 1990  she took the UK into the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM)  despite being opposed to a single currency to which the ERM was a stepping stone with the pound effectively shadowing the Deutschmark.

The idea that Thatcher only realised what the EEC was after taking office in 1979 is simple nonsense. Thatcher’s speech to the  Conservative Group for Europe at the start of the Wilson referendum on the EEC clearly shows her viewing the EEC as far more than a  simple free trading area, viz:

That vision of Europe took a leap into reality on the 1st of January 1972 when, [ Edward Heath] Mr. Chairman, due to your endeavours, enthusiasm and dedication Britain joined the European Community.

 * The Community gives us peace and security in a free society, a peace and security denied to the past two generations.

 * The Community gives us access to secure sources of food supplies. This is vital to us, a country which has to import half of what we need.

* The Community does more trade and gives more aid than any group in the world.

* The Community gives us the opportunity to represent the Commonwealth in Europe. The Commonwealth want us to stay in and has said so. The Community wants us.

 Conservatives must give a clear lead and play a vigorous part in the campaign to keep Britain in Europe to honour the treaties which you, sir, signed in Britain’s name.

 We must do this, even though we dislike referenda. We must support the [ Harold Wilson] Prime Minister in this, even though we fight the Government on other issues.

 We must play our full part in ensuring that Conservative supporters say “Yes to Europe”. (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102675).

In any case, the Treaty of Rome left no room to believe it was merely a free trade organisation.  No one could read that and be in any doubt  that the intention was to create a United State of Europe. Thatcher, the supposed obsessive  who was a stickler  mastering a subject,   should have read it before the referendum.

As for global warming, she started the ball rolling whilst in office and then reversed her position in her autobiography published in 2003. Here she is speaking to the  UN general assembly, in November 1989:

“What we are now doing to the world … is new in the experience of the Earth. It is mankind and his activities that are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways. The result is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto. Change to the sea around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change in the world’s climate, which could alter the way we live in the most fundamental way of all.

“The environmental challenge that confronts the whole world demands an equivalent response from the whole world. Every country will be affected and no one can opt out. Those countries who are industrialised must contribute more to help those who are not.” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2013/apr/09/margaret-thatcher-green-hero)

By  the time she had published her political work Statecraft in 2003 she was thinking along these lines:

“The doomsters’ favourite subject today is climate change. This has a number of attractions for them. First, the science is extremely obscure so they cannot easily be proved wrong. Second, we all have ideas about the weather: traditionally, the English on first acquaintance talk of little else.

“Third, since clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvellous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism. All this suggests a degree of calculation. Yet perhaps that is to miss half the point. Rather, as it was said of Hamlet that there was method in his madness, so one feels that in the case of some of the gloomier alarmists there is a large amount of madness in their method.” (http://www.masterresource.org/2013/04/thatcher-alarmist-to-skeptic/).

There were other issues where her public position was at odds with her actions, for example, the troubles in Northern Ireland and the rule of law. Thatcher claimed that there would never be a surrender to  IRA terrorism.  Yet after she narrowly escaped death in the Brighton Grand Hotel bombing in 1984 (12 October)  the Anglo-Irish agreement was signed little over a year later in November 1985 giving the Republic of Ireland government  a say in what happened in Northern Ireland and committing the British Government to accepting the principle of a united Ireland if a majority were in favour. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/15/newsid_2539000/2539849.stm). There was no obvious reason for such a change of heart beyond the fear generated in Thatcher by the bombing of the Grand Hotel.

As for the rule of law, far from respecting it as she claimed, she laid the basis for the ever increasing authoritarianism of the British state by permitting the police to act unlawfully during the miners’ strike by stopping miners and their supporters from travelling across the country and turning a blind eye to any police excesses as they clashed with the miners and their supporters.

A politician of conviction? Only if you define  someone as such who runs from one position to another while vigorously embracing each  successive position regardless of its  contradiction of a previous  advocated policy or set of ideas.

Nor was she someone who would take responsibility for her actions. When she found her policies were a disaster she either claimed she had been badly advised or cheated (for example, the Single Market, global warming) or attempted to ignore the mess she had created  (for example, enduring mass employment and ) by misrepresenting it, or in the case of unemployment, using North Sea oil  tax revenues,  the privatisation receipts and blatant manipulation of the unemployment statistics to paper over the unemployment cracks.

Why did Thatcher get things so horribly wrong? 

Why did Thatcher get things so horribly wrong?  Her behaviour  strongly suggested that she was seriously lacking  psychological and sociological insight. This meant she constantly made horrendous mistakes such as trusting the EU over the single market and imagining in truly infantile fashion that millions of jobs shed from heavy industry and coal mining would be rapidly replaced by “modern” jobs in the service and light industry sectors.  Her record in choosing people to support or employ was also dismal.

Far from being a free thinker her cast of mind  made her the ready captive of an ideology:

“…as Leader of the Opposition MT once cut short a presentation by a leftish member of the Conservative Research Department by fetching out a copy of The Constitution of Liberty from her bag and slamming it down on the table, declaring “this is what we believe”. (http://www.margaretthatcher.org/archive/Hayek.asp).

It is dangerous to trust anyone who is  susceptible to ideological capture for the simple reason that all ideologies, whether sacred or profane, are inadequate descriptions of and guides to reality.    This means that ideologues constantly have to try to fit reality within the ideology rather than having  reality driving their choices.  Those which include economics are particularly dangerous because their reach is so vast.

Ideologies are the prime example of Richard Dawkins’ memes, mental viruses which capture the individual and direct their thought and behaviour.  Those who are captured by them by them give up their mental autonomy.  That speaks either of a character trait such as that of requiring a source of authority for choices or a  weakness of intellect which seeks ideological  algorithms  developed by others to answer political  questions because the person’s capacity to answer the questions by rational pragmatic examination based on their own knowledge and intelligence  is inadequate.

How good was  Thatcher’s mind? She  is frequently  represented by her adherents as ferociously intelligent.  This view  will not stand up to examination.  She read chemistry at Oxford but only achieved a second class honours degree (http://womenshistory.about.com/od/thatchermargaret/a/Margaret-Thatcher.htm).  Oxford at the time did not divide the second class degree into  upper and lower second classes  and had a fourth class honours division instead.  The old Oxford second  is generally taken to be the rough equivalent of an upper second.  That raises questions over her intellect.  Chemistry at degree level in the 1940s had not become heavily mathematized  as it now is.  Diligence would get a student a long way. This   quality Thatcher  reputedly  had in spades. If she did, the fact that she only took a second suggests that she was not very intellectually gifted. That is particularly the case when it is remembered that she went up to Oxford during wartime when competition for places was severely reduced because so many of the potential male students went into the forces rather than to university. A beta plus mind at best.

What people probably mistook for intelligence was her avid seeking and retention of data. But it is one thing to learn facts or arguments parrot fashion, quite another to mould them into a coherent intellectual whole.  Based on her frequent renunciation of previous positions, it is reasonable to assume that she simply did not have the intellectual wherewithal to put the data she took on board to any useful purpose. She certainly never  gave no indication that she ever saw the bigger picture.

There were also the question of her how fitted she was by experience to fill the role she played, that of the hard-core economic libertarian forever seeking ways of making people take responsibility for their lives both socially and in their work.  When I look at the present Tory front bench I have a similar feeling to that  which I experience when thinking of the Nazi leadership.  The Nazis had a rather noticeable lack of Aryan types amongst them: the present Tory front bench is remarkably short on people who have been entrepreneurs or indeed of people who have any great  experience of work outside the narrow confines of politics.

Margaret Thatcher was a forerunner  in this respect. She graduated from Oxford in 1947.  For the next four years she worked for various private companies as a research chemist. At the age of 26 she married a millionaire. He funded Thatcher’s career change from chemist to barrister. She took the bar exams in 1953 and practised (specialising in taxation) until 1961, the last two years of the period occurring after she was elected to the Commons in 1959.  After that it was all politics.

Thatcher’s experience of the real world of work is at best four years as a research chemist and eight years as a barrister.  However,  being married to a millionaire at the age of 26 rather dulls the idea of her living a normal working life.  The truth is she made her way not as a self-made woman but by the traditional route  for female advancement of marrying a rich man.

There was no need for Thatcherism

The really angering thing about Thatcher’s time in No 10 is that she could have done what she was elected to do, tame the unions, without engaging in the deliberate wholesale destruction and alienation of much of Britain’s heavy and extractive industry and the placing in private hands of the public utilities, especially those of gas, electricity and water.   This was because Thatcher had the great good fortune to arrive as Prime Minister just as North Sea oil and gas was coming on-stream in large quantities.  Those revenues alone would have provided any government with a very large safety net to finance temporary difficulties caused by serious confrontations with the larger trade unions.   She also enjoyed  the very large receipts from the big privatisations such as gas, electricity and BT.  No British government has ever had such a sustained revenue windfall as hers.

There was absolutely no economic need to destroy so much of British industry or place much of the state-owned  organisations  into private hands.  Continental countries such as Germany and Italy retained their shipbuilding; France,  Germany and Italy retained a native mass production car industry.  Germany still has a substantial coal mining industry. Privatisation proceeded at very different speeds throughout Europe.  That no other large industrialised  country followed Thatcherite policies  with anything like the speed or fervour of Britain  yet  survived and frequently out competed Britain economically  demonstrates that Thatcher’s policies were not a necessity but simply an ideological choice.

Her government could have spent the 1980s taming the unions sufficiently to prevent the excesses of the 1970s.  It is true that the very high level of unemployment  of the 1980s was an aid to this, but it was probably not the main rod which largely broke the Trade Unions’ back.  Home ownership had been rising steadily throughout the twentieth century and by the time Thatcher came to power in 1979 not far short of 60%. The highest it reached even after Right To Buy was only 69% – the idea that it was Thatcher who made it possible for the working man and woman to own their homes for the first time is another myth about her(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/houseprices/10005586/Home-ownership-falls-for-first-time-in-a-century.html).  .

The fact that so many people were owner occupiers with mortgages  meant that they were much less willing than they had been to strike at the drop of a hat because they feared losing their home.  Even those who were not owner occupiers had much more to lose in terms of general comfort, security and prospects of greater opportunity for their children than had been the case before, say, 1939.  To take just one example, children from poor families had a greater opportunity than ever to enter  higher education. This growing reluctance to come  out whenever the union called for  strike  was why the National Union of Miners’ leader Arthur Scargill was not willing to hold a ballot of all  his members before calling a strike. He feared such a ballot would be lost.

The combination of this increasing  reluctance to strike amongst union members together with the legal restrictions on unions such as no secondary picketing and severe penalties for strikes called with a formal ballot would have been enough to end the anarchy which prevailed in the 1970s.

Apart from the social and economic upheaval of the Thatcher years, she can also be blamed for a continuation of the damage she caused both in the long term structural unemployment but also in the fact that she subverted  the Labour Party so that it adopted most of what was damaging from the Thatcher period, most particularly in the adoption of her devotion to laissez faire economics and in Labour’s all too ready acceptance of the EU  elite’s desire for comprehensive political and economic union.

The 1980s could have been so very different.  The revenue from North Sea Oil could have been put into a sovereign wealth fund which  by now would be worth hundreds of billions.  If  the Single European Act had not been signed the movement towards a  federal EU would have been halted in its tracks  (national vetoes applied to this area of decision making  at the time). If Thatcher had not argued for an ever wider EEC the poorer nations from the East would not have joined and the immigration threat they carry would not exist.  Indeed,   Britain could have left the EU entirely because the Tory Eurosceptics could have allied with Labour under Michael Foot or even Neal Kinnock. New social housing could have been built with the proceeds of Right to Buy thus obviating to a large degree the shortage of housing now.  If the nationalised industries had been sustained there would have been no serious structural unemployment.  Had proper attention been paid to the strategic importance of  essential economic areas such a food and energy self-sufficiency we should not be so dangerously reliant on foreigners for such things today.  Most importantly, if  that had been the general thrust of politics in the 1980s it is doubtful in the extreme that Blair and NuLabour would ever have arisen.

The tragedy of Margaret Thatcher is that she had a sense of patriotism and probably genuinely thought she was doing the best for her country at the time she implemented or advocated policies (her honesty when policies went wrong was  another matter).  The problem was that her judgement  and understanding was all too often hideously wrong or defective. She so often provided comforting rhetoric, especially on Europe and immigration,  but she never delivered the goods. The fact that she was such an overpowering political figure made things worse because it meant she could steamroller her cabinet on most issues at most times. It is difficult to think of another politician  in the past three centuries who wrought so much damage on Britain.

Politically incorrect film reviews – A Lincoln convertible

Robert Henderson

Main cast: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones, James Spader,  David Strathairn, Peter McRobbie, Lee Pace (There is a very extensive cast, but Day-Lewis is so dominant in terms of screen time that the main cast could have been him alone)

Director Stephen Spielberg

Running time: 150 minutes

What is the most damning word  that can be applied to a film? I suspect  it is dull. That is the word for Lincoln.  Too many characters, too much poorly orchestrated verbal  scrummaging in Congress, an avalanche of posturing earnestness and  a good deal of ham acting -  yes, that’s you James Spader I am particularly wincing at for your  Republican fixer William N. Bilbo and you Tommy Lee Jones for your painfully  ridiculous abolitionist Thaddeus  Stephens, a man unable to open his mouth without engaging in abuse.   The only performance of any note is that of Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln.

If there was ever an actor capable of single-handedly rescuing an  indifferent film  it is Day-Lewis. He did it magnificently in Gangs of New York with his riveting performance as Bill the Butcher.  The man does his level best here and in truth is a pretty convincing Lincoln, but  the film is so generally  flaccid, overly wordy and positively cartoonish in its representation of the debate over the Amendment to abolish slavery  that he cannot obscure its seriously disabling weaknesses.  Day-Lewis is also handicapped by the character of Lincoln which is devious while he maintains a façade  of reasonableness. It is too quiet, too restrained  a personality  to rescue  a poor film by obliterating the mediocrity around him, especially one of this length.

To those considerable weaknesses  can be added the film’s  gross dishonesty in representing Lincoln’s position on   slavery and blacks generally. This misrepresentation is made simple by restricting  the action in the film to a few months at the very fag end of the American  Civil War  during which the 13^th  Amendment to the US  Constitution abolishing slavery was brought to the House of Representatives, debated and eventually passed.  The short time span allowed Lincoln’s earlier equivocal and changing positions on the relative importance of abolishing slavery and respecting state rights and  for modern liberals his distinctly embarrassing views on blacks to be almost entirely hidden from view.

What did  Lincoln’s think of slavery?  He was very much the Lincoln convertible, with different messages, often subtly different, for various audiences and political circumstances.  But there is a clear line to be followed in his thought.  There is no reason to believe that he did not find the institution obnoxious in the abstract  and the actual mistreatment of slaves distressing. But the fact that Lincoln was distressed  when  for example, he saw blacks being transported chained – a story repeated in the film – did  not mean he thought of blacks as the equals of whites or wanted them to have full legal equality with whites. Here he is putting his views unambiguously in 1858:

“I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the White and Black races – that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes – nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to inter-marry with White people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the White and Black races which will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality, and in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the White race.” (ABRAHAM LINCOLN, in his debate with Senator Douglas at Quincy, IL, on Oct. 13, 1858 and quoted in Abraham Lincoln – Complete Works, published by The Century Co., 1894, Vol. I, page 273).

