One nation Labour: work, family and place – a taste of Labour’s next election propaganda

Civitas meeting at 55 Tuftn Street Westminster SW1P3QL

14 October 2013

One nation Labour: work, family and place

Speaker: John Cruddas MP

The speech was  howlingly vacuous, full of trite phrasemaking and statements of the blindingly obvious added to a rich menu of vague aspirations. Here are a few examples:

“Families come in all different shapes and sizes”.

“Some of our families trace their English roots back  generations, and for some their children are the first  born in England.“

“We will improve our schools so they can help children develop good character, and learn the values of respect, honesty, compassion, trust and integrity.”

The only surprise is that Cruddas did not tell  the audience that  he believed in motherhood and apple pie.

But empty as it was of hard policy, this speech is important because Cruddas was laying out the general propaganda strategy of the Labour Party for the coming General Election.  The strategy was noteworthy for  its unmitigated cynicism, it being a shameless attempt to cloak the true intent of Labour with words which until very recently the Party would have treated as beyond the politically correct Pale.

Cruddas’  engaged in dog-whistle politics. For Labour’s  historically  core vote, the unalloyed white working class,  he used words and phrases such as patriotism  and national renewal, but  in a way that would have met with the firm approval of  Lewis Carol’s Humpty Dumpty. They meant whatever Cruddas meant them to mean rather than what any normal person or a dictionary would take them to mean. Nation did not mean a natural nation but a bogus one centred around civic ideals. Patriotism did not mean wanting to express a sense of nation but pride in the civic ideals.  Being English did not mean being English in the cultural or historic sense,  but English as simply a coverall term for those living in England. (In passing, I could not help wryly wondering  if Cruddas was unaware of the fascist echoes in his language: One Nation; National Renewal,  the new England…. )

Cruddas had other electoral wares to peddle. To entice Tories alienated by Cameron’s NuTory social liberalism and the aspirational working-class vote,   Cruddas put forward what might politely be called the NuLabour version of that risible Tory phrase The Big Society.  This consisted of a condemnation of centralisation and a devolution of power and responsibility to the local level in general and the individual in particular. Here is a flavour of Cruddas’  general thrust:

“One Nation begins in local places. It is in our neighbourhoods that we express our cultures and identities and the new England taking shape is happening where people meet and greet one another, neighbours help one another and watch and learn from each others different lives and so build up trust and in the process make a home together. “

“They are the people who tend to think of themselves as both English and British. They care about their families and work hard for a  better life.  The ethic of work is deeply held because it is about  self-respect and self reliance.  They are responsible and look after their  neighbourhoods. But they don’t feel they get back what they deserve. “

“They are powerfully aspirational but they are struggling to make ends meet.  The better life they have worked for, and their hopes for their children are under threat due to the cost of living crisis.  Labour should be their natural home.” 

Despite the Thatcherite tone, this was The  Big Society NuLabour style. Consequently,  it also contained a good deal of political correctness, including a seeming acceptance of male employment  providing less than enough money to support a family as a permanent fixture in the British economy. Indeed, there was even an undertone of this being a good thing because  it furthers the cause of gender equality, viz:

“Millions of men no longer earn enough to follow their fathers in the role of family breadwinner. More and more women are taking on the role of breadwinner. Families thrive when there is a partnership and teamwork amongst adult relations We need a new conversation about families and their  relationships that is jointly owned by women and  men. “

“We need to value father’s family role as highly as his working role, and women’s working role as highly as her domestic one. And we need to have high expectations of fathers because otherwise we collude with those men who don’t step up to the mark.”

“We will look at where we can make greater use of a ‘whole family’ approach to public services which assumes, where it is safe and appropriate, that a child  needs a relationship with both parents.

 “That means:

– exploring changes to maternity services to engage the whole family and include fathers.

– looking at paid leave for prospective fathers to attend antenatal sessions and hospital appointments during pregnancy.

– developing services that facilitate mutual support between families.

– helping family self help initiatives in the community and letting finance follow.

