Monthly Archives: May 2011

Watch out : the Coalition is laying the ground for a national identity system

The Coalition Government is creating the basis for a national identity system which could evolve into a full blown compulsory identity system including identity cards, although identity cards are not in themselves the main threat to liberty, that being the creation of a database with a great deal of personal information on it. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8526946/Coalition-builds-new-national-identity-system.html.

How is this potential replacement for Labour’s ID Card system being developed? It is ostensibly part of the Coalition’s cost cutting programme. Their ultimate aim is doubtless to restrict access to public services and benefits through websites. In pursuit of this end the Coalition proposes that people wishing to access public services should create a unique personal identifier, with either mutual organisations or private companies such as VISA providing “identity assurance” services. The individual would choose their identity assurance provider. Here is the Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude explaining the Government’s position:

“The UK coalition government plans to introduce the identity assurance model in August 2012. If all goes well, the government plans to come up with a working prototype of the model in October this year.

“Online services have the potential to make life more convenient for service users as well as delivering cost savings. However, currently customers have to enter multiple log-in details and passwords to access different public services, sometimes on the same website,” said Maude, The Register reports.

“It acts as a deterrent to people switching to digital channels, hampers the vision of digital being the primary channel for accessing government information and transactions, and provides an opportunity for fraudster,” he added. Read more: http://www.itproportal.com/2011/05/20/uk-government-plans-id-assurance-marketplace/#ixzz1Nfqa4pWo

A pilot scheme is due to start in October 2011 and will include “the Department for Work and Pensions’ universal credits, NHS HealthSpace and HMRC’s one click programmes.”   (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/19/cabinet_office_id_assurance/)

The scheme has nothing like the ambition of Labour’s ID Card scheme, but it is easy to see how it could grow into a fully fledged identity scheme which would be every bit as intrusive as that proposed by the Labour Government. Personal details will be held on the databases run by the identity assurance suppliers and the universal identifier will allow state departments to readily link the data held on an individual by various government departments and databases. It is also likely that every child will have an identifier from birth because they need to access
services such as the NHS and education.

That would be the immediate authoritarian danger. Move the story along a year or two and we see it being made more and more difficult to gain access to public services without using a website. That will mean a universal identifier becomes ever more necessary. Eventually a future government will announce that as, say, 80% of te people eligible for public services have unique personal identifiers, in a ear or two everyone must have them if they wish to access public services. Once hat is done, not having a unique personal identifier will seem odd at best and suspicious at worst. A government will then make the case that it is essential for everyone to have a unique personal identifier so that terrorism, crime in general and immigration can be tackled. They will then make a unique personal identifier compulsory. At that point we are potentially at the scenario envisaged by the Labour Government; a universal database system contain vast amounts of personal data. All that would be lacking is a physical identity card.

The absence of a physical identity card would not in itself be a great check on an authoritarian government because identification by biometrics such as iris scans or fingerprints could be done by machines – it is not unreasonable to imagine technology advancing enough within the next few years to provide the police with biometric scanners linked to a central database which they can carry with them. But before we get to the stage where the holding of a unique personal identifier is compulsory, identity cards may have been issued because the government thinks (rightly) that a physical object will tie people to the idea more than a system held in cyberspace.

There is also the private and mutual sector dimension. A reliable means of identifying people would be very attractive to private companies and not-for-profit organisations (many of which are effectively sub-contracted state agencies). Once the identity assurance system is up and running, there will doubtless be lobbying for the unique personal identifier is extended to them. The likelihood is that the wish would be eventually granted. This in turn would increase the speed of the take up of the unique personal identifiers as it would become increasing difficult
to exist without one. It is also likely that once possession of a unique personal identifier became the norm, insurers who deal with insuring businesses dealing directly with the public will insist on such companies requiring a unique personal identifier before granting insurance. Alternatively they would up the premium for companies which refuse.

The other risk is that data is lost, stolen or sold illegally. That could have immense personal consequences. The greater the need for a unique personal identifier, the greater the opportunity for amassing information about individuals. Imagine a world in which most or all of these were linked: work record, health record, spending patterns, details of civil law actions, police record (which could simply be an arrest from which no trial or caution resulted) and tax details. Should you have a spouse and children, their records might well end up linked to yours.

The Coalition Government will make promises that none of these things will happen, but we all know how worthless such promises are. Nor can any Government bind its successor  because we have no superior constitutional law. All a future government would have to do is introduce new legislation to allow them to do whatever they want.

The time to protest about such possibilities is now, not when the system is up and running. Create the same stink about this as was made about Labour’s ID Card scheme. See  it off now because it will never be seen off once the basic system, is in place.  A national identity system whether officially compulsory by law or made irresistible by public and private administrative  demands becomes a licence to exist in the jurisdiction which insists upon its use.

Below is an article I wrote in 2004 about the proposed Labour system. Its message is still relevant to this new threat to personal freedom.

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Published in the July 2004 issue of The Individual, the journal of the Society for Individual Freedom (www.individualist.org.uk)

The practical problems and implications of biometric identities

Robert Henderson

The libertarian and moral implications of ID cards have generated a great amount of newsprint, but much less attention has been given to what biometric based ID cards will mean  in practice or to their practicality. This is a serious deficiency because a biometric-based ID card will be an entirely different animal from any non-biometric-based ID  card.

If it is successful, such a system will give a government unprecedented control of the lives of the individual – the ID card would potentially be a licence to legally exist – and if flawed in operation, cause untold disruption and personal misery.

How effective are biometric data as identifiers?

Biometric identifiers are generally presented to the public as foolproof, Big Brother, sci-fi-style technology. The reality is that there is no biometric identifier which is anything like  foolproof, nor, as we all know to our daily cost, any computer system which does not regularly crash.

What would be the most likely biometric data to be used? Iris scanning, fingerprinting and facial parameter recognition are the frontrunners, either singly or in combination. Facial  parameters are far from foolproof, while fingerprinting, despite what is generally thought, is far from conclusive being decided on points of similarity rather than an absolute individual singularity. One suspects that iris print recognition has similar drawbacks, whatever the “experts” tell us.

Take the expert on biometric testing Professor John Daugman, who is based in Cambridge University. He developed the algorithm for iris recognition. In the Daily Telegraph (12 5 2004) he is reported as saying: “The key point is the relative complexity of the iris, compared to, say, the fingerprint,” explains Professor Daugman, who is based at Cambridge University. “The  iris is much more random and much more complex, so it Is much more likely to be truly unique.” Randomness is measured in degrees of freedom. The face has less than 20 degrees of  freedom. Fingerprints have 40 degrees of freedom, but the iris has 200 degrees of freedom. “If we wanted the face to be as complex as the iris, we would need to have five mouths and seven noses…”

Prof Daugman goes on to say that “The technology has never yet given a false match and we have made millions of comparisons so far,” then unblushingly admits there have been problem with eye lashes and eye malformations. I think we should translate his remark as “The technology has never given a false reading where we have been able to get a readable iris print.”

The Home Office Commons  select committee recently went to a demonstration of iris-scanning. The Daily Telegraph  (7 5 2004) reported: “Members of the Commons home affairs select committee  who tried out the technology yesterday were told that up to seven per cent of  scans could fail.”

I heard a member  of the committee, Liberal Democrat Bob Russell, on Radio 5 (6 May) telling of  his experiences. His iris test failed because his eyes watered profusely.  Russell also said that the test was as intrusive as a visit to the opticians with  lights being shone directly into the eye. He found the experience physically  unpleasant.

DNA analysis – which  would be more certain – is a theoretical possibility, but whether it would be  technically possible now or within the foreseeable future to have a system  which could analyse DNA samples quickly enough is dubious. The person checking an  identity would have to have a means of checking within minutes a DNA sample  taken from a suspect and then comparing that with the DNA record in the central database.

As things stand,   the most likely biometric identifiers on the card and database will be fingerprints  and facial profiling, the latter to act as a decider if the fingerprint test  does not produce a positive identification. The reason why facial profiling  will be probably be chosen in front of iris recognition is that the International  Civil Aviation Authority is pushing for it in machine-readable passports. The problems of  damage and biometric impersonation.

A fingerprint could  be damaged by scarring or a temporary injury. Ditto an iris print. As for  facial parameter recognition, how effective is that going to be as a person ages?  Doubtless the “experts” will claim that basic facial parameters – breadth  of forehead, distance between eyes and such forth – remain constant enough, but  as the system is far from foolproof to begin with – Prof Daugman puts it as the  least effective of the three biometrics being considered – can we honestly be  sure that ageing may not produce sufficient change through, say, muscle
relaxation or gum shrinkage, to distort the face sufficiently to cause a false  non-recognition result?

Biometric impersonation  could conceivably occur with people wearing contact lenses to give a false iris  print (the experts such as Prof Daugman swear blind this would not fool a scanner because it uses infra red which would show up a flat plate , i.e. the  contact lens, over the iris, but you know what experts are like) or having fingerprint  “masks” of someone else to wear on their fingers. Further down the line  surgical techniques, including genetic surgery, could be used to alter  someone’s biometric data.

There is also the  question of technological advance generally. We simply cannot envisage what  advances may be made which will breach what is now seen as a seemingly secure  system.

What of the  robustness of the Government’s computer system? Will it break down or even ever  get to a stage of development where it can go live? We all know what a mess  large government computer projects have been. Why should this, which is even  larger and more complicated than those now in existence, be anything other than  a mess.

Could biometric  cards be successfully forged?

Could biometric cards  ever be foolproof in even the narrow sense of being impossible to forge? Could  forgeries exist? If biometric data are to be stored on a central database which  can be immediately accessed it would be pointless to get a false card if the system  would pick up duplicated biometric data. However, someone, for example, a foreigner,  whose details have never been on the database, could get a card in a false name  using false initial documentation – the initial identification of the person can  only be done by good old fashioned methods such as passports and driving licences.  There is also, of course, the opportunity for bribery of those operating the system.

If the database programme does not have the facility to check new biometric data against that already  on the database, multiple applications for cards under different names could be made.

If there is not immediate  verification of the biometric data by reference to the database, forged cards  could be used because all the card would do is provide whatever data the forger  chooses to put on the card when the card is put into a reader. Moreover, if the  card is simply put into a reader and verified with the data held on the  database, all that tells you is that the card is in agreement with the  database. It does not tell you whether the person who holds the card is the  same person. Thus the identities of legitimate cardholders could be copied onto
forged cards. The only certain way of stopping this would be to read the data directly  from the cardholder and compare it with data held on the central database.

Another problem  would be the possibility of a card forger placing a programme on the card which  would surreptitiously override the application to the central database and  place data contained on the card in the reader in a form in which looked as  though it came from the central database, a trick akin to placing videos in  security systems to give the impression that a surveillance system is working  when it is not.

The initial  identification of those applying for cards

A basic problem of  false identification exists at the point where the person’s identity is to be  established before the identity card is to be issued. Forged documents will be  of the type which are now forged, i.e. without biometric data. Over the  generations this might become a smaller problem as children are registered at  birth, but for the foreseeable future it will be a major difficulty. The initial  registering of the 60 million people in Britain will also be a massive task. Even  if new passports and driving licences are going to require biometric data allowing  the database to be gradually built up over years, that will still leave  millions of people who neither drive nor have passports. The administrative problems of ensuring all those are issued with cards will be immense.

What  non-biometric data could be on the database

It would be  impractical to include data which will regularly change such as a person’s  address or workplace. Yet that is precisely the type of non-biometric data which  is most useful in identifying someone. And what will the police do if they pick  up a suspect but have to rely on the subject to give them an address?

The administrative problems in the field

These are  mind-boggling. Can one imagine the ordinary policeman or immigration officer comfortably  or efficiently using complicated machines to read the data either from the  cards or directly from the cardholder? Or how about every store or bank  requiring one? Think of your average bored teenager serving in a shop and then  let your mind boggle at the idea of them taking an iris print. One can all too easily imagine a situation where using the machine is simply not done because the operator cannot be bothered or does not understand the procedure. British passports  have been machine readable since 1988. How many are ever machine read? Very few. Equally demanding  would be the mammoth task of maintaining literally thousands (potentially tens of  thousands) of machine card readers around the country. The likelihood is that  many would break down and in such circumstances identity checks would simply be  made by a non-id card means.

The potential  practical ill effects of a biometric-based ID card

There are  potentially massive practical problems which could arise from such a card. What  happens if a person’s card is lost or the biometric data used as an identifier  is damaged, e.g. by scarring a fingerprint? How would they actually exist if  the card is necessary for daily living?

The failure rate  for recognition requests would not have to be large to make the security of the  card and its practical use as an identifier problematical. With a database of  60 million (the UK population) even a one tenth of one percent failure would  mean 60,000 potential failures, each of which could be repeated many times if  the card is needed for a wide range of activity which is the Government;s intention.  (A Home Office press release states “crucially, the cards will help people  live their lives more easily, giving them watertight proof of identity for use
in daily transactions and travel” – (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/n_story.asp?item_id=91). Imagine that you are one of the  unlucky ones whose biometrics do not identify you positively, being faced over  and over again with the need to prove who you are by other  means.

There is also the  strong possibility that false information will be put into the database. Governments  will not be able to resist the temptation of going beyond the mere  identification of someone. They will wish to store details of other things such as criminal records, health data and welfare take-up.

When an identity  card was introduced in 1939 it had three purposes: to aid the function of  rationing, help conscription and improve security and immigration. When a  Commons committee examined the experience of the ID in 1950 (when it was still  in force) the number of purposes had risen to 39.

One may be  certain that something similar will occur if a biometric card is introduced. Indeed,  the schedule 1 of the draft Bill currently doing the “consultation” rounds  has a long list of information to be included on the ID register. This includes  names, date and place of birth, photograph, fingerprint (and other biometric  information), residential status, nationality, entitlement to remain in Britain and the exact terms of the right to remain and a National Identity Registration  Number. It will also carry a record of any changes made to the Register.

The more  information the more uses to which the card will be put. The more powerful computer  technology becomes, the greater the ease and range of sharing information.

There is also the  possibility that simple error will result in non-biometric data being entered  which will make the identity of the person suspect, eg, the wrong middle name. At  best that would be extremely inconvenient for the individual. Or suppose your health  records have the wrong blood group inputted and you do not know. You have an  accident and are taken to hospital unconscious and the wrong blood is used for  a transfusion?

More generally, what  would happen if the government computer system crashed, either through its own  inherent weaknesses or from a malicious hackers attack? How would the world work if everything has become dependent upon the person’s state stored  identity? The quick answer is the world would not work.

There is also the  question of security. In principle a system could be set up whereby the machine  card readers (or readers of biometric data directly from the individual) could  have varying levels of access. All readers would identify you as the individual  corresponding to the biometric data, but additional information such as health  and credit data would be restricted to those with a legitimate reason to know them. For example, you  go to hospital and their reader will allow them to see what your health data is  but nothing more. You go to get credit from a store and the shop’s reader gives  them access only to your credit status.

Fine in  principle, but does anyone believe that any of the information on the card  would not rapidly become successfully “hacked” by anyone with the necessary  IT skills? There is no reason to believe so because every other “secure”  system to date has been hacked, even those with the highest security.

ID Cards are not  the problem, the database is

Identity cards as  such are a red herring. If the system is sophisticated enough to read from a  database and check it immediately against biometric data taken directly from a  suspect there would be no need for a card because the person would carry his  own identification all the time, i.e. his or her biometric data. It is the  database which is the problem.

The overt  purposes of the proposed card

What effects would an identity card have on welfare abuse, crime, illegal immigration and  security? If the card is voluntary or carrying it is optional, it will little  if any effect on the last three items, for any person stopped who does not have  a card will simply fail to appear with his or her card at a police station within  the seven days as proposed in the draft Bill. However, let us assume that the carrying the card becomes obligatory. What then?

In theory, welfare  benefits, including NHS treatment, housing and education could be better  controlled, but there is the small matter of 400 million odd citizens from  other EU countries to consider who have or shortly will have an absolute right  to benefits in the UK. To those can be added millions more from around the  world from countries such as Australia and Canada who have reciprocal welfare  arrangements with the UK? Will they have to apply for a UK card before they get  them?

Perhaps, but what of emergency health treatment? Would any government, when shove comes to push, have  the will to deny treatment to those without a card? Moreover, what of failed asylum seekers who are not deported because it is deemed that their native  countries are too dangerous to return the failed asylum seeker to? Will they be  denied treatment even where the illness or injury is serious but not immediately  life threatening, for example, if they are HIV-positive?

An ID card is no help in solving crime generally because the police can only arrest or investigate those people whom they have already identified. In theory a card might reduce fraud based on identity misrepresentation, but that assumes private companies will play ball with the Government’s  stated intention that cards will be used “in daily transactions and  travel”. As they all have their own cards and identification systems which are getting ever more sophisticated, it is extremely dubious that they will  willingly add another layer of expensive security to their own.

As for illegal immigration,  a government could make it impossible for a person to work legally in Britain  unless they have a card. However, to enforce that would require an immense  bureaucracy and a willingness to harass both employers and the general public severely. Employers would have to be regularly prosecuted and subject to stiff penalties  for employing illegal labour, while the general public would find that they were  essentially slaves requiring the permission of the state to gain employment. In  fact, if a card was made necessary for not only employment but welfare and  transactions such as opening a bank account or using a credit card, the  individual would effectively require the permission of the state to live. Ultimately,  the state could control people simply by discontinuing money in the form of  notes and coins and making people use cards for all purchases.

As an anti-terrorist  measure it would be pretty meaningless because any visitor to this country will  not have to have an identity card. As tens of millions of visits are made each year,  any terrorist could operate without ever being asked to prove his identity by  any means other than would now be employed. As for any home grown terrorist, they  will be able to get a valid  card and until identified as a terrorist, by which  time identity is established, they will be able to use it to move freely in the  UK. It is also true that once human beings become reliant on machine checks  they tend to treat them as holy writ and become much less generally observant and  suspicious.

What if the  proposed UK system proves inoperable?

The proposed UK  card will not begin to be implemented if at all until 2007 and, even by the  Government’s estimates, it will take many years to establish universal coverage of the UK population. But even if the card is never fully implemented by further legislation the government will have a database with the biometric details of most of the population in a few years through their inclusion on passports and driving licences. This will be shared by government departments and other public agencies. It will be subject to hacking and the corrupt release of
information by those working within the system. If such a system  is implemented I predict that all those who are pro-ID card will be converted  to the anti-card camp the first time they are stopped by the police and asked for it, or the first time their biometrics are checked and show a false negative, or the first time the database crashes and makes transactions  impossible because identity cannot be verified, or the first time that they  lose their card and find their lives in limbo.

Those who are  against ID cards on principle will need no urging to oppose them. But even  those who are in principle supportive of the idea of an ID card – and  regrettably polls consistently show 70-80% of Britons in favour – may still  rationally reject the idea of this card because of the sheer impracticality of the  proposed system and its palpable failure to meet the objectives which persuaded  them to become supporters.

If you really want parental choice you need a school voucher system but….

….don’t forget the administrative complications

By Robert Henderson

The “free schools” currently being promoted by the Coalition Government (in reality the Tory part of it)  has two flaws:  it mixes private enterprise and public service and is in practice something likely to be of interest to the middle-class .  If greater choice and diversity for all was really wanted it would require a voucher system  which included all parents and guardians and kept private money out of the picture.

I am not ideologically opposed to a voucher system  for  school education  provided the voucher does not end up as a subsidy for private school fees, that is, the voucher should  not be used to pay part of  the  fees of, for example, Eton.  Indeed, I would go as far as to say that a  loosening of direct state control of education is in principle a good  thing.  However, attractive as the idea  is,  there are very large  administrative problems involved in moving to a fully-fledged voucher  system.

The most obvious  difficulty is what real choice can a parent have in  practice if they only have two or three schools in their catchment area?  Precious little, because it is unlikely that all will be good. Outside  the larger cities and towns the choice, particularly in rural areas, is  likely to be even more restricted.

Catchment areas could in theory be  greatly widened or even abandoned  altogether,  but neither  is  practical because  few parents and even fewer  children want to be travelling long distances to school every day or meeting the increasing cost of doing so.  In places where there are competing schools a  reasonable distance from a child’s home, a catchment might reasonably be defined as being within a thirty minute journey by public transport.

Allowing popular schools to expand is an  alluring idea but most  schools, and most are in cities and towns,  would have the land to do so  significantly.

The reality for most parents is that, as things stand, they will not be able to exercise significantly more choice than they do presently.

But even where  a school does have the land to expand fresh problems arise. First, where is it to get the money to fund expansion? The individual voucher  will pay for  the tuition, administration and the  maintenance of the  existing school. It will not fund  new buildings.

Who is to pay? The taxpayer? Private investors? If the latter, how would  the private investor be repaid? Out of future voucher proceeds? If so,  that would reduce the amount of money available for teaching, books, computers and so on.

Second, if a school expands it must draw pupils away from other schools  in the catchment area. Those schools at best will be underfunded and at  worst will become unviable. If the former the question why should the  pupils there be left  in a declining school with little morale has to be answered? There is no moral answer. If the latter, where exactly would  the  pupils from a failed school go to get an education?  Not to the  expanded school because that will already be full.

Is there any way to circumvent these  difficulties? A variety of private  options are possible. Parents could club together and use their vouchers  to fund a school of their own in its own premises. But that would be an  unstable  institution because parents would cease to have an interest in  the school once their children left, either through age or because the  family moved away.  Suppose a school had fifty pupils and ten suddenly  left. It could make the school unviable.

Private schools, in their own premises,  charging no more than the  voucher cost could arise, but they would drain pupils from the existing  state schools.

The third private option would be for private investment in existing  state schools. To an extent this is already happening. The problem with  this would be that once the schools have been
placed in private hands  the private contractor will have the option of blackmailing the  government into  paying more or seeing the school close down  leaving  pupils with nowhere to go. This is something which is already happening  in PFI projects generally. Alternatively, the private contractor might  go bust or simply walk away for a contract. Who would educate their  pupils then?