Lincoln’s belief that white and black could not live in equality led him to be an advocate of colonisation, which in this context meant  the transfer of blacks in the USA to other parts of the world , especially Liberia in West Africa.  He had doubts of the practicality for  in the Douglas debates   we find him saying “My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,—to their own native land. But a moment’s reflection would convince me that whatever of high hope (as I think there is) there may be in this, in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a day, they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days.

But if that is not the answer Lincoln has no ready solution for he goes on to say:

What then? Free them all, and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? I think I would not hold one in slavery, at any rate; yet the point is not clear enough to me to denounce people upon. What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if, indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot, then, make them equals. It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South.” ( http://www.bartleby.com/251/12.html).

Despite his concerns at the practicality of colonisation, Lincoln was still promoting the idea during his presidency. He mentioned it in his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in 1862 and created  a special office to oversee the process of colonisation under the control of the Rev. James Mitchell of Indiana and established a Bureau of Emigration.

Lincoln’s feelings towards slaves are suggestive of those  of  the man who sees animals being cruelly treated and wishes for the mistreatment to stop. Those feelings do not signify  that the animals  would be welcome round and about the homes of the pitying onlooker merely that the onlooker wished the mistreatment to stop.

Then there is the question of priorities. When he became president Lincoln had no hesitation in making clear his first concern was the preservation the Union. He did this in his first inaugural presidential address on March 4, 1861 when he offered no objection to the pending Corwin Amendment which ran “No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.” ( Volume 12 of the Statutes at Large at page 251).

This would have effectively made the abolition of slavery by Congress impossible by reserving the power to be a  free or slave state to the individual states Lincoln said this at his inauguration:

 ”I understand a proposed amendment to the Constitution . . . has passed Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States, including that of persons held to service. I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.” (http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html)

Well into the war Lincoln was unequivocal about the priority of the ends for which the war was fought, the primary end being the preservation of the Union:

“I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views. I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free…” Lincoln, Abraham. “Letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862″. In Miller, Marion Mills. Life and Works of Abraham Lincoln. Current Literature. Retrieved 2011-01-24.

The film’s presentation of the pro and anti-abolition arguments  will ring a bell with anyone who is familiar with the BBC’s idea of balance.  The pro-slavers are allowed to say something but they are always outnumbered and are never allowed the last word. Moreover, the fact that Day-Lewis’ Lincoln takes up so much of the screen time allotted to argument that any other voice is lost in the general babble of an overloaded cast.  Interestingly, the pro-slavers in the film engaged in argument  while the abolitionists readily turned to crude abuse. This is very reminiscent of the way modern liberals behave in real life (see http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/10/17/the-liberal-bigot/).   There is also the gaping hole of a virtually absent Confederate voice, not so much to give  the pro-slavery arguments  but those of the  state rights versus federal powers conflict.

Perhaps the most telling facet of the film is the depiction of the double dealing of Lincoln and his fellow Republicans. Opponents of the amendment are shamelessly bribed with offers of government jobs with the full approval of Lincoln  who also engages in a piece of gross dishonesty by delaying the arrival of a peace delegation from the Confederacy  to ensure the Amendment passes.  This also requires him to give a lawyer’s evasion to the question  of whether such a peace delegation exists by answering that he knows of no such delegation in Washington rather than saying he knew of no peace delegation.    All of this skulduggery is portrayed as a legitimate means to an end, which of course,  is the besetting sin of liberals today who eagerly embrace any enormity provided it is intended to move some part of the world towards their nirvana of unalloyed political correctness.  The problem with such dishonesty and is that even if it gains the immediate object –which often it does not – it invariably has a corrosive effect on political trust .  Even today there are still the lingering resentments in the states of the Confederacy over their treatment after the war during the reconstruction era.

In the end the question has to be asked, was the abolition of slavery as it was done worth 600,000 dead and many more injured, often hideously?  What was the greater good, no civil war and the retention of slavery for a time or the immediate abolition of slavery bought at the costs of  huge numbers of  killed and maimed ?  It might seem a simple calculus to us today  because slavery to us is self-evidently beyond the Pale,  but in mid 19^th century America things looked very different, just as they have looked very different to every society which has had a form of legal servitude, which includes most societies in most times and places with servitude ranging from full blown chattel slavery through serfdom to indentured labour.  It is also worth bearing in mind that the free poor in the vast majority of societies throughout history have in practice been in a de facto servile position because of their material circumstances and  the general imbalance of power between employer and employed. Indeed, the iconic  English  abolitionist William Wilberforce  was much taunted with the fact that while he made a great uproar about slaves he bore with equanimity the abject poverty of many of his countrymen.

The abolition of US slavery was reckless in its execution  because it was  made without compensation (with the exception of  Washington DC)  to slave owners  and was  not staggered over several years.  The British abolition of slavery in British colonies used both devices (the British taxpayer expended the then colossal sum of £20 million in compensation which represented two fifths of the annual British budget) and, though far from an easy transition, it did remove both the problem of the ruination of a very large part of the colonial economy (the slave related part) and provide the wherewithal for the now ex-slave owners to continue their various economic enterprises by paying wages and to make the necessary practical adjustments .  It also brought time for the transition from slave to wage-earner to be psychologically absorbed.  Slavery is the ultimate form of institutionalisation .  A man or woman born to  slavery and  knowing nothing but servitude may find themselves disorientated when suddenly freed even if they have long dreamt of freedom, just as long-term prisoners or mental patients  often do when released. That had benefits for both slave owners and slaves because it was preferable to the sudden disorganised shock of immediate and uncompensated

Had Congress arranged to compensate the slave owners at an honest price and staggered the ending of slavery there is good reason to believe the Civil War could have been avoided and slavery ended within a relatively short period of time. As it was the abolition as it stood made a mess of slave owning states economies, left the freed slaves in a precarious position to be subject to Jim Crow laws and segregation for nearly  a century and often the recipients of the practice of convict leasing whereby convicts  were effectively sold to private contractors for a set period of time.

If  the abolition of slavery been peacefully accomplished it would also have had the great benefit of leaving state rights and powers unsavaged by the  gross violations of the Constitution which Lincoln perpetrated during the war with his proclamations made as commander-in-chief which included the suspension of Habeas Corpus and his ignoring of rulings by the Supreme Court.   (http://www.civilwarhome.com/pulito.htm). Interestingly, the question of legality of his proclamations was addressed at some length by Lincoln in the film,  although primarily in the context of the legality of his Emancipation Proclamation.

It should be  very difficult for any person without a political axe to grind to come away from the film without seeing Lincoln as a slippery hypocrite with no regard for the truth.  Needless to say in these PC times  you would not guess it from the reviews. The  critics have generally grovelled before the film’s prime politically correct subject matter. The review by  Rupert Christianson  of the  Daily Telegraph (a Tory newspaper) gives a taste of the tone in the British media:   “I cannot vouch for the movie’s historical accuracy – so much about Lincoln remains contested – but, without resorting to pomposity or sentimentality, Spielberg has built the story into a stirring drama of dilemma worthy of Racine or Schiller… The word that came to my mind as I left the cinema is an unfashionable one: noble. This is a noble film, about noble people. Quentin Tarantino doesn’t do noble.” ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/baftas/9857721/Baftas-2013-Spielbergs-Noble-Achievement.html).

Should you go and see this film?  Well, if you do, visit  it in a spirit of inquiry into exactly how blatant in their bias the politically correct  can be when  producing what can only be described as unashamed  propaganda. Talking of modern liberals, the film  has provided me with some amusement. Discussing it with the politically correct  in Britain it is remarkable how many believe Lincoln to have been a Democrat and the opponents of slavery in the film to have all been Republicans. It is a treat to watch their credulous little faces drop when I tell them the truth.

Politically incorrect film reviews – Django Unchained

Robert Henderson

Main cast: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington,  Samuel L. Jackson

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Running time  165 minutes

Even by Tarantino’s standards this is an extraordinarily self-indulgent film, both in terms of his fixation with  disproportionate  violence only tenuously related to plot and with  his one-dimensional  representation  of slavery. This portrayal  is unambiguously cruel and, as with almost  every film about American  slavery, set against the background of a palatial  plantation.   American slavery was vastly more nuanced than that, with single slaves being owned by a master or mistress;  free blacks owning slaves; slaves working for commercial and  industrial enterprises; slaves employed in fieldwork and mining.  The most favoured in terms of their treatment were probably house servants in the larger  establishments. [1]

Slave owners being human beings it is reasonable to assume that the treatment of slaves would have varied greatly, from the indulgent to the use of the slave simply as an object to be worked or abused as the slave owner wished. Even at the base level of slaves as considered simply as  property,  the idea that slave owners would be routinely physically abusing their slaves to the point of greatly reducing their value or losing the value completely by killing them makes little sense because slaves were expensive.  The growth of the black population generally and of slaves in particular supports this view.  It is estimated that approximately 645, 000 slaves were shipped  to the territory which eventually formed the USA [2] The 1860 US census shows  a  total population of 31,443,321 with 3,953,761 slaves and 488,283 free blacks, 251,000 of which were in the slave-owning states.[3]

The plot is a straight forward revenge drama. Dr King Schultz  (Christoph Waltz) a German dentist turned bounty hunter seeks out a couple of slave traders (the Speck Brothers )  who are transporting some slaves.  Schultz wants to buy a slave from a particular plantation off them because the slave can identify three brothers who have a large bounty on their heads.   The Speck brothers  do not wish to trade, guns are drawn and a shootout ensues killing one of the brothers and trapping another under his horse with a broken leg.  Scultz, a pedant  for the  legal form but  not the spirit of the law throughout the film, makes out a bill of sale for the slave he wants, leaves this with some money with the surviving Speck brother and releases the other slaves with a suggestion that they kill the surviving Speck and head north to the non-slave states.  The slaves duly oblige Schultz.

The slave Schultz obtains is Django (Jamie Foxx).  Django is a failed runaway who was caught  trying to escape with his wife  Broomhilda Von Shaft (Kerry Washington). As a consequence the pair of them are deliberately sold separately at auction and separated. Consequently Django does not know where his wife is.  Schultz strikes a deal with Django: join me as a partner in bounty hunting until the spring and I will help you find your lost wife.   Django agrees.  Much of the  rest of the film is taken up with Schultz and Django scheming to kill people for the bounty on their heads, killing people such people and killing people to revenge Django and by extension his fellow slaves.  Eventually Broomhilda is tracked down to a huge  plantation owned by Calvin Candy (Di Caprio) and   Schultz and Django lay a scheme to persuade Candy to sell her to them.

The character of Schultz is morally absurd. He is a bounty hunter for whom the words “captured dead or alive” have only one meaning: dead.   The concept of innocent till proven guilty is redundant because he kills simply on the issue of a warrant for someone’s arrest  and he never makes even a token attempt to take them alive. Hence,  Schultz’s  frequently made claim that he is only killing those who have committed serious crimes does not stand up to moral scrutiny. He could be killing an innocent man as easily as a criminal. Yet this immoral  character postures throughout the film as a morally superior being because he disapproves of slavery. Moreover, this supposed dislike for slavery does seem somewhat flexible.  To promote the end of purchasing Broomhilda,  Schultz (and Django)   watch without complaint a slave brutally killed in what is termed Mandigo fighting, that is , no-holds barred fighting between two slaves,  and a runaway slave ripped to shreds by dogs.   Schultz’s  final pc flourish occurs when  he behaves in a maniacally egotistical   way after  Django and he have  achieved their aim of buying Broomhilda from  the slaveowner Candy. All  he has to do to seal the deal is shake Candy’s hand.  Schultz refuses, shoots Candy and then dies in the farcical  “shoot ‘em up” sequence which follows.

The Eponymous Django (Jamie Foxx) , an actor whose screen presence exudes a dismal surliness at the best of times  is ridiculous in a different way.  He adopts an aggressive  and insolent attitude towards Candy and his associates, behaviour  which even as a free black it is wildly improbable would have been tolerated by a man as rich and powerful as Candy.   Nor is it readily imaginable  that he would have been allowed to dine with Candy and his family. His acting range recalls Dorothy Parker’s put down of  Katharine Hepburn: “She  delivered a striking performance that ran the gamut of emotions, from A to B.”

The two performances worth watching are DiCaprio’s malevolent plantation owner Calvin Candy and Samuel Jack’s privileged slave Stephen, part Uriah Heap, part licensed court jester,  part smart operator and wholly Uncle Tom.   Candy has something of the unwonted and disconcerting  charm of Ralph Fiennes as the Concentration Camp commandant  Amon Göth in Schindler’s List,  being capable of Southern  courtesy at one moment and gross cruelty the next.

Tarantino is continuing what he did in Inglourious Basterds . In his earlier films the themes and characters were simply violent and immoral. Inglourious Basterds changed that. Taratino suddenly decided he wanted to morally posture, in that instance by adopting the position that any mistreatment of Germans, Nazi or otherwise,  was justified in WW2 because of the Nazi mistreatment of Jews.   Consequently the film’s gang of Americans in Nazi-occupied Europe were allowed to engage in any violent  horror, for example, killing someone by sledgehammering them to death, on the pretext that it was reasonable because they were killing Nazis.  Even if that had been true it would not have given the characters  the  moral high ground  because brutality is simply  brutality when it involves killing defenceless men in a cruel fashion. But  Inglorious Basterds did not confine themselves to killing card-carrying Nazis: ordinary Germans, for example,  conscripted Wermacht soldiers,  were killed gratuitously and cruelly.    In Django unchained Tarantino substitutes slavery for the Nazi’s reatment of the Jews.  A comment made by Django early on  encapsulates the director’s intention:   “Killing white folks and  getting paid for it: what’s not to like?”  (Try to imagine a white character in any film saying “Killing black folks and getting paid for it: what’s not to like?”   Difficult  going on impossible isn’t it? )

The problem with this is that most white Americans of the time were not slave owners of any sort .   But just as the moral restraints in Inglourious Basterds were loosened to include any German regardless of whether they had perpetrated any atrocity or even whether they were Nazi party members, so were the moral restraints removed on what might be done to whites of any status in Django Unchained.

The other  serious difficulty with the film is  the violence. Violence is a necessary  and interesting part of film-making when it serves a dramatic purpose. Let it become a gorefest and it is pornography.  In  Django Unchained  it moves into the positively  cartoonish with killings which are not only incontinent in motivation but often  look completely unconvincing:  the worst example is the shooting of Candy’s sister when a single shot lifts her into the air and through a door in the manner of a pantomime fairy being lifted off the  stage.  All this becomes at first boring then irritating.

The film has been criticised for its free use of nigger.  Tarantino has a record of his characters using the word , although never with  anything like the fluency as happens here where it is used several hundred times. It is used freely by black as well as white characters. Bearing in mind the film is set in slaving country and much of the action takes place on plantations, Tarantino is probably being realistic in putting it into the film.  However, when did realism ever trouble him? Certainly not in the film as a whole with a KKK-style  slapstick scene inserted into the pre-Bellum South long before the KKK was created and the acceptance of wildly insolent behaviour by Django or his wearing of modern sunglasses for most of the film.    Could it be that Tarantino puts nigger  in simply for the thrill of playing the enfant terrible? Or perhaps he simply wants to have his pc and non-pc cake at the same time.