Helping children take responsibility for their own actions, also means improving sex and relationship education for boys and girls with zero tolerance of violence at its core.  “

The third prong of Cruddas’ propaganda method was to speak of England not Britain:  

“It is a sentiment that is shared by a large part of the electorate today, particularly in England. Patriotic, love of family; live and let live. Committed to the virtues of responsibility and duty; fiercely democratic and individual. “

“We are a country of many roots looking for an identity. Some of our families trace their English roots back  generations, and for some their children are the first  born in England.“

“One Nation begins in local places. It is in our neighbourhoods that we express our cultures and identities and the new England taking shape is happening where people meet and greet one another, neighbours help one another and watch and learn from each others different lives and so build up trust and in the process make a home together.”

This is not Englishness at all but a substitute for the increasingly meaningless use of British, a term  which has become a semantic umbrella to obviate the need to call immigrants and their descendants English. There  is to be a new Englishness, not one born of the organic formation and shaping of a nation across a millennium and a half, as has been the genesis of England and the English,  but  a cosmopolitan multicultural politically correct mess which no English man or woman would recognise as English.

In true Labour fashion his speech was also packed with uncosted spending commitments  such as paid antenatal paternity leave, guaranteed work for the long-term unemployed, increased childcare payments, cutting and then freezing business rates for small and medium sized firms and  putting more money into vocational training. Incredibly, Cruddas claimed that  these new costly policies will be made whilst government spending reduces overall, viz:: “We will govern with less money.”

There was a strong hint to what the devolution of power  would really be about in Cruddas’  housing proposals, viz:

“Local people need local homes and we will devolve power to local authorities to negotiate with private landlords reductions in rent and use the savings to build new homes.”

The device is transparent: the responsibility is moved from national politicians and any failure rests with local politicians.  And so it will be with anything else devolved under a Labour government if one is elected in 2015.  As for the housing proposal, If there were no legal power to force private landlords to reduce rents, and there was no suggestion from Cruddas that there would be, it is  the purest pie-in-the-sky.

On the subject which most exercises the native English, immigration, all Cruddas had to offer was first this:

 “Change brings both a sense of loss as well as hope; across the country there is a powerful sense of grievance and dispossession. A loss of culture and a way of life.  We have to engage with the visceral politics it creates. “

With this as the risibly inadequate solution:

“On immigration, Ed Miliband has set out a new approach which combines tougher controls on people coming in from new EU countries with measures to help stop low skilled migration undercutting the wages of workers already here.” 

Cruddas also had the effrontery to claim The Conservatives are dividing Britain  when of course the greatest cause of division is mass immigration which increased hugely under Blair and Brow with a net inflow of more than three  million to the UK.

It would also be interesting to know how Cruddas could square his wish for Britain to be “fiercely democratic” with the  mass immigration which has been the prime policy exercising the British electorate for a long time when they have been denied any say on  it because neither of the major parties has any real intention of preventing it, not least because both major parties are committed to Britain’s membership of the EU.

There was also a feeble apology for the mess created by the Blair and Brown governments. Reflecting on the 2010 election defeat Cruddas mused “did we spend too much attention treating problems in society rather than preventing them? We moved thousands more people into work, but did we pay sufficient attention to the type of work performed and the rewards received? Were we attuned to the scale of low skilled immigration and across its impact in communities?  “ before concluding baldly “We got things wrong.”

Needless to say,  Cruddas’  conclusion that serious mistakes were made did not lead him to suggest that he , and all the other Labour MPs who served in the Blair and Brown governments who are still in the Commons should resign in  disgrace because of the mess Labour left on leaving office. An admission of fault without proportionate or indeed any penalty suffered by the wrongdoers is meaningless, a taunting of the public.

The full text of Cruddas’ speech is at http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/earningandbelonging.pdf

Come question time I managed to get the first question. I launched it with a decent preamble during  which I pointed out the three to four million net immigration under the last Labour government; the reckless spending with government spending deficits totalling more than £200 billion before the crash of 2008 and  the millions in full-time work who could not earn enough to support themselves and were heavily dependent  on benefits. I ended by asking the question “In view of the mess the last Labour Government left behind them in 2010 why should anyone trust the Labour Party enough to re-elect them at the next election?  Had there been time, I would have added in the perpetual warmongering of Blair, the handing to the EU of ever more power without the British public being consulted in a referendum, the disastrous neglect of the UK’s energy supplies, the vast expansion of the  racket that is PFI and the institutionalisation of political correctness within the British public sector.