There is a general problem of how to maintain provision if the state  and private sector becomes entwined. Suppose private schools took so  many  pupils that many state schools had to
close.  That would reduce  the default  state educational provision. If there is a severe  depression and private schools really  felt the pinch, many might go to  the wall. Who would run the schools then? The taxpayer would have to  stump up to keep things going.

All of this is rather daunting. However,  we might inch towards a voucher system by degrees. The first thing to do would be to make all  state schools self-governing. This would prepare them administratively  for a voucher system.

The second thing would be to put more money into schools to bring them  up to the mark before a voucher system was introduced. The money should  come from  abolition of LEAs (which would  free up a good deal of money  they spend on their administration and reduce the administration schools have to undertake) and the abolition of all teacher training colleges and departments (teachers would learn on the job).

I would further free up teachers by  reducing the current  age-group  tests to the three ‘Rs’,  making all school exams true exams, that is, their  classification to be simply a final exam mark  with no course work to  count towards the grade and generally reducing the  information sought  by the Dept of Education and Science. I would  also reduce the stress on  teachers by abolishing  league tables,  which  have  merely distorted  the way schools’ operate to the detriment of true education. Government  could control quality by ensuring that the school public exams were of  sufficient standard.

The real answer to our present educational woes is of course a good  school for everyone.  But even if that were possible people would still  have preferences.  The only honest way of deciding who should go to  which school when a school is oversubscribed is to put all the names  into a hat and draw out enough to fill the school .

There is also the question of  the curriculum and  religious schools.  Would it be reasonable to allow schools to set  their own curriculum beyond the teaching of the three Rs?  Would most
people want Creationism taught as science?  I suspect a large majority would not. Nor is the idea of segregation within religious schools an easy question to decide. C of E schools are often
very mixed in terms of faith, ethnicity and race where a catchment area is mixed. However, other  religious schools, especially Muslim ones, are  frequently mono-cultural, that is, comprised entirely or almost entirely of the faith they represent. This is plainly dangerous for social cohesion.  More broadly, should it be government policy to allow vouchers to be used to create what are de facto ethnic minority schools?  The same objection applies as to religious schools.   To prevent ethnic minority ghetto schools a maximum percentage of any school being from ethnic minorities should be made law.

The move to self-governing schools  would multiply the opportunities for fraud and allow  administratively incompetent school managers to get into serious financial trouble without meaning to. Consequently, it would be necessary to put in place a rigorous external  audit regime to keep  dishonesty and  financial incompetence in check and there should be a legal requirement for bursars with the right background in financial management to be appointed by every school.   There would also have to be checks on schools to ensure they were appointing and remunerating staff fairly –  no favouring of friends and relations –   and operating the entry to a school within the legal framework.

The wages of globalism

There is a New World Order, but it is not the one envisaged by conspiracy theorists. Far from being covert, it is out in the open, a vast network of ideologues occupying the positions of power and influence in the Western world whose declared intent since 1945 has been to create a world fit for liberal internationalists to live in. From small beginnings it has grown to the point that there is a general acceptance by Western elites that liberal internationalism is the only acceptable political policy.  This elite includes not only politicians,  but also those who control the media, state institutions, academia and  big business.

This NWO’s primary institutions are the UN and all its agencies, the IMF and the World  Bank.  Supporting them are a large and  ever growing catalogue of treaties which formally commit great swathes of the  world to elements of the liberal internationalist ideology, the organisations arising  from such treaties (for example, NATO, the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Area) and supra-national political entities (most notably  the EU). In addition, there are the departments controlled by national  governments which disburse and control the foreign aid given directly by  states. Finally, there is a vast web of powerful non-governmental organizations  whose activities dilute national and regional identity and autonomy in the name  of ‘human rights’ environmental protection and the amelioration of poverty. All  of these institutions, organizations and treaties hamstring nations in their political choices, in anything from the control of immigration to deciding what  to do about the emissions of carbon dioxide and methane.

The destruction of democratic control

Democratic  control  vanishes as  national elites adopt policies  which  dilute  the power of  national  governments  to make decisions.  Potent examples  of  such policies are  free trade, the free movement of labour and,  most ambitiously,  the creation of  supra-national political entities like the EU. These policies   are then enshrined in treaties which make  the adoption of  different policies  difficult going on impossible. Domestic laws are also frequently  passed to prevent honest public discussion of  subjects which are disagreeable to the internationalist political elite.

The  eventual consequence  of  this process  of internationalisation is, in practice, to persuade all established  political parties with a realistic chance of  forming a government  to agree
to  work within the constricted political  framework created by  the treaty  obligations and national  laws which  prevent free public discussion of  whether the new status quo should be change.  This also means that the political differences between the parties narrow, because by the  act of accepting the  constraints means that the range of possible policies is dramatically reduced.

Once the  shift from national to supra-national politics is made the electorate are  left with no  meaningful choice between the established parties. Nor is there any  realistic chance of  a new party with different  policies arising  which can successfully  challenge for power. This is because either the political  system favours the established parties  to the point where they cannot be overthrown  (Britain is a prime example with its need  for a party which wishes to be taken seriously as a contender for  government to produce candidates and party organisations for 646  constituencies, a mammoth task ) or because  there is a system of proportional representation which  means that the electorate can never vote to  elect a party to govern on a manifesto because governments are invariably  coalitions (for example, Italy) .

The loss of  democratic control is most  advanced in  the EU and nowhere is the loss greater than in Britain, which unlike all the  other major EU states has  no history  of  dictatorship in  modern  times.

The  inevitable consequences of “inevitability”

Like  Marxists, liberal internationalists imagined that their new socioeconomic order  was inevitable. They could not conceive that anyone would not see the ‘superiority’  of their way of thinking if only they could  be brought into close and sustained contact with it. They thought that if the  West ‘engaged’ with the rest of the world, the large majority of which was (and  is) under dictatorships of varying severity, the rest of the world would  embrace liberal democracy as a matter of course.

To this end  they developed the doctrine of ‘soft power’, whereby the West used aid and  trade to seduce the rest of the world from its mistaken, old-fashioned ways –  aid being the overt tool to force their values on others while trade was  intended to foster capitalistic ways of business which, so it was believed,  would inevitably force even the most hidebound and natural autocracies to adopt political systems akin to those in the West.

That this was pure fantasy was obvious from the start, because it ignored both human  nature and the strength of individual cultures. The experience of post-war  decolonisation should have taught the liberal internationalists that it is not possible consciously to create the institutions of liberal democracy – such as parliaments and an independent judiciary – in fact as well as name, nor the cultural norms which underpin them. These things are organic social growths  which arise, if they arise at all, out of the general nature of a society. Sadly,  the liberal internationalists did not learn the lesson. Like those who argue that communism has never failed because it has never been tried, they believed that if their ideas had not proved successful before that was not because they  were unrealistic but because they had not been tried in conditions in which they would flourish.

Until the  end of the Cold War, proponents of liberal internationalism were constrained by  two things. The first was the division of the First and Second Worlds into, for  want of a better description, the liberal democratic West and the Communist  East, with most of the rest of the world siding with one power bloc or the  other. This meant that the reach of the liberal internationalists was limited  to the developed world and those parts of the developing world which came under  its aegis. Much of this problem dissolved, temporarily at least, when the
Soviet Union collapsed. The second  constraint was the tiresome (to liberal internationalist minds) persistence of  national sovereignty in the developed world, primarily through the maintenance of protectionist economic policies and the existence of national populations  which enjoyed a high degree of racial and cultural homogeneity. Mass  immigration into the West and state-sponsored multiculturalism became liberal  internationalist policy during the early  days of the Cold War, and have now seriously undermined the cultural solidarity  of Western nations. But until the 1980s, national economic self-sufficiency  remained high. Then along came Margaret Thatcher and everything changed. British  Labour Party thinkers were among the first socialists to embrace  laissez-faire economics. Initially, they did  this because they were demoralised by the electoral success of Thatcher, and  agreed to embrace the market as the price of regaining power. But what started  as a venal political compromise soon became a prime  ideological tool.

As  Thatcherism unfolded and spread throughout the world, it dawned upon some on  the Left that the removal of trade barriers and the further loosening of  immigration controls in the name of creating a free market, far from being a  capitalist device to entrench conservatism, was in truth a magnificent engine  to destroy the nation state and allow the tenets of liberal internationalism to  be widely disseminated and more thoroughly enforced. We have now arrived at a  situation whereby the major parties in all Western countries have virtually  identical economic views, which means they are unable or unwilling to deal with the ongoing global economic meltdown.

The  economic consequences of globalism

Free trade,  or at least freer trade, reduces the self-sufficiency of countries by forcing  developed economies either to export industries to lower wage economies or  simply give up trying to operate in certain industries. The result of this has  been a serious narrowing of the economic base. Nowhere is this seen more dramatically  than in Britain where the economy has become dependent on financial services,  an economic activity which can be switched rapidly from one country to another  if circumstances change, and which, as we have seen during the last year, is in  any case a dangerously unstable kind of national economic foundation.

At the other end of the developmental scale, the aid policies of the developed world,  the economic institutions they dominate (such as the IMF and World Bank) and  the effective independence from any state control of Western multinationals,  have driven many developing states towards economic practices which have  radically altered their native economies for the worse. In the poorest, least  developed states, the political policies with regard to international trade and  consumer demand of the developed world (and latterly the developing world in  the shape of the Chinese) has slanted their economies towards dangerously narrow  economic bases, most commonly built on the extraction of raw materials,  tourism and the production of food and horticultural products for export.

The less  self-sufficient a country is, the more unstable its economy becomes. As the  variety of its economy lessens, it becomes more susceptible to economic shocks  in the rest of the world. A country with a narrow range of exports is at the  mercy of a change in global demand for those products, while the increased  imports which are needed because of its narrowed economic base leave the country vulnerable to wide fluctuations in their price and availability. The  recent violent ups and downs of commodity prices, especially oil and gas, are a  savage reminder of this fact. So much of  the West’s industrial capacity has been shifted to the developing world, most  particularly to China, that any substantial reduction in exports from that
these new sources of manufactured goods to the West  would have severe and immediate effects on countries which now lack the industrial capacity to easily make up the shortfall. China alone could cause  grave problems if she substantially restricted her exports. Such a reduction in  exports is quite possible. First, China’s domestic consumer demand is growing  rapidly as its population gets wealthier. Second, as China and much of the  Third World industrializes, there may simply not be enough raw materials to go around  and in the future China might not be able to obtain sufficient raw materials to  supply both her home market and foreign demand. Third, there is a good deal of  political tension inside China, between the dirt-poor countryside and the rapidly enriching urban population, between the 100 million or more ethnic  minority population within China and the Han Chinese, between the Communist Party  and the rapidly expanding entrepreneurial class. Fourth, China is deadly  serious about regaining Taiwan and, notwithstanding growing trade links with  the country, is naturally hostile to Japan. Fifth, there is also the question  of the Russian far East. This vast region is rich in natural resources and  populated by a mere six million Russian citizens – and that number is declining every year as Russians return to the more prosperous Western part of the country. The temptation for China to grab this territory is great.

Why free  enterprise cannot be left to its own devices

I have no doubt that the market is  the most efficient means of conducting the vast majority of economic activity,  especially within a sensibly protected domestic market, but it flies in the
face of reality  to believe that Adam  Smith’s famous “invisible hand” will produce the  most desirable result in all circumstances.  Indeed, Smith himself acknowledged  that certain projects, such as road building, should be  undertaken by the state because they would  never be adequately provided  by private enterprise – and that strategic activities, such as the native”
manufacture of armaments, should be ensured by the state for  reasons of national safety and security. Here  is Smith on the Navigation Acts:

“…the  Act of Navigation by diminishing the number of buyers [means]…we are thus  likely not only to buy foreign goods dearer, but to sell our own cheaper, than  if there were a  more perfect freedom of trade. As  defence, however, is of much more importance than opulence, the Act of  Navigation is, perhaps, the wisest of all the commercial regulations of  England.” 1

It is also  a fact that private enterprise relies on the state to maintain a system of law  which both allows contracts to be enforced and public order to be maintained,  two things vital to the working of private business. Moreover, what is commonly  called a free market is in fact a state-controlled market, being dependent on  anti-monopoly laws  enacted by the state  and enforced by the state, the natural end of a truly free market being monopoly or at least greatly reduced  competition.

The problem with private enterprise is that it is essentially amoral – Stalin pungently  described the mentality of those driven by the profit motive with the brutal  sentence “When we hang the capitalists they will sell us the rope.”  That is not so far from the truth as to be ridiculous. Those who are driven by  the profit motive will satisfy that before anything else. Such behaviour is not  simply or even primarily the sating of individual greed – although in  individual cases it can be just that – but a simple consequence of trading in a  competitive market.

At the most  basic level, the need in private business to maintain a sufficient cash flow to  keep the business running concentrates the mind wonderfully to the exclusion of  other concerns. Publicly quoted companies  are expected as a matter of course to try to grow their share price, pay  healthy dividends and expand the business. What may seem to be selfish and  damaging behaviour can be no more than a struggle for survival, even if the  mentality of those who command private companies often contains a good helping  of self-advancement, greed and ego. (Gordon Gecko’s “Greed is good”  mantra in the film Wall Street did not come from thin air but reflected  reality, albeit hyperbolically).

Of course,  history shows many instances of capitalists behaving philanthropically and with  concern for the general good, but the catalogue of such acts is infinitesimal  compared with examples of capitalists behaving selfishly for short-term gain  without concern for the societal consequences. A classic British example  occurred after the Great War when Stanley Baldwin called for private  businessmen who had profited  from the conflict through reduced foreign competition and massive government  contracts – those “hard faced men who had done well out of the war” –  to make voluntary donations to the Treasury, his family leading the way with a  donation of several hundred thousand pounds. The response to his call was  negligible.

Because unrestrained capitalism will naturally tend to look to its own narrow and  frequently short-term interests, governments need to regulate it sufficiently  to restrain its pernicious effects. The more competitive a market, the more ruthless and reckless the behaviour of those competing within it. The more  ruthless and reckless the behaviour  becomes,  the greater the need for the state to restrain it. Except in a  few areas, such as aerospace, where the entry cost to the industry is  prohibitively high, the freer international trade is the more  competitive the market will be.

Nowhere is  government regulation more needed than in the field of finance, as the present  crisis vividly reminds us day by day. This is because banks and allied  undertakings are the prime drivers of the money supply through their offering  of credit (when a loan is made the money supply increases by the amount of the  loan, because the lender still owns the money and the borrower has the use of  it). Their creation of  credit dwarfs the  amount of coins and notes in circulation and credit  created by government borrowing. The lack of  proper controls over  lending through  simple and readily understandable measures such as  credit controls has effectively privatised  control of money, with the financial  institutions being allowed to contaminate the economy by  creating money of widely varying quality; a good analogy would be with a  currency  based on gold with the government minting to a consistent  standard, while allowing private companies to mint coins to whatever  standard they  chose.

The present  global financial crisis is probably the prime example of governments failing to  exercise necessary regulation since the Great Depression, the consequence of  this failure being that the financial institutions  were able to offer credit incontinently and so contaminate the whole financial  system.

For those who believe that the market is all, let them think upon these facts.  Laissez-faire first gained practical expression as an elite economic ideology  in Britain in the 1840s when Robert Peel began dismantling  the protectionist system which had served England and then Britain so well for  three centuries (it was under this economic regime that the Industrial
Revolution occurred). Since these  changes the periods of great economic upheaval have been when laissez-faire has  been the ‘official’ ideology. Economic crises regularly arose from the 1860s until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Between 1931 and the election of the  Thatcher government in 1979 Britain experienced no economic upheaval equivalent  to what we are currently undergoing, let alone the Great Depression. That was the period of unabashed state involvement in the economy and protectionist  policies.

In short, every major economic crisis for the past century and a half has come during  times when laissez-faire policies were in the ascendant. That alone makes a  strong case for state intervention. I hasten to add that the sort of state  intervention which is necessary is not a wholesale nationalisation of industry,  but commonsense regulation such as credit controls and the protection of strategic industries such as food and energy.

The future

The day of  liberal internationalism is probably almost done. As in the latter days of the  Soviet Union, the visible discrepancy between reality and the ideology has  become so vast that it has moved from being sinister to absurd. Even  Francis Fukuyama, the man who famously claimed that the fall of the Soviet  Union meant that capitalism and democracy had beaten all its ideological  competitors out of sight is no longer so sure of his ground, although he still  believes that capitalist democracy is the best game in town. Here he is writing  very recently:”I wrote an essay in 1989, The End Of History, and in it  argued that liberal ideas had conclusively triumphed at the end of the Cold  War. But today, US dominance of the world system is slipping; Russia and China offer  themselves as models, showing off a combination of authoritarianism and  modernisation that offers a clear challenge to liberal democracy. They seem to
have plenty of imitators…..

“A critical issue that will shape the next era in world politics is whether gains  in economic productivity will keep up with global demand for such basic  commodities as oil, food and water. If they do not, we will enter  a much more zero-sum, Malthusian world in which one country’s gain will be  another country’s loss. A peaceful, democratic global order will be much more
difficult to achieve. Growth will depend more on raw power and accidents of geography than on good institutions. And rising global inflation suggests that  we have already moved a good way towards such a world” (2)

The  skeleton of liberal internationalism will remain for a while in institutions  such as the UN and in the rhetoric of its disciples who continue for the moment  in positions of power and influence, but the hard reality of changing  circumstances will make it impossible to sustain it as an active philosophy.
The present financial crisis has seriously discredited laissez-faire economics,  while the resurgence of Russia and the rise of China, India and other large  Second World countries such as Brazil will radically change the patterns of geopolitical  influence in most of the world. The West, especially the United States, is  increasingly in hock to China and the various non-Western sovereign wealth funds and looks ever more tired of international entanglement.

The big winner from globalism to date has been China, which has swallowed up much of  the manufacturing work of the developed world, is running a truly colossal  trade surplus and has foreign reserves exceeding a trillion pounds. Most  tellingly, she has not gone down the laissez-faire route, being still very much  a command economy with Chinese control of businesses in China maintained by an  insistence that in joint ventures with foreign companies the Chinese are the  majority shareholder.

This does  not necessarily mean that that the West will end up being dominated by China  (or Russia and India). Just like Western nations, China and other potential  global rivals all have serious internal problems of  their own which could at any time plunge them into political and economic  disaster. And the financial crisis may mean that Western countries begin to  take a more responsible attitude towards their economic assets  The only thing certain about the future is that  the world will be a more uncertain  place than it was between 1945 and 1990, when the competing  Western and Communist power blocs produced  an abnormal degree of  international stability.

The  stability  produced by  the Cold War is  extremely important. As an under graduate in 1970 I wrote an essay which  pointed out that this stability was greatly to the  advantage of the West because it produced general stability, greatly reduced the opportunity for mass migration and shielded the West from a great deal of economic competition.

David Kelly, NuTory Boy, Norman Baker and me

The determination of the British political elite to prevent any meaningful investigation of Dr David Kelly’s death continues unabated. At Prime Minister’s Questions on 18 May 2011 a Conservative MP Sir Peter Tapsell asked  “Now that there is to be an investigation into the abduction or murder of Madeleine McCann, isn’t there a much stronger case for a full investigation into the suicide or murder of Dr David Kelly?” Cameron replied : “On the issue of Dr David Kelly, I thought the results of the inquest that were carried out and the report into it were fairly clear and I don’t think it is necessary to take that case forward.” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8521641/David-Cameron-rules-out-further-inquiries-into-death-of-Dr-David-Kelly.html)

This was surprising as the Attorney-General is still considering whether to order an inquest (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/aug/13/david-kelly-death-inquest), the original inquest having been suspended when superseded by the Hutton Inquiry. The Attorney-General responded with:

‘The remarks appeared to catch the office of the Attorney General off-guard, with officials suggesting that nothing had change. A spokesman for Mr Grieve’s office said he would announce “in due course” whether he will ask the High Court to order an inquest.

She said: “The Attorney General is still considering representations made and we will be making a decision in due course.

“He has not consulted any of his Cabinet colleagues on the issue and is undertaking the review in his public interest role. He is still considering the material and the representations made and will make his decision in due course.”’ (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8521641/David-Cameron-rules-out-further-inquiries-into-death-of-Dr-David-Kelly.html)

Cameron’s determination to elite elite mischief sleeping dogs lie is made more toxic than usual by the presence in his Government of the Lib Dem Transport Minister  Normal Baker who believes Kelly was murdered, viz: “In 2007, Baker, the Lib-Dem MP for Lewes, published a book called The Strange Death of David Kelly, in which he concluded that Dr Kelly was murdered. Baker continues to believe this and has spoken frequently of the need for a full coroner’s inquest into the death because he says the public inquiry into it, chaired by Lord Hutton, had no proper investigatory powers. Some at Westminster are saying Baker is now facing a career-defining choice: serve in a government which is apparently happy to suppress the truth as he sees it, or quit. Which will it be?” (http://londonersdiary.standard.co.uk/)

I had an exchange of letters with Baker in 2006. I reproduce these below.

————————————————————————–

To: Norman Baker MP

House of Commons

07 September 2006

Dear Mr Baker,

I have read your Mail on Sunday article and watched your TV interview on the Sunday Programme (GMTV – 3 7 2006) which also contained an interview with Tom Mangold. I agree that Kelly’s death is highly suspicious and commend you for re-opening debate on the matter.

I see that Rowena Thursby is asking for help in carrying the investigation forward. I do not have any inside information but I think I might be able to help you in terms of your general investigative thrust and strategy for drumming up sustained interest within the media. You will find comments under the following heading:

General investigative thrust

Points to consider and questions to ask

The murder hypothesis

Tom Mangold

Andrew Gilligan

The behaviour of the Kelly family, the media and politicians since

Hutton

Mai Pedersen

General investigative thrust

I suggest you concentrate primarily on two things: contradictory statements made by those whose words have been recorded publicly, e.g. family, workmates, and ascertainable facts such as whether Kelly left handed (see below).

The problem with using arguments based on such things as medical judgements is that they are just that, judgements, not fact. Moreover,in the case here, there is no conclusive physical cause of death, or at least, not one which can be proved on the available evidence. The general public (and many MPs) is also unlikely to follow technical details.