Although an offshoot of Blaxploitation films, both the 1975 film Mandingo and its sequel Drum were  much more finessed in their treatment of the relationships between slaves owners and their slaves. Although there was violence and harsh treatment shown it was not incessant or grossly improbable. There was  also some attempt to place behaviour in context . This last  is completely missing in Django Unchained.  For example, Stephen is shot in cold blood by Django for being an Uncle Tom after being told by Django to remain after other slaves are escape unharmed because Stephen is “exactly where he belongs  ”.  That  we are all prisoners to a large degree of where our birth places us and humans being humans will develop relationships even where the relationship may seem tainted by the disparity in power between those involved is unexamined.

Should you go and see the film? Well, Di Caprio and Jackson’s performances are well worth seeing. Just don’t expect  Gone with the wind.

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[1] http://elliotlakenews.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/blacks-owning-black-slaves/

[2] b Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and David Eltis, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research, Harvard University. Based on “records for 27,233 voyages that set out to obtain slaves for the Americas”. Stephen Behrendt (1999). “Transatlantic Slave Trade”. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience. New York: Basic Civitas Books. ISBN 0-465-00071-1.

[3] .   http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1860a-02.pdf

The significance of borders –why Representative Government and the Rule of Law Require Nation States

Author: Thierry Baudet

Publisher: Brill

ISBN 978 90 04 22813 9

Robert Henderson

This a frustrating book.  Its subject is of the greatest interest, namely, how human beings may best organise themselves  to provide security and freedom.   It contains  a great deal of good sense because   the author understands that humans cannot exist amicably unless they have a sense of shared identity and a territory which they control.   (Anyone who doubts the importance of having such a territory should reflect on the dismal history of the Jews.) Baudet  vividly describes  the undermining of the  nation state  by the rise of  supranational bodies: the loss of democratic control, the impossibility of taking very diverse national entities such as those forming  the EU and making them into a coherent single society;  the self-created social divisions caused by mass immigration  and the rendering of the idea of citizenship based on nationality effectively null by either granting it to virtually anyone regardless of their origins or by denying the need for any concept of nationality in the modern globalised world.  He also deals lucidly with the movement from the mediaeval  feudal relationships of fealty to a lord to the nation state;   correctly recognises representative government as uniquely European;  examines the  concept of sovereignty intelligently and is especially good on how supranationalism expands surreptitiously, for example,  the International Criminal Court is widely thought to only apply to the states which have signed the treaty creating it. Not so. The nationals of countries which have not signed who commit crimes on the territories of states which have signed can be brought for trial before the ICT.

That is all very encouraging stuff for those who believe in the value  of the sovereign nation state. The problem is Baudet  wants to have his nationalism whilst keeping a substantial slice of the politically correct cake. Here he is laying out his definitional wares:  “I call the open nationalism that I defend multicultural nationalism – as opposed to multiculturalism on the one hand, and an intolerant, closed nationalism on the other. The international cooperation on the basis of accountable nation states that I propose, I call sovereign cosmopolitanism – as opposed to supranationalism on the one hand, and a close. Isolated nationalism on the other. Both the multicultural nationalism and sovereign cosmopolitianism place the the nation state at the heart of political order, whole recognising the demands of the modern, internationalised world. “(p xvi).

Baudet’s  “multicultural nationalism” is  the idea that culturally different  groups ( he eschews racial difference as important) can exist within a  territory and still constitute a nation which he  defines  as “a political loyalty stemming from an experienced collective identity…rather than a legal, credal or ethnic nature ” (p62) . How does Baudet think this can be arrived at? He believes  it is possible to produce the  “pluralist society, held to together nevertheless  by a monocultural core”. (p158).    Therein lies the problem with the book: Baudet is trying surreptitiously to square multiculturalism with the nation state.

The concept of a monocultural core is akin to  what multiculturalists are trying belatedly to introduce into their politics with their claim that a society in which each ethnic  group follows its own ancestral ways can nonetheless  be bound together with a shared belief in institutions  and concepts such as the rule of law and representative government.  This is a non-starter  because a sense of group identity is not built on self-consciously created  civic values and institutions –witness the dismal failure of post-colonial states in the 20^th century -  but on a shared system of  cultural beliefs and behaviours  which are imbibed unwittingly through growing up in a society.  Because of the multiplicity of ethnic groups from  different cultures in  modern  Western societies,  there is no  overarching single identity within any of them  potent enough to produce Baudet’s   unifying “monocultural core”. Moreover, the continued mass immigration to those societies makes the movement from a “monocultural core” ever greater.  In practice his “Multicultural nationalism” offers  exactly the same intractable problems as official multiculturalism.

Baudet’s idea of a “monocultural core”  would be an unrealistic proposition if cultural differences were all that had to be accommodated in this “pluralist society”, but he  greatly magnifies his conceptual difficulties by refusing to honestly  address the question of racial difference.  However incendiary the subject  is these  differences cannot be ignored.   If human beings did not think racial difference important there would  there be no animosity based  purely on physical racial difference, for example, an hostility to blacks from wherever  they come.  It is their race not their ethnicity which causes the hostile reaction.

The idea that assimilation can occur if it is actively pursued by governments is disproved by history. France, at the official level,  has always insisted upon immigrants becoming fully assimilated: British governments since the late 1970s have embraced multiculturalism as the correct treatment of  immigrants. The result has been the same in both countries; immigrant groups which are racially or radically culturally different from the population which they enter do not assimilate naturally.  The larger the immigrant group the easier it is for this lack of assimilation to be permanent, both because a large population can colonise areas and provide a means by which its members can live their own separate cultural lives and because a large group presents a government with the potential for serious violent civil unrest if attempts are made to  force it to assimilate.

The USA is the best testing ground for Baudet’s idea that there could be a common unifying  core of culture within a country of immense cultural diversity.   Over the past two centuries it has accepted a vast kaleidoscope of peoples and cultures, but  its origins were much more uniform. At  independence the country had, as a consequence of the English founding and  moulding of the colonies which formed the USA , a dominant language (English) , her legal system was based on English common law, her political structures were adapted from  the English,  the dominant general culture was that of England and the free population of the territory was racially similar.  Even those who  did not have English ancestry almost invariably prided themselves on being English, for example,  John Jay, one of the founding Fathers of the USA who was  of Huguenot and Dutch descent, passionately wrote:  “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.” (John Jay in Federalist No. 2).There was the presence of a mainly enslaved black population and the native Amerindians, but the newly formed United States at least at the level of the white population had a degree of uniformity which made the idea of a core monoculture plausible.

From the mid-sixties after US immigration law was slackened migrants arrived in ever increasing numbers and with much more racial and ethnic variety. The result has been a balkanisation of American society with a legion of minority groups all shouting for their own advantage with the  original “monocultural core” diluted to the point of disappearance.

There are other weaknesses in Baudet’s  thinking.  He is  much too keen to draw clear lines between forms of social and political organisation. For example,  he considers  the nation state to be an imagined community  (a nation being  too large for everyone to know everyone else)  with a  territory  it controls  as opposed to tribal or universal loyalty (the idea that there is simply mankind not different peoples who share moral values and status). The problem with that, as he admits, are the many tribes which are too large to allow each individual to know each other (footnote 23 p63).  He tries to fudge the issue by developing a difference between ethnic loyalty and national loyalty, when of course there is no conflict between the two. Nations can be based solely on ethnicity.

Another example of conceptual rigidity is Baudet’s  distinction between  internationalism and supranationalism.  He defines  the former as the traditional form of international cooperation whereby nation states make agreements between themselves but retain the ultimate right to decide what policy will be implemented (thus preserving their sovereignty) while the latter, for example the EU, is an agreement between states which removes,  in many areas of policy , the right  of the individual contracting states to choose  whether  a policy  will be accepted or rejected.   Although that is a  distinction which will appeal to academics,  in practice it rarely obtains because treaties made between theoretically sovereign states often results  in  the weaker ones having no meaningful choice of action.

Despite the conceptual weaknesses ,  the strengths of the book are  considerable if  it is used as a primer on the subject of national sovereignty.  Read it but  remember from where Baudet is ultimately coming.

The US and Ethnic voting – Why white America (and the rest of the West) has to play the ethnic card to survive

Robert Henderson

1 White liberals get dangerously over excited

2. The election’s voting patterns.

3. Romney as a candidate

4. The demographics

5. A programme to maintain the white majority

6. The rest of the West

7. Another “End of History”

8. The danger of ideologies

1. White liberals get dangerously over excited

Even by the demanding standards of adolescent inanity set by them in normal times white liberals have been getting dangerously over-excited following the Obama re-election. His victory has induced industrial quantities of self-indulgent masochistic politically correct fantasy revelling in the belief that the USA is locked into an inescapable demographic trap which will mean, within a generation or two, the end of the white majority and the dominant culture which has shaped the country not only since independence but in the previous one hundred and eighty-odd years of the American colonial experience. This , the white liberal fondly and ludicrously imagines, will mean the triumph of political correctness with a wondrously multicultural and multiracial USA of the future standing as the very model of social and historical development at its evolutionary summit.

This is truly an epic fantasy. Even if mass immigration does continue and makes whites a minority in the USA it does not follow that the multiculturalist dream of a multiplicity of groups living in harmony will arrive. Indeed, we can be sure it will not, because never in the history of Man has a territory occupied by racially or ethnically differentiated groups produced societal harmony. The best that is ever achieved is an uneasy armistice enforced by a socially and culturally detached (often formally imperial) overlord. The result of increasing the size of various racial or ethnic minorities relative to the white population will not create a rainbow alliance against the white population, but greater competition amongst the ethnic minorities with the largest groups amongst them vying to become the most dominant of the racial or ethnic minorities other than the now minority  but still largest minority group American whites.

This enthusiasm of white liberals for a future in which they are at best reduced to part of a group which is no more than just another ethnic minority in the USA is extended to their claim that inescapable decline is also the fate of the Republican Party, unless, that is, the GOP gets with the right-on programme and begins to pander to blacks, Latinos, gays, feminists , the young and immigrants generally, while dropping any pretence of trying to stem immigration and signing up to all the shibboleths of political correctness. In short, it must cease to be what it has been and just about still is, at least at the grass roots level, a conservative party with a sense of nationhood trying to hold the line against an ever more aggressive political correctness, and become the ideological Tweedledum to the Democratic Party’s Tweedledee. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/republicans/9669468/Republicans-may-drop-opposition-to-granting-illegal-immigrants-residency.html).

The chief  fly-in-the-ointment for the white liberal’s prescribed redefining of the USA and the GOP is that the demographic future for the USA does not have to be as they paint it. Mass immigration could be stopped if there was the political will and this would at least greatly slow down  the projected demographic shift to whites being in the minority by 2050 or even possibly by the 2040s (http://www.npr.org/2011/06/27/137448906/us-will-have-minority-whites-sooner-says-demographer   and http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/08/13/census.minorities/index.html).

But even on the most aggressive demographic projections put forward by liberals there is no compelling reason to believe that in the next 15 years Republicans will be excluded from controlling Congress if they do not change their policies to radically politically correct ones. In short, there is still considerable time for the GOP to do what is necessary to defeat the supposedly pre-determined US demographic and political future by ending mass immigration and adopting a programme designed to appeal to whites. More on the detail of that later.

2. The election’s voting patterns

( http://www.people-press.org/2012/11/07/changing-face-of-america-helps-assure-obama-victory/).

The ethnic vote was overwhelmingly for Obama: blacks 93% , Hispanics 71% and Asian s 73%. Obama also captured 55% of female votes and enjoyed a large advantage over Romney amongst younger voters taking 60% of the 18-29 group and 52% of the 30-44 age group. Romney took 59% of the white vote to Obama’s 39%

There are important lessons to be taken from these statistics. A majority formed of several ethnic minority groups is certain to be neither a stable nor a harmonious political constituency simply because there is no example of such a coalition ever being other than this; the overwhelming black support for Obama may is almost certainly a phenomenon which attaches itself only to a black candidate; the Hispanic vote is racially disparate and the white Hispanic part of this ethnic group may in time simply see themselves as white Americans rather than hyphenated Americans ; the Asian constituency is still small and disparate and Asians probably voted for Obama to a significant degree simply because much of the group is comprised of recent immigrants and as recent immigrants they will naturally go for the most immigrant friendly candidate, a tendency that will weaken as the generations pass and the descendants become distanced from their ancestral culture which will when encountered seem ever more alien to them; the youth vote for Obama dropped significantly compared with 2008 and, finally, the split of the female vote gave Obama a healthy but importantly not overwhelming advantage.

The last point is highly significant because women represent the largest group of voters who are supposedly set to consign the Republicans to the dustbin of history unless they change their supposedly outmoded and reactionary ways. A five per cent shift in women voters to the Republicans (something perfectly plausible with different candidates and circumstances ) and the Republican women problem vanishes. This could easily happen.  For example, faced with a white non-Hispanic Democratic candidate, the non-white minority female vote could be reduced substantially by female voters failing to vote in such numbers as they have voted for Obama simply because the candidate was white or, less probably, voting for other candidates whether Republican or third party. Another possibility would be a white Hispanic Republican candidate who could capture a large part of the now Hispanic Democratic vote whilst not alienating non-Hispanic white voters.

As for the (under 30) youth vote, 51% of that portion of the white vote went to Romney against 44% to Obama . This reversed the 2008 election where Obama won 54% of the under thirty white vote and McCain 44% (http://www.people-press.org/2012/11/26/young-voters-supported-obama-less-but-may-have-mattered-more/) . This is significant because the substantial drop off for Obama in young white voter support shows how fragile is the race factor in voter preference amongst whites. Obama was a novelty in 2008; he is increasingly seen as just another tired failed politician. Any black candidate in the future will be just another candidate who will not benefit from the immense deference Obama has enjoyed and to a large extent still enjoys from the mainstream media. It is also true that younger voters often change their political allegiances as they grow older, normally by moving from the left to the right.

Because the descendants of recent immigrants, of whatever racial and ethnic origin, will have an ever weaker attachment to their ancestral land and culture as the generations pass, their preference for candidates and parties which are soft on immigration will weaken because they will no longer think there is  a pressing need to bring in more of those from their ancestral lands.  The effect of that would be to reduce support for immigration generally amongst  ethnic minority groups, because  support for immigration amongst recent immigrants is very strongly driven by the desire to bring in extended family members and friends.  More dramatically,  there are many examples of those of immigrant ancestry wishing to pull up the drawbridge to prevent  further immigration  even where the would-be  immigrants are connected by national origin or ethnicity to  those opposing their settlement . Anglicised Jews from families long settled in Britain complaining about Jews from Eastern Europe entering in the nineteenth century is e a good historical example of this trait (http://www.movinghere.org.uk/galleries/histories/jewish/journeys/journeys.htm).

Such behaviour is unsurprising because once an immigrant is in a country any further immigration, especially that of immigrants who are different in race, nationality  or ethnicity from those already there, will mean greater competition for jobs, housing, education healthcare and so on. That is a particularly strong motive for immigrants to oppose further immigration if the country they have settled in a First World state with a comprehensive welfare system.

