The BBC and the Rivers of Blood speech at 50

Robert Henderson

The BBC recently broadcast Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech about immigration which is known popularly as the Rivers of Blood speech.  The speech is forthright in its treatment of mass non-white immigration and couched in terms which  prompted the onetime Labour minister  Lord Adonis  to attempt to have it banned by Ofcom  on the grounds that  “If a  contemporary politician made such a speech they would almost certainly be  arrested and charged with serious offences.” Ofcom refused to intervene but only because they did not act until material had been broadcast.

On the face of it this might seem a strange programme for the  assiduously politically correct  BBC to air because the . However, it served two purposes for them. First, the BBC likes to maintain the pretence that “all views are represented”. Programmes such  as this  allow them to say, see, we allow views across the political spectrum. Second, the shape of the programme allowed the BBC to have the last word on what Powell foretold.

The breaking up the speech into sections which were commented upon by commentators who were in the main unreserved critics of  Powell  – Simon Heffer, Powell’s biographer, was the token  Powell supporter and even  he attempted to put his support within a  politically correct envelope.

The interruptions to the speech  inevitably  diminished the force of the speech  but the great lack was a failure to  address much of Powell’s predictions. .For example, Powell’s forecasts for  the growth of black and Asian minorities in the UK were pretty accurate as the 2011 census shows, viz:

 “Amongst the 56 million residents in England and Wales, 86% were White, 8% were Asian/Asian British and  3% were Black/African/Caribbean/Black British.”

In his speech Powell made these predictions:

“In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General’s Office.

There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.”

Powell was also correct in predicting a  lack of integration and  the creation of de facto ghettos by immigrants and their descendants.

In addition Powell foresaw the effects of state enforcement of  censorship on anyone who spoke out against immigration and its effects  is only too visible today when thousands of people every year  find  themselves in criminal courts because they have said or written something  deemed to be  racially or religiously “hate speech”.  ( It is worth adding in passing that the constraints on what may be said about  race  and immigration have acted as a springboard for political correctness in general to flourish.)

When Powell spoke of the black man having the whip hand over the white man he was thinking of  how the 1968 Race Relations Act  would affect the existing relationship between the population of the UK.  He saw that those who were from  racial and ethnic minorities would have a new  form of privilege deriving from the fact that such people would be able to insist that they be served or employed  in a way the native white population would not be able to insist. For example, a native white Briton would  not normally  be able to cry racism if he was denied a   job because the vast majority of employers were (and are)  white.  Anyone who was black or Asian would have huge opportunity to make a claim of racism because most employers were (and are) white.

Here is Powell on  the disadvantaging of the native British:

“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; 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.”

In his speech Powell quoted the Labour minister John Stonehouse on the subject of communal privileges which minority groups were already demanding when Powell made the speech. Stonehouse had written this

“’The Sikh communities’ campaign to maintain customs inappropriate in Britain is much to be regretted. Working in Britain, particularly in the public services, they should be prepared to accept the terms and conditions of their employment. To claim special communal rights (or should one say rites?) leads to a dangerous fragmentation within society. This communalism is a canker; whether practised by one colour or another it is to be strongly condemned.’”

None of these issues were addressed  meaningfully or at all in the discussion breaks which interrupted the reading of the speech.

On Powell’s prediction of violent racial clashes  with “the Tiber foaming with much blood”,   it is true that  has not yet occurred in the sense of large scale fighting between the native population and the minority immigrants. However, there has been a series of  serious riots by non-whites since he Powell gave the speech, the most recent in 2011.  Moreover,  it is worth pointing out Powell put no time limit as to when   such violence might occur. Common sense  suggests that the larger the racial and ethnic minorities become the greater will be the racial tension  because the minorities will demand more and more privilege for their own group. It  is also worth noting that  non-white immigrants have brought a disproportionate amount of crime to the streets of Britain, much of it violent. That propensity for violence  could easily be harnessed to fight racial/ethnic disputes.

As for the general effect of   non-white immigration, it has undeniably resulted in a fractured and vastly less cohesive society.

2016 and the future

Robert Henderson

What has changed over the past year?