The advantages of concentrating on contradictory statements are:(1) the general public can readily understand such information, (2) it is not a matter of opinion but fact whether someone has contradicted themselves at different times or contradicted another person and (3) if the people and organisations involved can be challenged about the discrepancies they have no meaningful wriggle room, because they are faced with objective facts – any refusal to answer would be pro-murder thesis circumstantial evidence.

Points to consider and questions to ask

I suggest you raise these matters publicly (you do not appear to have done so from the publicly available material – my apologies in advance if you have):

1. Kelly was within months of drawing a civil service pension. He had a sick wife who needed treatment which was not available under the NHS and he was thinking of taking up a new job in the US after he retired from the civil service to make money to pay for treatment for her. Dr Kelly had a daughter about to be married in a few weeks.

2. Kelly would surely have known that suicide would mean that his widow would at best get a widow’s pension. He would also know that any life assurance he had would be invalidated by suicide. By committing suicide, he would have been leaving his sick wife with considerably less support than he could have provided had he remained alive and continued working for someone other than the British government.

3. Slashing the wrists is a very painful way to die. If you have ever had blood taken from the wrist for testing you will have some vague idea of the excruciating pain a deep cut would engender. Death through cutting a wrist is not an obvious way to commit suicide if the person wishes to definitely kill himself. Why not use pills or drive the family car to a quiet spot and run a tube from the exhaust to the closed car interior? All perfectly simple and requiring far less nerve than slashing a wrist deeply.

4. Check whether Kelly owned a gun. If he did, the question would have to be why not use that?

5. Check whether Kelly was right or left handed. If he was lefthanded it is improbable in the extreme that he would have used his right hand to cut his left wrist. I suspect he may have been left handed simply from the way he held himself when he was before the Commons Select Committee. That is just the sort of detail a killer might overlook, ie, he or she would assume Kelly was right handed and cut the left wrist.

6. Check whether Kelly had any medical condition, such as arthritis or rheumatism, or injury which would have prevented him either using his right hand or so impaired it he would not have been able to make the cut in his wrist.

If Kelly was left handed or incapacitated by a medical condition, that alone would scupper the suicide claim.

The murder hypothesis

You have been very circumspect to date about who might have done it or why. I realise that such matters are pure speculation but to maintain media and public interest I think it important for you to lay out publicly the possible motives for murder and the possible players in a murder. You would not be accusing anyone of anything merely putting forward the possibilities.

Why would anyone wish to kill Dr Kelly? The short easy answer is because he held information which could terminally damage politicians or members of the security services. The politicians and security services could be either British or foreign. Suppose, for example, Kelly could prove that the dossier had been deliberately enhanced far beyond any intelligence appreciation of the evidence. Perhaps Kelly had been threatening privately to go public with something fundamentally damaging or that someone simply feared he might do. It could even be that Kelly did not hold damaging information but someone feared he did.

A more Machiavellian possibility is that Kelly was killed to deliberately destabilise Blair and his Government. This could have been a foreign government, a foreign security service or the British security services. John Reid claimed not long after the Kelly death that “rogue elements” within the security services were attempting to destabilise the government with dirty tricks.

Conceivably Kelly could have been killed by a single individual in government or working in the security field, who feared he would reveal something to compromise them.

Kelly was killed by someone with a personal grudge against him which had nothing to do with his work or the information he gave the BBC.

The last would seem to me to be improbable going on absurd. The others are plausible to a greater or lesser degree.

Tom Mangold

As you know from our meetings regarding the Data Protection Tribunal and MI5, I am a retired Inland Revenue officer. Part of my Revenue career was spent on investigations. When you do that kind of work you become very sensitive to the signals, verbal and non-verbal, which people give out, especially people under stress – posture, facial expression, speech delivery, content of speech etc.

During the GMTV programme to my mind Mangold was giving out signals that he was frightened and pretty frightened at that, viz: face lacking variety of expression, tense posture, nervous hand movements, eyes constantly looking slightly away from the camera – very odd for an experienced BBC journalist.

As for his language, it is a curious mixture of the sort of over emphatic speech which one commonly encounters in a saloon bar well into the evening (“Ludicrous”, “shadow of doubt” etc) and Mills and Boon (“This was a man with a very fine mind who thought, ‘Oh God I can’t get out of this “….). His statement also had all the hallmarks of being well-rehearsed rather than spontaneous. It would be interesting to see Mangold challenged by an interviewer because someone with a prepared statement which does not fit reality will struggle for lying is more demanding than telling the truth.

Here are some Mangold statements from the GMTV interview:

“I think Mr Baker could save his time and energy and should have stayed on the front bench. An enquiry into the Kelly Affair to find out if there is the possibility of murder and if so by who is a complete and utter waste of time. ”

“Nothing ever happened by accident with David, you know. What he did was always calculated…”

“I am sorry to say to my mind there is not a shadow of doubt that he committed suicide, not a scintilla of doubt…”

“Something awful happened around 11.00 o’clock…”

“This is a man who had a very fine mind… who thought ‘Oh God, I can’t get out of this’…”

“I think Janice realised something awful had happened to David mentally She went upstairs and was sick a couple of times. She laid down. I think she had already decided that she was beginning to lose David…”

“The question of the possibility murder is so ludicrous you only have to think about it for a couple of minutes…”

“This case was investigated by the local police, the county police, Scotland Yard, Special Branch, MI5, MI6 had a man present and the CIA had a man present because the Americans were very interested in this. So, we are taking about seven top flight agencies investigating this, never mind Hutton, put Lord Hutton to one side. Are we to believe that all these agencies fooled by the murderers or that they conspired together to cover up the murder? It is too silly to contemplate, too silly to contemplate.”

I particularly enjoyed the sight of a supposedly sceptical leftist journalist putting his trust in the likes of M15 and the CIA.

Mangold’s performance overall I would describe as blustering. He not only uses the inflated language quoted above, but his conjectures about David and Janice Kelly’s states of minds are thin at best and bizarre at worst – his ” I think she [Janice Kelly] had already decided that she was beginning to lose David…” is truly odd.

His claimed necessary scenario for a Kelly murder – abduction from his home – is all part and parcel of his over-eager desire to rubbish the idea of murder. Quite clearly Kelly could have been (1) either abducted by people simply waiting for him to go on what appears to have been a favourite walk or (2) the phone call he received at 11.00 am may have resulted in him going out to meet someone, perhaps someone he knew, and then being abducted. The e-mail he sent to Judy Miller, a New York Times writer who had used Kelly as a source for a book on biological terrorism, in which Kelly wrote of “many dark actors playing games” (Daily Telegraph 20 7 2003) may well have been sent after he received the 11.00 am phone call. Perhaps the phone call prompted the phrase, perhaps the call came from Mai Pedersen.

So outlandishly out of character is Mangold’s behaviour that it could be interpreted as someone trying to signal that what he was saying he did not believe by being so over the top as to be absurd.

There is something called microexpressions. These are fleeting expressions which pass over a person’s face so rapidly that they are either barely discernible at the conscious level or not discerned at all. I suggest that you have the Mangold interview played in slow motion, the slower the better, and see what his microexpressions were during the interview. (I do not have access to such super-slomo equipment myself. Someone friendly to you in the media would be your best bet). I would be willing to bet that Mangold’s microexpressions during the interview were of high anxiety verging on panic.

I also suggest you get hold of other Mangold TV performances and compare the micro-expressions and non-verbal behaviours on those with Mangold’s performance on the GMTV Programme.

Andrew Gilligan

Gilligan’s article “Those who say David was murdered are so wrong” (The Evening Standard 24 July 2006) is, if anything, even odder than Mangold’s TV performance. Gilligan begins the article by suggesting why Kelly was not an obvious suicide candidate, viz:

“As well as being upset, I was very, very surprised. I hadn’t known David all that well – I’d never met his family, for instance – but he didn’t strike me as the suicidal type, if there is such a thing.”

“He was quite used to confrontation and pressure: he’d been a weapons inspector in Iraq, for goodness sake. I thought his famous grilling by the Foreign Affairs Committee had been distasteful, and symptomatic of the committee’s stupidity, but it hadn’t been that bad.

“And anyway, the affair was basically over: Parliament was about to break for the summer recess, the BBC had refused to confirm or deny whether David was my source, and the battle between Downing Street  and the BBC had reached stalemate. Politics was closing down for a month. The row between the Government and BBC was essentially a  diversion. All those spin-doctors, toady New Labour journalists and compliant MPs who had helped to keep it bubbling for the previous few weeks were about to disperse to Tuscan poolsides.

“All David had to do was keep his head down and it would go away. The Government, I thought, was unlikely to discipline him for the partial admissions he had made about his contacts with me. They needed him more than he needed them. If anyone was going to find Tony Blair some weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it was David Kelly.

“Such were my thoughts on that morning of 18 July 2003, thoughts that made me, at first, question whether David did actually kill himself…”

All fine and dandy, but then Gilligan proceeds to give a string of arguments for why suicide is the best bet to explain Kelly’s death. These always either take the official line or adopts a line which explains inconsistencies and anomalies away, viz:

“Even if the motives for David to kill himself do not, on the face of it, seem quite strong enough, the motives for anyone else to kill him are far, far weaker. In whose interests can it possibly have been to murder David Kelly? The Government’s? But his death plunged the Government and New Labour into the greatest crisis in its history, a crisis from which it has still not recovered, a crisis that has some claim to be the turning point in the Blair premiership.

“The intelligence services? But even if you accept the (wildly false) premise that MI5 and MI6 are rogue states within a state, popping off their own citizens whenever they feel like it, why on earth would they want to kill Kelly? His death didn’t do them much good, either.

“The Iraqis? The Saddam regime had dissolved weeks before and its members were hiding in holes. The Americans? Not without British permission, surely – and, again, where’s the motive?

“Looking at Baker’s dossier, I notice that most of the “new questions” it raises are actually quite old. The most important piece of evidence questioning the official explanation is a letter written by three (later five) doctors to The Guardian newspaper as long ago as January 2004, providing statistics which showed that it was unlikely for death to be caused by slashing a minor artery, as David had done, and questioning the toxicity of the co-proxamol painkillers in his blood.

“Baker has gone a little further, revealing the important fact that only one person – David Kelly – died in this way in the UK during the whole of 2003.

“However, Chris Milroy, professor of forensic pathology at the University of Sheffield, points out that “the problem with the use of statistics in any single case is that ‘unlikely’ does not make it impossible”. Furthermore, he said, “the toxicology [on Kelly] showed a significant overdose of co-proxamol”.

“There is also the argument that there was very little blood around David when he was discovered. Two ambulance workers who attended him, Dave Bartlett and Vanessa Hunt, said they would expect to find several pints of blood around someone who had died through slashing a wrist. They believe it “incredibly unlikely” that David died from the wound they saw.

“David Kelly’s place of death was, however, a field. Professor Milroy and another forensic pathologist, Professor Guy Rutty, suggested that the blood could easily have seeped into the ground.

“Another explanation, said Professor Milroy, might be that David’s heart condition may have made it difficult for him to sustain any significant blood loss.

“Baker also says that calls to David’s mobile were not checked by the police.

“If the evidence of the police to Hutton is to be believed, they were checked. There is also some confusion about the position of the body, with different accounts from different witnesses. But eyewitnesses, as we know from the Jean Charles de Menezes case, are seldom consistent and not always reliable…

“Lord Hutton had many failings. But the verdict of suicide on David Kelly was almost certainly one of the few things he got right.

Some of these arguments are absurd, for example the claim “…even if you accept the (wildly false) premise that MI5 and MI6 are rogue states within a state…” By definition Gilligan cannot know whether they do or not. Or how about the idea that Kelly could not have killed by the state because it embarrassed the Blair government? Kelly might well have been in a position to do far more than embarrass Blair and co. Ditto the intelligence services British and foreign.

Other arguments, such as those regarding blood soaking into the turf where Kelly was found, improbable – even if the blood had soaked in it would still have left a large surface stain. Gilligan always takes an explanation against suicide whether it is probable or not. One or even two improbable arguments might be accepted as reasonable as part of an explanation, a string of them cannot be,

As with Mangold’s behaviour, Gilligan’s article could be interpreted as someone trying to signal that what he was saying he did not believe by making it so over the top as to be absurd.

The behaviour of the Kelly family, the media and politicians since

Hutton

The behaviour of the surviving members of the Kelly family has been of the same general quality as that of Mangold and Gilligan: ostensibly they have bought into what might be called the elite version of his death. This version has two strands: the “suicide” and the misbehaviour of the Government leading to Kelly taking his life. Mrs Kelly and her daughter accepted both strands early in the investigation into his death and by their evidence to the Kelly Enquiry were strident about the Government driving David Kelly to his death.

I wonder if I am alone in finding this behaviour more than a little odd. First of all, one might have expected some members of Kelly’s family to have different views. Second, would not any family in the circumstances have had at least suspicions that his death was not suicide?

Soon after Kelly’s death his wife Janice the New York Times reported that: “Mrs Kelly told the paper her husband had been under enormous stress ‘as we all had been’, but she had no indication he was contemplating suicide.” (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3080795stm – 19 7 2003). If she did think that, why on earth would she so readily accept the suicide story when there were so many features about it which suggested otherwise?

The same willingness to accept the “suicide version” is found amongst politicians and the mainstream media.

Why is almost everyone who could be and should be expressing public doubts so determined not to? It is one of two things: either people have been directly threatened by the state or agents working covertly for the state – I suspect this has happened to the Kelly family, Mangold and Gilligan – or people are being driven to keep quiet because of the natural fear people feel when faced with the powerful, i.e., they feel instinctively that to question Kelly’s death is dangerous.

Mai Pedersen

During the Hutton Enquiry there were persistent reports that the CIA operative Mai Pedersen might appear at the hearings. She never did despite being someone who would in all probability have been a valuable witness. Here is what the Times reported (“American was Kelly’s spiritual mentor”, 1 September 2003) at the time:

“The role of Mai Pederson, a US military linguist, in bringing Dr Kelly to the Baha’i faith was highlighted by Mrs Marilyn VonBerg, who was secretary of the local Baha’i assembly in Monterey, California, when Dr Kelly converted there in 1999.

“Mrs VonBerg said Sgt Pederson was “very close” to Dr Kelly’s family and had visited them some time before his death. “He and Mai were friends because she had taught him the faith. She is high security so we never asked them questions. But I am sure she was his translator at one point.” The VonBerg family received a call from Ms Pederson, an Arabic-speaker who holds the rank of senior staff sergeant, to inform them of Dr Kelly’s apparent suicide on July 17.

“All she said is: ‘Don’t believe what you read in the newspapers,” John VonBerg said. “I do not know which direction she was coming from. It’s very mysterious to us.”[ http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7813-00123,00.html]

If she did say that, it is not merely intriguing but it shows she is not exactly the tight-lipped spy. If you could get an interview with her I suspect you might find her rather indiscreet.

If there is anything else I can do to help your enquiry I shall be more than happy to do it.

You may reproduce, circulate and make public any information I send you.

Your sincerely,

Robert Henderson

————————————————————————–

Norman Baker MP

(LibDem Lewes)

HOUSE OF COMMONS

LONDON SW1A OAA

Dear Mr Henderson,

Thank you very much for you long and helpful email, concerning my investigation into the death of Dr David Kelly.

I am determined to get to the bottom of this matter, but I am sure you, more than most, will understand that it would not be prudent for me to set down my thoughts in too much detail on paper at this point. To do so I fear might preclude further progress in my enquiries, at least in so far as certain directions are concerned.

You may be interested to know that I am due to see Tom Mangold shortly, at my request, and I am sure the meeting will be an interesting one. You ask if there is anything you can do to help. You do in fact make some points about the use of microexpressions and it might be helpful if you were able to carry out the sort of analysis you refer to in your email. I do not in fact have the equipment and it is clear that you know more about what ought to be looked for than I do. If you were able to do this then that would be a helpful contribution to my enquiries. If however you are not able to then I would quite understand.

In any case, thank you very much for writing.

Norman Baker MP

11 September 2006

Our ref: HR1 109-Kelly Affair\cc

Norman Baker MP

————————————————————————–

Norman Baker MP

House of Commons

18 9 2006

Dear Mr Baker,

Thank you for your letter of 11 Sept. I would be more than happy to give an analysis of Mangold’s microexpressions but I regret that I do not have access to the requisite “slo-mo” equipment. If you can gain access to such equipment – a contact in broadcasting would be the place to start – I will give you an analysis. However, for public credibility you would need to get a professional working in the area (a psychologist most probably) to give you a “formal” assessment of Mangold’s microexpressions (or anyone else’s).

When you meet Mangold I suggest you concentrate on the two startling discrepancies in his evidence to Hutton compared with his later statements, most notably on the GMTV programme. First is his relationship with Kelly. In the GMTV interview Mangold claimed that he was a close friend of Kelly. In fact, he did not meet him until 1998 and so knew Kelly for five years at most. Then there is his testimony to Hutton, viz (he was questioned by Mr Knox):

11 Q. How frequently would you speak to him over the years?

12 A. It was not that frequent. I spoke to him whenever I had

13 a query about biological warfare or occasionally

14 chemical warfare subjects. But it was not a frequent

15 relationship.

16 Q. Would these be unattributable briefings?

17 A. Sometimes they were; but the major interview for the

18 book he came to my home and I spoke to him for about

19 eight hours in one day and that was on the record, that

20 was attributable.

21 Q. And his name is mentioned in the book.

22 A. Yes, yes.

23 Q. You would meet him sometimes. Would you be able to say

24 roughly how often you would meet him?

25 A. I would say, on balance, maybe twice a year.

61

1 Q. And when you spoke to each other, it was generally just

2 on professional matters —

3 A. Always.

4 Q. — or other matters as well?

5 A. But I spoke to him on the phone much more than I met

6 him.

7 Q. In those telephone conversations, what did you talk

8 about?

9 A. Biological warfare.”

Note that not only did Mangold say his relationship with Kelly was infrequent and professional, he ignores the double invitation from Knox to expand his answer from his claim that they discussed only “professional matters”, viz: “or other matters as well?” and “In those telephone conversations, what did you talk about?”

The second contradiction concerns his melodramatic claim during the GMTV interview that “I think Janice [Kelly] realised something awful had happened to David mentally. She went upstairs and was sick a couple of times. I think she had already decided that she was beginning to lose David…”

His evidence to Hutton runs:

8 Q. Did you speak to Mrs Kelly on 17th or 18th July?

9 A. Yes, I did, yes. I received a phone call on that day,

10 somewhere around 9 to 9.15, telling me that David Kelly

11 was missing.

12 Q. And you then spoke to Mrs Kelly?

13 A. Yes. I sat down and thought about that quite carefully;

14 and then I spoke to Jan, yes.

15 Q. And what did she tell you?

16 A. Well, I had very mixed emotions on that day. I knew the

17 moment I got the phone call at 9 o’clock in the morning,

18 I knew that he had to be dead because David Kelly did

19 not go missing. If he was missing, he was dead. So

20 I had a slightly difficult phone call with Janice. She

21 was still fairly upbeat and felt that he must have had

22 a heart attack or a stroke and was — she felt he was

23 lying in a field, you know, waiting to be found.

The phone call was only “slightly difficult” and Janice Kelly was “still fairly upbeat” and “felt he must have had a heart attack or stroke…”. No suggestion that she had given up hope in some mysterious way even before he went missing or that she believed him to be suicidal.

It might seem strange to you that an educated intelligent man such as Mangold would contradict himself in such a fashion. He must, you may argue to yourself, have known when he gave the GMTV interview that the contradictions would be obvious because both would be on the public record, so why put himself in such an awkward position?

Mangold’s behaviour is readily understandable. I used to see it regularly when I worked for the Revenue. People would tell me lies which they knew I could immediately demonstrate to be lies. For example, an employer would claim he did not allow overtime. I would find overtime sheets which did not appear in the wage records. I would then interview the employer again with the overtime sheets in front of me and ask whether he paid overtime. More often than not the employer would deny it again despite the fact that he was staring at the overtime sheets which he knew would immediately prove him a liar.

The reason that people behave in this seemingly bizarre fashion is simple: they become psychologically paralysed and are incapable of behaving rationally, because the acceptance of reality is simply too painful or frightening. That is what has happened to Mangold. Part of him knows that his latest story is unsustainable because of his previous public statements, but whatever is making him do what he is now doing – almost certainly pure undiluted fear – is simply too difficult for him to confront.

Because of all this Mangold will be in a delicate mental state when you meet him. If you keep banging away at these two central contradictions – his bogus friendship with Kelly and his varying accounts of the wife’s state after the death – over and over again from my experience there is a fair chance that Mangold will lose control. If he does, he will probably become either violently abusive or break down and tell you at least some of the truth, even if it is in a disjointed form. Either behaviour provides you will valuable information about Mangold.

Kelly’s “training”

I have also been foraging generally around on the Hutton website. Two emails from Kelly on the 5th and 8th of July 2003 – urls below – refer to “training” he was undergoing. It is probably a dead end but just possibly the “training” might be a pointer to his killer or add something useful to the circumstantial knowledge surrounding his death. I suggest you try to find out what the “training” was and who was involved. The urls are:

http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/evidence/com_4_0088.pdf

http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/evidence/com_4_0089.pdf

The Kelly Family

The behaviour of the Kelly Family suggests they have been frightened into going along with the suicide line. If so, a carrot or carrots have  probably been introduced to balance the stick of threat (the same applies to Mangold and Gilligan). I suggest you try to find out what Mrs Kelly has received by way of Civil Service widow’s pension and gratuity. These are standard figures based on years of service so cannot be fudged.

If Mrs Kelly has received anything more than her strict entitlement that would suggest foul play. You should be able to get the data, directly or indirectly, with a Commons question or use of the FOIA. If you cannot get details of an individual, put in a request for the anonymised details of all pensions/gratuities larger than those which are catered for in the regulations paid out the spouses of those in Kelly’s department who died in 2003.