Cruddas gave me a non-answer,  being reduced to saying that I had not given a nuanced  view of the last Labour government, followed by a claim that all had seemed going well until the crash of 2008, with an implied shrug of the shoulders that the crash could not have  been foreseen.  Contemptibly, he tried to hide behind the Tories by saying they had supported the economic policies of the Blair government.  The latter was of course true, but being wrong with along with your political opponents is no excuse. The reality is that the crash was about as obvious as Christmas coming at the end of December if one looked at the economic indicators.  (I publicly predicted the crash  in July 2007. By then house prices had risen so high that in the large majority of English council areas it was impossible for someone earning the average wage to buy their first house, despite the ease with which mortgages could be obtained with loans of up to 125% of the property’s value being offered.  It was clear that the housing market, which underpinned the gerrymandered NuLabour boom, would collapse and cause a severe recession).

The rest of the questions were curiously bloodless. Depressingly, no one else at the meeting seemed to be angry about what had happened to Britain under Blair and Brown.

The one thing of interest which came from these  questions was Cruddas’ definition of what constituted a sense of nation and patriotism. It was the “civic patriotism” so beloved of the left at the moment, the ludicrous idea that a nation can be formed around nothing more than a set of self-consciously arrived at values such as a belief in representative government and the rule of law.  Any sense of belonging arises organically from the natural human traits which create “tribal feeling”  not from governments telling people what to believe.

The “values” which Cruddas was speaking about were in reality  those of political correctness. This  meant  he  was purveying not one nonsense but another one on top of  it –  nonsense on stilts – because political correctness is in itself an exercise in denying reality.

After the meeting I email Cruddas this without receiving a reply:

Dear Mr Cruddas,

I was the person who asked the first question at the Civitas meeting tonight. Apart from the points I made in the preamble to my question, I would say that your  emphasis on localism and community  self-help sounded remarkably like a NuLabour version of the Tories’ Big Society. Both ideas are non-starters because you cannot create  social networks and community spirit self-consciously. It can only develop organically. For the same reason a civic citizenship cannot be created to stand in the stead of Man’s innate tribal feeling.

What the Labour Party needs is a return to a firm and clear understanding of what things should be private and what public and to defend public ownership and intervention where it is appropriate.  The long essay below (https://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2012/07/22/public-and-private-confusion-and-yes-there-is-an-alternative/) examines that proposition in detail

At present all your party is trying to do is patch a few social and economic grazes when what is needed is major surgery.

In your answer to my question you said the picture I painted was not nuanced. To that I would reply how exactly does one nuance over 3 million net immigrants under Blair and Brown or massive debt they ran up from 2002 onwards? The detailed debt figures are

Labour ran a surplus for each of their  first four years of government:

1998       £    703 millions

1999      £11,976 millions

2000       £16,697 millions

2001       £ 8,426 millions

Total  1998 – 2001  surplus of £37,802 millions

 

Labour ran a deficit for  the rest of their time in government:

2002    £19,046  millions

2003    £34,004  millions

2004     £36,797  millions

2005     £41,355  millions

2006     £30,755  millions

2007     £33,718  millions

2008     £68,003  millions

Total 2002 – 2008   Deficit of £263,678  millions

 

2009   £152,289 millions

2010   £148,774  millions

Total  2009 -2010   Deficit of £301,063 millions

 

Net total debt accumulated  in the period 1998 – 2008 £225,876

Net total debt  accumulated in the period 1998-2010 £526,339 millions

Figures taken from http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/oct/18/deficit-debt-government-borrowing-data.

These figures understate the true increase in public debt because of the Enron-style accounting which kept most the PPI and PFI debt incurred under Blair and Brown off the books.

As can be seen, the present Labour claims that the financial mess is all due to the post-Lehman global crash is embarrassingly  untrue.

Yours sincerely,

 

 

Robert Henderson

Is the English Defence League (EDL) the real deal?

Robert Henderson

The decision by the EDL  leaders Tommy Robinson*  and Kevin  Carroll to leave the movement  has been so abrupt that it raises severe doubts about the nature of the EDL.  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/10363174/EDL-Leaders-quit-over-concern-about-far-right-extremism.html).