The grip of the Western globalists is slipping.   They do not   realise it yet but their day is  almost done. Their ramshackle ideology,   a toxic blend of open borders politically correct internationalism  and what is crony capitalism but called by  those with a vested interest in it neo-liberal or laissez faire  economics , has wrought as it was certain to do,  rage and increasingly despair amongst  the majority of electors in Western states who are increasingly turning to  politicians that at least have some grasp of what is necessary to preserve  the viability of Western nation states.

The most  optimistic possibility for the West  is that  parties which do have some real attachment to what the great mass of people seek will be both elected and when in office carry through their pre-election promises.  But this is far from certain. It does not follow that what will replace globalism will be a politics which reflects the wants and needs of Western voters because the existing elites may drop all pretence of being anything other than an authoritarian clique and go in for wholehearted suppression of any dissent.  There are already signs that  this might happen with  the  growing willingness  amongst Western  elites  to  censor  political ideas, potent examples of which have been the  recent conviction of Gert Wilders in Holland for inciting racial hatred by saying there should be fewer Moroccans in  Holland , while in the UK  the  Prime Minister Theresa May has just sanctioned the putting into law of a definition of anti-Semitism so broad that any criticism Jews or Israel could be interpreted as anti-Semitic. Much will depend on how Donald Trump’s presidency develops.

In Britain the  EU referendum  has dominated everything both before and after the vote to leave in the political year .The anti-democratic mind-set of those who wanted to remain in the EU has been nakedly shown by colossal attempts to  sabotage the result of the referendum through legal  and political action and an incessant bleat about how they want a soft Brexit not a hard Brexit when only  Brexit  exists.

Something which the government calls Brexit will  eventually emerge,  but it could easily  be  a beast which is  directly at odds with what the British people voted on when they went to the polls on 23^rd June, namely, for a clean break with the EU.  If this government, or conceivably its successor, concludes  a deal which stitches the UK back into the EU with  such things as free movement of EU citizens into the UK, the UK paying for the “privilege” of remaining in the Single Market and the UK being subject to the European Court of Justice, there  is surely a serious risk of political violence. But even if that  is  avoided British politics would be seriously curdled by such a betrayal.

The other  pressing political  need  is  for an  English parliament and government  to balance the devolution of powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. A procedure to have only  MPs sitting for  English seats  voting on English only legislation  (English votes for English laws  or EVEL for short)  began a trial in 2015,  but  it  has few teeth because  it is difficult to disentangle what is English only  legislation, not least  because  MPs  for seats outside of England argue  that any Bill dealing solely with English matters has financial implications for the rest of the UK and , consequently, is not an England only Bill. Nor does EVEL allow English MPs to initiate English only legislation. Most importantly  England , unlike Scotland,  Wales and Northern Ireland, is left without any national political representatives   to concentrate on purely English domestic matters.

The House of Lords review of its first year  in operation makes EVEL’s  limitations clear:

The EVEL procedures introduced by the Government address, to some extent, the West Lothian Question. They provide a double-veto, meaning that legislationor provisions in bills affecting only England (or in some cases, England and Wales, or England and Wales and Northern Ireland), can only be passed by the House of Commons with the support of both a majority of MPs overall, and of MPs from the nations directly affected by the legislation.

Yet English MPs’ ability to enact and amend legislation does not mirror their capacity, under EVEL, to resist legislative changes. The capacity of English MPs to pursue a distinct legislative agenda for England in respect of matters that are devolved elsewhere does not equate to the broader capacity of devolved legislatures to pursue a distinct agenda on matters that are devolved to them

The most dangerous general global threats are plausibly these in this order

1. Mass immigration, the permitting of which by elites is the most fundamental treason because unlike an invasion by force, there is no identifiable concrete foreign enemy for the native population to resist. Yet the land is effectively colonised just the same.

2 Uncontrolled technology, which leaves the developed world in particular  but increasingly the  world generally,  very vulnerable  to suddenly being left without vital services if computer systems fail naturally or through cyber attacks.  Judged by the number of reports in the mainstream media the frequency of personal data being hacked and major computer systems  going down, most notably banks, is increasing. This is unsurprising because both state organisations and private business are remorselessly  forcing  customers and  clients to use web-based contact points rather than deal with a human being.  This in itself makes life unpleasant and for older people in particular most difficult.