There is also the fact that as ethnic\racial solidarity within a country lessens, the willingness of the population to fund welfare weakens (Frank Salter: On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethnicity, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration (http://edna.machighway.com/~franksal/EthnicResearch/Background.html). Mitt Romney was much castigated for saying that 47% of the population were on benefits and would not vote for someone who would not at worst unambiguously support present benefit levels. Contrariwise, Obama offered the promise of continuing welfare benefits. Whether the USA can afford the level of benefits it currently provides is debatable, but there must be some unsustainable limit to public spending. What if the 47% became 60% or 70% who were dependant on benefits? As a matter of simple arithmetic, there has to be a point where benefits simply cannot be maintained let alone increased if the numbers who are net tax contributors become so small they cannot support welfare levels.

That would be a serious difficulty in a very homogeneous society: in an increasingly fragmented one it is a recipe for racial and ethnic strife which at its least violent will see a reluctance by the ethnic and racial groups least benefitting from taxpayer funded schemes becoming more ever more reluctant to fund such spending. In addition, those within ethnic and racial groups who have done better will almost certainly tend to see themselves in class terms rather than ethnic or racial terms. It is also true that the spread of wealth and poverty within ethnic and racial groups can and almost certainly will change over the years. There is no certain perpetual advantage or disadvantage for any particular group.  This could mean that state provision becomes greatly reduced, something which would discourage  future prospective immigrants.

3. Romney as a candidate

There were numerous drawbacks to Romney as a candidate. He is a rich man who made his wealth in the now widely despised and hated financial industry. He is a leading member of a religion with cultish elements which troubles even mainstream Christian voters. He has a tin ear for what should not be said when you are courting the general public, most notably his claim (mentioned above) at a fund raising dinner that 47% of voters were never going to vote for him because they were dependent on taxpayer funded goodies. In an electoral race where personality counts for so much he comes across most of the time as wooden and incapable of engaging with voters. In truth, he was pretty poor as a campaigner and unimpressive as a public personality ( http://www.people-press.org/2012/11/13/lessons-from-the-2012-election/).

But there was more to his deficiencies than that. Romney also added radical policy shifts on subjects with a good deal of traction right across the US electorate . He moved  from being what is politely called a moderate Republican (translation closet liberal) on subjects such as immigration and gay marriage to a significantly less pc line. Many liberal commentators are now arguing that this made him unelectable because it alienated Hispanics, blacks, gays, the young and women. Equally  plausible reasons for Romney not benefitting from those policy shifts are either people not believing his change of heart was sincere or thinking that Romney was not being coherent and full hearted in presenting his new “hardline” views. Such behaviour probably lost him votes on both sides of the US political divide.

There was also a general air of diffidence about Romney, as though his heart was not wholly in the fight or even that he might be scared of the post of President. Interestingly, since the election media reports suggest that Romney was a very reluctant candidate:

“After failing to win the 2008 Republican nomination, Mr Romney told his family he would not run again and had to be persuaded to enter the 2012 White House race by his wife Ann and son Tagg.

“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire… to run,” Tagg Romney said. “If he could have found someone else to take his place… he would have been ecstatic to step aside.”

Mitt Romney “is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them. He loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention,” his son said. ‘ (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-politics/9764312/Mitt-Romney-didnt-want-to-run-for-president-son-claims.html).  If true, that will have been signalled to voters by the unconscious signals which humans cannot control such as body language and vocal traits.

In addition to benefitting from Romney’s considerable and numerous  weaknesses, Obama had in his favour the fact that he was the sitting president. Since 1945 only Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Bush senior in 1992 have failed to gain re-election. He also had the reduced but still significant boost from the fact that he was the first black president. Balanced against that Obama had presided over the most difficult US economic situation since the 1930s for four years, but as the recession started during the term of a Republican president and in the public mind, at least at the headline level, was created by bankers and their ilk who were generally Republican supporters, voters seem to have widely accepted that this was a mess not created by Obama. They may have blamed Obama for not ending the economic troubles, but they blamed the last Bush administration more. In these circumstances Romney’s past as an investment fund manager made him by proxy part of the cause of the present mess in the eyes of many voters.

Despite the balance of electoral college advantage lying heavily with Obama his win on the popular vote was not massive:

Obama 64,428,975 (50.80%)

Romney 60,227,548 ( 47.49%)

Total vote 126,832,750

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2012

It really was not an impressive win in terms of popular support. The split between the candidates in electoral college votes was vast 332 to 206, but many of the Obama state  wins were narrow ones.  If  approximately 850,000 Obama voters spread over the closely contested  states  had switched to  Romney he would have won.  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/liamhalligan/9770870/The-US-cliff-one-small-part-of-a-huge-debt-crisis.html)

There have also been numerous complaints about machine voting with claims that voting machines registered for Obama when Romney was selected, for example, Any form of machine voting  is difficult to check for faults, wilful or otherwise. Machine voting which relies on computers makes  meaningfully checks of flaws  or deliberately introduced biases into voting all but impossible.  There were also doubts raised by very high Obama voting and voter registration  in particular districts (http://www.wnd.com/2012/11/did-voter-fraud-swing-election/) . Whether  any of these complaints  are indicative of wilful or widespread fraud remains to be seen, but if widespread irregularities favouring Obama are demonstrated,  then future elections may be more closely scrutinised and the chance for fraud reduced. This could aid Republican candidates if voter fraud is more prevalent amongst Democrats than Republicans. In the 2012 elections this  appears to be the case,  because complaints by Democrats against Republicans alleging voting  irregularities favouring them were thin on the ground going on non-existent.  This might be explained by the fact that Obama won, but it would be a natural response to claims of bias towards Obama for Democrats to cite cases of machines favouring Romney or exceptionally high voter registrations or votes for Romney.

Taking the broad picture, there  are no compelling reasons to believe that the groups which failed to provide sufficient  support for Romney would behave in the same way towards a future Republican presidential candidate in the next fifteen to twenty years, especially one faced with a Democratic candidate who was not black.

4. The demographics

It might be thought from the liberal media excitement that whites are on the brink of becoming a  minority group in the USA. In fact they still form the large majority of the population.

The 2010 US census arrived at a figure of 308.7 million, an increase of 27.3 million people since the 2000 census ( Table 1 http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf – all references to 2010 census statistics come from this PDF file) . This represented an increase of 9.7% over ten years. The non-Hispanic white population increased numerically from 194.6 million to 196.8 in those years (63.7% of the population). Moreover, whites in the USA also include large numbers of Hispanics, this being a classification based on ethnicity not race. The census counted 50.5 million Hispanics of which 26,735,713 are white (Table 2) . This raised the white component of the population in 2010 to 223,553,265 or 72.4% of the entire US population (Table 1)).

It is true that white Hispanics may have a general group solidarity with Hispanics of a different race or a mixture of races, but as pointed out previously, with the passing of the generations the descendants of immigrants become less and less engaged with the ancestral homeland. That is particularly so where there is neither racial difference from the dominant population in a territory or a wilful attempt to stand aside from a dominant culture such as that made by orthodox Jews.

The other fly in the demographic ointment for liberals is the number of people qualified to vote who did not vote. The latest (2011) US census estimate of the total US population is 311,591,917. (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html). Those under 18 constitute 23.7% of the population or approximately 72 million people. Not all of those will be US citizens but the vast majority will be. It would be reasonable to assume the potential voter population is at worst around 225 million. At the presidential election just past on 126 million voted. That means 100 million-odd white votes are presently up for grabs.

As the US becomes more and more polarised along ethnic and racial lines, the likelihood is that voting will increase. But an increase in voting will not necessarily  be uniform. While they are the majority, whites can vote for white favouring candidates and policies without any conflict of interests for a party or candidate offering pro-white policies can gain election simply by appealing successfully to enough white voters. The same is not true of the various minority populations. They will all be competing for political attention with different demands and needs. No single party or candidate is going to be able to satisfy these disparate claims. Already there is friction between blacks (the largest racial minority) and Hispanics (the largest ethnic minority) over the spoils of positive discrimination, something which is likely to intensify if the Hispanic population continues to swell and Asians (admittedly a very mixed group) increase as predicted.

The other thing in favour of the white population is that even on the most aggressive demographic predictions of the point at which Non-Hispanic whites are in the minority allows for at least a another generation to pass before it occurs and quite possibly not until 2050. In addition, there is the possibility previously mentioned of white Hispanics simply becoming Americans in a generation or two. That would delay the point of white minority status even further. All of this means that there is plenty of time for both the Republican Party and whites generally to act to change the demographic future by voting for candidates and parties which will control immigration and cease to pander to ethnic and racial minorities.

But even if the white population (whether defined as non-Hispanic whites or whites including white Hispanics) becomes a minority it would remain by far the largest minority for a considerable time. That could bring into play the a coalition of whites and one or two smaller partners to create a white dominated political grouping which excluded the largest of the non-white minorities. That would leave the white population in a position of considerable power.

5. A programme to maintain the white majority

In principle any party  in the USA, whether existing or new, could adopt the programme,  but it is  unrealistic to expect a new party to arise which can challenge the duopoly of Democrats and Republican. As the  Democrats are wedded, at least for the foreseeable future, to the politically correct ideology, the only real option for such change in the USA lies with the Republicans for the foreseeable future.

The logical and natural thing for the Republican Party to do  is  what neither they nor any other mainstream party in the developed world has done is to play the racial/ethnic political game by unambiguously appealing to whites in the USA. To be effective the political platform would have to be adopted by Republican candidates across the political board not merely by presidential candidates.  That would go against the US party tradition which is much looser than it is in many European countries, especially the UK.  Perhaps the most likely way that such Republican policy uniformity could arise is for it to be adopted first at state level and then after it is shown to be successful to gradually morph into a national policy. A  movement such as the Tea Party has been on taxation and spending, could  also prove to be a potent lever to shift  party policy on race and immigration at the national level.

At the core of this appeal to the white majority must be a promise of an end to mass immigration of those who cannot be assimilated into the American mainstream to prevent the demographic advantage of the white majority being further seriously eroded. This promise must be accompanied with a credible plan to prevent further mass immigration of the unassimilatable . That would require both practical measures such as the building and ample manning of a truly formidable barrier along the entire length of the Mexico/US border, the strengthening of coastal surveillance and the proper policing small airfields. In addition a change in the federal immigration policy to allow immigration to revert to something similar to what it was before the passing of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the country of origin quotas established by the Immigration Act of 1924. This had limited the annual number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States in 1890. That would favour white immigrants.  None of that would require a constitutional amendment . It would be useful if the constitution could be amended to remove automatic US citizenship from those born of non-citizens on US territory.  However, constitutional amendments are notoriously difficult to make.

There is also the question of the millions of illegal immigrants already in the USA. The claim that they could not possibly be forcibly removed because of the numbers is not a self-evident truth. In 1954 Operation Wetback (http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0706/p09s01-coop.html) saw more than 1 million Latin Americans (mainly Mexicans) leave the USA either as a result of arrest and forced deportation or by illegal immigrants choosing to leave for fear of being arrested. This was achieved by a border force of little more than 1,000. Whether the expulsion of millions today would be the best course of action – it could be plausibly argued (although not  by me) that it would be smarter to accept those who are already in the country and concentrate on future immigration, thus giving those already here some incentive to accept the new regime without protest – but it is manifestly not impossible to expel very large numbers of people when there is the political will and the place to where they are being deported shares a border with the expelling country. A large-scale expulsion of illegal immigrants from the USA would of itself signal more than any other act the Federal Government could take to the white population that at last a party was willing to act on their behalf.

Other inducements for whites to vote for a party which promised to defend their immediate and long term interests would be a pledge to make illegal all forms of “positive” discrimination, overt or covert, and the provision of any form of taxpayer funded state aid at every level from the federal downwards , whether that be welfare , healthcare or education , to illegal immigrants .  None of that would be unconstitutional because such changes would not mean that anyone would be treated less favourably than any other. Indeed, it would return to the status quo of the constitution under which all citizens are equal in terms of the civic rights at least.

A change in the language used by the GOP when dealing with race and ethnic issues would also be necessary.  Trying to fit non-pc ideas into a pc framework or speaking the language of political correctness one moment and putting forward non-pc ideas at another and being awkward whenever challenged  about views which are not considered entirely pc creates uncertainty in the white voter’s mind. Nor can such equivocation inspire any white American to believe that at last there are politicians   willing to speak up for white American (one might say American) interests and needs.   To re-capture the trust of white Americans Republican politicians must state unambiguously that both they and their party are jettisoning political correctness, especially that part of political correctness which relates to the suppression of white America’s interests and the legal privileging of ethnic and racial minorities.  Not only must they make clear that political correctness is being discarded not because it is outmoded or impractical,  but  from a belief that it is a totalitarian creed whose central tenet of non-discrimination affects every aspect of life and whose imposition of necessity requires the suppression of any other view.   Republicans  should constantly reinforce the absolute necessity for free expression in a democracy and the value of the First Amendment.

Such an approach does not mean turning back the clock forty years or so and simply saying this is what should be done or that observed as a cultural practice.  The appeal should be to what humans understand without being told: that men and women have different priorities, that the idea of same sex marriage is wrong because it  both does violence to language and permits those with political power to indulge in the sinister practice of deciding the meaning of words and,  most importantly,  a recognition of the  tribal nature of human beings.  Republicans should base their appeal on freedom and personal choice  and contrast this with the demands made by political correctness  which says only the politically correct view is to be permitted.  Above all,  they must make clear that the values  and general culture of the founding and ancestral  white population of the USA  are precious things which the white population have both the right and ability to defend.  They should invite the ethnic  and racial minorities already in the USA to embrace  those  values and culture, to become not hyphenated Americans but simply Americans.  A law, or even better a constitutional amendment,  stating that English was the national language of the USA and genuine fluency in it a  requirement for American citizenship would be a good start to achieving this.  Whether the ethnic and racial minorities would be able or willing to embrace the native values and culture of the US is debatable, but the offer itself would assuage white doubts about the programme because it would be seen as a form of inclusion.

The programme I have sketched would have great appeal to the white American population which in the main does not believe in the politically correct  agenda . White Americans pay  lip service to the creed or stay silent about their dislike and resentment  of its enforcement  for fear of losing jobs, being denied jobs, suffering  socially ostracism (because  those held up as politically incorrect become objects of fear to others), attracting civil suits for damages  or even facing the force of the criminal law.  Once mainstream politicians have  the courage to  attack political correctness  regularly and unashamedly in an intelligent manner,  some of the mainstream media at least will come on board and the ordinary white American will lose their fear and their  long pent-up resentment  at what has been done to their country over the past fifty years will  be released as water from a breaking dam.

The adoption of such a platform by the GOP would put the Democratic Party in a very difficult position. When first put forward it would force Democrats to make a very difficult decision: would they unashamedly go after the ethnic minority vote by promising ever more privileges to them  to counter the GOP’s appeal to the white majority?  If Democrats did decide to do this they would alienate some, perhaps many,  of the white Democrat voters because they would have to say in effect , look ethnic and racial minorities, vote for us because the Republicans are not going to pander to you but we shall continue to do so and offer you even more.   Even if  the Democrats  simply  remained  clutching   their present  policies  which are attractive to  ethnic and racial minorities,  they would also be likely to lose substantial numbers of white voters because they would have nothing new to offer white voters to counteract the white enticing programme of the Republicans.

If the Democrats lost substantial ground amongst white Americans they would almost certainly start to shift their own policies away from political correctness and towards the new programme of the Republicans.  That would  help to move the political debate and language  away from political correctness towards reality.