Following the same track, try to discover what private insurances Kelly had against his life and whether these were (1) claimed by Mrs Kelly and (2) paid in full or part. The amounts he was insured for, if any, would be useful both as evidence of why he would not have committed suicide (commit suicide and wife loses X) and to compare with what Mrs Kelly (or any other member of her family) has received from the state (the state may have compensated Mrs Kelly for any lost private insurances).

In an ideal world you would also want access to all of Kelly’s bank accounts and those of his family, especially that of Mrs Kelly, to see if any unaccountable money has been introduced into them before or since Kelly’s death.

Finally, find out the value of Kelly’s estate – this will be public knowledge.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Henderson

Osama bin Laden – who did the Navy Seals kidnap?

Early in the reporting of the death of Osama bin Laden the British broadsheet paper the Daily Telegraph  reported “One survivor, possibly one of bin Laden’s sons, was
captured by the Americans and taken away with the special forces in a helicopter.”  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8491826/Osama-bin-Laden-captured-alive-before-being-shot-in-front-of-family.html

I cannot find any subsequent mention of this  event or what might have happened to the kidnap victim.

The complete Joy of Diversity columns

Note: These are the complete Joy of Diversity columns published in Right Now! Magazine between January 2005 and December 2006. Sadly, the magazine has now ceased publication.

The columns provide snapshots of the truly mad world which political correctness has created. Robert Henderson

——————————————————————————

‘In a speech to the Institute for Public Policy Reform, in London, Mr Blunkett defended the historically high levels of immigration under Labour, which had “enriched every aspect of British life”.’ Daily Telegraph, July 8, 2004

January 2005

Welcome to the new column. It will certainly be diverse, jam-packed with the exciting doings of all those elements in society our liberal bigot friends tell us are such a positive and essential part of NuBritain. Does that mean this will be a column to cheer the hearts of such diversity-drooling gentry as David Blunkett? Happily no, for it will contain all those facets of diversity which go strangely unmentioned by those who are forever telling us how grateful we should be for the consequences of the mass post-war immigration. It is in short, a column to have Outraged of Islington reaching for his AppleMac keyboard and the Guardian letters page email address.

Now what was it our Home secretary said? Ah, yes, that immigrants have “…enriched very aspect of British life” Mmmm… now let me see; high immigrant crime, high immigrant unemployment, high immigrant benefit dependency, increased Race Relations Industry, the passing of oppressive laws to silence and disadvantage the native white population, the colonisation of parts of the country until they are no longer culturally part of Britain…. yep, we really have been “enriched”.

Let us have a closer look at the parts of our society which this column will cast a regular eye over. Take crime. Ethnic minorities enrich the lives of the boring old law-abiding, hard-working, native white population with a quite disproportionately large contribution to murder, rape, mugging and fraud (think BCCI, think Asil Nadir, think Robert Maxwell). So enriching are the black population in this sphere that approximately 15 per cent of the male British prison population is black, despite the fact that blacks comprise only two or three per cent of the population according to the last census.

Obviously that is ol’ whitey discriminating against them when it comes to prosecutions. Well, obvious to the liberal bigot mind and their client “ethnics” who have climbed on the victimhood bandwagon. To anyone with knowledge of our courts, the not-so-small matter of persuading a jury might seem to be a pretty good guarantee that the vast majority of guilty verdicts resulting in jail are correct.

Not wanting to seem stick-in-the-muds in the crime stakes, Asians are rapidly coming up on the rails, especially on the criminal gang front. Take the case of the Glasgow teenager, Kris Donald. At the age of 15 Kris was kidnapped by an Asian gang and then tortured to death. The trial of those accused started this week. Not heard much about it? Unsurprising as the mainstream media has been remarkably coy in reporting it. Compare and contrast with the Stephen Lawrence circus which rolls ever onward.

Then there is the disproportionate large immigrant take up of welfare, both in legitimate benefits and fraudulent ones. Strange how the group which are always being extolled as putting more into the British economy than they take out should be so much more dependent on the taxpayer than the native population.

From the point of view of ethnic minorities, benefit fraud is best considered as an additional income to compensate them for the ills, often imagined, suffered by their ancestors at some distant date at the hands of “honkey”. Nigerians are especially enriching in this area, but other ethnics do their bit especially in employments such the London Rag Trade where “working and drawing” is the norm.

Those unsatisfied with the “benefit supplement income” can enter the “Employment Tribunal Racial Prejudice Lottery”. In practice, only non-whites can normally enter the lottery, although in theory it is open to all. The game is entered by a black or Asian shouting “Racism” whenever they encounter any criticism, failure to be promoted, the sack for incompetence or even a failure to get a job. The “wins” are satisfying large, sometimes running to more than half a million pounds. And it costs absolutely nothing to enter.

The white liberaln who misrule us and obsessively extol the virtues of diversity have a curious lack of trust in the general population sharing their view. To this end they have enriched our society by passing laws such as the Race Relations Act to intimidate the native population into keeping quiet about their incomprehensible (to the liberal bigot mind) lack of enthusiasm for the way Britain is being diversified.

These laws are bolstered by the “anti-racist” (in reality anti-white racist) mentality which dominates public life and includes politics, public service, education and, most importantly, the media. The long-term growth of the mentality was greatly amplified by the Macpherson Report into the black teenager Stephen Lawrence’s death. Since then, there has developed a positively Maoist culture of public admission of fault by senior public servants. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner started the ball rolling immediately after the report was published by accepting the idea of “institutionalised racism”, a strange concept whereby individuals behaved in racist ways despite not being individually racist. Since his splendidly pc example, all other police forces, the NHS, the fire service and the prison service have made their public confessions.

Strangely, those who profess the greatest liking for diversity show a very marked tendency for living in very white worlds. Take the BBC broadcaster Adrian Chiles. Last year he looked at his wedding photos and found, much to his display, not a single black, brown or yellow face amongst the 100-odd guests. Yet Mr Chiles assures us that he is absolutely delighted with all the diversity he sees about him. We must of course take him at his word, hoping only that he actually encounters some diversity in the future.

But of course the greatest joy of all is that we are now experiencing the highest level of immigration ever, otherwise known as conquest by other means. As Mr Blunkett has said “there is no natural limit to immigration” all diversity fans may rest easy in their beds.

Sadly for those stick-in-the-muds who just don’t want to be enriched, they can expect ever more joy in the future, with more murders, muggings, rape, benefit fraud and de facto privileges for “ethnics”, all wrapped up in the double standards of politicians and the media.

March 2005

Diversity buffs have been positively bloated with enrichment in the past few months. Indeed, there has been so much of it that even the most enthusiastic liberal bigot could scarcely complain.

They were not deprived even on Christmas Day, when the Queen in her Christmas message (which is her own choice of words not the Government’s) told her subjects “there is so much to be gained by reaching out to others – diversity is a strength, not a threat” (Daily Telegraph 26 12 2004), a ringing slogan to go with “Freedom is slavery, war is peace and ignorance is strength”, the Party’s prime slogans in 1984.

The Queen of course lives in a very white, very English world. Isn’t it strange how what is supposedly so desirable – diversity – is studiously avoided by those who claim that a racially and culturally mixed society is the best of all possible worlds in which to live? Abraham Lincoln used to challenge pro-slavers who claimed slavery was good for slaves with the unanswerable “What is this good thing that no man wants for himself?” The same challenge is tailor-made for the white purveyors of the joys of diversity.

The national media and politicians have been up to their censoring tricks. In June 2004 a 15-year-old white schoolboy in Glasgow, Kris Donald, was abducted by Asians who bundled him into a car and drove off at high speed. The abduction was witnessed by a friend of Kris’ who was with him at the time and whose abduction was also attempted. Kris’ body was later found bearing the marks of a terrible beating and active torture, including setting him alight whilst still alive. During the trial in November it was ruled that the killing was racially motivated.

The actual killing was more horrific and calculated than the murder of Stephen Lawrence, yet the murder and trial were minimally reported in the British media. Only one conviction for murder was obtained at the trial (of an Asian Muslim). The Home Office put its shoulder to the pc wheel and refused to apply for the extradition of three further suspects who fled to Pakistan. (http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=846582004).

The “religion of Peace and mercy” has been showing its appreciation for Britain in other ways. In December, Albanians Taulant Merdanaj and Elidon Bergu were jailed for 18 years and nine years for trafficking women for exploitation (Daily Telegraph 24 12 2005), while Manzoor Hussain was jailed for ten years for raping and indecently assaulting a girl aged 13 at the mosque where he worked (Metro 23 12 2004). With all this Muslim “joy” about, Labour minister Mike O’Brien showed where his priorities lay by writing in The Muslim Weekly “Ask yourself what will Michael Howard do for British Muslims. Will his policy aim to help to Promote Palestine? Will he promote legislation to protect you from religious hatred and discrimination?” (Daily Telegraph 7 1 2005). Some might think a British minister would be better employed thinking about protecting native Britons from Muslims.

Speaking of which, our past and present Home Secretaries has been attending to our liberties in their usual conscientious fashion. Thwarted by the Lords in his attempt to introduce a Religious Hatred Act a year or two ago, David Blunkett, in between playing Blind man’s up-the-duff, decided to have another go. His successor, Charles Clarke, has promised to force the measure through. Watch this space for developments. Not wishing to be left out of the multicultural fun, violent and persistent demonstrations by hundreds of Sikhs in Birmingham managed to close a play, Behzi, by young female Sikh playwright, Gupreet Kaur Bhatti (Daily Telegraph 20 12 2004). The forced closure of the play, which deals with immoral goings including a rape and murder set in a Sikh Temple, was greeted with a near complete silence from all parts of the British political mainstream.

Remember the bad old evil days fifty years ago when there were hardly any blacks and Asians in Britain? What a fool’s paradise we lived in then with no racial conflict, where free expression was taken as read and there were no ethnic fifth columns actively hostile to this country.

To understand just how lucky we are to be living today, we should heed Yasmin Alibhai Brown. In a recent Evening Standard column Brown Alibi (as I prefer to think of her) declared of racism amongst children “… most British children have changed profoundly, particularly those lucky enough to live in mixed cities like London” (Evening Standard 5 1 2005). I can’t help wondering if “lucky” is the word which would come first to the lips of most of those living in the midst of all this diversity.

But it has not been all torture, murder, child-rape, people trafficking, censorship by violence and threats and active encouragement to ethnic separatism by the Government. The CRE is always busy attempting to reduce the morale and operational efficiency of the police. They will be cheered by a letter from an unnamed retired Met police officer in the Standard recently who wrote:” The atmosphere on the issue of racism and discrimination had become so suffocating that I was afraid to open my mouth. Senior officers were denied promotion if they rocked the boat” (London Evening Standard 16 12 2004). What goes for the police goes for any public body these days, namely, a poisonous atmosphere, vast amounts of time wasted on multicultural awareness training and monitoring and a regular diet of industrial tribunal lottery cases.

How goes the  conquest by other means? For those whose palate is jaded by reams of Home Office statistics showing a positive army of foreigners descending on Britain by the day, a tasty novelty. The Office for National Statistics has just announced that Mohammed, in its various forms, has entered the top ten boys names in Britain (Daily Telegraph 6 1 2005).

Here’s a potent thought to end with. The Canadian columnist Mark Steyn recently defined multiculturalism as “a suicide cult conceived by Western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own”. (Daily Telegraph 11 1 2005).

May 2005

In the past two months there has been the usual rich diet of individual ethnic mayhem to choose from – a gang rape here, a murder there – but the big general issues have loomed especially large and I’ll look at them this time around.

Let’s begin with immigration aka conquest by other means. The surreptitious elite-sponsored colonisation of our country has been going on for more than half a century, but rarely has the treason of it all been seen quite so nakedly as it has been recently, as the numbers rise inexorably and the politicians’ lies swell accordingly.

Driven by the pending general election, both NuLabour and Tory have been “getting tough on immigration”, talking boldly of quotas and points systems for skilled staff, whilst coyly failing to mention that our membership of the EU means that no significant control can be exercised because some 400 million legal EU residents have the right to live and work in Britain. And, boy, are they coming! Following the recent EU enlargement, NuLabour claimed that approximately 13,000 would come when the barriers went down. In fact, 133,000 registered under the Workers Registration Scheme in the first 8 months (D Tel 23 2 2005). God, but not NuLabour, knows how many have not bothered to register.

The sham of the “hard talking” was excruciatingly demonstrated by Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary. Only days after Blair had promised strict controls under an Australian-style points system, Clarke told Labour activists: ” We want more migration, more people coming to study and work. We want more people coming to look for refuge”. (Metro 15 2 2005). The real choice for voters is simple: NuLabour offer unlimited and actively encouraged mass immigration; the Tories offer barely limited mass immigration.

Race realism amongst the liberal elite is growing apace. The egregious and fantastical “war on terror” constantly pumped by Blair and senior police officers, and the growing belligerence of separatist sentiment amongst certain ethnic minorities, has resulted in a significant shift in what is permitted by the pc gentry. What was gross racism to the liberal bigot mind a year or two back, now passes without comment. Consider the novelist A N Wilson writing after the Court of Appeal judgement that the Muslim schoolgirl Shabina Begum was wrongly denied the religious garb of her choice by her school. Under the headline “I’m ashamed to say it – those headscarves give me the creeps” Wilson wrote:”…the sight of these ‘extremist’ Muslim women, often swathed totally,gives me the creeps every time I see it. I feel that something alien tomy way of life has been allowed to sneak in. These feelings are based entirely on ignorance, but they are there” (Evening Standard 4 3 2005). Talk about having your liberal bigot cake and eating it by both letting out his real thoughts and masochistically thrashing himself for having such thoughts.

The CRE in the shape of the ineffable Trevor Phillips has been keeping its end up as per usual in the institutionalised racism stakes. Trevor’s latest wheeze has been to suggest that black boys should be educated in all black, all male classes because black boys continue to do horrendously badly academically, even compared to black girls. The real primary reason is simple: the substantially inferior IQ distribution of black boys, which is inferior even to that of black girls. Not, of course, that this has been mentioned by any media commentator on Phillips’ suggestion. But even here race realism has raised its head. Take Allison Pearson writing in the Evening Standard about black academic underachievement: ” In the past black leaders have been …oddly reluctant to discuss the way black parents fail teachers by giving them boys to educate who are hostile and undisciplined. More than half of Afro-Caribbean boys are brought up by single mothers…after the age of six a boy needs a bloke around.” (ES 9 3 2005)

The CRE has also given birth to a report on race training in the Met Police by a former DPP, Sir David Calvert Smith QC who writes:”There is a real potential for ‘backlash’, particularly amongst white officers, and race equality training remains far more ‘politicised’ and sensitive than the delivery of other types of training.” (D Tel 9 3 2005)

But the report has also admitted defeat on the absurd targets for ethnic recruitment set in the wake of the Macpherson circus. These insisted that all police forces reached a certain level of “ethnicity” regardless of the population of their areas. Police forces such as those in almost all-white Cumberland and Cornwall were left scratching their heads. Now, police forces are merely required to recruit ethnics in accordance with their proportion in the local population. Diversity fans will be heartened, however, by the fact that being a British citizen is no longer a requirement for recruitment to the police and as a consequence the Met Police now has officers from 37 nationalities (Evening Standard 18 2 2005).

All the talk about the need for special treatment for Blacks and Asians has raised what might be called the “Apartheid problem”. Under the title “Who is black? Don’t ask a policemen” Sean Thomas recounted his experiences (Sunday Telegraph 13 3 2005) when he asked various bodies in the race-relations game what exactly constituted being black.

The Runnymede Trust refused to give an answer. The CRE claimed at first it was self-declaration but had no answer when asked what would happen if “someone declares themselves to be black, but is actually a Welsh-speaking redhead from Anglesey?” The Metropolitan police began by saying it might go by such indicators as skin colour or hair type, but eventually retreated behind the bureaucratic barricades with “we go by what the Home Office tells us”. State sponsored race classification anyone?

July 2005

Such has been the sheer volume and inventive variety of black criminality in the past two months – a touch of cannibalism here, a tad of conspiracy to murder a child “witch” there – I was sorely tempted to make this column a “Black Violence Issue” to set against the “Black History Years, Months, Weeks, Days” to which we are so regularly treated. But the rare event of a general election having just occurred, I shall reluctantly leave the “Black Violence Issue” for another not-too-distant day.

The British political system has long been looked on as a model of incorruptibility. No longer. Why? Well, it is ostensibly because the Blair Government has introduced postal voting on demand with no meaningful safeguards. But postal voting is really a symptom rather than a cause of the disease. A lax system would not matter if it was used only by those with a tradition of honest voting, which is what the native British have in their political DNA. Alas, because of the sixty-year long act of treason which is mass immigration we no longer have the luxury of a homogeneous population.

Widespread postal fraud was first indubitably proved during the last local elections. These resulted, most exceptionally, in challenges being made to council ward results in Birmingham. The election commissioner who heard the challenges, Richard Mawrey QC, found for the challengers and memorably described the evidence of electoral fraud was such that it “would disgrace a banana republic.” (Daily Telegraph 4 May 2005).

All those responsible for the Birmingham fraud cases were (1) Asian, (2) Muslim and (3) Labour supporters. Complaints of widespread fraud were made during the general election and many police forces are reputedly investigating complaints – the Daily Telegraph reported 17 forces doing so on 9 May 2005. Place your bets now on the ethnic background of those who are being investigated.

There was an hilariously non-pc general election constituency battle in Bethnal Green, east London, between two of the most pc politicians in the country. The seat was held by the Labour MP Oona King. This lady scores remarkably high on the pc scale, being black, female and Jewish. Short of coming out as a lesbian and developing a fashionable disability, she could not be more a la mode in these liberal bigot times. Alas, as a faithful Blairite and pantingly eager supporter of the war, she was persona non grata with the mainly Bangladeshi Muslims who have colonised the area over the past 25 years and who now form around half of the electorate in the constituency.

King was faced by frantically right-on George “friend of Iraq” Galloway, a man who once greeted Saddam Hussein with the stirring words: “Sir, I salute your courage, strength and indefatigability” (Evening Standard 7 April 2005). Galloway, a one-time Labour MP expelled by the Party a year or so back, considers the Iraq invasion to be a war crime and consequently went down a treat with Muslim voters. Standing for the risibly named Respect Party (Yo, man!) he won, overturning a Labour majority of more than 10,000. Muslim bloc vote anyone?

During the campaign Galloway was asked how he felt about standing against one of the only two black women MPs in the Commons. Heroically George answered “Oona King voted to kill a lot of women in the last few years…Many had darker skins than her.”

If Galloway showed himself a devotee of racial grading by skin colour, so did King. It was a case of send the right election pamphlet to the right ethnic group. She issued one leaflet to wards within the constituency which were overwhelmingly Muslim extolling all she had done for Muslims in the past Parliament. She issued another leaflet to white dominated wards with the references to Muslims removed (Evening Standard 26 4 2005).

For one group of voters the election was literally a waste of time. Worse, it was sinful. For the Muslim Saviour Sect, voting is the sure way to hellfire. The Sect engaged in the most strenuous canvassing of politicians, including most deliciously George Galloway and Oona King. George “friend of Islam” Galloway was taken prisoner, denounced as “a false prophet” and jovially warned that a gallows was being erected to hang him. (Evening Standard 20 4 2005). Gratifying indeed for a politician to discover in such a personal way the esteem in which he is held by the ethnic group he has championed so long and hard.

Oona King, alas, had to content herself with having her tyres slashed, her car pelted with eggs and abuse (including “Yid”) shouted at her.

Another great election rib-tickler was the claim that the Tories were “getting tough on immigration”, a claim which is a self-evident nonsense while Britain remains a member of the EU (350 million EU residents have the right to settle here.)

Worse, as the son of an immigrant and a member of an “ethnic minority”, Howard presented NuLabour and their liberal bigot friends in the media with an open goal into which they kept kicking him with cries of “racist!” and “hypocrite” . That was to be expected. They were joined by unnamed “senior conservatives” and the odd big Tory donor such as Michael Spencer (Evening Standard 9 5 2005), all of whom claimed that immigration had been overplayed. After the election, John Bercow, a Tory MP who was once a shadow frontbencher, decided to speed-up a Tory handcart already hurtling towards Hell by declaring that Howard’s focus on immigration was “at best obsessive and at worst repellent” (Daily Telegraph 13 5 2005). Sadly, in the present state of the Tory party, that also was to be expected.

September 2005

Four bombs, more than 50 dead and 700 injured – welcome to Londonistan on the 7 July 2005!

After the bombings the French newspaper Le Figaro described London as “the European fiefdom of European Muslim fundamentalism”(8 July 2005).

It is indeed. Foreign governments, especially France, have been complaining for years that the European HQ for Islamic fundamentalism is London while our Quisling elite – quislings in the service of internationalism – publicly insisted that those complained of were all jolly good Muslim chaps and chappesses who wouldn’t hurt a fly, whilst privately desperately hoping that Britain would be protected from Islamic terrorist attacks by its status as the prime “safe house” in the developed world for Muslims who have the temerity to take the tenets of Islam at face value, ie, kill all unbelievers who resist and conquer the entire world to place it under the black banner of Islam.

The failure of Blair is clear but no government has clean hands. The one-time Tory cabinet minister David Mellor writing in the Evening Standard on 11 July told of his inability when Michael Howard was Home Secretary to get Howard to promise to monitor foreign alleged Muslim terrorists in Britain. Mellor ended with “But for years now, successive Home Secretaries have downplayed the overwhelming evidence that today’s militants are dangerous. Not only have we allowed the mad mullahs to stay and spew out their hatred; we have paid them social security. We have lost control of our borders.”

One of those benefiting from this lax policy is Hani al-Siba’i of the London-based al-Maqreze Centre for Historical Studies. He celebrated our hospitality after the bombing with “The term civilians does not exist in Islamic law….People are either Dar Al-Harb [the non-Islamic world, the world of conflict] or not….If al-Qaida indeed carried out the act, it is a great victory for it…It rubbed the noses of the world’s eight most powerful countries in the mud.”(World Net Daily 12 7 2005).