The resignations of Robinson and Carroll are made all the stranger because both men were enthusiastically purveying  the normal EDL  line at a rally in Sheffield on 21 September, only 17 days before their resignations were announced  (http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/tommy-robinson-in-sheffield/).  Here are a few samples statements made by Robinson at the rally:

“At what point does diversity become takeover?” (enter video at 1 minute 50 seconds)

“English girls in Sheffield are being groomed and raped… by members of the Islamic community”  (3 minutes 21 seconds)

“We don’t want any more mosques in this country”  (4 minutes exactly)

“People will no longer stand by and watch their towns and cities being taken over” (3 minutes 30 seconds).

It is rather difficult to square such comments with Robinson’s claims so soon afterwards that he now thinks the EDL is no longer  the vehicle to combat  Islamicists because it has been, he claims,  taken over by right extremists .

These recent Sheffield comments become  even stranger in the light of his Newsnight resignation interview on the day of his resignation when he says in response to a Paxman question that he decided to leave the  EDL in February 2013 – see http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=744_1381276885  – enter at 4minutes and 4 seconds). Robinson needed an exit strategy but this was just about as clumsy a one as it would be possible to construct. If he had really wanted to go as early as March why wait for six months?

Caroll’s Sheffield speech was primarily about the double standards of the police when treating Muslims and non-Muslims, but it included what looks like in retrospect a piece of howling cynicism   when Caroll boasted to the crowd that “We are getting bigger and stronger everyday”. (Enter the video at 12 minutes and 58 seconds –  http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/kevin-caroll-in-sheffield/)

 The ostensible reasons for the  resignations

During his various media appearances announcing the resignations Robinson said “I have been considering this move for a long time because I recognise that, though street demonstrations have brought us to this point, they are no longer productive.

“I acknowledge the dangers of far-right extremism and the ongoing need to counter Islamist ideology not with violence but with better, democratic ideas.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24442953).

But he also laid  emphasis on the threats to his family and the fact that he was judged by what the more extreme members of the EDL did, viz: “When some moron lifts up his top and he’s got the picture of a mosque saying ‘boom’ and it’s all over the national newspapers, it’s me, it’s when I pick up my kids from school the parents are looking at me, judging me on that.

“And that’s not what I’ve stood for and my decision to do this is to be true to what I stand for. And whilst I want to lead the revolution against Islamist ideology, I don’t want to lead the revolution against Muslims.” (Ibid).

The problem with these reasons is that they have existed throughout the four years of the EDL’s existence.  That does not mean his fears are invalid but we do require an explanation from him as to why they have suddenly become intolerable.

Nonetheless, it is not implausible that Robinson  in particular may have simply tired of the harassment and worse he has experienced.   That the harassment has been considerable we know because  many  publicly reported instances of marches being hamstrung or stopped altogether and the frequent arrests fo EDL members.  But there is also what goes on without getting into mainstream media reporting.  In his  recent Sheffield speech (enter the video at 5 minutes 44 secs)  Robinson  said that as a consequence of being charged with criminal damage valued at a paltry £30 (something he is still waiting to go to court about), the police obtained warrants to search his parents’ house and his house, the officers who arrived at his house he said were armed with machine guns. Robinson also  spent 18 weeks in prison earlier in the year and with three young children he does have reason to fear for their safety.

Is all not as it seems? 

There is a well tried and tested intelligence service  technique of  setting up a front organisation which ostensibly provides a platform for those opposed to government policy or just the way society is organised.   The idea is that the front organisation acts as a light to a moth and attracts dissidents. This allows the security service to both monitor and manipulate those considered politically dangerous to the status quo.   The manipulation may be anything from infiltrating agent provocateurs to persuading  a dissident by one means or another to change their ideological tune.

What are the signs that point to a front organisation? Such things as rapid formation,  a ready supply of money both initially and as the organisation progresses, organisational skill and a failure to make any progress towards attaining  its claimed ends despite making a good deal of public noise.  MigrationWatch UK strikes me as a  classic example  of a front organisation – see https://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/is-migrationwatch-uk-a-security-service-front-organisation/.

The other and very obvious  used security ploy is to infiltrate an existing dissident group and attempt to monitor and manipulate it.