6. The rest of the West

What applies to the USA holds true for the rest of the white developed world. The programme I suggest for the Republican Party (or any other US party in principle) applies with equal force to any other state with a largely homogeneous native white population which has been diluted by and fractured by mass immigration. In many such states the task will be politically easier than it is in the USA because, unlike the USA , their political systems are based on elections which do not have the complication of an electoral college. They may elect an executive president by a simple one round of voting popular vote or some form of the popular vote mediated by several rounds of voting or multiple choice voting. Alternatively there will be a parliamentary system such as the UK’s elected by first-past-the post or some form of proportional representation  with the executive within the legislature.

The other advantages many First World countries have over the USA are two: their parties are more coherent and unified in ideology and organisation than those of the USA and they are much smaller countries, a fact that makes it much easier to create a party with the unified programme that is required.

In principle, the UK would be best placed amongst larger First World countries to create such a party and have its programme followed through. This is because the UK has no written constitution; no superior constitutional law (any law passed by Parliament has the same status and can be repealed by a simple Act of Parliament); no executive head of state; a first-past-the-post electoral system for the main Parliamentary chamber (the House of Commons ) and an executive drawn, with one or two exceptions, from that  House of Commons. It is true that the UK is presently enmeshed in the EU and various other treaties and conventions such as the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Convention on Refugees, but these could all be abrogated and repudiated by a simple Act of Parliament.

The main barrier to political change resulting in the protection of the interests of the white native majorities in the USA, the UK and elsewhere is informal, a matter of political ideology and custom. If the political will exists, the change can be effected.

7. Another “End of History”

Where do the  predictions made by white liberals about the USA’s political future based on demographic projections and extrapolations from voting patterns over a few elections come from? Such ideas have a long history. The last time something similar hit the headlines was after the publication of  Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 article The end of history? This, readers will remember, maintained that liberal internationalism was the pinnacle of human social development and that the long march of human social evolution had come to a halt (http://www.kropfpolisci.com/exceptionalism.fukuyama.pdf). Wittingly or not, the present outpouring of liberal triumphalist glee is an offshoot of the Fukuyamian world view which itself was in the line of historicist claims that history was not simply a series of random events but a process which had some ultimate end, willed either by God or an ineluctable consequence of cause and effect.

Fukuyama did not foresee a cessation of strife in the near future. Rather, he engaged in something altogether more ambitious and arrogant. He worked from the premise that liberal democracy was an inevitable consequence of the evolution of human social organisation. A few quotes will give a flavour of Fukuyama’s mentality to demonstrate exactly how wrong-headed he was:

“ The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism…”

“What we may be witnessing in not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs’s yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run. To understand how this is so, we must first consider some theoretical issues concerning the nature of historical change.”

“…at the end of history it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society.”

“But it is not clear that nationalism rpresents an irreconcilable contradiction in the heart of liberalism. In the first place, nationalism is not one single phenomenon but several, ranging from mild cultural nostalgia to the highly organized and elaborately articulated doctrine of National Socialism. Only systematic nationalisms of the latter sort can qualify as a formal ideology on the level of liberalism or communism. The vast majority of the world’s nationalist movements do not have a political program beyond the negative desire of independence from some other group or people, and do not offer anything like a comprehensive agenda for socio-economic organization. As such, they are compatible with doctrines and ideologies that do offer such agendas. While they may constitute a source of conflict for liberal societies, this conflict does not arise from liberalism itself so much as from the fact that the liberalism in question is incomplete. Certainly a great deal of the world’s ethnic and nationalist tension can be explained in terms of peoples who are forced to live in unrepresentative political systems that they have not chosen…”

“The automatic assumption that Russia shorn of its expansionist communist ideology should pick up where the czars left off just prior to the Bolshevik Revolution is therefore a curious one. It assumes that the evolution of human consciousness has stood still in the meantime, and that the Soviets, while picking up currently fashionable ideas in the realm of economics, will return to foreign policy views a century out of date in the rest of Europe.”

“The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”

Immediately they were published Fukuyama’s ideas struck me as pathologically naïve . He was peddling the idea of predestined human social and intellectual evolution favoured in their different ways by Hegel and Marx (who famously claimed to have turned Hegel on his head by substituting the material and the empirically verifiable for Hegel’s idealist philosophy of the whole, with the clash and evolution of ideas as the driving force of history for history as the product of causal relations and class conflict, not dialectical conflict between ideas. Hegel’s ideology is at best incomplete because he ignores events which have no human agency and has no means of verification of when the end (the realisation of the whole through the dialectic) is ultimately achieved and logically inconsistent in his political theory which lauds the nation state because if the most perfect reality is the whole, then world government not the nation state is closer to reality (and hence closer to perfection) than the nation state. Marx, unlike Hegel, produced a theory which could be tested by events and has been found wholly wanting by the historical story told over the past two centuries.

That Fukuyama , unlike Marx and Hegel, felt a quiet dismay at the likely consequences of his analysis of social evolution is neither here nor there in terms of the mentality he peddled. It may be a soulless unexciting world he sees unfolding inexorably , but the message is the same as earlier progenitors of what might be called mechanical sociology envisaged: this is how it is going to be in the long run and there is nothing anyone can do to prevent it. Add in Fukuyama’s allowance that eventually “history” may begin again and there is a clear parallel in the idea of the physical universe moving towards a state of absolute entropy before perhaps rewinding to begin the process of expansion all over again. It is chocolate box sociology/philosophy with no need for the individual to search further for any explanation of what needs to be done or what might be done for the best. All the human race has to do is lie back and accept whatever the  social laws of motion dictate.

But although Fukuyama was dismayed at the future, that is not true of the legionaries of the one-world ideal where there are no nations, no nation states, no borders and ultimately no distinction between people regardless of race or ethnicity. That idea, as unexciting as it may be to Fukuyama, has a religious intensity for true one-worlders. That is for several reasons. First, it is the working towards a goal, a goal moreover which is assured and promises a world which, for the one-worlder, will be perfect (or at least greatly superior to what now exists) when it is reached. That has the intensely exciting and liberating effect of absolving the true believers from responsibility for the here and now. It also fosters the idea that anything which is done now is legitimate regardless of its moral consequences in much the same way that Marxists decried “bourgeois morality”, that is morality, and permitted any atrocity provided it was part of the historical motor which drove society to its final and perfect end. Moreover, even if the one-worlders believe that is the inevitable end of human society they may also believe, as Marxists do, that despite the inevitability of the final end the speed at which it arrives may be hastened by conscious action on the part of its adherents. They could even imagine that their actions and words are part of the inexorable movement of history and they can do no other than they do. It is worth noting the similarities between Marxism and the one-worlders, because the adherents of the latter are the type of people who thirty years ago would have been Marxists.

8. The danger of ideologies

The dangers of ideologies such as those of Hegel, Marx and Fukuyama lies not in how close an approximation to reality they are. It  would not have mattered what they had predicted because all of historical experience shows that it is inherently impossible to predict even the broad march of human history let alone its specific organisational detail. That this is so should surprise no one. All any person has to do to realise that prediction is a mug’s game is to look at their own lives and they will see how often, no matter how intelligent and erudite they may be, that they can no more reliably predict what will happen to them over the course of their own lives than they could regularly predict winning horses or the results of the lottery.

Anyone who allows themselves to become the prisoner of an ideology whether sacred or profane is dangerous. That is because no ideology is a complete description of the world and the attempt to accommodate an ideology to reality must result in fantasy, a fantasy which the ideologue insists on forcing upon others if he has the power to do so. The most dangerous ideologies are those which say there is an definite and inescapable end which cannot be altered by human agency.

But there is one  difference of great significance between the ideology of Hegel and Marx or the Fukuyaman belief that liberal democracy is the sociological end game and the claims being put forward by liberals about the Republican Party and more broadly about political correctness. There is an aspect of the claim that if the Republican Party (or any other party in other advanced white a white majority countries) does not embrace political correctness uncritically and unambiguously it is heading for extinction because of demographic change   which distinguishes it from predictions such as those of Marx, Hegel and Fukuyama.   The difference is that there is a mechanism already in existence  created by human agency which patently can achieve at least part of the prediction. The mechanism is mass immigration. If there is no party in a country which will take action against further mass immigration of those who will not or cannot integrate then the numerical dominance of the majority native population will be steadily eroded until it becomes a minority or even a small majority of the population. (The latter  is a very real danger in a small country such as Norway).  The prevention of future mass immigration is an essential part of the part of the programme I have outlined.

The liberal voices calling for the Republicans to “wake up and smell the ethnic coffee” and get with the multiculturalist project are siren voices. They are asking whites in the US to commit political suicide by allowing ethnic and racial victimhood to become the driving force of their party as well as that of Democrats. That would remove any chance of an effective stand against mass immigration. The logic of USA ethnic and racial change tells the Republicans to use the still white majority to safeguard their position as soon as possible by stemming further mass immigration. Ethnic and racial  politics may be toxic, but if that is what all the other players in the field are peddling except you, then you have to play the same game as a matter of individual and national self-preservation.

Will Republicans seize the day and embrace their only rational way forward, to become the standard bearer for white America?   It is a tremendous psychological hill  for them to climb  because of the  past fifty years of every growing political correctness and sectional politics which have pushed the interests of the white majority not simply to the back of the room but under the carpet.  Left to their own devices Republican politicians might well accept the fate laid upon them by white liberals and their ethnic minority auxiliaries. But they may well not be left to their own devices because hard economic times are making white Americans angrier and angrier at the way they have been betrayed by their elite.

Following Obama’s re-election there have been petitions gathering substantial numbers of signatures in many US states arguing for the State’s secession from the USA. (http://rt.com/usa/news/petition-white-house-secede-688/). These are just expressions of exasperation by white Americans at present , but they are indicative of a growing sense among whites that there is no way to alter matters  within the Union.   If  mainstream American politicians remain divorced from the wishes of the  still white majority demands for secession may become more than an expression of exasperation.

It is not inconceivable that the USA could fracture if mass immigration, especially from Latin America,  is allowed to continue . If that happens territory is what counts.   The most striking thing about the 2012 US Presidential Election map is this, a large  majority of physical territory voted Republican. In the end control of physical territory, whether through the overt exercise of power or the passive fact of being the dominant population by numbers in the territory, is the most important fact about any state. Keep a grip on that fact.

Effects of Mass Immigration on Canadian Living Standards and Society

The Fraser Institute’s Effects of Mass Immigration on Canadian Living Standards and Society

Edited by Herbert Grubel  – a compilation of essays by  12 authors

Published by the Fraser Institute of Canada  in 2009 ISBN 978-0-88975-246-7

Massive numbers of immigrants who are either unable or unwilling to integrate with the society into which they come; cities increasingly dominated by ethnic and racial ghettos;  laws which grant immigrants rights which make it next to impossible to stop them entering the country or to deport  them once they are there;  employers greedy for cheap labour;  immigrants depressing wages and forcing up native unemployment; immigrants taking more out of the communal national pot in benefits than they put in through taxes;  a political elite which is  sold on the idea that immigration is an unalloyed good at a naïve best and a source of new voters  for parties which support mass immigration at  a venal worst; a bureaucracy which religiously carries out the politically correct  dictates of  the elite embraced  multicultural ethos ; the development of  an “immigration industry” comprised of vested interests such as lawyers, pressure groups, charities; public servants  appointed to act as what are effectively political commissars for multiculturalism; a mainstream media which ceaselessly propagandises on behalf of the wonder of multiculturalism and value of immigration whilst censoring any opposition;  a rabid state-inspired  suppression of  dissidence at any level by a mixture of  laws banning honest discussion of immigration and its consequences  and the engendering of a public culture which puts  anyone who voices anti-immigration views, however cautiously, at risk of losing  their job or political position and to  ostracism from their social circle  if they are judged to have committed a “crime” against multiculturalism.

Welcome to the Canadian experience of the joy of mass immigration. Sounds familiar? It certainly will to British ears, but the same could broadly  be said of any First World country for the globalist ideology has become the creed of elites throughout the First World.   This makes the book generally valuable as a primer on the dangers of mass immigration.  This utility is enhanced  by significant reference being made to immigration as it affects  the  USA, Britain and France.

There are of course differences of detail  between the Canadian and British experience.  Canadians   traditionally have seen themselves as a nation of immigrants whereas the British  have not and do not.  This means that  Canadians have, like Americans,  at least the residue of the sentimental  idea that immigration should be the natural order of things and  that it is somehow wrong to deny  to others what they or their ancestors enjoyed. The Canadian elite have taken this to extremes  according to   Stephen Gallagher of the Canadian International Council because “….more than any other country  Canada has bought into the  cosmopolitan logic that there can exist a ‘civic nationalism in the absence of any ethnic or cultural majority, shared roots or social coherence” (p188). His claim is borne out by the objective evidence of modern Canadian immigration policy and its consequences.

The problem with the “civic nationalism” mentality is it is one thing to have immigration consisting overwhelmingly of people who are broadly  similar in race and culture into the receiving society  – as happened throughout most of Canada’s history  -who  can  assimilate rapidly; quite another to import immigrants in large numbers  who are radically different in race and culture and either cannot or will not assimilate.  That is what has happened to Canada in recent decades.

Over the past quarter of a century  immigrants to Canada have come  overwhelmingly from Asia. The result is that at the last Canadian census  5 million  (16 per cent) out of the Canadian population of 16 million  were  “visible minorities” (p5).   The size of the overall population also counts hugely:  16 per cent of 33 million is considerably more concerning than 16 per cent of, say, Britain’s currently  estimated 62 million.

It might be thought that the geographical vastness of  Canada   would mean there is  not the same sense that the country is being  physically swamped as there is in a geographically small country such as Britain, but  Canada  is a very urbanised country with   25 million Canadians  living in towns or cities and most  immigrants  are concentrated  in a few places.   60 per cent of the  5 million “visible minorities”  live in the Metropolitan areas of Toronto and Vancouver (p5).  In Toronto  in 2001  those classified as  “English (Anglos ) “only  formed a majority in  in a quarter of metropolitan “census tracts” (p180).  The sense of conquest by stealth is as apparent in those particular places as it would be in London or Birmingham.

Reckless Canadian immigration  took off in the  1990s. In 1990 the annual limit was raised to 250,000 by  a Progressive Conservative government with the  Minister responsible, Barbara McDougal, arguing that this would help the party with the ethnic  minority vote, the clear implication being that a large portion of the additional immigrants would be black or Asian (p4). Since then  immigration has averaged nearly 1 per cent  of the population (p4. )Things worsened after the 2001 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act was passed.  This  set selection criteria for immigrants without putting any limit on the numbers who could come in. As there were vastly more people who could meet the criteria than  Canada  could readily accommodate and there was no flexibility to adjust to changes in economic conditions generally or to  the Canadian labour market in particular, the system soon ran into trouble. A backlog of would-be immigrants waiting to be processed formed which is estimated to reach 1.5 million by 2012 (p7) to which did not include refugees who number is considerable.  Canadian asylum policy became so lax in the 1980s that over the past 25 years more than  700,000 asylum seekers were admitted (p14).  Canada has taken steps to amend the  Immigration Act,, but even if those are effective the existing backlog of 1.5 million will be processed under the old rules (p5).