The shameful tacit agreement between Muslim fanatics and successive British governments – “You let us live here and we’ll not attack Britain” – was upset by the recklessness of that perpetual adolescent Tony Blair, whose mindless support for Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq acted as the immediate primer for the bombings. But behind Blair’s inexcusable criminal error lies a greater and more fundamental fault: the permitting of the mass immigration of unassimilatable peoples since 1945 which has driven alien wedges into our once homogenous and settled society. The present equation is beautifully simple: no Muslims in Britain = no homegrown Muslim terrorists.

After the bomb blasts the purveyors of multiculturalism at first clung desperately to the idea that the bombers were foreign. Most excitingly for liberal bigots, the Metro (11 July 2005) reported that unnamed British intelligence officials “are investigating the possibility that a gang of white mercenaries was hired by al-Qaeda to carry out the attacks”. When faced with the fact that three of the four bombers were British born and raised Asians – the fourth was a Jamaican born Briton – the liberal bigot community evinced shock, collectively saying “Who would have thought it?” Just about everyone other than a liberal bigot is the answer.

The bombings engendered a truly horrific outbreak of competitive political correctness. Just as the more bonkers and egotistical mediaeval clerics boasted that they were “the most humble and miserable of all”, a motley gallery of senior coppers, the media and above all politicians vied with one another to be “the most politically correct of all”. The watchword was “Don’t, just don’t… mention the religion”.

Assistant Deputy Commissioner Brian Paddick of the Metropolitan Police took first prize for officially burying his head in the ethnic sand. At a press conference on the same day as the bombings he told the world the words “Islamic and terrorist don’t go together”, (Daily Telegraph 9 7 2005).

Close behind the Met came the BBC with their decision to excise the word terrorist from their website because it was just too, too upsetting Muslims (Daily Telegraph 12/7/2005). Just to make sure no one got the “wrong” idea about the bombings, the BBC also cancelled the 9 July broadcast of the Radio 4 drama serial Greenmantle, a John Buchan book of 1917 which deals with a German-Islamic plot during the Great War.

The prime concern for politicians was to insist hysterically variously that the bombers and their ilk were “not true Muslims”, “only a tiny minority of Muslims” and “99% of Muslims are law-abiding, hard-working chaps, as British as they come”. I suggest they disabuse themselves of this fantasy by (1) referring to the Guardian opinion poll of 15 March 2004 which reported that 13 per cent of British Muslims supported terror attacks on the US – the same percentage said they might become a suicide bomber if they lived in Palestine, and (2) by reflecting on the many extremist Muslim web sites which are avidly used by British-based Muslims.

Even for the “tiny minority” liberal bigot understanding was at hand. The bombers were “obviously” not to blame. They were either the victims of other (interestingly always non-British) men who had brainwashed them or responding to the institutionally racist society (in the liberal bigot’s mind) which is Britain.

On the other side of the story, Muslims filled the airwaves with the absurd claim that the attacks had nothing to do with Islam and were contrary to the Koran, despite the Koranic verses which invite attacks on non-Muslims such as that of Sura (chapter) entitled Repentance: “Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal vigorously with them. Hell is their home,” while Muslims who personally knew the bombers insisted that they were all splendid fellows full of charitable impulses who would not have hurt a fly, claims which had curious echoes of the myth of the Kray Twins in the East End (Ronnie and Reggie? Diamond geezers. Loved their mum. Couldn’t do enough for you).

Gradually a voice or two of elite dissent was heard. The Daily Telegraph leader of 14 July insisted that Britain must “…resist the idea that British citizens owe a greater allegiance to the global ambitions of a religious sect…”, while Tory MP Boris Johnson writing in the Daily Telegraph on the same day identified the problem thus: “The disaster is that we no longer make any real demands of loyalty upon those who are immigrants or the children of immigrants….many Britons have absolutely no sense of allegiance to this country or its institutions.” All true enough. But fear not, ol’ whitey is to blame. Who is primarily at fault in Johnsons’ eyes? Why, damn me, if it isn’t the one British politician of the past 50 years who has told the truth about immigration, Enoch Powell. According to Johnson “the problem was not so much his catastrophic 1968 tirade [The so-called Rivers of blood speech], but the way he made it impossible for any serious politician to discuss the consequences of immigration. In the wake of Powell’s racist foray, no one had the guts to talk about Britishness…” So there you have it, Enoch Powell is responsible for the mess we are in because he didn’t realise that our entire political class both then and since would utterly lack courage.

Powell’s 1968 speech was not racist or intemperate (it was forthright, no more). Here is its opening passage: ‘The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future. Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “If only,” they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.”’

Well, no politician after Powell would talk honestly about mass immigration. And the problem is growing. Blair swore blind during the last general election campaign that he had absolutely no idea of how many people were in the country illegally. (Less than two months later the Home Office has come up with an estimate of those in the country illegally of 370,000-570,000.)

Every mainstream British politician is terrified by the bombings. But their greatest fear is not the physical damage, horrific as it was. Rather, our politicos fear they are about to lose control. They know that they and their predecessors over the past 60 years have engaged in an act of the most fundamental treason by forcing mass immigration onto the British people. They have only been able to do this by their monopoly of the state’s power and in collusion with a mass media long dominated by those who share their liberal internationalist outlook. By these means the native population’s dissent has been stifled and censored.

What our elite cannot pretend is that the present situation could not have been foreseen. Powell’s 1968 speech contains a series of remarkably accurate predictions about the consequences of immigration for the native population, not least what we now call “anti-racism” and political correctness. Powell placed too little emphasis on ethnic solidarity, but the only important development he did not foresee was the rise of Islam as a revolutionary force. The passage which perhaps best shows Powell’s prescience is this:

“But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country. They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. They now learn that a one way privilege is to be established by act of parliament [the 1968 Race Relations Act] ; a law which cannot, and is not intended, to operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions. ”

All the focus is currently on Muslims, but any large ethnic group in any society which either will not or cannot integrate to the extent of being indistinguishable from the native population potentially offers a similar threat. The behaviour of British Sikhs in 2004 in closing down a play of which they disapproved shows the dangers. The frightening truth is that our elite have created an army of fifth columns since 1945.

November 2005

For decades the liberal bigot line has been that everyone in UK possessed of a black and brown face or an “ethnic identity” was every bit as loyal and committed to Britain and its constituent countries as the native white population. Any suggestion to the contrary brought heroic outbreaks of liberal bigot posturing as they solemnly told us that an Asian woman from the subcontinent, who could not speak English and lived entirely within her ethnic group knowing nothing of English culture, was just as English as the Englishwoman born and raised in England whose whole being was impregnated with English culture.

This shrieking nonsense was holed below the waterline by the bombers of July. The liberal bigot response has been to engage in the futile task of trying to square the circle of the ghettoised society which is modern Britain with a belated recognition that a society can only have cohesion if there is a shared national identity.

My favourite amongst the cascade of resulting intellectual incoherence comes from a report by Vince Cable for the “Think Tank” Demos (http://www.politics.co.uk/domesticpolicy/demos-abandon-multiculturalism ). This sternly said that Britain must toss aside multiculturalism and – wait for it – replace it with a “multiple identity”, consisting of a recognition that people in Britain belong to different “communities” based on race, ethnicity, and religion.

I have turned this concept upside down, placed it back to front, laid it flat on the floor and it still looks like multiculturalism to me. And what is to bind this disparate population? Well, it is “a strong commitment to the rights of the individual and law and order”, in short the liberal bigot fantasy of a “rational” non-tribal society made flesh.

Close behind Cable, and scoring considerably higher on the guffaw scale, comes the ineffable Trevor Phillips. Through CRE research, Trevor has discovered (shock horror) that “most white people do not have a non – white friend, while young Asian and black people have almost exclusively Asian or black friends” (Sunday Times 18 9 2005). Damn me, who would have thought it! Anyone living in the country apart from the strange ethereally silly creatures of the CRE.

The truth of Trevor’s words was illustrated in the Sunday Telegraph (31 July) where Sir Max Hastings wrung his hands over never having had a Muslim (and precious few blacks and Asians of any kind) to his dinner table. He assured his readers that he really must have such people around his dinner table in the future.

Of course, the Muslims (and other ethnics) that Hastings may invite to his dinner parties will be of the educated, middleclass Westernised kind. Sadly, he will never know the joy of living in an area where he is in the racial minority, of sending his children to a school where they are the only white child in the class and the head boasts “We have 133 languages spoken here”, of having his wife and children routinely intimidated by gangs of ethnic youths or caught in the gun crossfire of ethnic gangsters. He will never live in a council Tower block where his family are the only white tenants or find the only local shops have all become Halal.

These, of course, are the conditions which have been forced on the white working class by people such as Sir Max who have supported mass immigration and extolled the joys of diversity.

One of the 7 July bombers Mohammed Siddique Khan could have put Trevor and the liberal bigot fraternity generally right about the desirability of multi-ethnic mixing and nation building. A videotape message he left behind was broadcast by Al-Jazeera and included the words “Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people and your support of them makes you directly responsible, just as I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters” (Daily Telegraph 2 9 2005).

Anyone following the London bombings from the British media might be forgiven for imagining that London is an overwhelmingly non-white city and that the victims were predominantly non-white. In fact, the large majority of victims were white and British – from the details provided by the Daily Telegraph (22 7 2005), the dead divide into 30 white British, 5 white foreign, 3 from Turkey or the near East, 3 Mongoloid Asians, 5 subcontinental Asians and 4 blacks.

This media distortion of racial reality is routine. Crowds for England football and Rugby games are solidly white. Crowds for England Test matches are the same unless England are playing an Asian side. The London crowds which gathered for the Rugby World Cup winners and the Ashes victors were overwhelmingly white. Ditto the London crowds following the death of Diana and the funeral of the Queen mother. Despite the objective whiteness of the crowds, they are mysteriously transmogrified into multicultural events by the media.

One of the great entertainments of the summer was watching mediafolk desperately pretending that the Ashes cricket series had gripped “people of all races and beliefs”. C4 were so desperate at the Oval Test that they were reduced to showing a single black face in the flats overlooking the ground. The crowds were so uniformly white that I started a “Spot the black or Asian face in the crowd” competition on the Web. Sadly for the liberal bigot community it went un-won.

Talking of the Ashes crowds, Yasmin Alibhai Brown decided that the English fervour over their Ashes win was the worst kind of nationalism (Daily Telegraph 13 9 2005). Indeed, the games were so mono-racial it is a wonder that Brown Alibi and the likes of Trevor Phillips did not claim that they were illegal because the sides, the commentary teams and the crowds were all “hideously white”.

Occasionally race realism even infiltrates the BBC, albeit unintentionally. A white Geordie convert to Islam, Ibrahim Hewitt, let the cat out of the bag when he was interviewed on the Radio 5 Simon Mayo programme (23 8 2005). Hewitt runs a private Islamic school in Leicester, the city in Britain with the largest ethnic content to its population. Questioned on one of the BBC’s favourite fantasies – Leicester as a beacon of multicultural harmony – Hewitt replied “Leicester is not a multicultural city but a city of multi-ghettos.”

January 2006

Liberal bigot hearts were all of a flutter in October as yet another (sigh) race riot…er… festival of diversity erupted in Birmingham. But this was a festival of diversity with a difference: it was blacks fighting Asians. Cue the blackest liberal bigot dismay, because ONLY WHITES ARE RACIST. What on earth were they to do? Simple: deny reality and blame it on ol’ whitey.

Truly heroic attempts were made by the media and our politicos to pretend that it was not a “race riot”. Rather, we were told, it was the natural outcome of the poverty in which ol’ whitey wickedly keeps blacks and Asians. Most inconveniently from the liberal bigot standpoint this explanation ignored one glaring fact: there are vastly more poor whites in Britain than poor blacks and Asians and the poor whites do not riot.

Alas, quite disgracefully, the blacks and Asians in the area would not play with the liberal bigot propaganda ball. Instead they told a story built around black and Asian stereotypes now legally forbidden to white lips: thieving, idle blacks and money grabbing Asians.

As the days went by more honest reporting appeared which made it clear that the area was waiting to racially explode because blacks are resentful that most of the retail businesses in the area, particularly the shops stocking black-centred products, had all been taken over by, guess who, Asians. Idi Amin, thou should be living at this hour.

Blacks claimed that the immediate cause of the riot was the gang-rape of a 14-year-old black girl by a mob of Asians after she was caught shoplifting in an Asian shop. (Blacks complaining about gang-rape eh? Excuse me while I stop laughing.) The girl was never identified and (chortle) it was claimed she could not make a complaint because she is a failed asylum seeker who feared deportation (you couldn’t make it up). The local police and immigration authorities cringed dutifully and said the putative rapee could come forward without worrying about her immigrant status, but all to no avail. Whether she actually existed is a very moot point.

Inter-ethnic minority violence is actually common in Britain, Regular gang battles take place between variously blacks, Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims in places as disparate as Bethnal Green and Slough. Not that one would know this from our mainstream media which has long been most conscientiously censoring the race of those who misbehave, unless, of course, the culprits are white.

Diverting as it was, Birmingham proved to be a mere sparkler in the ethnic firework box compared to the very large banger which went off in France a few weeks later. Muslim rioters made merry first in Paris and then in cities and towns throughout France, gaily burning everything in sight provided it belonged to ol’ whitey . As I write this, the Gallic festival of joy has been running for nearly three weeks, curfews have been declared and one third of the French riot police, the CRS, have been garrisoned in the most excitingly diverse areas (Daily Telegraph 14 11 2005).

Diversity fans will not be surprised that Britain now has a black Archbishop of York, because since Blair took office blacks and Asians have been pushed into positions of public influence in numbers out of all proportion to their representation in the population. The very lucky winner in this pc lottery is John Sentamu, a Ugandan. I say very lucky because the chances of any priest becoming Archbishop of York are vanishingly small and the chances of one of the very few black bishops being promoted on merit to the second most powerful position in the Church of England next to non-existent, there being so many white English bishops as candidates. The answer of course is that such appointments are acts of patronage rather than appointments strictly on merit.

Sentamu is routinely described as “an outspoken critic of racism” (e.g. Daily Telegraph 9 10 2005). The white liberals who roost in the upper reaches of the Church are doubtless waiting for him to accuse the C of E of being “institutionally racist”, to which accusation they will doubtless respond with hysterical squeals of masochistic delight.

At least the prison service is one public institution which need not worry about lacking diversity. Around 10,000 out of a UK prison population of 85,000 are foreigners and no less than 160 nationalities are represented – Jamaica proudly heads the list with 2039 inmates (Daily Telegraph 26 10 2005). To these may be added the 15 per cent or so of the prison population who are British born blacks while a growing number of British born Asians are readily taking to a life of crime.

A study commissioned by the Commission for Racial Equality into “Britishness” showed with unforgiving clarity the commitment and loyalty of all those “British” and “English” blacks and Asians we are always hearing about from our elite. The most telling passages are:

“In England, white English participants identified themselves as English first and British second, while ethnic minority participants perceived themselves as British. None identified as English, which they saw as meaning exclusively white people.”

“Britishness was associated with great historical and political achievements, but only amongst white participants (whether from England, Scotland or Wales), not those from ethnic minority backgrounds” (http://www.cre.gov.uk/downloads/what_is_britishness.pdf). In short, blacks and Asians actively reject Englishness and have no interest or conception of what is encompassed by British history and traditions.

Unreason formally entered the English legal system when the High Court overturned a Home Office decision to refuse to extensively consider the asylum claim of a Nigerian woman called Ebun Ajbaje. (Daily Telegraph 27 10 2005). The grounds for Ms Ajbaje’s claim? Why, if she goes back to Nigeria she is stone-cold certain that her relatives will use black magic against her. The Home Office quite scandalously decided such a claim was “bound to fail” and summarily refused it using the new “fast track” asylum method. Let us hope they’ll know better next time.

March 2006

Lest we forget. Just to make sure we infidels had got the message of 7/7, i.e., Muslims will not be satisfied until the black flag of Islam flies over Downing Street, the leader of the bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan spoke from the grave in a valedictory video thoughtfully provided by al Qaeda: “[Muslim leaders in Britain] seem to think that their responsibility lies with the Kafiris [unbelievers] instead of Allah so they tell us ludicrous things like we must obey the law of the land. How on earth did we conquer lands in the past if we were to obey this law?” (Evening Standard 16 11 2005.)

The benefits of diversity crop up in the most unexpected quarters. Anne Cryer, the Labour MP for Keighley recently published a report on recessive gene disorders created by inbreeding amongst British Pakistanis. Around 30 per cent of the UK recessive gene birth defect total comes from Pakistanis who account for 3.4% of UK births, unsurprising as the Daily Telegraph (16 11 2005). reported “It is estimated that 55% of British Pakistanis are married to their first cousins…in Bradford, more than three quarters of all Pakistani marriages are believed to be between first cousins”. Ms Cryer, in whom race realism is engaged in a mortal struggle with political correctness, bravely concluded that “They [Asians] must look outside the family for husbands and wives for their young people.” One can only marvel that she has not had a visit from the police.

The journalist Jonathan Freedland let us all into a secret: “The only true ghettos in Britain are white: like Berwick-on-Tweed with a 99.6 per cent white population, or Barnsley 99.1 per cent white, or the Prime Minister’s beloved Sedgefield, 99.3. These areas are not merely “sleepwalking to segregation”: they’re already there.” (Evening Standard 17 11 2005). So there you have it, to the liberal bigot mind for an area of Britain to remain what it has always been, i.e., white, is forming a ghetto. Truly surreal.

Doubtless in time liberal bigot demands will come for immigration to Britain to be restricted to non-whites until “Britain resembles the world” and the native population is in the small minority. Come to think of it, it may not even be necessary for such demands because the conquest of Britain by immigration continues apace. The think-tank Migrationwatch has collated figures issued by the Office of National Statistics. These show that 124,000 out of 640,000 births in England an Wales in 2004 were to foreign born mothers, roughly one in five. (Daily Telegraph 5 1 2006). Of the rest, a significant proportion will have been to native born blacks and Asians.

Multiculturalists may rest easy in their beds that mass immigration will continue for the foreseeable future. The NuTory leader, David Cameron, launched his leadership by announcing that immigration is “very good for Britain” (Daily Telegraph 19 12 2006). The three major British parties now have the same official immigration policy, i.e., a commitment to the most fundamental form of treason there is, the wilful colonisation of one’s own country by mass immigration.

Shameron has generally been competing very strongly in the pc stakes. Our quisling politicians love nothing more than pretending that taxpayers’ money is their own while they claim moral kudos as they use it for their own vanity projects. Shameron’s present vanity project is “Make poverty history”. Britain, he says, is simply not doing enough, despite the fact that currently the taxpayer is bilked to the tune of £4 billion a year for “Aid”, a figure which will rise to £6 billion pa by 2008 – that is £100 for each man, woman and child in the country .

Media double standards were forthrightly on show with the murders of Anthony Walker (black) and Chris Yates (white). Walker was killed by two white youths. The murder was immediately labelled racist by the police and treated as such by the court which gave heavier sentences as a consequence. The evidence for it being racially motivated were reports by witnesses of racial comments being made before the attack. Vast amounts of media coverage of both the trial and of the family was given.

Yates was killed by an Asian gang. Witnesses heard the gang boasting that they had killed a white man and saying “that will teach an Englishman to interfere in Paki business” (Evening Standard 23 11 2005). Clearly it was racially motivated. Despite this the case got minimal coverage before and during the trial. The judge bizarrely decided the attackers were not racially motivated – and consequently gave out much lighter sentences – because after they had killed Yates, the gang non-fatally attacked and abused a black and an Asian. This is a howling non sequitur, for it does not follow that because two out of three attacks were not racist the other was not racist. How interesting that the judge by implication assumed that Asians do not harbour racist feelings towards blacks or to Asians of an ethnicity other than their own.

But not all members of the liberal left are irredeemably thick or dishonest. Anthony Browne, for long a lone leftist voice raised against mass immigration, launched an attack on political correctness in a Civitas publication The retreat of reason: Political correctness and the corruption of public debate in modern Britain. He sees pc as “a heresy of liberalism” (p.2) in which “a reliance on reason has been replaced with a reliance on the emotional appeal of an argument” (p.6) to produce a “dictatorship of [putative] virtue” which drives out all contrary opinion.

Spot on. Political correctness is literally a totalitarian creed, for it both enters every aspect of life – anything can be presented in terms of multiculturalism or sexual equality – and allows only one “right” opinion on anything.

June 2006

Local elections in May meant that our politicians thoughts turned temporarily to the electors. Modern politicos always find this a distasteful task but this time they were unreservedly appalled at what they saw. A YouGov poll (21 4 2006) Daily Telegraph) showed that seven per cent of voters were willing to vote BNP while twenty four per cent had considered doing so.

Faced with white voters turning in despair from the multiculturalist monolith that is the British political mainstream, all the major parties flew into a panic. They even reached for (part) of the truth. The employment Minister Margaret Hodge, who is the MP for Barking, found the light of realism suddenly shining into her mind: “They [the white voters] can’t get a [council] home for their children, they see black and ethnic people moving in and are angry… When I knock on doors I say to people ‘are you tempted to vote BNP?’ and many, many, many – eight out of ten of the white families – say ‘yes'”. (Sunday Telegraph 16 4 2006).

Contrariwise, the Tories refused to let reality impinge on their minds. David Shameron was on particularly fine NuTory form during the local elections. Determined not to be outdone in the multiculturalist stakes, he resolutely put political correctness before party and nation with his truly grisly “I hope nobody votes BNP. I would rather people voted for any other party.” (Daily Telegraph 24 4 2006).

In the event the BNP with only 13 candidates took 11 council seats in the Barking and Dagenham wards and ended the local elections with 44 seats nationwide. Hodge was blamed by the local Labour Party for providing the BNP with “the oxygen of publicity” (Daily Telegraph 5 5 2006), a tacit acknowledgement of how any party outside the British mainstream is viewed by our political elite, i.e., they have no business existing.

The liberal bigot fraternity were shaken but only allowed reality into their heads only so far. They acknowledged the social problems and resentments of the white working class, but refused to see that these were symptoms not the disease itself, namely, mass immigration aka invasion and colonisation.