Which is most likely in the case of the EDL? Well, it rose quickly and has displayed a certain organisational aptitude. It runs a decent website and can get marches, rallies  and demonstration up and running with sufficient people to raise them above the risible, especially when their performance is put in the context of the considerable harassment they have suffered both from the British authorities and the hard Left.

To those facts you can add the concentration on Muslims and the elements of political correctness in in their repeated claims that the EDL welcomes all creeds and colours and that they are a human rights organisation. A Machiavellian case can be made that it suits the  British political elite to have a “working class” protest group which concentrates on Muslims (because  it diverts attention away from the general question of mass immigration and its consequences) and plays the multiculturalist tune as it marches.  Such a case could also be made  for the political elite finding it useful to have an ostensibly independent grass roots  political movement opposing Islamist groups as a distraction from the insidious and much more damaging gradual imposition of Muslim ways on British society as the British elite generally give way bit by bit to Muslim demands. A  good example is the recent permitting of Muslim pupils to wear a beard, something  which is forbidden to non-Muslim pupils at the school (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/10374528/Bearded-Muslim-schoolboys-barred-from-class-allowed-to-return-because-of-human-rights.html).

But on balance  I doubt whether this is a security front organisation because it simply is too uncontrolled.  If it is a front organisation it has not been very successful in channelling dissident behaviour.  Not only that but  most of the possible advantages for the political elite which I  listed above arise just as readily if the EDL is simply what it says it is, a spontaneous grass roots,  mainly working class movement.

How likely is it that the EDL will have been infiltrated by the police or the security services? You can bet  your life that it will have been.  Will the state  have been controlling the EDL leadership? Quite possibly, not necessarily from the first but at some point when they had found a lever to control the leaders.

A strong pointer to what may have  happened is  Robinson and Caroll’s  new association with (but not joined) the Quilliam Foundation, a body  which describes itself as a think-tank tackling extremism in all its forms, although its focus is heavily on Islamicist actors.   When Robinson and Caroll’s resignation were made public they appeared with two of the senior members of Quilliam, the chairman and co-founder Maajid Nawaz (a one time Hizb ut-Tahrir  member)  and Usama Hasan, Quilliam’s senior researcher in Islamic studies. Both Nawaz and Usama come from an extremist Muslim background. The narrative provided by both Quilliam and the two ex-EDL leaders is that it was engagement with Quilliam which led to the resignation of Robinson and Caroll, viz:

Quilliam is proud to announce that Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll, the leaders of the anti-Islamist group, the English Defence League (EDL), have decided to leave the group. Having set up the EDL, infamous for its street protests, in 2009, they wish to exit this group, because they feel they can no longer keep extremist elements at bay……

Quilliam has been working with Tommy to achieve this transition, which represents a huge success for community relations in the United Kingdom. We have previously identified the symbiotic relationship between far-right extremism and Islamism and think that this event can dismantle the underpinnings of one phenomenon while removing the need for the other phenomenon. (http://www.quilliamfoundation.org/press-releases/quilliam-facilitates-tommy-robinson-leaving-the-english-defence-league/).

The fact that Quilliam are involved  is decidedly interesting  because they have been seen by some as Home Office stooges as a result of the large amounts of public money pumped into the think-tank after its foundation in 2008. (http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/oct/12/tommy-robinson-quilliam-foundation-questions-motivation) .  There have also been rumblings about the large salaries drawn by the  senior members of  Quilliam, for example, Nawaz paid himself £77,438 in 2012 (ibid).

Quilliam’s Home Office funding ended in 2011 and its overall income dropped severely putting it into the red (ibid). When the Guardian tried to get an up to date set of accounts  they were ‘told by a press officer: “There is only one print copy and that that has gone missing.”’ (ibid)

The Guardian article suggests that the embracing of Robinson and Caroll by Quilliam may be a ploy to increase funding both through the publicity they are now receiving and because by widening their natural remit to include “right wing extremism”, viz:  “In 2010, when it began to look like Islamist extremism was slightly on the wane and there was an interest in far-right extremism, some people were slightly cynical that the Quilliam Foundation had originally said they were the specialists in Islamism but suddenly started to want to do work on far-right extremism as well. Some people feel that was a cynical land-grab to keep them in the media. But they are a thinktank that has to raise money and has to be visible.” (ibid).  This could well make them flavour of the month again with the Home Office.