All but one the most sacred cows of the pro-immigration, pro-multicultural lobby are precisely dissected before being put out of their misery.  Overall, immigrants  do not add to Canada’s per capita wealth (p104), not least because less than 20% of immigrants come in based on their work skills or training (p3);  cultural diversity does not equal an enhanced  society  but a divided one with an ever weakening national identity and  bringing in huge numbers of  young immigrants will not solve the problem of an ageing Canadian population – Robert Bannerjee and William Robson (chapter 7)  estimate that to even stabilise the  Old Age Dependency ratio – the ratio between those of working age  to those over retirement age – and those   from what it is at  present would take decades of annual  immigration amounting each year to 3% of the Canadian population (p142). The effect of that would be to effectively end any concept of a Canadian nation as it has been and still largely is.  It would be a classic case of  the transformation of quantity into quality.  A place called Canada might still exist but  he  existing Canadian nation would be no more.

The sacred cow which remains standing if more than a little nervous,  is the question of the incompatibility of races.  Nonetheless ,  some of the contributors (especially those in chapters 9-12)  come close to venturing onto this currently forbidden territory, for example :-

“..the analysis of Sammuel Huntingdon (2004), who argues that a nation is the function of the identity of its majority population  and in the United States this identity is rooted  in the original founding Anglo-Protestant  culture and a value system described as the American Creed.” (Stephen Gallagher P188).

“What guarantee do we have that diversity in itself is a desirable objective? At what point does diversity mutate into a form of colonisation? (James Bissett p6).

The book is also good at flagging up consequences which are not immediately obvious. For example, Marcel Merette  makes the important point that as higher skilled immigrants increase the differential in wages between the skilled and the unskilled shrinks  (p159). This discourages  Canadians from taking the trouble to acquire skills because the advantage of doing so would be lessened.

Nor is any change in the type of immigrants without ill consequences. For example, if immigrants are restricted to the young (which might be thought a god thing in an ageing society) that  disadvantages the native young because it means they face greater competition for jobs from the immigrants in their age group.

There is also the effect on the one long-standing substantial Canadian minority, the French-speaking  Quebeccers . They are increasingly finding their language and culture undermined both by the presence of immigrants who will not integrate and by  having to compete for attention and privileges from the majority population with the new minority groups.

Rather touchingly, Gordon Gibson (chapter 11)  imagines that the position is much healthier in Britain because there is at least growing public discussion here and  an organisation such as MigrationWatch UK  to ostensibly provide a  focus of concern about immigration (the  final  essay in the book is by the head of MigrationWatch UK  Sir Andrew Green).   But public debate can be not merely useless but positively harmful if it is controlled.

It is true that there is vastly more  public discussion in Britain now than there was under  the Blair Government when any many of immigration and its consequences brought squeals of “racism” from politicians, the left-liberal dominated media and any pressure group or individual  able to climb onto the “anti-racist” bandwagon.   But public discussion does not equal action and  despite Cameron’s  Coalition  Government’s rhetoric about cutting net immigration to Britain “from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands a year” , the  numbers remain much the same as under the Blair and Brown governments.

The extent of  the growing disquiet amongst Canadians is indicated by the very existence of the book.  The editor has brought together a  wide-ranging group of contributors:  economists, political scientists, think tank members and retired ambassadors. These are not the class of people who would  commonly be found  publicly expressing  concern  about immigration,  for they are by background part of the broad elite which has embraced the multiculturalist  ideal.  That they are willing to write pretty forthrightly about the dangers speaks volumes in itself.  The message it sends is that they are so worried by the observable effects of mass migration that they are willing to put their heads above the parapet  and risk, at the least, social, political and academic ostracisation.

The failure to address the question of race as a social separator is frustrating but understandable in the present politically correct circumstances, but it cannot be ignored forever. Those who say physical differences in race are unimportant and  that race is merely a social construct should reflect upon the fact that if there was no natural mechanism to stop humans of different physical types breeding as  freely together  as those of a similar physical type then there would be no broad physical groups which we call races . These group separations cannot be ascribed to humans evolving in separation from one another  because  throughout history there has been an immense amount of movement of peoples  with every  opportunity for inter-breeding. We see the same thing happening today in places such as London where,  despite the open invitation to inter-racial breeding and the incessant multi-culturist propaganda over several generations, a surprisingly  small percentage of the population does interbreed.

I can unreservedly recommend this book because it provides almost all the ammunition needed to  refute the multiculturalist propaganda . It is not the easiest of reads  because most of the contributors take an  academic approach, which means a fair number of  charts and tables plus a decent dollop of jargon. But the book is  not very heavy going and its message is  the most important which can be given to the developed world at present: guard your own societies against this surreptitious form of conquest or  they will die.

Political speech and action in Britain: What is legally permitted ?

Robert Henderson

Free speech is a very simple concept: you either have it or a range of permitted opinion, the  scope of  which can be altered at any time (http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/06/04/free-expression-or-permitted-opinion-that-is-the-choice/).  Sadly and dangerously, not only is free expression in Britain unavailable,  but  the range of permitted opinion is becoming ever narrower . This is a consequence of the  totalitarian ideology that is political correctness becoming   embedded ever deeper into the British power  structure through laws both criminal and civil and the  control of the mass media  by the politically correct. Great swathes of political opinion are deemed criminal or at least grounds for excluding their holder from not only mainstream politics but public debate.     It is no longer possible to engage in political activity without fear of prosecution, loss of employment (especially in publicly funded jobs) or  of being the subject of a media hate campaign.

British political parties can no longer be what they want to be

The most fundamental  denial  of democratic political action in a Parliamentary system  such as that of Britain  is to refuse a  party the right to recruit as it chooses.  It is the most fundamental  breach because,  if a party cannot recruit freely and stand whatever candidates it chooses in elections ,  it is barred from any chance of taking part in a government or having a significant voice in opposition  on its own terms.    By controlling party membership the policies of a  party are determined.  This is the position in modern Britain.

It is no longer possible for a party wishing to stand candidates in British elections to choose who shall be its members and candidates or determine what are  its fundamental beliefs. This was made clear by a court ruling of  Judge Paul Collins in  March 2010:

“The British National party was plunged into chaos yesterday, weeks before the general election, when a court ordered it to remove central beliefs and policies about race from its constitution.

In a landmark injunction at the Central London county court, a judge found that the BNP’s membership policy remained discriminatory, even after a direct whites-only clause was removed last month.

The judge, Paul Collins, ordered the BNP to remove two clauses from its constitution as they were indirectly racist towards non-white would-be members.

The party also remains banned from signing up new recruits until it satisfies Collins it has changed the constitution, although it said last night that applications to join were being processed again.

In a further blow to the party’s election hopes, it was ordered to pay an estimated £60,000 in legal costs. The bill could rise to £100,000 when its own legal fees are included.

While one offending clause is largely an administrative matter – a requirement that all new members agree to a vetting visit from BNP officials, something the judge found could intimidate non-white applicants – the other spells out core beliefs.

This is a requirement for members to believe in the “continued creation, fostering, maintenance and existence” of an indigenous British race and action towards “stemming and reversing” migration.

The BNP last month voted to remove a direct bar on non-white members after a legal challenge from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). The government equalities watchdog then challenged the revised constitution on the grounds that ethnic minority Britons could still not subscribe to the party’s beliefs without “denying themselves”.

Collins ruled in favour of the commission, ordering the BNP to remove the offending clauses by Monday afternoon or face potential legal penalties.

The EHRC head of legal enforcement, Susie Uppal, said: “Political parties, like any organisation, are obliged to respect the law and not discriminate against people who wish to become members.”

The BNP’s leader, Nick Griffin, said the decision “opens a very dangerous door. It’s a huge change to the unwritten constitution of Britain. The judgment has given a government-appointed, taxpayer-funded quango the rights to change the aims and objectives of political parties.” The costs award would “have some effect” on the BNP’s election campaigning, but it would not be significant, he added.

Griffin said he had already amended the constitution so the clauses were removed from membership criteria. He insisted, however, that the beliefs about immigration and race would remain, even if members did not have to officially sign up to them. “It won’t make any practical difference to us. But it’s hugely symbolic,” he said. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/mar/12/bnp-racist-membership-rules-outlawed).

The judge’s ruling means that the BNP cannot in principle prevent those from ethnic minorities or the white “antiracist” political left  from joining the party with an intent to sabotage it. In addition, the policy of the party has been changed in the sense that its ostensible core values are no longer core values because their acceptance is no longer  required  of members.  Nor is it clear whether the BNP could legally refuse membership to anyone  because,  if it cannot insist that members must  support the  ‘”continued creation, fostering, maintenance and existence” of an indigenous British race and action towards “stemming and reversing” migration’,  prospective members could believe and advocate  anything with regard to race and immigration,  including demands for Sharia law and the abolition of immigration controls. Such a person  out to sabotage the  BNP could accept the rest of the party’s political platform , much of which is, ironically,  shared by the mainstream parties, to prevent membership being denied on any other  ideological ground.   More banally, the BNP could be forced to take people who would deliberately try to disrupt its administration.  There would also be greater opportunity for leftist agent provocateurs to join the party to engage in violence or crude racist language to reinforce the liberal elite’s portrayal of  the BNP as no more than a group of hooligans always on the verge of  criminality.

In the present political climate it is also probable  that any person  refused BNP membership who belonged to an ethnic minority or was native white Briton and came from an “antiracist” background,  would find the courts likely to support  any action they brought for damages against the BNP on the grounds that they had been discriminated against  because of their race, ethnicity or a refusal to accept the BNP “core beliefs”.  It is not inconceivable that if such suits were brought,  the EHCR (http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/) might climb on the  “anti-discrimination” bandwagon again and obtain  a further court order banning further recruitment or even making the collection of subscriptions from existing members illegal until  the refused applicants for membership  were accepted.  The reduction ad absurdum of Judge Collins’ ruling would be a court ordering the BNP to accept someone as a member who was patently not suitable to be a member.

The danger for any party which cannot decide its own membership by requiring members to adhere to the fundamental principles for which its stands  is that it could,, and most probably would,  quickly become a meaningless political shell.  In the case of the BNP suppose   numbers of  the political left and ethnic minorities large enough to swamp the existing BNP membership applied for membership.  If the BNP had no way of refusing them membership,  the party could soon be  captured over by the incomers who could overthrow the leadership and change the party’ policies utterly.

That is the way only the BNP is being treated at present , but any party could find themselves in the same predicament if their policies do not meet with the approval of those in power. At present the powerful  are disciples of political correctness,  but   politics can move very rapidly and no one can be certain that their politics will not become the target for criminalisation and marginalisation.  Moreover,  where an ideology is involved, the ideology can alter  so that what was acceptable within it  to a follower may well become unacceptable when it changes. A good example comes from modern liberalism.  Until around 1980 the liberal left approach to the consequences of  mass immigration to Britain was assimilation; in a year or two it switched to multiculturalism, a very different thing which has strong similarities, at least at the conceptual level,   to the idea of separate development in Apartheid South Africa.

The Electoral Commission

Successful court challenges by the ECHR are not the only legal obstacle to political parties deciding their own policies. There is the Electoral Commission to contend with.   A political  party which wishes to put up candidates in a  UK election has to register with the Commission.  That registration is not automatic and can be refused if the name or emblem is deemed  “obscene or offensive “ . (http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/107694/to-names-rp.pdf).  It is all too easy to see anything non-pc being refused by the Commission who would inevitably point to the many legal restrictions which already exists  on what may be said legally and use those as the basis for a refusal to register.

There are also some prohibited words in the Electoral Commission’s lexicon which could not be used at all or in certain formats which could curtail political expression  in the registration of parties, for example, English Party is forbidden under category 2 words (http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0016/107701/doc-prohibited-rp.pdf) .

The Returning Officer  (who supervises the administration of an election) can also refuse  a party label on a ballot paper if they deem it inappropriate.

In view of the political dominance of  the political correct and the expressed attitude of official bodies such as the ECHR  and the courts towards party membership and the values of a party which challenges political correctness, it is reasonable to assume  that any party which transgresses the politically correct limits would fail to be registered by the Electoral Commission  or pass the scrutiny of the Returning Officer, for example, parties called England for the English or the Anti-Immigration League.   It might even prove impossible for parties in the Celtic Fringe to run under banners such as The English in Scotland or Protect the English in Wales

Independent candidates

Independent candidates do not need to register with the Electoral Commission. However, this has the disadvantage for candidates of not being able to described themselves as anything other than Independent  on the ballot paper (http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/electoral_commission_pdf_file/0009/83169/UKPGE-Nomination-Forms-Final.pdf ).   To use any other label candidates  have to pretend to be a party and  register themselves as such with the Electoral Commission  with all that entails  in time, money (there is a £150 registration fee) and organisation .  It also leaves  them open to the same pc objections to labels as genuine parties. Indeed,  the censorship  of candidate descriptions  is likely to be  even more wide ranging than for individuals pretending to be a party than for  genuine parties , because the banning of an individual candidate would be far less likely to attract media attention or  result in  court action to challenge any ban because the refused candidate would be unlikely to have the wherewithal to challenge the refusal. .

The Electoral Commission also control what are known as third party campaigners . These are individual or corporate bodies (including registered political parties)  who can be campaigners in support of parties, individuals or policies without being candidates in an election.  (http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/105936/intro-campaigner-npc.pdf)

There are a considerable and growing number  of elections in the UK  – Westminster, local government, devolved assemblies, elected Mayors and  police commissioners .  Consequently, the Electoral Commission  has  the potential to exercise a very powerful influence on British politics through determining what parties are called.

Laws to silence opinion

In addition to the restrictions imposed on  candidates,  political speech, writing  and action (for anyone) is  heavily circumscribed by a depressingly large number  of laws which,  whether originally  intended to suppress  political views or not , are being used to censor views deemed to be non-political  with ever increasing frequency.   he  most likely to be applied  is  the 1986 Public Order Act sections 4 and 5 and the Communications Act 2003 section 127.

“Public Order Act 1986

Section 4 Fear or provocation of violence.

(1)A person is guilty of an offence if he—

(a)uses towards another person threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or

(b)distributes or displays to another person any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,

with intent to cause that person to believe that immediate unlawful violence will be used against him or another by any person, or to provoke the immediate use of unlawful violence by that person or another, or whereby that person is likely to believe that such violence will be used or it is likely that such violence will be provoked.

(2)An offence under this section may be committed in a public or a private place, except that no offence is committed where the words or behaviour are used, or the writing, sign or other visible representation is distributed or displayed, by a person inside a dwelling and the other person is also inside that or another dwelling.

(3)A constable may arrest without warrant anyone he reasonably suspects is committing an offence under this section.

(4)A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 6 months or a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale or both.

4 A Intentional harassment, alarm or distress.

(1)A person is guilty of an offence if, with intent to cause a person harassment, alarm or distress, he—

(a)uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or

(b)displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,

thereby causing that or another person harassment, alarm or distress.

(2)An offence under this section may be committed in a public or a private place, except that no offence is committed where the words or behaviour are used, or the writing, sign or other visible representation is displayed, by a person inside a dwelling and the person who is harassed, alarmed or distressed is also inside that or another dwelling.

(3)It is a defence for the accused to prove—

(a)that he was inside a dwelling and had no reason to believe that the words or behaviour used, or the writing, sign or other visible representation displayed, would be heard or seen by a person outside that or any other dwelling, or

(b)that his conduct was reasonable.