Blairite hack Rachel Sylvester wrote “Voting for the BNP is about rage rather than race” (Daily Telegraph 18 4 2006), black Labour MP Dianne Abbot was certain that race in the context of housing was “a red herring” (Evening Standard 18 4 2006), while Frank Field, the Labour MP once given the task of “thinking the unthinkable” about social policy by Blair, was absolutely certain that “This is not about race, immigration and bogus asylum seekers” Daily Telegraph 204 2006.

The grotesque scale of our ongoing immigration and the absolute lack of any meaningful controls, was officially revealed by Graham Roberts of the Nationality and Immigration Directorate (part of the Home Office). Mr Roberts is in charge of “Enforcement and Removals” (chortle). He told the Commons home affairs select committee that the Directorate had no estimate of people in Britain illegally, no figure for the number of failed asylum seekers who had not been removed and could not even say how many people had been told by his office to leave the country. (Daily Telegraph 17 5 2006).

The shape of English things to come if nothing is done to stop the literally mad level of current immigration can be seen from the composition of primary schools. In 1996 11 pc of children in English primary schools were from ethnic minorities: in 2005 18.7 pc were (Daily Telegraph 28 April 2006). If this rate of increase continues more than 50% of children in English primary schools will be from ethnic minorities by 2226 and in all probability the English will be a minority in their own land before 2050.

Even non-white immigrants are beginning to see the light. George Alagiah the Sri Lankan BBC Newsreader concluded “Some of today’s immigrants aren’t interested in making Britain their home. They see it as a place they can live – but their real ties remain with their homelands.”Sunday Telegraph 23 4 2006.

Just so. Criminality is high on their list of lucrative activities to pursue whilst here. In April the Home Office was forced to admit that since Labour took office in 1997, 1023 foreign criminals convicted of crimes serious enough to warrant a prison sentence have been released at the end of their sentences without being considered for deportation – many were cases where the judge had recommended they be deported at the time of their sentence. These included murderers and rapists. The Home Secretary Charles Clarke was forced to resign and, even after weeks of frenzied activity in an attempt to round up the released prisoners, the new Home Secretary John Reid had to admit that 446 could not be traced (Daily Telegraph 16 5 2006).

The nastiest ethnic crime to hit the front pages involved a couple of first generation immigrants. It was the trial of those found guilty of the rape, torture by burning, beating and murder of the white 16-year-old Mary Ann Leneghan and the rape, torture, beating and attempted murder of her 18-year-old white friend who was the main witness at the trial (the girl was not named during the trial for legal reasons). The gang consisted of five blacks and an Albanian immigrant (29 4 2006 Daily Telegraph). One of the blacks, Rashid Musa, was an immigrant who had been allowed to stay in Britain after being jailed for rape and burglary (Daily Telegraph 26 4 2006). Strangely, there was no suggestion from the police, the court or the media that this was a racist attack.

Quite shockingly, the police so forgot themselves on one occasion that they classified the petrol bombing of Asian shops by a black man as racist (Reuters 30 4 2006). Dearie me, have the long years of indoctrinating Her Majesty’s finest with multiculturalism been for naught? They haven’t even learnt the most basic rule of political correctness: ONLY WHITES ARE RACIST.

August 2006

“We’ve done work here which shows that people, frankly, when there aren’t other pressures, like to live within a comfort zone which is defined by racial sameness. People feel happier if they are with people who are like themselves…” Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) chairman Trevor Phillips on the BBC programme The Happiness Factor .

Out of the mouths of babes and race relations functionaries. Of course this is not an honest admission that heterogeneous societies are a bad idea: note the “like to live in a comfort zone” implying that this is weak and self-indulgent behaviour. For people such as Phillips, the admission of what every human being knows in his heart of hearts – that people prefer their own – is merely an acknowledgement of how things are not how they will always be. Faced with the unfortunate facts of human nature the answer for the liberal bigot is always “more education is needed”. The fact that “more education” has never succeeded in changing human nature is simply evidence for the liberal bigot that “even more education is needed.”

But let us not look a gift horse in the mouth. Apart from being an hilarious Peter Simple character made flesh, our Trevor also has a genius for letting the racial cat unintentionally out of the bag. During a speech in which he peddled the routine multiculturalist line that racial tensions were being stoked by the “far right” and that more race riots could be expected, the CRE chairman suddenly let slip “Everyone thinks it’s going to be in the northern towns but it could be anywhere.” (Metro 26 5 2006). So there you have it, according to the CRE chairman the whole of the country has become a racial tinderbox.

Some white liberal bigots have got the wind up sufficiently to drop any pretence at multiculturalist waffle. Take the novelist A N Wilson: “We can see that, quite literally, Europe is being invaded before our eyes… There is only one policy which will work, the cruel Spanish one of repatriation…While the politicians of three generations have failed all of us by fearing to be labelled racist, they have allowed the effective dismantling and destruction of our civilisation…” (Evening Standard 19 5 2006).

Of course, as with the followers of all ideologies, some liberal bigots have been left behind and are still forlornly spouting the classic multiculturalist line. In early May Telegraph hack Alice Thomson ventured the opinion (3 5 2006) that if Britain followed America’s recent lead and had a day’s strike by immigrants “You would have to be living in a yurt and eating nettle soup in the middle of the country not to be affected. From the moment you woke up and tried to turn on the radio and television you would realise something was wrong. Most cab drivers taking presenters into studios are immigrants.” Some cruel souls might think broadcasting studios bereft of liberal bigot presenters would be something of a plus.

The reality is that if such a strike took place the large majority of native Britons would notice very little was happening because most parts of the country still do not have large immigrant populations and the jobs which the multiculturalists are always telling us cannot be filled with indigenous workers are, strangely, filled by just these people in most of the country.

The start of the football World Cup brought forth the usual forest of St George’s flags and the now traditional crowd of Anglophobe Celts and quisling members of the English elite equipped with their jolly cries of “English racism” at the first public sign of English national sentiment. The starting gun for the Anglophobe charge was fired by headmistress Karen Healy of Birches Head High School in Stoke who first banned the flag from her school and then belatedly accepted it after a flood of criticism swept over her. The worst World Cup related Anglophobe incident occurred in Scotland where seven-year-old Hugo Clapshaw was punched on the head in an Edinburgh park for the “crime” of wearing an England shirt (Daily Telegraph 22 6 2006).

The police went off on a jolly jaunt in June when they raided a house in Forest Gate in London after receiving a tip off that its occupants were making a chemical bomb hidden in a jacket for a suicide bomber to use. The house was raided, two brothers, Abul Koyair and Abul Kahar, were taken into custody, one of them after being shot in the shoulder by the police. The house was taken apart. Nothing was found… except œ30,000 in cash (16 6 2006). Splendidly thrifty fellows these Muslims.

The two brothers were released without charge. The police swore blind that their informant was considered reliable and hinted the chemical bomb might have been moved. The public as usual were left in the dark.

Whether or not the informant was generally reliable and did or did not give the information believing it to be true is sadly beside the point. The dangerous truth is that MI5 and Special Branch do not have, and cannot have, the resources to deal with a British Muslim fifth column numbering several million.

In the wildly improbable event that Britain runs short of home-grown terrorists our quisling elite (quislings in the service of liberal internationalism) have made certain more can come from abroad. The Man charged with reviewing Britain’s border security, Lord Carlile of Berriew QC, has concluded that our border controls are paper thin because of a woeful lack of staff: “This kind of manpower weakness is no discouragement to terrorists….This is still a cause of complaint by Special Branch officers. The adequacy of staffing at HM Customs and Excise at ports of entry of all kinds is an important matter.” (Daily Telegraph 20 6 2006).

October 2006

Elites only have one settled principle – to do anything necessary to maintain their power and privilege. A splendid example of the principle in action is the growing race realist talk amongst our liberal bigot ruling class. Note I say talk, for our elite have not yet moved from rhetoric to action, nor will they do so if they think they can get away with rhetoric alone. Nonetheless, the rhetorical shift has been dramatic, a fact maverick leftie Rod Liddle neatly nailed in the Sunday Times (27 8 2006) with his article “How right wing the left sounds after its moment of racial truth”.

Ruth Kelly, the female impersonator who rejoices in the Orwellian title of Communities Secretary, caught the new mood, viz: “We have moved from a period of near uniform consensus on the value of multiculturalism to one where we can encourage that debate by questioning whether it is encouraging separateness… We must not be censored by political correctness.” (Daily Telegraph 24-25 8 2006). Dontcha love the “We must not be censored by political correctness” from a member of a government which has done more than any other to enshrine it as the secular state religion? Even better is the shrieking lie that “We have moved from a period of uniform consensus on the value of multiculturalism…” The only near uniform consensus on multiculturalism has been the overwhelming feeling amongst native white Britons that it is a hated instrument of the elite designed to suppress their interests and culture whilst promoting those of the immigrant minorities.

Ms Kelly is now all for integration. Sadly, there is little good news on that front, but I can bring her one heartening story courtesy of Johann Hari of the Evening Standard. He reported, with a shed-load of liberal bigot angst, that large numbers of black and Asian women are shock horror! devoted to skin-lightening products. When asked why, the little minxs failed miserably to follow the standard pc script and replied “I just feel better”, “I feel more confident” and “I get more men checking me out” (Evening Standard 28 7 2006).

The latest chapter in the sordid act of treason which is post-war mass immigration was opened with the Government’s admission that around 600,000 immigrants from the new EU states have arrived since 2004. This splendidly robust figure compares with the measly pre-EU enlargement Home Office estimate of 13,000.

Race realism is even extending to the economic effects of immigration. Having sworn blind that it did not place undue pressure on our infrastructure or reduce the job opportunities and lower the wages available to native Britons, politicos are now singing a different tune. The ex-Tory Cabinet minister Peter Lilley writing in the Sunday Telegraph (27 8 2006) admitted that immigrants increased overall GDP but reduced GDP per capita and described claims that Britain is generally short of labour as “nonsense”, correctly attributing labour shortages to poor pay, shortages which vanished when pay was raised, as has happened in the case of nurses.

Boston (pop 50,000) in Lincolnshire knows all about EU immigration. This town was the lucky recipient of the artistic endeavours of an American Jordan Baseman who made a video about an anonymous woman who is one of 5,000 Portuguese immigrants who have descended on Boston in recent years. The woman, who is not seen but is simply heard off camera, whines about the hostility of the native population who she gaily describes as “ignorant people who are jealous of the fact that I have a job and they don’t”. (Daily Telegraph 19 08 2006). How outrageous of the good folk of Boston to be angered by a foreign influx amounting to 10% of their population which takes jobs from locals.

But it isn’t only jobs which immigrants take from Britons. Lucky Chistian Bola, 18, arrived here three years ago from the Congo and sought asylum and managed to gain a much sort-after place at one of London’s few remaining grammar schools, Latymer. He gained this prize after his local vicar David Bolster expressed the opinion that Bola “could benefit from studying at the school.” (Evening Standard 18 08 2006). Unkind folk might think one of our own people studying in his place would have benefited the country rather more.

The enemy within storyline has been as strong as ever. Two months ago we had the Forest Gate fiasco: in August an alleged plot to blow up airliners on the north Atlantic run appeared over the horizon. As I write 12 young British-based Muslims have been charged in relation to the plot, most with conspiracy to murder (Daily Telegraph 23 8 2006), with another 8 are still being questioned.

Sometimes I wonder why Muslims bother with terrorism in Britain when the British establishment is so eager to embrace their more advanced Islamists. Take the Foreign Office, Its chief adviser on Islamic affairs is one Mockbul Ali, 26, one-time political editor of the newspaper of the Union of Muslim Students. Soon after 9/11 Ali wrote in that paper “If you are not white, you are most likely to be liberated through bombings, massacres and chaos.” (Sunday Times July 30, 2006).

Kieran Keenan discovered what it is to be a native white Briton in Britain 2006. A history graduate, Mr Keenan had the temerity to apply for the post of trainee museum assistant at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton. Alas, his skin-colour disqualified him. A Brighton and Hove Council political apparatchik explained helpfully that it was “positive action” which is legal because it is “lawful to offer training only for people of a certain racial group or to encourage people from that group to apply” (Daily Telegraph 13 7 2006). Strange how such “positive action” is never offered to the native white population in areas such as the law, medicine, the BBC, the CRE and professional football and cricket, in all of which they are grossly under-represented.

December 2006

As this is sadly the last issue of Right Now! I am going to give no more than a nod to the big issues such as the fundamental act of treason which is post-war immigration and the various fifth columns we have within our country and instead try to cover some of the ground I wished to cover into previous columns but couldn’t because of pressure of space.

The biggest omission has been insufficient on honest-to-goodness non-political crime – sadly, I never managed to fit in the promised “black violence special” (what a column that would have been!)

British governments no longer publish general crime statistics by race. In their absence, the best that can be done to get at the truth is to monitor media reports and this is what I have done. For each two month period between issues of Right Now! I have kept two files of press cuttings. One file related to immigration and one to anti-social behaviour by immigrants and British-born ethnics.

The sheer volume of the cuttings was an eye-opener. For a subject which we are forever being told by the liberal bigot elite “is not a major issue with the British public”, the mainstream media do seem to devote a startling amount of space to immigration, while the representation of immigrants and British-born ethnics in reports of anti-social behaviour ranging from horrendous noise to murder and gang-rape is so grossly disproportionate to their representation in the population as to verge upon the comic.

Judged by the files I kept, crimes such as rape, murder, serious assaults and mugging are overwhelmingly committed by black men. One crime – the rape of a woman of a different race from the rapist -appears to be an almost exclusively a black and Asian crime (predominantly a black crime). Overwhelmingly, it was white women who were raped in such cases. Gang-rape of white women by blacks and Asian was not uncommon while gang-rape by whites is very rare indeed – I could find no instance of a white gang raping a black or Asian woman. Gun crime is overwhelmingly a black crime, a fact reflected in the existence of Operation Trident unit in the Met Police which deals with black-on-black killings.

Asians lag behind black men in the violent crime stakes, although they are coming up strongly on the rails, particularly in the field of “honour killings”. Nonetheless, the favourite crime Asian crime still seems to be fraud.

By way of comparison I kept a cuttings folder for a two month period for murder, manslaughter, rape and GBH committed by native white Britons and separated the immigrant and British-born ethnics instances of such crimes to another file. The native white Britons file ended up thinner than that for immigrants and British-born ethnics.

Another very difficult statistic to get hold of is the cost of “diversity” action within public bodies. Occasionally the veil is lifted as happened with the Met Police. The Evening Standard reported (27 10 2006) that ‘last year alone œ187 million – six per cent of the Met budget – went on “equality and diversity training”‘. It is a fair bet that most of the money will have gone on race-related work because of the Met’s religious desire to “make the force look like London”.

The other major issues which have been under addressed are gipsies and the over-representation of blacks and Asians in public employment. Gipsies are important because they represent a long established group with Britain, yet they behave as though the rest of the population is their prey. This behaviour is simply explained: it is the tactic of the nomad, namely despoil an area of resources then move on. Moral: any group, native or immigrant, which feels they are outside the moral bounds of the society they are physically within will feel entitled to behave badly to those outside the group. That is why multi-racial/ethnic societies are always a disaster: there is no shared sense of moral commitment to the whole of the population.

The widespread over-representation of blacks and Asians in public employment is epitomised by the BBC. The Beeb publicly boasts that they have a target for 12.5% of their staff to come from ethnic minorities. That is an over-representation of around 50% based on the last census in 2001. Leaked minutes from a BBC internal discussion meeting showed that even BBC staffers thought they were unbalanced – the erstwhile BBC political editor Andrew Marr was minuted as saying that the BBC is an “organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people.” (Daily Telegraph 27 10 2006).

My purpose in writing the JoD has been twofold. The first was to provide a counterblast to the perpetual deluge of multicultural propaganda which tells us how lucky we are to have had our country turned from a monocultural desert to a blooming garden of ethnic diversity, a lie on a par with Stalin’s claims to have created a new socialist heaven on earth.

My second reason was to show that it is still possible in Britain to write about race and immigration in the most forthright way without running foul of the law. I have ensured that all the candidates likely to initiate a complaint to the police about my column have had sight of it, from Trevor Phillips at the CRE to the most pc of journalists and politicians. None of them has tried to have me prosecuted.

There is a lesson in that: race-related police action and prosecutions will only normally be taken against those whom the authorities think can be intimidated and who will, consequently, not speak out against their mistreatment. It is also worth noting that the vast majority of police investigations of these indubitably political crimes do not result in prosecution, their real purpose being to intimidate the general public into self-censorship. Stand firm and there is very little chance of being prosecuted for inciting racial hatred.

If anyone wishes to continue publishing the column please contact me at anywhere156@yahoo.co.uk.

The column below was written for the May 2006 issue. This was never published because the May 2006 Right Now! was moved to June 2006 for which I wrote a new column.

Being a liberal bigot means living a life of constant disappointment as resolutely non-pc reality rudely intrudes into their pc fantasy world. By far the most inconvenient reality at the moment is Islam. Sadly, while liberal bigots ever more frenziedly chant their mantra “Islam is a religion of peace”, Muslims amuse themselves by giving them the lie direct.

In February the followers of the religion of peace and mercy were in fine voice on the streets of London. They were marching against the supposed insult to Islam of cartoons featuring Mohammed published in Denmark. Gaily they skipped along with banners bearing jolly messages such as “Behead those who insult Islam”, “Massacre those who insult Islam”, “Butcher those who insult Islam”, “Slay those who insult Islam”, “Behead the one who insults the Prophet”, “Europe you will pay, your extermination is on the way”. One fine fellow, Omar Khayam, a criminal out on parole (you couldn’t make it up), added to the festive outing by dressing up as a suicide bomber (Metro 7 2 2006).

The police did their pc duty and made no attempt to stop the placards being carried and, just to make sure the demonstrators were not harassed by wicked whites, provided a strong escort as the demonstrators marched. They did make two arrests – of white non-Muslim counter-protestors who carried placards with one or more of the Mohammed cartoons. The police also attempted to prevent press photographers taking photographs of the demonstration and threatened to arrest at least one person who had the temerity to ask why the police were not arresting the placard bearers calling for murder. (Sunday Telegraph 5 2 2006).

The Metropolitan Police’s spokesman immediately after the demonstration gave no indication of any investigation of those with the banners, but merely “explained” the reluctance to arrest demonstrators by citing public order fears (as Rachel Sylvester put it: “One law for the bloodthirsty: another for the tolerant” – Daily Telegraph 6 2 2006). Eventually the police set up an investigation, but only after vigorous protests in the mainstream media, from the public (500 separate complaints were eventually made to the Met) and, perhaps most importantly, a statement by the Tory Home Affairs spokesman, David Davis, viz: “Clearly some of these placards are incitement to violence and, indeed, incitement to murder – an extremely serious offence which the police must deal with and deal with quickly. Whatever your view on these cartoons, we have a tradition of free speech in this country, which has to be protected. Clearly, there can be no tolerance of incitement to murder.”(The Sunday Telegraph of 5th Feb 2006).

The demonstration consisted of hundreds of people, many of them carrying banners inciting violence and murder. By mid-March all of three protesters (Daily Telegraph 16 3 2006) had been arrested by our fearless boys in blue and charged with incitement to murder and the incitement of racial hatred.

No such reluctance about arresting and prosecuting two members of the BNP, their leader Nick Griffin and an activist Mark Collett. They were tried in January on various counts relating to racial insult and incitement. The trial ended with half the charges being swept aside through not guilty verdicts and the others left undecided because the jury was hung.

Only a few hours after the end of the trial word came that the prosecution would be seeking a re-trial on the hung charges, a quest which was satisfied most expeditiously with the re-trial set for October. The trial and re-trial required the agreement of the attorney-general, a member of this Labour Government. The head of the Crown Prosecution Service, the Director of Public Prosecutions Ken MacDonald, is a Labour supporter. It warms the heart to know we have such a disinterested justice system.

The BNP two were charged with offences which resulted from speeches made at meetings of BNP members and only became public property because the BBC placed an undercover reporter Jason Gwynne within the BNP, who secretly recorded them for later broadcast by the BBC. Grotesquely, part of the charges against Griffin concerned his accurate forecast of suicide bombings in Britain, a prediction which came horribly true on July 7 2005. The worst that could be said about the speeches was that some of the language was crude.

Abu Hamza, aka Captain Hook, was brought to book for ten years of inciting racial hatred and various acts of violence including murder. Hamza received seven years at Her Majesty’s pleasure despite his defence counsel, Edward Fitzgerald QC pointing out the embarrassing fact that “It is said he was preaching murder, but he was actually preaching from the Koran itself.” http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper 0,,174-2001006 00.html.

Dr Frank Ellis of Leeds University (who is well known to readers ofRight Now!) has been enjoying the attentions of some of what Aubron Waugh delighted in calling Mrs Williams’ unemployables. Twenty years ago they simply went on the dole: now they go to university.

Frank gave a long and forthright interview to Mark Kennard, the editor of the university student paper the Leeds Student. The interview included reference to Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanan’s IQ and the Wealth of Nations, a book in which the authors compute the average IQ of black Africans to be 70, the level which is recognised in Britain as constituting mental retardation. Cue for the regulation “anti-racist” rentamob squealing for Frank’s dismissal. (As I write – March – this has not happened.)

The interesting thing is that Frank was merely repeating what any psychologist specialising in intelligence testing will take as a given: that blacks have a much lower average IQ than whites and that whites have a less dramatically lower average IQ than Asians of the Chinese racial type. Strangely, no one ever complains about the higher Asian average IQ.

Osama bin Laden: more dangerous dead than alive?

The story coming out of Washington is incoherent. We are told that Al Qaeda at the time of Osama bin Laden’s death was a terrorist organisation with SMERSH-like global reach and capability with bin Laden as its directing mastermind. At the same time the US administration (falsely) depicted him as a coward who used his wife as a human shield, and showed him as a prematurely aged man living in physical circumstances verging on the squalid. As the story moves along they add further demeaning details such as claims that herbal Viagra was found in bin Laden’s medicine chest (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8502363/Osama-bin-Laden-was-a-user-of-herbal-viagra.html) and a large amount pornography discovered in the compound. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8513131/Osama-bin-Laden-dead-large-pornography-stash-found-in-compound.html).