What is in it for Robinson and Caroll?  Apart from taking them out of the EDL firing line, assuming they are genuinely worried about that, it could give them, especially Robinson,  an entry into the media and even access to public funds. Imagine a future for them in which they become the “right wing sinner who repenteth”.  Stranger things have happened, think of John Bercow moving from Monday Club enthusiast to his present devout political correctness.  Or it could be that Robinson and Caroll are merely being led to think that they have such  prospects and will be dropped soon, their utility to the politically correct project being judged to be exhausted.

The future of the EDL

The EDL website has a remarkably sanguine official view of the resignations , viz:

“We are grateful to Tommy and Kev for their hard work and dedication in helping to set up such a large and strong organisation as the EDL four years ago. We can easily appreciate the pressures and strain their leadership of the EDL has placed upon Tommy and Kev, not just personally, but also on their families and those dear to them. Not many people could have stood firm in the face of death threats, assaults, police intimidation and state interference. While we regret their decision to leave the EDL, we can understand their reasons and we respect them, as we hope everyone else will.

The EDL was founded for a reason. We had a cause in the beginning and we continue to stand by that cause now. We cannot at this moment say with any confidence what form the EDL will take in the future, but we can say with firm conviction that the EDL will continue to oppose militant and extreme Islam. We will further endeavour to apply our Code of Conduct and reject all Nazis, all extreme right wing organisations, and those who express racism either on our Internet forums, our Facebook pages or on the streets at our protests.

In these times of change, we are determined to fulfil our declared mission and carry on. Our next demonstration in Bradford will therefore go ahead as planned, with a number of guest speakers as well as the regular speakers and including ex-members of our armed forces. The EDL will continue its ideological struggle against Militant Islam and we collectively will not Surrender!” (http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/tommy-and-kevin-resign-from-the-edl/).

To put it mildly that is not a viewed shared by many EDL members judged by the comment on the various social media.

But the flight of Robinson and Caroll  from the EDL is not the main problem for the movement. The main problem is that EDL has always been ideologically confused. This is because the party tries to fit its aims within a politically correct envelope on anti-racism. Here is an extract from their mission statement:

“The English Defence League (EDL) is a human rights organisation that was founded in the wake of the shocking actions of a small group of Muslim extremists who, at a homecoming parade in Luton, openly mocked the sacrifices of our service personnel without any fear of censure. Although these actions were certainly those of a minority, we believe that they reflect other forms of religiously-inspired intolerance and barbarity that are thriving amongst certain sections of the Muslim population in Britain: including, but not limited to, the denigration and oppression of women, the molestation of young children, the committing of so-called honour killings, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and continued support for those responsible for terrorist atrocities.

Whilst we must always protect against the unjust assumption that all Muslims are complicit in or somehow responsible for these crimes, we must not be afraid to speak freely about these issues. This is why the EDL will continue to work to protect the inalienable rights of all people to protest against radical Islam’s encroachment into the lives of non-Muslims.

We also recognise that Muslims themselves are frequently the main victims of some Islamic traditions and practices. The Government should protect the individual human rights of members of British Muslims. It should ensure that they can openly criticise Islamic orthodoxy, challenge Islamic leaders without fear of retribution, receive full equality before the law (including equal rights for Muslim women), and leave Islam if they see fit, without fear of censure. “(http://www.englishdefenceleague.org/mission-statement/)

There are two problems with this stance. The first is what constitutes a moderate Muslim, not merely as things are,  but in a future in which the Muslim population of Britain will almost certainly be considerably larger,  both absolutely and as a proportion of the British population.  For any sincere Muslim there can be no question of moderation as we would understand the term in Britain, no equivalent of faint hearted Anglicanism where to mention God is felt to be decidedly vulgar,  nor a ready acceptance of criticism of religion.

There will be Muslims who eschew violence and Muslims who embrace it, but many of both the violent and non-violent would be comfortable with a state in which Islam was the faith of a majority of the population and in consequence placed in a privileged position. There would not have to be a formal Islamic theocracy, as there is not in Pakistan,  merely Islam as the majority religion with the state turning a blind eye to the oppression of non-Muslims.

The implications of this is that there could never be a movement which is simply opposed to the most extreme Muslim elements, because  potentially all Muslims will support the imposition of Islam as  not merely the dominant religion but the dominant way of life.