(4)A constable may arrest without warrant anyone he reasonably suspects is committing an offence under this section.

(5)A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 6 months or a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale or both.]

5 Harassment, alarm or distress.

(1)A person is guilty of an offence if he—

(a)uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or

(b)displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,

within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby.

(2)An offence under this section may be committed in a public or a private place, except that no offence is committed where the words or behaviour are used, or the writing, sign or other visible representation is displayed, by a person inside a dwelling and the other person is also inside that or another dwelling.

(3)It is a defence for the accused to prove—

(a)that he had no reason to believe that there was any person within hearing or sight who was likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress, or

(b)that he was inside a dwelling and had no reason to believe that the words or behaviour used, or the writing, sign or other visible representation displayed, would be heard or seen by a person outside that or any other dwelling, or

(c)that his conduct was reasonable.

(4)A constable may arrest a person without warrant if—

(a)he engages in offensive conduct which [F2a] constable warns him to stop, and

(b)he engages in further offensive conduct immediately or shortly after the warning.

(5)In subsection (4) “offensive conduct” means conduct the constable reasonably suspects to constitute an offence under this section, and the conduct mentioned in paragraph (a) and the further conduct need not be of the same nature.

(6)A person guilty of an offence under this section is liable on summary conviction to a fine not exceeding level 3 on the standard scale.6 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64/section/4

The  Communications Act 2003

Section 127 Improper use of public electronic communications network

(1)A person is guilty of an offence if he—

(a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or

(b)causes any such message or matter to be so sent.

(2)A person is guilty of an offence if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he—

(a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that he knows to be false,

(b)causes such a message to be sent; or

(c)persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.

(3)A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable, on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale, or to both.

In addition these Acts  may be deployed :

Malicious Communications Act 1988 section 1 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/27/content  as amended by Section 43 Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2001/16/contents

Postal Services Act 2000 section 85 (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/26/contents).

There may be other laws which are used to specifically hamper free expression which is deemed politically incorrect, ,  but those I have cited give the flavour of the current powers available to those with power in Britain to intimidate the public and  control public debate.  They all have one very dangerous thing in common:  the Acts  are so broadly drawn that they are an open invitation to those with power  to shut down dissent.  The idea that people can assign an objective value to words  such as menacing, threatening, abusive or insulting  is simply wrong. Even more to the point, if words or images may be deemed criminal because they are merely abusive or threatening,  anything contentious to the mind of another could be held to be criminal.

In addition to the considerable restrictions on free expression  already described,   there are  civil  laws  allowing actions for libel and slander,  court orders prohibiting the publication or public discussion of specific subjects (breach of which risks imprisonment for contempt of court), restrictions placed by the Official Secrets Act  (which applies whether or not a person has signed the Act) and criminal offences relating to  obscenity,  blasphemy and  libel (the last three are so rarely used they are practically obsolete,   but  they are live laws which could be utilised if no other law would do).

Nothing non-pc is safe

Where does all this leave us?   The problem is that no one can be sure what would be treated as criminal by the police and the prosecuting authority the Crown Prosecution Service.   A person could look at non-pc speech and writing which has not resulted in prosecution and words which  has been resulted in criminal charges and try to analyse what will be deemed officially beyond the Pale  but be none the wiser.  That is for two reasons: first, the boundaries of  what is deemed  criminal are constantly expanding especially with reference to “hate speech”  and, second,  there is no consistency  in the investigation and prosecution of similar statements.

A  few examples to demonstrate the difficulty in knowing what is likely to result in police action.    Negro was the polite word for a black person  for two centuries .  Gradually over the past half century it was superseded by black, African-American, Afro-Caribbean or even African as blacks asserted their identity. But negro continued to be used.  It was not  considered a racist term, although a bit old fashioned in much the same way that homosexual rather than gay now seems slightly anachronistic. In 2011 the Liverpool FC forward Luis Suarez   (white) repeatedly referred to the Man U fullback Patrice Evra (black) as a negro, (actually its Spanish equivalent negre). This resulted not in criminal charges but disciplinary action by the Football Association who fined and banned him for eight matches for racial abuse (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/liverpool/8969738/Liverpools-Luis-Suarez-guilty-of-racially-abusing-Patrice-Evra-live.html).  Although there was no police action, the message the Suarez case sent to the public was negro is now a term of racial abuse which could result in action being taken against its user.  If another case comes to public notice I would be most surprised if at the least a  police investigation is not begun even if  no criminal charges are brought. That would be par for the course in these cases.  A  word is mysteriously deemed unacceptable, there is liberal media outrage and a little down the line the police act against someone who has used it. Frequently the police investigation does not result in charges but the publicity of the police involvement serves to intimidate the public.

The next word describing the race of a person which is likely to be ratcheted  up from polite term to criminal will probably be coloured. This is even more ludicrous than the outlawing of negro as a racial epithet. It is simply a description as innocuous as white.  That it was not considered anything more until recently  can be seen from the title of the American organisation for promoting black interests  the  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.  Despite this history  the Scottish football pundit Alan Hansen  ran into trouble after  using it in 2011 and was forced to offer an abject apology to save his job. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2011/dec/22/alan-hansen-black-footballers-coloured)

Now let us move forward to a recent case which did result in criminal charges.  BNP member Michael Coleman has just been give an eight month suspended sentence with 240 hours of community service (unpaid work) for publishing racist articles on his blog:

“ The 46-year-old was reported to police after two blogs he wrote in response to last summer’s London riots appeared online.

In them, he said the riots were a perfect example of ‘the difference in personality, perceptions and values of people of the darker races and ourselves’.

And he accused Stoke-on-Trent City Council of ‘flooding this city with Muslims and blacks, a complete population replacement programme. Darkies in, whites out’.

Police were called by Labour city councillor Joy Garner, below, who had been asked to read the blogs by a member of the public. (http://www.thisisstaffordshire.co.uk/Stoke-Trent-BNP-leader-Michael-Coleman-guilty/story-16839343-detail/story.html).

Leave aside the word “darkies”  for the moment. Coleman’s message is a straightforward political protest against  the most profound act of treason which is the permitting of mass immigration. If he was convicted for that protest it is unambiguous censorship for political purposes.  The prosecution is sending the message to the public that complaints about  immigration and its consequences  is being criminalised.

If it is solely “darkies”  which has led to the conviction,  and the report does not suggest that it is,  then the-powers-that-be through the courts and prosecution authorities are controlling language in a manner reminiscent of the Soviet Union or Red China.  “Darkies” may again be an anachronistic term , but it was never considered racist as such when it was widely used. Often it was bestowed on someone black in the same way that a man called white would end up being called “Chalky”.

Even liberals are beginning to get uneasy about the way that day after day new cases as  threats of prosecution or actual prosecutions are applied to people in situations which appear ever more extreme. Take  Brendan  O’Neill of  the Daily Telegraph on Coleman.  He pays ritual pc obeisance to  the “horror” of Coleman’s views and the use of “darkies”, calls him a moron, but then writes

“The councillor who kick-started the legal action against Coleman said something very interesting – he said the reason Coleman had to be punished and turned into a criminal for writing those blog posts is because the views they expressed are “not acceptable to the overwhelming majority of local people”. That is true; the vast majority of Britons find racist ideas and language disgusting. But are we really going to start threatening with imprisonment people who express opinions that the “overwhelming majority” consider to be unacceptable? Will that include radical political views, edgy social arguments, harebrained religious beliefs? The fact that in Britain in 2012 a man has been given a suspended jail sentence and 240 hours’ community service for saying something that is offensive to the “overwhelming majority” should give us all serious pause for thought, and make us ask what gives us the right to slam Putin’s Russia for likewise banging up punkish singers who, according to polls, also offended an “overwhelming majority” of Russians.” (http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/brendanoneill2/100183130/darkies-is-a-disgusting-word-but-people-shouldnt-be-given-suspended-jail-sentences-for-saying-it/).

Of course, the “vast majority of Britons” do not find what liberals now call racist ideas and language disgusting (effectively any preference for one racial, national or ethnic group over another) . Many might not feel comfortable with the word “darkies”, but the “vast majority of Britons ” will have varying degrees of sympathy with the idea that mass immigration has changed the country for the worse and is a form of colonisation.   But such expressed thoughts would now appear to be illegal. The case of Emma West  falls into this category.  Miss West was recorded on a camera phone  during a tram ride complaining  to a racially mixed group of passengers about the effects of mass immigration. There was a bit of effing and blinding but there was no gross racist abuse , just a complaint that her country had been utterly changed through mass immigration (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/emma-west-immigration-and-the-liberal-totalitarian-state).   She was arrested after the video was placed on YouTube, held against her will in a top security prison (the authorities claimed it was for her own protection even though Miss West  said she did not want to be protected) and is being subjected to an unconscionable delay before she is brought to trial – it is already 11 months since she was charged, the case has been adjourned three times and no new trial date set (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2012/09/08/emma-west-trial-delayed-for-the-third-time/).

One last case. The England and Chelsea footballer John Terry was charged with racially aggravated public order offences when he was alleged to have  called the black QPR defender Anton Ferdinand “a f**king black c**t” during a Premiership match between Chelsea and QPR in 2011.  Terry’s defence was that he had not called Ferdinand that but thought Ferdinand had accused him  of using the words and said  to him “I didn’t call you a  f**king black c**t”.

A court accepted this version and found him not guilty in July this year, but that was not the end of the matter. Once again the Football Association (FA) acted and effectively tried Terry on the same charges, found him guilty and  fined him heavily and banned him for four matches. ).  That of course is simply a sporting body  and not a court making the judgement, but it at best creates a public mood of fear of saying anything contentious which could possibly be construed as racist. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/chelsea/9568184/John-Terry-found-guilty-of-racially-abusing-QPRs-Anton-Ferdinand-in-FA-hearing-and-handed-four-match-ban.html). Moreover, it  was  a very sinister development because Terry was adjudged guilty by the FA regardless of the context of the words he uttered. The FA found that the uttering of words to deny having said them  with an intent to abuse  is an offence if the words are deemed racist.  Most dangerous. It could in principle mean that a writer of fiction could be held to be racist because he creates a racist character.  Improbable? Well, as luck would have it the author of the Harry Potter books, JK Rowling, has just run into trouble for doing precisely that.  In her first adult novel  The  casual vacancy  she has  a Sikh woman portrayed in unflattering fashion by a character  who is a racist. Sikhs in Britain are up in arms threatening to stop it being sold in India and possibly banned in Britain because it portrays a Sikh unfavourably (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9580177/First-Middle-England-now-Rowlings-novel-upsets-Sikhs-as-well.html).

There is a further problem with the increasing numbers of prosecutions being undertaken for alleged racially-aggravated offences. The prosecuting authorities and the courts do not operate an even-handed approach. The most outrageous example I have come across is the treatment by four Somali girls of a white woman Rhea Page. The Somalis viciously attacked Miss Page  -a video of  the attack can be found here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2070562/Muslim-girl-gang-kicked-Rhea-Page-head-yelling-kill-white-slag-FREED.html#ixzz1flw8TY6p. Despite the fact that Somalis were screaming “white slag” and other racist terms at her,  the judge found the attack was not racially motivated and, amazingly, did not impose  prison sentences on the Somalis.

Despite the uncertainty and double standards , it is reasonable to think that the following would leave a party or individual open to criminal prosecution :

1. Any statement which claimed  that mass immigration was an unalloyed ill.

2. Any statement which claimed that the permitting of mass immigration is the most fundamental form of treason.

3. Any statement which claimed that mass immigration is a form of conquest by means other than force of arms.

4. Any statement which advocated the forced expulsion of immigrants.

5. Any statement which claimed that an ethnic or racial minority has cultural values and practices which are incompatible with British society.

6. Any statement which claimed that a racial or social minority commits more crime than the native British population.

7 . Any statement which claimed that a religion favoured by an ethnic minority  is  antipathetic to British society.

8. The use of the words black, brown or yellow  as an adjective where it is attached to a statement which is critical of a person.

9. Any statement claiming or suggesting that there are biological differences between races which mean that different races have innately different capacities.

Race is undoubtedly the prime driver of prosecutions for simply expressing opinions,  but  increasing  police attention is being given to statements about homosexuals (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1270364/Christian-preacher-hooligan-charge-saying-believes-homosexuality-sin.html and http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2206108/Daniel-Thomas-Footballer-posted-homophobic-Tweet-Tom-Daley-charged.html)) and recently there have been swelling attempts to bring abuse of the disabled into the police investigation net.  Words judged to be insulting to women are, as far as I can discover,  as yet not the subject of police action, but give it time and surely they will be because any person with a public voice who makes comments which deviate from the pc line that women are just like men is likely to be shouted down by the liberal media and its cronies.

But it is not only overtly politically incorrect statements which have attracted the attention of the police and the courts. Once it is allowed that words deemed insulting or upsetting can be criminalised, nothing but nothing is beyond the reach of the law. In the political sphere this can stop criticism of a politician. Recently it was revealed that two MPs and two peers reported twitter abuse to the police (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/9558464/Two-MPs-and-two-peers-go-to-police-over-Twitter-abuse.html).  The revelation of these attempts by politicians  to have members of the public investigated by the police resulted in this  statement by Jeremy Browne, the junior Home Office minister: “The Government are not seeking to criminalise bad manners, unkind comments, or idiotic views.”

But he went on: “The Government are reforming measures to tackle antisocial behaviour, regardless of whether it occurs offline or online.

“To continue to support professionals to help and protect victims, we are introducing simpler and more effective powers that, where appropriate, agencies can use flexibly to deal with antisocial individuals who cause misery and distress to others.”

The Crown Prosecution Service is drawing up the first guidelines on social media abuse, following concerns that too many people were being prosecuted for making one-off offensive comments that were intended to be funny and not directed at specific individuals.

I think we can all see where that is goings, straight down the path to censorship of political complaint.  The  present  reality is any statement whether  spoken, written or  broadcast which is not anodyne and written in cautiously polite language  potentially puts its creator at risk of prosecution.

All of  these assaults on free expression are taking place when the politically correct have a stranglehold on British society through their control of  the state and the mass media. No political party which radically challenges the pc creed has any chance of being in government or any likelihood of gaining  a seat in the Commons.  Yet the strangling of contrary opinion is becoming ever fiercer.  Imagine what they would do if a political force which did unambiguously  oppose political correctness looked as though it might gain seats in the Commons.

No free expression, no democracy

In a true democracy there can be no restriction on speech because the full range of political opinions and policies must be available to be debated and implemented.   Equally importantly if is the ultimate guarantor of freedom. Authoritarian states can only survive if  free expression is crushed.  Make free expression an absolute  legal right and no dictatorship could be  established; bring free expression into a dictatorship   and it will dissolve the dictatorship.

John Milton famously and eloquently  identified the power of free debate  three and a half centuries ago: ‘And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose upon the earth, so truth be in the field [and] we do injuriously by licensing and prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood grapple; who ever knew truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter…’ [Milton - Areogapitica].

Anybody putting forward a case for censorship needs to explain why  they cannot let “truth and falsehood” contend .  I have never met anyone who could provide a meaningful reason.  Their arguments are always once removed from the issue of free expression: its denial is always justified in terms of the imagined hurt, whether to feelings or violence,  the disapproved of words will cause not on the grounds that the words are true or false.