Even as unabashed propaganda that is inept in a world which contains the Internet. Long gone are the days when contradictory propaganda messages could be delivered to different audiences safe in the knowledge that the “wrong” message would not end up in unintended ears and eyes. Not only that but the propaganda is remarkably crude. Successful propaganda does not smack you in the face and say “Hey, look at me!” Rather it suggests by circumstance and implication.

It is clear what the US wanted to achieve; to sell the story of a menacing and capable terrorist leader and his organisation to justify the raid to Western audience and to make bin Laden seem contemptible in the eyes of Muslims. It has achieved neither end as the multiple protests against the nature of the raid and bin Laden’s killing show and the outraged response of radical Muslims. The credibility of the propaganda was further eroded by the ineptitude of the bewildering number of alterations in the story told by Washington. The US Government has variously claimed there was fierce firefight then admitted that only one person fired at them and he was not in the main house; that bin Laden was shot whilst firing an automatic weapon then admitted he was unarmed when shot l); that bin Laden used one of his wives as human shield and she was shot while in that position which was changed to her not being used as a human shield and shot as she charged a Navy Seal. ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8489658/Osama-bin-Laden-was-not-armed-and-did-not-use-wife-as-human-shield.htm).

The most incredible change of story concerned the original claim by Washington that Obama, senior cabinet members such as Hilary Clinton and their advisers had watched the raid as it happened with a live feed from cameras attached to the Navy Seals’ helmets. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110503/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_bin_laden_obama_s_suspense) . A photograph of Obama and co watching agog adorned the front pages of newspapers until an abrupt about turn occurred and the story changed to Obama et al only having the live feed up to the time the Seals entered the compound. (Http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8493391/Osama-bin-Laden-dead-Blackout-during-raid-on-bin-Laden-compound.html). The story then changed again to there being no live feed from within the compound and then back to an admission that there was a live feed but Obama and co had not watched it. (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/05/12/eveningnews/main20062410.shtml). Add to this nonsense the US claim that bin Laden had been buried at sea and the refusal to release either still photographs or video of bin Laden either dead or at the moment of killing and the White House could not have produced a better launching platform for conspiracy theories if they had tried.

Notwithstanding such  crassness, the most important question to decide is how far bin Laden and Al Qaeda represented a threat to the West. No significant terrorist attack attributable to Muslims, whether Al Qaeda members or not, has occurred since 2005. In the light of this it is reasonable to conclude that the ability and/or desire of radical Muslims to do serious damage to the West is next to non-existent at present. There have been a substantial number of arrests and trials of Muslims in the West on terrorist charges since 2005, but these have either been of people who were deemed to have been interested in making attacks without having the means to do so (the large majority) or farcically crude attempts at bombing with bombs which either did not explode or had no capacity to cause major damage.

To go six years without carrying out a single major attack or the discovery of any planned attack which would have been serious if it had been carried out strongly suggests that bin Laden and Al Qaeda were a spent force as far as the West was concerned. Islamic terrorism has continued on a large scale since 2005 in other parts of the world but it has been concentrated within Muslim countries. How far Al Qaeda has been responsible for that is debatable, but what it does indicate is that radical Muslims in practice really want is their form of Islam in Islamic countries, not the clutching at the dream of a universal Caliphate. Such a desire fits comfortably with human nature because what the overwhelming majority of human beings want is to live in a society with which they are familiar and in which they feel secure.

It is also questionable whether bin Laden was really intent on sabotaging the West for the sake of it , rather than undertaking and advocating terrorist attacks on the West to remove Western powers, especially the USA, from Muslim lands in North Africa and the Middle East. Bin Laden’s last known interview appeared in a Pakistan newspaper on September 28, 2001, and was translated by the BBC World Monitoring Service on September 29, 2001. In the interview, bin Laden says: “I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. . . . Whoever committed the act of 11 September are not the friends of the American people. I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks the common American people have been killed. . . . The Western media is unleashing such a baseless propaganda, which makes us surprised, but it reflects on what is in their hearts and gradually they themselves become captive of this propaganda. . . . Terror is the most dreaded weapon in the modern age and the Western media is mercilessly using it against its own people.” (http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24697).

If that was his true intent, bin Laden was essentially in the same position as the Provisional IRA, namely, a man willing to use violence to achieve clear practical and finite ends. That does not in any way excuse his support for the killing of those without power or influence or any practical part in the ills he perceives from Western action and influence in the Muslim world, but it does radically alter the threat which is offered to the West.

To the objective fact of an absence of serious Islamic terrorist action in the West for six years, can be added the evidence of the circumstances of the compound in which bin Laden died. When the news of his death broke he was described by the as living in luxury. In fact photographs and videos of the exterior of the compound and the interior of the main building show it to be hastily erected without any concern for aesthetics and the interior shots showed rooms having the type of disorganised squalor characteristic of squats. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8500525/Osama-bin-Laden-home-video-terrorist-leader-shown-as-frail-figure-watching-himself-on-TV.html) .

We are told there was no phone or internet connection in the compound and that “a mother lode” of data from computers and a mountain of memory sticks was taken by the Navy Seals. The early reports said that the data was unencrypted. In addition, bin Laden left videos of himself, both out-takes from videos intended for public consumption and those showing him relaxing in his hideaway watching a television showing programmes about him. Very strange behaviour for an arch criminal mastermind with supposedly considerable resources, material and human, to call upon.

To this can be added the strange lack of security in the design of the bin Laden hideaway . Imagine you are planning a secure bolthole which is going to be built from scratch. Living in a compound with plenty of open space is an obvious security breach, because apart from the possibility of helicopters landing inside the walls, it would be vulnerable to ground assault. A much safer bet would be a building which incorporated the exterior wall of the entire plot with a courtyard in the centre to provide recreation. The courtyard could be covered to prevent surveillance from the air. There would not have to be windows in the exterior walls. In the main building in the compound there were substantial windows , an obvious danger from both the point of view of surveillance and forced entry. Such a building would also be much less obvious as a place designed for defence.

As for accommodation, would you choose to live at the top of a building, as bin Laden is reported to have done, or in a basement? At the top you are exposed and the accommodation can be readily seen and attacked. Build a basement and you are hidden away from exterior view and the entrance can be disguised from those entering the building. It would also be possible to have disguised room leading from the first basement to another basement. A basement would also give the opportunity to provide an escape tunnel if the builder could be trusted not to divulge the fact. At the very least a panic room would have been expected somewhere in the building.

The picture painted by bin Laden’s physical circumstances and lack of proper security is that of a man who far from being hyper-cautious and security conscious was (1) decidedly naïve about security beyond the obvious step of not having a broadband connection or phones and (2) surrounded by those who were equally clueless. This suggests a lack of sophistication and intelligence in both bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Add that picture to the absence of serious Islamic terrorist action in the West since 2005 and it is reasonable to conclude that bin Laden did not represent any credible threat to the West at the time of his death and for years beforehand.

The US authorities have claimed that evidence of planned attacks on the West, including ideas in bin Laden’s handwriting, were found during the raid. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8499211/Osama-bin-Laden-dead-bin-Laden-was-masterminding-fresh-atrocities-from-compound.html). Even if that is true, it does not mean they were credible plans. Rather, they smack of the type of fantasy recorded in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s Table Talk which contained conversations recorded by various people involving Hitler in social gatherings during the last World War. Hitler envisaged vast schemes such as clearing the Ukraine of Ukrainians to allow the land to be settled by Germans and building a railway from Germany to India. They never got beyond his dreams. The same seems to have been true of any plans bin Laden had for further major terrorist action in the West .

It will be interesting to see exactly how many arrests or killings of Al Qaeda or other Islamic terrorists are made or claimed by the US Government over the next few months. If the cache of information found in the bin Laden compound is as great a find as the US Government is claiming, it would be reasonable to expect considerable numbers of Islamic terrorists to be quickly removed from active service. If that does not happen, it will be reasonable to assume the bin Laden cache was rather less than a defining moment t in the “war on terror”.

The killing of bin Laden is simply a continuation of the mistake the Americans made after 911 – assuming it was a mistake rather than a calculated act to provide either an excuse to intervene in the Muslim world or to create an enemy to justify greater governmental authoritarianism – of treating the event as an act of war. Suppose the attack had been undertaken by the likes of the Oklahoma City Bomber Timothy McVeigh rather than foreign Muslims, what would have happened? The USA would have simply treated it as a crime. They would have called for the abridgement for civil liberties, white separatist groups and militias would have probably received a hard time for short a while and the proponents of gun control would have shouted ever louder, despite the absence of firearms in the attack. But the American Government would not have said it was an act of war or have decreed that every nation on earth must cooperate with the USA in rooting out “terrorism with global reach” as defined by the American Government or be an enemy of the USA, let alone declare a “war on terrorism”.

Far-fetched? Well, consider what happened after the Oklahoma bombing, which was mass murder on a dramatic scale in its own right – several hundred died, including women and children, and many more were injured. The US government did not say it was an “act of war” although there was as much if not more reason to call it that as there was to describe the 11 September attacks in that manner – McVeigh was indubitably mounting war against the US Government if the WTC attackers were judged to have done. Yet the US government did not declare a “war on terrorism”.

Neither did they, for all the illiberal noises made by politicians at the time, generally abridge civil liberties. Instead they treated the perpetrators as criminals and brought just two people to court and tried them. No one else – although it is odds on that more were involved – has been charged with a capital offence in connection with the crime. Whether the trials were entirely fair or whether the US government was not keen on delving deeper because of federal penetration of the group which planned the bombing (or even conceivably for some more sinister reason) are open questions. What is certain is that the American public were able to accept this action as adequate in terms of retribution.

That no group claimed responsibility for the 911 attacks of itself provided an opportunity to keep the official response within bounds. Had the US government treated the event as a criminal act internal to America, the group responsible for the hi-jackings would either have had to claim it or would have been left in the media cold. By taking the initiative in defining the status of the act, the Bush government played into the hands of the hijackers and their associates. They should have treated the attacks of 911 as a crime. They should have grabbed hold of the fact that the immediate perpetrators of the crime had suffered self-inflicted capital punishment and kept a very firm grasp on it.

Once the 11 Sept attacks were defined as an “act of war” the whole psychological shape of the event altered. If you are at war, the enemy gains a quasi-formal status. Let them remain criminals and everything is simpler, both psychologically and practically. Because the hijackers were killed, the declaration of “war” meant that another enemy had to be sought for punishment. As the Hijackers were Muslims who had operated within the USA for some time before the attack on the World Trade centre, that immediately raised a severe difficulty, namely, what to do if there were other members of the terrorist group still being active in the US. This was a hideously delicate matter even if only foreign Muslims were in the extended group, but it became infinitely more so if native born US Muslims were found to have some involvement. If the arch enemy was recognised as being within the US, the US would have to act in a way which was likely to inflame all Muslims in America and probably increase racial tension generally. The immediately safer option was to choose an enemy abroad, who could be made the font of all responsibility and evil. Hence, the choice of Osama bin Laden as a demon to hate and a demon, moreover, supposedly controlling an international conspiracy aimed at destroying the West. Sherlock Homes’ arch foe, Professor Moriaty, comes irresistibly to mind.

The need for a focus of evil is still with the US Government. Only days after bin Laden’s death the Barack Obama’s National Security Adviser Tom Donilon declared al-Qaeda’s second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri to be the world’s “number one terrorist” thus providing a replacement demon to epitomise the Islamic terrorist threat (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8501294/Osama-bin-Laden-dead-Ayman-al-Zawahiri-the-worlds-number-one-terrorist.html) . Because the US demonised bin Laden and his organisation, that gave him not merely immense publicity but also a greatly enhanced status and credibility amongst Muslims (and one suspects in the Third World generally), a credibility which may well be enhanced by his death. All the Muslims (and much of the non-Muslim Third World) see is a man made a martyr and hero by a country possessing more firepower and resources than any other in history. Bin Laden may well be more dangerous dead than alive.

Why the nature of bin Laden’s death matters

For the purposes of this piece I am going to assume that Osama bin Laden was killed during the American raid, although by disposing of the body at sea , the refusal to release photographs or video of bin Laden’s body, the absence of any first hand testimony from  the survivors of the raid (all  we  have is what the Pakistani authorities say the wives and children have said) and the continual changing of the story by the US government, just about everything has been done that could be done  to feed conspiracy theories.  (On the facts delivered so far,  it is simple to construct a coherent scenario in which bin Laden was not killed and the whole episode was a Wag the Dog construction.)

It is easy to persuade the general public that the killing is cause for a Thatcherite  cry of Rejoice! Rejoice!  After all this is the man who has been presented for a decade by the Western media and politicians as the personification of terrorist evil, the organiser of 911 and other enormities  and an implacable enemy of Western society. Does he not deserve summary execution? Why offer him justice when he has been responsible for thousands of deaths?  Many, probably most people in the USA feel that way. A large number in Britain and Europe do as well.  So what is the case against?

To make the case as clear-cut as possible, let us take him at that valuation assigned to him by Western politicians and  media.  The first and strongest argument is  that of precedent.  If  it is accepted that this raid was (a) legitimate despite the fact that  the US ostensibly operated in a foreign country without that country’s knowledge or permission and (b) the shooting of bin Laden was lawful, no place or person on Earth would in principle be safe from foreign powers crossing borders to  kidnap, kill,  maim or destroy  property as they  as they choose.

As for the raid itself, what is the position with regard to international law? It is indubitably illegal under international law to carry armed action into a foreign country without the permission of that country  unless it is in what is known as “hot pursuit”. This would cover a situation where  a country has been invaded by a foreign force, whether that be large or small, and in the pursuit of the invaders the chase crosses national boundaries.  That clearly is not the case here.

The other legal circumstances for an attack  would be where a serious and immediate threat was offered by a potential enemy, for example, in Napoleonic times if a great fleet  was massed in Northern  France  with large numbers of troop carrying ships, it would be reasonable to imagine that an invasion of England was to take place and consequently to take
pre-emptive action.  Again, this class of situation patently did not apply in the bin Laden attack, not least because al Qaeda has not be able to mount a serious terrorist attack in the West since 2005.

If Pakistan knew about  the attack in advance and  agreed to it, it would have been legal in as much as the raid took place.  It would not automatically make what happened in the raid legal.   The fact that no Pakistani military or police response to the fighting in the compound occurred , even though the Naval Seals who conducted the raid  were there for
around 40 minutes,  is a strong pointer to Pakistani government covert  knowledge and permission.   That the raid took place in a garrison town crawling with Pakistani troops  makes the failure to respond even more telling.   There were also reports that residents near to the bin Laden compound were warned an hour before the raid to put their lights out.

That leaves the killing of bin Laden. Was it murder or self-defence?  If the raid was illegal the killing was culpable; if the raid was legal the killing may have been legal.   However, the ever shifting  US descriptions of what happened at the compound are  indicative of something being not quite right. First we were told there was a “ fierce firefight” , then it was admitted that only one person – bin Laden’s courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti – who was not in the main building but a security post outbuilding, had fired a shot at the Navy Seals who carried out the attack.  First we were told bin Laden  had been armed and fired on the Seals; this changed to bin Laden being unarmed. First were told that bin Laden had used one of his wives as a human shield and she had been shot dead as a consequence; then the story became that the wife had been only wounded (in the leg) as  she charged at a Seal  after he daughter was hurt.  Eventually the story of bin Laden’s shooting became that a Seal had fired at him outside a door on the third floor of the building and missed after which bin Laden went through the door to the room in which he supposedly had spent the past few years where he was shot twice, once in the chest and once in the head. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8491113/Osama-Bin-Laden-dead-White-House-backtracks-on-how-bin-Laden-died.html)

At any time such variations in a story would be highly suspicious.  In this case they are simply incredible because not only must the Navy Seals conducting the attack have known the
truth, but  the  audio and video coverage of the attack  from cameras operated by the Seals was being fed back to Washington as the attack was taking place.  Even here the official story changed. At first it appeared from the official version  – which included a photograph showing  Obama  et al  raptly watching real-time coverage of the raid – that   Obama, other senior members of his cabinet such as Hilary Clinton  and Obama’s  staff  had viewed the entire attack.  (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110503/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_bin_laden_obama_s_suspense) . After a day or so  the story changed and the official line was that Obama and co had ceased to have any video or audio fed to them after the Seals entered the compound (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8493391/Osama-bin-Laden-dead-Blackout-during-raid-on-bin-Laden-compound.html).  This probably was  done to give them deniability … “No, I did not see Osama shot or anyone else shot or harmed…”  after it transpired that no one in the main building had fired a gun and bin Laden had been shot whilst unarmed.  Nonetheless,  it is reasonable to believe that the cameras did continue to roll throughout the operation and that a live feed of the entire attack was fed to the head of the CIA as was originally reported . Consequently the truth must have been known when the initial false information was released. This episode has elements of Wag the Dog about it. Obama and co probably got so carried away with the PR  aspects that they made a fatal error: filming the raid. Worse thing they could have done. I bet they are all now  wetting themselves in case the video of the attack leaks.

The shooting of an unarmed  bin Laden of itself makes a good case for this being a pre-determined  killing.  On the one hand we have the Navy Seals, who are represented as the nearest thing to Superman in human flesh by the US authorities, and on the other a sick, prematurely aged unarmed man in his fifties.  Are we to believe that they could not have overpowered him with little risk to themselves?   It has been claimed by the US Government at various times that he was shot because  he was firing an automatic weapon,  that the Seals were afraid bin Laden  might have a suicide belt strapped to him,  and most absurdly that by dodging back into the room after the Seals had shot at him and missed,  bin Laden  had shown resistance which justified his killing.  That there was very little chance of bin Laden being taken alive even if that was an intention  is shown  by the instructions given to the Seals that he could only be taken alive if he was found naked (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8491768/Osama-bin-laden-would-have-to-be-naked-for-surrender.html).
That extreme rule of engagement suggests there was never an intention to take him alive.

Exactly what killed him is uncertain, with reports from the White House  claiming variously that  it was one shot in the head and one in the chest, two shots in the head  or  one shot in the chest and  two shots to the head. ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8499216/Osama-bin-Laden-death-al-Qaedaleader-killed-after-he-retreated-into-his-room.html) . As the body was disposed of in the sea and no photographic evidence of his death has been released  it is impossible to know what wounds were inflicted. However, if he was hit with two shots wide apart, one to the body and one to the head,  that could suggest he was first wounded  in the chest then finished off with a shot to the head.  It is also possible that bin Laden may not have been shot in the chest but in the back. If so  he would have been unlikely to have presented a n immediate threat to highly trained special forces troops.  Alternatively it may have  been a  deliberate execution. Second-hand reports of what  bin Laden’s  12-year-old daughter has supposedly told the Pakistani authorities lend credence t o the idea.  She reputedly witnessed the killing and is reported as saying that  bin Laden was in the hands of the Seals when he was killed. http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Osama-Was-Not-Armed-During-Raid-Daughter-Says-He-Was-Captured-And-The-Killed/Article/201105115984701).  If this happened it might provide the  explanation for why the story about Obama and co watching the entire raid on a live feed was changed so that they could not be questioned about how bin Laden was killed.

Where does this all leave us? Certainly not in the realm of justice.  There are prima facie grounds for believing the raid and the killing and woundings  that took place were illegal  under international law.  Ostensibly there was a gross breach of Pakistan’s sovereignty and the circumstances of the killings, especially that of bin Laden suggest manslaughter at best and murder at worst. But the  truth is that International law is no law at all, because there is no proper jurisdiction. By that I mean the law cannot  be enforced generally and without
fear or favour, There is no equality before the law, merely the exercise of power by those with it. Weak states  get invaded by the strong if the strong choose to invade.  Sometimes
the breaches of national sovereignty are given the legal fig leaf of  a UN resolution as there was  in the invasion of Afghanistan and more recently in the case of Libya with resolution 1973,  sometimes there is not as was the case  with the intervention in the Balkans after  Yugoslavia broke up. What this means is that the Americans involved in the raid, both those who planned  and those who executed it will never be investigated or brought to trial. It was not even a quasi-legal act,  but  simply a  massively powerful country acting unilaterally
to suit its own purposes.

The legal flimsiness of a UN resolution can be seen from the fact that action is taken without them if they are not forthcoming. This fragility can be seen further from  the way that  where resolutions are passed, once action is begun the terms of the resolutions  are frequently grossly exceeded , as is happening with the war in Libya where the UN sanctioned forces are acting as the rebels’  airforce and navy  and patently trying to kill Gaddafi despite the resolution only empowering  those enforcing it to protect the civilian population.   Sometimes, as was the case with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, this expansion of action takes place before an attack has begun by the actors in the attack claiming that UN resolutions passed before an attack was mooted are sufficient to legalise the attack, even if it is clear that they gave no such mandate.

There are  two  further problem with the UN granting legal sanction.  The first is obvious, namely, the five permanent members of the Security Council – USA, UK, France, Russia,
China – have the power of veto over any UN resolution. That means they can stop any legalising of action by the UN, including action against themselves,  without regard to any legal principles or process.  No legal system can be called legitimate which allows some of the actors within the territory it encompasses  to stand outside  its jurisdiction.

The second concerns the source of the legal authority of the UN.   It is an organisation of 192 states, the vast majority of which are dictatorships of varying degrees of brutality ,  most are deeply corrupt,  a fair number  are in a state of perpetual civil war and few have a meaningful justice system by which I mean one which attempts to provide equality before the law
and observes such things as rational rules of evidence and due process.   It is a strange crowd to be acting as a dispenser of justice.   In reality, it is simply a group comprised mainly of the vicious and the corrupt which has arrogated to itself power and called power legal authority.

Bad state habits abroad also have a knack of washing back into the country from which they came. Let a country have its will through violence abroad and the government of that country will be tempted often enough to transport such behaviour to the domestic arena to suppress political dissent .  Even if naked violence is not used, commonly  the freedom of a society will often be reduced, vide the Patriot Act in the USA (http://www.fincen.gov/statutes_regs/patriot/index.html) and the Terrorism  Act of 2006  in the UK (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/11/contents).