The second difficulty is why just Islam?  Islam may be the most aggressive and high profile minority  group at present, but they are far from being the only threat to the British way of life. Mass immigration generally constitutes such a threat, for heavy settlement of particular ethnic and racial groups, aided and abetted by the pernicious embrace of multiculturalism by the British elite, has produced what are in effect colonies in Britain of groups who have no wish or intention of assimilating or even integrating to a substantial degree.  Each of these groups seeks privileges for itself  which it frequently receives from an increasingly frightened political elite who fear any honest public discussion of what has been done through mass immigration will result both in inter-ethnic violence and public anger directed at themselves.

Many who have been drawn to or will be drawn to  the EDL  in the future will be generally hostile to mass immigration and its effects. Thus, it is improbable that the EDL will ever be able to be a single issue– anti-Islamist movement   promoting the multicultural message.

How will the EDL develop? It could simply become an increasingly marginalised group such as the BNP of National Front. However, it differs from  such groups in one potentially very important respect, namely, it is overtly representing England. That could give it greater staying power than the likes of the BNP  because it is filling a very real political void, that of a grass roots movement representing,  however imperfectly,  the resentments and fears of the English.

—————————–

*There is considerable dispute over Tommy Robinsons’s name. It is definitely not his true name, but whether his true name is  Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Andrew McMaster or Paul Harris is a matter of some debate.  Yaxley-Lennon is probably his true name. For the purposes of this essay I shall  call him Tommy Robinson.

Operation Elveden and Piers Morgan et al – I try to bring Norman Baker MP into the picture

Note:I have had some dealings with Norman Baker regarding both the Blairs’ attempts to prosecute me and its aftermath and the David Kelly death. Robert Henderson

Mr Norman Baker MP

House of Commons

London  SW1A 0AA

9 October 2013

Dear Mr Baker,

Congratulations on your promotion to the Home Office.

I have a scandal which comes within your new remit. In January this year I supplied Operation Elveden with a letter sent by Piers Morgan to the PCC when he was editor of the Daily Mirror. A copy of that letter is attached in facsimile.

In the letter Morgan writes “The police source of our article (whose identity we have a moral obligation to protect”. That can only mean the information was given illegally. Moreover, the information which the Mirror received was of a nature which could not have been legally given  to a newspaper.  The information concerned me.

Operation Elveden refused to investigate – It took them around  five months to tell me they were not going to act. During that time I made repeated requests to be interviewed  and  give a formal statement,   but these requests  were ignored.

I then wrote to the DPP asking him to intervene.  I received no overt encouragement from him,  but something may have happened behind the scenes because Elveden  emailed me to say the matter had been referred to the Met’s Directorate of Professional Standards .  That was nearly two months ago. The matter is being dealt with by the head of the Directorate, Det Chief Supt Alaric Bonthron.  I have made several requests for him to meet me but he has simply ignored them.

As a subsidiary scandal, I  give you this.  I supplied to the Leveson Inquiry a copy of  the Morgan letter along with a good deal of other material relating to press abuse . Leveson refused to allow me to be a core participant, refused to call me as a witness, failed to use the letter as evidence against Morgan when he was giving evidence under oath and was so desperate to write me out of the script that he excluded me from the list of people who had made submissions to the Inquiry.

I would greatly value a meeting with you to discuss this matter.  I realise that you will be immensely busy as a minister , but this is a matter which falls absolutely within the Home Office remit.  Moreover, it goes to the heart of  our justice system because this is who shall guard the guards territory.  The police are in effect perverting the course of justice by refusing to act on the clearest evidence of a serious crime having been committed.

There is a good deal of correspondence below this email, but  please do not be daunted by that. I suggest that you concentrate for the moment on the Morgan letter and,  if you are willing to meet me,  I will run you through the story then.

Yours sincerely,

Robert Henderson

Click on the tags Operation Elveden and Leveson Inquiry for the full story of those issues. Click on the category The Scandalous Blairs for that story.