The Leveller leader John Lilburne never ceased urging people  in his struggles with the Parliamentary leaders in the English civil war to resist tyranny with the words  “What they do to me today they may do to you tomorrow”. That is a maxim for all people of  any time who wish to remain free.

 

 

 

http://ics-www.leeds.ac.uk/papers/vp01.cfm?outfit=ks&folder=13&paper=130

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BNP ‘whites-only’ membership rules outlawed

 

Judge agrees with human rights watchdog that British National party’s rewritten criteria for joining are still racist

Peter Walker

The Guardian, Saturday 13 March 2010

Nick Griffin, the BNP leader. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

The British National party was plunged into chaos yesterday, weeks before the general election, when a court ordered it to remove central beliefs and policies about race from its constitution.

In a landmark injunction at the Central London county court, a judge found that the BNP’s membership policy remained discriminatory, even after a direct whites-only clause was removed last month.

The judge, Paul Collins, ordered the BNP to remove two clauses from its constitution as they were indirectly racist towards non-white would-be members.

The party also remains banned from signing up new recruits until it satisfies Collins it has changed the constitution, although it said last night that applications to join were being processed again.

In a further blow to the party’s election hopes, it was ordered to pay an estimated £60,000 in legal costs. The bill could rise to £100,000 when its own legal fees are included.

While one offending clause is largely an administrative matter – a requirement that all new members agree to a vetting visit from BNP officials, something the judge found could intimidate non-white applicants – the other spells out core beliefs.

This is a requirement for members to believe in the “continued creation, fostering, maintenance and existence” of an indigenous British race and action towards “stemming and reversing” migration.

The BNP last month voted to remove a direct bar on non-white members after a legal challenge from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC). The government equalities watchdog then challenged the revised constitution on the grounds that ethnic minority Britons could still not subscribe to the party’s beliefs without “denying themselves”.

Collins ruled in favour of the commission, ordering the BNP to remove the offending clauses by Monday afternoon or face potential legal penalties.

The EHRC head of legal enforcement, Susie Uppal, said: “Political parties, like any organisation, are obliged to respect the law and not discriminate against people who wish to become members.”

The BNP’s leader, Nick Griffin, said the decision “opens a very dangerous door. It’s a huge change to the unwritten constitution of Britain. The judgment has given a government-appointed, taxpayer-funded quango the rights to change the aims and objectives of political parties.” The costs award would “have some effect” on the BNP’s election campaigning, but it would not be significant, he added.

Griffin said he had already amended the constitution so the clauses were removed from membership criteria. He insisted, however, that the beliefs about immigration and race would remain, even if members did not have to officially sign up to them. “It won’t make any practical difference to us. But it’s hugely symbolic,” he said.

A spokesman for the anti-fascist campaign group Searchlight said: “This judgment is a personal humiliation for Nick Griffin. The BNP has been proven in court to be as racist and extremist as ever.”

The millionaire Asian businessman Mo Chaudry, who had said he would apply to join the party to “fight them from the inside”, welcomed the ruling. He said: “This was the only decision that could have been made today. There was no alternative.”

The decision follows weeks of wrangling over the legality of the far-right party’s membership criteria. After the EHRC challenge last year, BNP members voted at an extraordinary general meeting a month ago to scrap the whites-only clause. BNP critics argue the party has no genuine interest in recruiting non-white members and is doing the minimum to avoid legal action and court costs.

An internal BNP memo seen by the Guardian this week told members that the party had not “gone soft”. It continued: “We don’t expect any more than a handful of people of ethnic minority origin to apply to join the party nationally, and we will not let this deflect us from our political objectives of saving Britain and restoring the primacy of the indigenous British people.”

Politically incorrect film reviews – God Bless America

Robert Henderson

Main Cast

Joel Murray as Frank Murdoch

Tara Lynne Barr as Roxanne “Roxy” Harmon

Directed by  Bobcat Goldthwait

This is a very confused film . At one level it is a shoot ‘em up murderfest, on another  a road movie, on a third a political polemic.  There are elements of Michael Douglas in Falling Down, Bonnie and Clyde and a Michael Moore documentary.

There are only two characters of significance: Joel Murray (Bill Murray’s brother)  is Frank Murdoch and  Tara Lynne Barr is  Roxanne “Roxy” Harmon. Murdoch is an insurance salesman in late middle age  who is nauseated by modern America.  He loathes the vacuity of thought and purpose he sees in those around him, the absence of good manners,  the sexualisation of children and the vulgarity and  casual  cruelty of reality shows ? (His particular TV hatred is a reality show  American Superstarz where a  hopeless singer named Steven Clark (Aris Alvarado) is made an object of fun by the judges and the audience . Eventually Clark tries but fails to commit suicide). Murdoch  summarises his feelings to  a work colleague “Why have a civilisation if we are not interested in being civilised any more?”

All of those sentiments could be ascribed to someone of the political right, as could the character’s  liking for guns and his readiness and delight in using them.  But on top of all this raw and understandable emotion  is piled a thick grey curtain of political correctness which oozes over the film as oil floats on water. Apart from liking guns, having no scruples about killing  and generally disapproving of modern American life and culture,  Murdoch also has a hatred of the politically incorrect who  have the temerity to disapprove of homosexuals,  mass immigration and  abortion and support the neo-cons in their warmongering or  the  Tea Party in their small state agenda. As he  puts it, “I am not afraid of immigrants and people with vaginas”.

Murdoch’s life is messy. He is separated from his wife and daughter and  lives in a cheap flat with the next-door-neighbour –from-hell  whose particular source of provocation is a baby who never seems to stop crying. Murdoch  fantasises about killing the child and the father by spectacularly blowing them away with a heavyweight gun Arnold Schwarzenegger  would have been happy to tote in one of his more extreme roles.    His ex-wife panders to their daughter who is a shrieking ingrate, much like the first person he kills,  Chloe(Maddie Hasson),  the daughter  of a family taking part in a fly-on-the-wall  reality show .

Murdoch  loses his job summarily as, ironically,  he becomes a victim of  the political correctness which he embraces . He has sent flowers to the home of a receptionist who works for the same company and this is treated as sexual harassment.  He  is also told (wrongly)  by his doctor that he is dying of a brain tumour.  With these  burdens upon him Murdoch decides  to commit suicide, but decides to murder Chloe first after watching an episode of her  reality show when her behaviour is ungrateful with knobs on, behaviour  which in Murdoch’s eyes makes her worthy of death.    He  first attempts  to burn her to death  by handcuffing her to the steering wheel   of her car and then shoving a burning wick made of paper  into the petrol tank – note the very cruel intended death – and when this  fails  through his laughable incompetence,  he shoots the girl.

At this point  Roxy Harmon appears. She is a 16-year-old classmate of  Chloe . Her character is  teen psychopath mixed with winning ingénue. Having seen Murdoch kill the Chloe she squeals with delight and attaches herself to him. After he has threatened suicide she persuades Murdoch not to do it because the media would  depict him as a stalker who killed the girl because of a sexual obsession rather than  a pain-in-the-neck deserving death .  Roxy also suggests that they kill Chloe’s parents because they are also worthless.  They do this and Roxy then persuades Murdoch  to take her with him on a killing spree by  feeding him with false story about coming from a deprived and abusive family comprised of a  drug addict mother and rapist step-father. Murdoch agrees to let her come along   on the understanding that  they only kill people who deserve it, the classic modern liberal’s understanding of justice, that is, punish anyone who disagrees with us.

The pair go on a  killing spree the motives for which range from the childlike temper tantrum of  killing of a man who double parks, teenagers  in a cinema who talk, throw popcorn and use their mobile phones to the adolescent ideologically inspired murder of a right wing  broadcaster.

Eventually Murdoch learns that his doctor had made a mistake  and that he does not have a brain tumour. Cheered by this news, Murdoch plans to escape to France with Roxy and start a new life.  Before this plan can be put into action he is propositioned by a man who thinks he is Roxy’s pimp. Depressed again by this encounter he returns to his motel room and sees Roxy’s parents making a plea for her to come home. Far from being from a dysfunctional family, Roxy comes from a staid middle class family with money.  Murdoch is dismayed further at the disjunction between reality and his liberal fantasy about rescuing Roxy from a non-pc  home. He relieves his feeling by beating to death the man who thought he was Roxy’s pimp.

Murdoch then decides to make a grand statement by deciding to hijack  Superstarz  to both say what he thinks of modern America in general and the expose what he perceives to be the mistreatment of   Steven Clark  in particular. This involves him buying some heavyweight weaponry from a shady  gun dealer (Mike Tristano). The scene  involves startlingly hard-core political incorrectness  with Tristano engaging in some most unusual sales spiel  such as  “Put this 357 magnum….to the back of some n****r’s head and all you are going to see is some pink mist“;  “Walther P38. German. Who knows how to kill people better than German, right? You’re not a Jew are you Frank?;  “AK47 . When you absolutely have to positively waste every mother f**ker in the room accept no substitute …. ”  It’s a spray and spray weapon and what’s better than that right?”

During this scene Murdoch’s face is deepening ever further into the peculiarly ghastly rictus grimace mixed with sickly grin  which modern liberals adopt when  having to listen to anything which treads heavily on their pc dreams.  (The scene can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN5KRvfo-AA&feature=related).  This is interesting because left-liberal directors seem to get a particular thrill out of creating scenes of intense political incorrectness. It is almost as if, not being able to readily find such rich fare in real life,  they have to provide an ersatz substitute to persuade themselves that non-pc demons really do exist. Or perhaps they simply enjoy the thrill of the illicit.

The final action is in the American Superstarz  studio where Murdoch and Roxy are re-united and blast all and sundry before being riddled in a manner suggestive of both Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Bonnie and Clyde.  Before this happens Murdoch suffers the fate of all modern liberals of being mugged by disagreeable reality.  Steven Clark  tells him that the reason he had attempted suicide was not because of the ridicule but because he feared he was going top be dropped by the show.  Murdoch responds by shooting him in the manner of a five-year-old throwing a tantrum.

Murray is extremely good as Murdoch, giving him at first a querulous anger which dissolves into the persona of a confident killer as the film progresses. (He is surprisingly adept at the hit-man element of the film). Tara Lynne Barr is engaging in a Goldie Hawn sort of way as Roxy. I suspect she will make a substantial career in comedy.

This is a watchable film in its own right, but it is also worth viewing because Murdoch encapsulates the modern liberal character: part young child, part adolescent, religiously  mouthing politically correct platitudes whilst casually removing those who irritate him Murdoch’s desire to control what people do and say is simply a desire to control. The fact that a large part of his agenda could be espoused by the Right is irrelevant. It is the control which matters..  Like all those who are captured by an ideology,  the politically correct really only want to make the world in their own image at best and at worst, like the Party in 1984, the only object of their  power is the exercise of power itself.

Politically incorrect film reviews – The Sweeney

Main cast Ray Winstone, Ben Drew, Damian Lewis, Hayley Atwell and Steven Mackintosh.

Robert Henderson

The latest filmic incarnation of the 1970s TV series the Sweeney is  a serious mess. (For those unfamiliar with the  TV series, the Sweeney is rhyming slang for the  Flying  Squad  = Sweeney Todd – an elite (London) Metropolitan Police unit dealing with armed robberies and other serious  armed  crime).  The film, as with the TV series, is built around the operational head of the Flying Squad Detective Inspector Jack Regan (Ray Winstone) and his second in command Detective Sergeant  George Carter (Ben Drew).

The action is removed from the 1970s  to  the  world   of the modern Metropolitan police.   This time shift  alone makes the  film utterly implausible, because the  routine mistreatment of villains and suspects in the film  would simply be impossible in the present day world of taped interviews and all too pervasive recording equipment. An officer might get away with it   once if he was dealing today with a villain who had reason to keep quiet about the abuse  but not over and over again. Nor will you find suspects being routinely interviewed without a lawyer. The extent of the violence, especially the frequent gun fights, adds to the absurdity.  If the  film had  remained set in  the 1970s, the audience might just have swallowed the mistreatment of suspects  just as they did with  the TV series Life on Mars, a  recent TV police drama set in the 1970s, although the extensive use of guns would still have seemed ludicrous because even today the British police use guns on a remarkably small number of occasions a year and did so even less in the 1970s.

But the updating of the film is not the most glaring  implausibility of the film.  This is an equal opportunities production . Whereas  in the 1970s TV series and the two original film spin-offs the Flying Squad was  resolutely white and male,  here it is crammed to the gunnels with , yes you’ve guessed it, blacks and women. (There is a double pc score in two cases because  two of the women are black).    Even in the  achingly  politically correct modern London police force you would be startled to the point of a cardiac arrest to find that  half the staff  in an elite unit like the Flying Squad were either black or female.  Just  to put the pc cherry on the cake, Carter is given a black stepson.

As so often happens with the inclusion of black characters in modern  films, they are utterly peripheral.  The pc quota has been filled and the pc gods placated. The white  women with one exception  are also non-entities.  The exception is Nancy (Hayley Attwell) .  She is the wife of  an officer Ivan Lewis  (Steven Mackintosh) from the Met’s internal affairs division who is investigating the misbehaviour of the Flying Squad. Nancy is  also Regan’s mistress despite being half his age.   To prove that women really are equal  to men we see her roughing up suspects  (very unconvincingly), punching villains, shooting guns and finally, just to show a female character can do the lot, getting killed in a gunfight.

The political correctness of the film, primarily feminism in this case, sits very queasily  with the non-pc nature of  Regan and the Flying Squad. The film is trying to have its 1970s era cake while trying to stuff a 2012 politically correct tart into its mouth at the same time.

There are other serious problems. The film  is built around  a  tiresomely improbable and convoluted plot based on the revenge  to be exacted by a villain Allen (Paul Anderson)  who was “nicked” by Regan years before and sent down for a long stretch.

Then there is the relationship between  Regan and Carter which was central to the success of the TV series and earlier films, with Regan as the erratic  DI and Carter as the person who regularly covered for him.    This film also puts  the relationship between Reagan and Carter at the centre of the action. The problem is the  relationship does not work.  John Thaw, who played Regan in his earlier incarnation, was nothing like such as blunt instrument of an actor  as Winstone  and Dennis Waterman as the original Carter had a much larger and intrusive personality to project than Drew, whose default  expression in the film was a near catatonic  God ,I’m being so cool.  They both offered far more scope for  a complex meeting of personalities.  Winstone and Drew just do not gel as a pair.   Perhaps most damaging  to the  relationship   is the loss of the considerable  humour between Regan and Carter which existed in the original Sweeney. The original also had a good deal of genuinely funny interplay between the Flying Squad as a whole.  That has gone as well,  with vulgarity  mistaken for  humour in the 2012 version.  The considerable screen-time devoted to the Regan/Nancy affair, which is embarrassingly unconvincing, also weakens the Regan/Carter  interaction.

The only enjoyable thing in the film is Winstone’s Regan sounding off in his 1,000 decibel way against his bosses, villains and anyone else who gets in his way.  Then his considerable screen presence  momentarily blots out the general failure of the film. The rest of the cast  are strangely insipid,  including both Regan’s boss Frank Haskins (Damian Lewis) and  Steven Mackintosh as the internal affairs investigator.

Should you go and see the film?  All I will say is older Sweeney fans should resist the temptation .  Keep your dreams.