Those who value the nation state should be alarmed by this raid, not least because the attack was simply one in a growing series  of actions supported by the West where national sovereignty has been over-ridden in the most flagrant and  brutal fashion and entangled  Western nations, most notably the USA and Britain, in a seemingly interminable series of wars  in which they have  no natural interest,  beginning with the intervention in the Balkans after the breakup of Yugoslavia through to the  present gratuitous involvement in the Libyan civil war.

This warfare is horribly reminiscent of the perpetual conflict in that great political novel 1984, not only in its continuous nature but in the way allies become foes and foes allies at the drop of a hat.  In this scenario bin Laden has been allotted by Western politicians and the mass media the role  Goldstein occupied  in 1984, the font not only of all evil but of all danger.  It is telling that only days after bin Laden’s death  the  Barack Obama’s National Security Adviser  Tom Donilon declared  al-Qaeda’s second in command  Ayman al-Zawahiri to be the world’s “number one terrorist” thus providing a replacement  demon to epitomise the Islamic terrorist threat  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/al-qaeda/8501294/Osama-bin-Laden-dead-Ayman-al-Zawahiri-the-worlds-number-one-terrorist.html)
.

The preservation of the integrity of national sovereignty  is reason  enough to be disturbed  the nature of  bin Laden’s death, but there also the fact that action such as this  transgresses
precisely the  values which countries such as Britain and the USA purport to embody ; the rule of law, no sentence without trial, the presumption of innocence , freedom from  arbitrary state action. By behaving in such a violent and arbitrary way the USA and by extension the West  hands  a propaganda weapon of great potency to  Islamic terrorists  in particular and terrorists in general and makes outrage against any future Islamic terrorist attacks on the West morally problematic to say the least.  As the Israelis have found with the Palestinians,
state violence from reducing dissent and terrorism, feeds it.

Nothing I have written is intended to justify the views of bin Laden or excuse any act of terrorism.  What I am concerned with is the bigger geo-political picture, both in terms of preserving national sovereignty (which ironically was principle  upon which  the UN was founded) and in ending  Western interference in foreign conflicts which resolve nothing and leave a deep enmity towards the West in  the states who suffer the gratuitous interference.  In terms of the death, maiming, destruction and social dislocation they bring, the most dangerous people in the world are not the likes of al Qaeda  but the liberal internationalists such as Blair and the NeoCons such as George W Bush .  We need to find a way of stopping their insatiable appetite for war from being constantly sated.

How elites feed conspiracy theories

There are conspiracy theories and then there are conspiracy theories.  There are those who believe that Aliens were found in a crashed spacecraft at Roswell in 1947 and the truth  was hidden by US government or that humans are the result of a breeding program engineered by a group giant reptiles called Anunnaki from the Draco constellation as proposed by David Icke.  Then there are conspiracy theories  which arise out of hard facts and a reasonable interpretation of human behaviour and experience.  Two of the latter have been  in the news in he recent weeks:  the furore over Barack Obama’s missing birth certificate and the alleged murder of Osama bin Laden.

In the case of Obama he refused to perform the simple and reasonable act of producing a full birth certificate to prove he was born in the USA for more than three years.  Had he done so when it first became an issue during the 2008 Democratic Primaries it would in all probability have killed the issue.  (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53563.html).  Instead he chose to issue only an abbreviated version which was a computer generated document produced  in 2008. The consequence of this tardiness  is that  Obama still has a poblem, namely, doubters are asking why has it taken so long for him to produce the certificate if it is genuine.   It makes no political sense for him to have let the matter rumble on for three years.

The idea,  frenetically pressed by both Obama and his political and media supporters, that asking a candidate for the Presidency to prove they are qualified to stand is wrong or absurd is peculiar to say the least.  Indeed, if the US constitution is taken seriously, all candidates should as a matter of  course prove their qualification because the Constitution states  that  “No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President” (Article  II section 1).  In the case of Obama, the fact that one parent was a foreign national gives such a request  greater force because of the increased possibility that he might have been born abroad. bearing in mind that presidential candidates make their medical history available to the public – a much more intimate set of data – it is difficult to see why any candidate should object to producing a birth certificate which if it shows the candidate is a” natural born citizen” at worst might reveal that they are illegitimate, something which is scarcely a  scandal to most Americans  these days.   However, in Obama’s case it is part of a pattern because he has been obsessive in keeping secret documentation of his life such as his educational records and his records as state senator in Illinois. (http://www.projectworldawareness.com/2009/07/obama-is-shielding/).   The record he did have to produce – details of his medical history – was minimal running to a single page.  This secrecy suggests that Obama is paranoid about reality clashing with his own version of his life and person in his books “Dreams from my father”  and “The Audacity of Hope”.  He probably has good grounds for his fear because much of his depiction of himself has been shown to be fantasy, for example, his inflation of the importance of  his first job after graduating and his practice of presenting vast tracks of dialogue as reality when they are clearly invention because, as far as is known, he has not kept a journal at any point of his life. (Those wanting a detailed examination of Obama’s tendencies to fantasy can find my The character of Barack Obama in his own words on the American Renaissance website  (http://www.amren.com/mtnews) .  The article is in three parts.  Just  put my name or the title of the article into the search facility).   The argument has been put forward that Obama did not release the full birth certificate for a long time because he was worried that it would provide a lever for demands that he release the rest of his unreleased records. This is nonsense. There is no constitutional requirement for a candidate to do anything other than prove they are a “natural born citizen”.  Hence, the only document which by implication is constitutionally required is a birth certificate.

It has been claimed that there is no  explicit provision for such a check  in the Constitution and consequently no authority or procedure to make such a check. . The answer to that is  simple, the Supreme Court adjudicates on whether the provisions of the Constitution have been breached. They are by implication the body to make the adjudication on presidential  constitutional qualification. That both the Supreme Court  has not intervened on their own initiative or accepted any challenge as having no standing and every  lower court which has  been faced with a request to  force Obama to prove his eligibility has also rejected it on the grounds of lack of standing is distinctly disturbing for how can any US citizen fail to have standing in the matter of whether the President is legitimately qualified? (Having standing in  US courts means having a direct interest in and/or being directly affected by the substance of the suit) .

Apologists for Obama have  suggested that the delay in releasing the full birth certificate was an act of Machiavellian genius to allow the birthers to become ever more demanding before deflating them by producing the document . I do not buy  this, not least because Machiavellian plots rarely succeed. I cannot see what  Obama would gain from delaying the document’s release. Those who think the birther claims are nonsense will not change their minds: the rest of the population will at best continue to wonder why he did not put the  latter to  bed before now and at worst suspect  the document is a forgery.  Not only that, but the birther claims started while he was running for president, a time when they could have  done him real damage.   If Obama did not have a cast iron reason for releasing the full certificate after his election he certainly had one during the primaries and election campaign.

The full certificate Obama has produced   will not convince many of the birthers  simply because of the delay.  It is also worth asking why he has not produced the  original birth certificate issued to his parents.  However,  there is a more general problem. With digital technology it  would be very easy to forge such a document.  The certificate would need  to be subjected to forensic analysis of inks, paper, the handwriting  (to see it is compatible with the person who supposedly filled in and  signed the  form) and so on.  (See  http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/02/27/obama-us-citizenship-and-the-presidency/).  Even a forensic test would not be absolutely conclusive because it is reasonable to presume that it would be possible to replicate ink types or use a blank certificate which has survived since the right period or to “wash” another person’s certificate of their details and impose Obama’s details on the cleansed certificate. An example of the sort of manipulation which can be done is at http://rightnetwork.com/posts/obama-birth-certificate-a-fakeHowever, a forensic test would probably catch any forgery because forgers tend to forget some details which give them away.

That brings us to the alleged murder of  Bin Laden. I say alleged not because there is any doubt about the crime of murder if the reports from the US government are true, but because there has to be a question mark over whether  Bin Laden has in fact been killed. More on the question of whether Osama was killed later.  First let us look at the oddities in the US government’s story.

It is very strange indeed that the body would supposedly have been disposed of so soon and  deliberately placed where it could not be recovered.  If the Pakistanis knew nothing about the raid, then the only people to have seen the body would have been American.  If they did know about the raid, the Pakistani government and security service would have a very good
political reason not to admit they knew anything because they cannot afford for both domestic and political reasons . As for releasing a photograph of the alleged body that would prove nothing because these can easily be forged . An example is at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/02/osama-bin-laden-photo-fake.  It is also dubious whether a photograph of  someone suffering a massive would to the face is likely to be convincing. Nor is there an undisputed photograph or video of Obama since 2001. The appearance of a man, especially a sick ageing one, can change dramatically in ten years.  No one has a clue  of how he looked  in 2011. What the US could do but almost certainly will not do is release the video of the attack including the killing of the claimed Bin Laden.  The claimed DNA evidence would prove nothing because there would be no means of verifying it. Media reports say that the near match was with one of Bin Laden’s sisters.  It would be interesting to know if  she was a full or half sister of Bin Laden (Bin Laden senior had over 50 children by various wives).  If the latter, a match would be less conclusive.

The American government has  described the assault on the compound as resulting in “a fierce firefight”.  Yet they also claim that no American involved in the attack was wounded in the slightest  let alone killed.  Those two statements sit uneasily together. How exactly does a “fierce firefight” occur with one side not suffering any injuries? Nor are there reports of large numbers of casualties on the other side, most of which occurred it seems when the Navy  Seals shot unarmed people.

The initial description of Bin Laden’s death from  Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan painted bin Laden as a  coward using women as a human shield :  “From a visual perspective, here is bin Laden … living in this million dollar-plus compound … hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield. I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.”  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8489236/John-Brennan-In-Quotes.html). The US government has since admitted that no women were used as a human shield.  As there was a live feed to the CIA and the White House of the raid itself plus debriefing of those who took part in the raid, it is difficult to see how the mistake could have been made.  Why did the story change? Perhaps it was because there is  a filmed record of the raid which shows the original claim was false and the propensity for computer files to be leaked these days persuaded the White House that they could not afford to continue the lie for fear of this file going AWOL.

Brennan also claimed  that “If we had the opportunity to take him [Bin Laden] alive, we would have done that.”  The US government has since admitted that Obama  was not armed,  yet they claimed that he had to killed because he was “resisting”.    Let’s examine that claim. We are told on the one hand that the Navy Seals who undertook the  raid are the cream of the cream of elite special forces. Are we to believe that such men found it necessary to shoot dead an unarmed Bin Laden, a man in his fifties  who is seriously ill and frail?   There is  also, as in the case of the claim of the use of a woman as a human shield, no plausible  reason why  it should have been claimed initially  that Bin Laden was armed.

Brennan also speculated that “It’s inconceivable that bin Laden did not have a support system in the country that allowed him to remain there for an extended period of time. I am not going to speculate about what type of support he might have had on an official basis inside of Pakistan.“ This is a fair point, but an equally telling one, perhaps more telling, is why  the US military would not have identified the compound as being  worthy of suspicion simply on the grounds of its size and nature.  They have ample satellite surveillance and even if they did not have reason to suspect that Bin Laden was there, they should have been curious enough about it to make enquiries.

The other things which remain unclarified are three: (1)  how did the Navy Seals leave the compound; (2) why did  the local Pakistani military not respond to the attack and (3)  what has happened to the surviving members of then Bin Laden family who were allegedly living with Bin Laden.  The Seals arrived in two helicopters and left in one because of the claimed malfunction of one helicopter which rendered it useless and led to its destruction by the Seals. It would be interesting to know how many Seals were employed in total and what the lifting and carrying capacity  of a single helicopter was .  If a single helicopter could not evacuate all of the Seals then we need to know how they got away.  The failure of the local Pakistani military to respond to the attack despite the town crawling with army personnel and having forty minutes to respond is peculiar at best and indicative of collusion between the US and Pakistani  authorities at worst. Interestingly,  there are reports which say the local residents close to the compound were asked to turn off their lights an hour before the attack. As for the alleged surviving members of Bin Laden’s family, it will be interesting to see what happens to them.

Those are the oddities. How about the question of whether  it was Bin Laden who was killed?  Reports of his death date back ten years, for example,  Fox news carried a report in December 2001 claiming Bin Laden was dead. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,41576,00.html).  The last undisputed Bin Laden video dates from 2001. Since then  there have only been two videos in which purport to show Bin Laden talking.  The last was in 2007.  The authenticity of both these videos is  disputed.  The other  tapes have provided audio only.  (A good account of these and  the Bin Laden story since 911 can be found in the  2010 BBC programme  Osama Bin Laden: Dead or Alive . This is posted on YouTube in six parts and parts 2 and 3 are the most useful for the videos in which Bin Laden is purportedly seen speaking.  Go to  the url below  and you will find all six parts on the page  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLmG9mOxLn4&feature=related. )

It is also striking that there has been no  claimed definite sighting of Bin Laden since 2001 until now  despite the fact that his is a face which has been plastered all over the mainstream media and Internet in still photographs and videos  and the  $25 million reward for information leading to his capture or death offered by the USA.   The fact that it is now claimed that Bin Laden was living for a substantial period in a garrison town only 60 miles from the Pakistani capital makes  the failure to inform to claim the reward even more extraordinary if  the story is true.  It also stretches credulity that the Pakistani authorities at some level would not have known he was there .

If  Bin Laden  was not killed why the raid? Here’s a scenario for you. The US carried out the raid, thought they had Bin Laden, took the body away and then found to their dismay it was not him. They then got rid of the evidence. That would leave them open to Bin Laden putting out another  video but it would be impossible for the man  to absolutely prove he was still alive without exposing himself to capture or killing. There is also a decent probability that he died some time ago.

Here’s a second scenario. The whole thing was a charade. Bin laden was already dead, perhaps a long time ago, and the US knew it. They staged the  attack to provide a distraction from
the failure in Afghanistan, the disaster of Iraq and the new involvement in Libya and potentially the rest of North Africa and the Middle East.  In addition, the  claimed death of Bin aden brought down the psychological curtain on the USA’s original prime reason for attacking Afghanistan and provided a possible springboard to extract the USA from Afghanistan on the basis that it was “mission accomplished”.

As to the immediate political  value of the raid, Brennan rather gave the show away with  “It was probably one of the most anxiety-filled periods of time in the lives of the people asembled here. The minutes passed like days….The president had to evaluate the strength of that information, and then made what I believe was one of the most gutsiest calls of any president in recent memory….I think the accomplishment that very brave personnel from the United States government were able to realise yesterday is a defining moment in the war against al-Qaeda, the war on terrorism, by decapitating the head of the snake known as al-Qaida.”  That is propaganda not a rational analysis of what the raid had achieved.

Whatever the truth of  Obama’s delay in producing his full birth certificate and the alleged killing of Bin Laden , there is a fact about them which cannot be denied: in both instances the powers-that-be in US politics have given  ample grounds for rational scepticism.  Examining official versions of events for contradictions and unanswered questions does not mean you are away  with the fairies. Blindly accepting the official version is the real bending of reality; accepting the official version while knowing it is questionable is worse than naïve, it is sinister.

If we leave the EU we mustn’t be another Norway

Amongst those who want the UK to leave the EU there are those who say “Look at Norway, we can have the same arrangement with the EU as they do, a simple free  trading agreement”.  This is profoundly wrong.  The European Economic Area (EEA)  countries  of which Norway is one have to take on most of the more obnoxious burdens of the EU  whilst being excluded from EU decision making . This is unsurprising because the EEA was born of a desire of the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) to integrate with the EU.

EFTA was founded in 1960. The founding members were Austria, Denmark, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Subsequently Finland became an associate member in 1961 (becoming a full member in 1986),  Iceland joined in 1970, Liechtenstein 1991 (previously its interests in EFTA had been represented by Switzerland).

EFTA gradually lost its members as they joined  what is now the EU.  The United Kingdom and Denmark joined the European Economic Community in 1973, Portugal joined  in 1986., Austria, Sweden and Finland joined the EU in 1995. This left only Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein.

Negotiations between the EFTA nations and what was then the European Community  (EC) for a closer relationship came to fruition in 1992 when the  EEA Agreement was agreed by  negotiators of EFTA states and the EC members.  Switzerland rejected the agreement in a referendum,  but later signed bilateral treaties with the EU which have much the same effect as the EEA Agreement.  (http://eeas.europa.eu/delegations/switzerland/eu_switzerland/political_relations/index_de.htm )The rest of the EFTA members signed. The EEA Agreement came into force in 1994. The full text can be found at   http://www.efta.int/legal-texts.aspx  (click on the EEA link and open or download the PDF file).

EEA membership requires that subscribing states have to accept the “four  freedoms” of the EU: the free movement of goods, persons, services, and capital among the EEA countries as well as those comprising the EU.  This the prime reason for not joining the EEA or having a bilateral relationship with the EU similar to that of Switzerland.  These “ four freedoms” mean amongst other things that  EEA members cannot meaningfully control immigration, protect their economy, prevent foreign takeovers or  freely engage in any new taxpayer funded  subsidy  for  which is judged to interfere with the market (article 61).

The forced adoption of the “four freedoms”  is reason enough not to join the EEA or anything like it.  However, there are further sovereignty removal horrors. EEA members have to adopt EU law in the areas of social policy (article 67), consumer protection (article 73), environment (article 73), company law(article 77) and statistics (article 76) and surveillance (article 108). In addition, article 78 states “The Contracting Parties shall strengthen and broaden cooperation in the framework of the Community’s activities in the fields of:

– research and technological development,

– information services,

– the environment,

– education, training and youth,

– social policy,

– consumer protection,

– small and medium-sized enterprises,

– tourism,

– the audiovisual sector, and

– civil protection”

The EEA states  are not required to make the type of contribution required of EU members  to Brussels nor do they receive any funds from the EU.  However, they are  forced to follow the judgements of the  European Court of Justice,   they have to pay a membership fee towards “community cohesion, that is, they are required to subsidise the poorer EU states. (article 82).

The EEA states have no formal position within EU institutions such as the Council of Ministers, the EU Commission or the European Parliament.  Hence, EU decisions are made without their official involvement. In addition, the EEA states are required in practice to abide by the European Court of Justice’s rulings (article 105). However, there is a joint committee comprised of EU and EEA representatives (article 90).

If  the UK joined the EEA, in theory   they would not have to participate in these  areas of EU policy

“Common Agriculture and Fisheries Policies (although the Agreement contains provisions on various aspects of trade in agricultural and fish products);

Customs Union;

Common Trade Policy;

Common Foreign and Security Policy;

Justice and Home Affairs (even though the EFTA countries are part of the Schengen area); or

Monetary Union (EMU).”  (http://secretariat.efta.int/eea/eea-agreement.aspx)

However,  as we have consistently seen since Britain joined in 1973, the EU has constantly found ways of  expanding their powers either by stealth or through new treaties which are never resisted in the end even if national referenda reject them because the elites of all the EU and EEA countries are  committed Europhiles .  A  referenda rejects further EU integration; the elites arrange for another referendum  to get the “right” result  or produce a new Treaty  which is the rejected treaty in a new guise and then find an excuse not to hold a referendum on it , normally along the lines that it is not a constitutionally important treaty.

If  the UK is to regain its sovereignty it needs to withdraw completely from the EU for two reasons. First, if we accepted EEA membership or something like it, we should still be so heavily linked into the EU (and would almost certainly become more heavily involved as the EU expanded its remit), that the British political elite would always be able to argue that we were so much part of the EU we might as well go the whole hog and become full members. That argument would have resonance  with Europhiles, the resigned  and those who have no strong opinion either way about the EU. The second reason is that even as it stands EEA membership would deprive the UK of massive amounts of sovereignty including the most important of all sovereign powers, the ability to control who lives in a country.  If we are to leave,  the UK should deal with the EU and EEA countries as we do with any country outside the EU and EEA territories.

How easy would it be for the UK to leave? Article 50 of the Treaty  runs:

1. Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.

2. A Member State which decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council of its intention. In the light of the guidelines provided by the European Council, the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union. That agreement shall be negotiated in accordance with Article 218(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. It shall be concluded  on behalf of the Union by the Council, acting by a qualified majority, after  obtaining the consent of the European Parliament.

3. The Treaties shall cease to apply to the State in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the Member State concerned, unanimously decides to extend this period.

4. For the purposes of paragraphs 2 and 3, the member of the European  Council or of the Council representing the withdrawing Member State  shall not participate in the discussions of the European Council or  Council or in decisions concerning it. A qualified majority shall be defined in accordance with Article 238(3)(b) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

5. If a State which has withdrawn from the Union asks to rejoin, its  request shall be subject to the procedure referred to in Article 49.

The assent  of the EU is required for a member to withdraw with an agreement in place, but withdrawal  without an agreement can take place after two years. However, the  Article does state that but  ”  the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that State, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal.” This seems to assume that an agreement will definitely have to be reached.  There is a possible ambiguity there which might be used to invalidate the leaving without agreement clause or at least   delay Britain  leaving while the matter was argued  out.

There would also be great scope for further prevarication. For example, the British Europhile elite would be happy to string things out in the hope that political  circumstances would  change to allow them to fudge any leaving agreement to tie Britain back into the EU and the agreement of the EU parliament  might  well be withheld  if any proposed agreement  deviated seriously from the shape of the  Norwegian or Swiss agreements.

But assuming Britain could leave after two years without an agreement,  it would still mean Britain being tied in for two years, during which period the EU could cause Britain a good deal of economic harm because  in principle  they could pass whatever new laws they wanted including those directed at Britain with malign intent,  and Britain would still be bound by EU laws for the two years. Or there could simply be administrative action.  Take immigration. There could be a deliberate policy to drive as many immigrants as possible into Britain within the two years.

If Britain left without an agreement after two years we would be in a much worse situation than simply announcing we will leave and leaving immediately. That would be technically illegal in terms of  the Treaty agreement, but whatever the Treaty says the reality is that if a state as large and wealthy  as the UK announced its withdrawal without conditions, the EU would accept it because they could do nothing to prevent it and imposing sanctions against the UK would be counter-productive because the UK runs a large trade deficit with the EU. Moreover,  any sanctions against the UK would ruin the Republic of Ireland, another EU member.

Membership of the European Economic Area is  a poisoned chalice.  Resist the temptation to drink from it.

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