The Marxist Ralph Miliband and how he bit the English hand that fed him

Robert Henderson

The Daily Mail has put the cat amongst the pigeons by examining the character of Ralph Miliband, the father of David and Ed. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2435751/GEOFFREY-LEVY-SATURDAY-ESSAY-Red-Eds-pledge-bring-socialism-homage-Marxist-father.html#ixzz2gSu79fxm)

Ralph Miliband (originally Adolphe Miliband) was born of  Polish Jewish parentage  in Belgium.  There he  became a member of Hashomer Hatzair (“Young Guard”), a socialist–Zionist youth group. He fled Belgium with his father in 1940 and came to England.  He was sixteen when he arrived in England, A year after he arrived he was writing this in his diary:

” ‘The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world . . . you sometimes want them almost to lose (the war) to show them how things are. They have the greatest contempt for the Continent . . . To lose their empire would be the worst possible humiliation.’  (ibid)

Interestingly, although  Ralph Miliband attacks not Britain but the English, all the present day British media have translated the attack on England into an attack on Britain.

But we do not need to rely on a 17 year old’s words to doubt his feelings for the country which had given him refuge. Ralph Miliband’s unequivocally  adult beliefs do that.  By its very nature Marxism is incompatible with representative government and democratic control. It also operates completely outside morality, which it dismisses as “bourgeois morality”. The end always justifies the means until the attainment of a universal state of  communist development, a state which can never be legitimately changed. Interestingly, it mimics Islam which also has as its end a universal state, in their case an Islamic theocracy  (the world Caliphate) which which will brook no alteration once established.

Miliband senior  was an exceptionally  committed and enduring Marxist, who died still believing in the revolution of the proletariat and the eventual attainment of universal communism.  That means by definition he was an enemy of this country because Marxism is antithetical towards British values and traditions. It also means he was a  hidebound ideologue and like all ideologues, hopelessly equipped to deal with reality*

Ed Miliband has frothed at the mouth over the Mail’s attack on his father, giving a saccharine description of his father’s “love” for Britain, with his “evidence” being how he had spent three years in the Royal Navy fighting Hitler and how glad he was to return to the country every time he left it (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2439593/Why-father-loved-Britain-Ed-Miliband.html#ixzz2gSuPSzL1) .His service against Hitler can plausibly be put down to the entry of the Soviet Union into the war: as for being glad to return to Britain, this was scarcely surprising because it had been first a place of safety during the war and then a residence in which he and his family did well.  But there is nothing in Ralph Miliband’s adult writings or speeches which ever suggested he liked the people or society of the the British. Indeed, the every reverse  because his politics involved sweeping away much that was distinctively British or English, especially the ruling class and their institutions. Here he is writing to the American leftist C Wright Mills:“Eton and Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, the great Clubs, the Times, the Church, the Army, the respectable Sunday papers . . . It also means the values . . . of the ruling orders, keep the workers in their place, strengthen the House of Lords, maintain social hierarchies, God save the Queen, equality is bunk, democracy is dangerous, etc. ‘Also respectability, good taste, don’t rock the boat, there will always be an England, foreigners, Jews, natives etc are all right in their place and their place is outside . . .” (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2435751/Red-Eds-pledge-bring-socialism-homage-Marxist-father-Ralph-Miliband-says-GEOFFREY-LEVY.html)

Miliband senior  was emotionally committed until the day he died in bringing communism to Britain.His son Ed can scarcely complain that his father’s attitude to this country and his politics were given a public airing because he himself has recently been banging the socialist drum, saying he was going to bring socialism back to Britain (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/10325076/Ed-Miliband-Im-bringing-socialism-back-to-Britain.html), something plausibly  attributable to his father’s Marxist influence beyond the grave.  As the Blairite blogger Dan Hodges remarked, Ed Miliband constantly refers to his parents, and his father in particular, in his speeches and the influence on him.  Nor is Ed Miliband unaware of  his father’s undemocratic views for in his first speech as Labour leader he said   “I suppose not everyone has a dad who wrote a book saying he didn’t believe in the parliamentary road to socialism…”(http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danhodges/100239016/if-ed-miliband-wanted-his-father-to-be-off-limits-he-should-have-kept-quiet-about-him/).Ralph Miliband gave this country nothing of worth and took much from it. For him it was a milch cow to be exploited.

*  By ideology I mean a set of ideas, religious or secular, to which an individual subscribes blindly regardless of the objective and testable truth of the ideology or of any contradictions which it may contain.  Read more at  https://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/against-ideology/