In the  medium  term –  probably within ten years –  there is the existential  threat  to humans of general purpose robots being able to cause a catastrophic  drop in demand by taking over  so many jobs that demand collapses because huge numbers are rapidly made unemployed.  To that can be added the development of military robots which have the capacity to make autonomous judgements about killing humans.

The  general lack of political concern and a seemingly  universal inability of those with power and influence to see  how robotics and AI systems generally  are rapidly  developing is astonishing. Time and again when the subject of robots and AI systems is raised with such people they will bleat that new jobs will arise due to the new technology, as new technology has always created jobs, and these developments will provide the jobs for humans.

This is sheer “it’ll never replace the horse” ism .  Intelligent robots and AI systems will not only take existing jobs,  they will take most or even all of the new jobs that arise.  This is the potential catastrophe that humans face from robots and AI,  the rapid loss of such  huge amounts of employment  that the economic systems of both the developed and the developing world cannot function  because of the loss of demand,  not the SF style scare stories about intelligent robots making war on humans.  The other thing that  politicians do not seem to understand is that when there are  robots and AI systems sophisticated enough to do most of the jobs humans do, the loss of human jobs will occur at great speed. We can be certain of this for two reasons; our experience with digital technology  is of rapid advances and robots and AI systems will be able to design and build even more advanced  robots and AI systems, probably  very quickly.

Aside from digital technology,  advances in genetic engineering and ever more radical transplant surgery raise the question of what it is to be a human being if full face transplants are now available and the possibility of things such as a head being transplanted in the not too distant future.   We need to ask ourselves what it is to be human.

3. Islam – serious unrest is found throughout the world wherever there are large numbers of Muslims.
4. Ever increasing general instability. Contrary to Steven Pinker’s view that the world is becoming more peaceful, if civil conflict is included things are getting worse.  Formal war may be less easy to identify , but ethnic  (and often religious ) based strife plus repression by  rulers  is so widespread outside the West that it is best described as endemic. Globalisation =  destabilisation because by making the world’s economic system more complex , there is simply more to go wrong both economically and socially. Sweeping aside  traditional relationships and practices is a recipe for social discord.  All of economic history tells you one thing above all else: a strong domestic economy is essential for the stability of any country.   The ideology of laissez faire, is like all ideologies,  at odds with  human nature and reality generally and its application inevitably creates huge numbers of losers when applied to places such as China and India.

The most dangerous specific  threats to global peace and stability are:

–              The heightened tension between China and the rest of the Far East (especially Japan) as a consequence of China’s growing territorial ambitions.

–              China’s extraordinary expanding  shadow world empire which consists of both huge investment in the first world and de facto colonial control in the developing world.

–              The growing power of India which threatens Pakistan. An India/Pakistan nuclear exchange is  probably the most likely use of nuclear weapons I the next ten years.

–              The increasing authoritarianism of the EU due to both the natural impetus towards central control and the gross mistake of the Euro.   This will end either in a successful centralisation of  EU power after the UK has left the EU  or the attempt at centralisation will lead to a collapse of the EU.

The Eurofanatics  continue to play  with fire in their attempts to lure border states of Russia into the EU whilst applying seriously damaging sanctions to Russia. It is not in the West’s interest to have a Russia which feels threatened or denied its natural sphere of influence.

–   The ever more successful (at least in the short run) attempt of post-Soviet Russia to re-establish their suzerainty over the old Soviet Empire and Putin’s increasingly martial noises including substantial re-armament.  However, these ambitions will be likely to be mitigated by the plight of the Russian provinces of the Far East where there is unofficial Chinese infiltration of the sparsely populated and natural resource rich land there. Eventually China will wish to capture those territories.

Robert Henderson 17  12 2016

The Archers: an everyday story of feminist folk

Robert Henderson

The Archers is the world’s longest running radio soap opera,  having run continuously  from  1951 to the present day. It is  set in Ambridge, a fictional  farming  village in the English midlands .  In the real world such a place would  even these days be  very white,  very English and  decidedly traditional in its ways.  For most of the Archers’ existence  the fiction  generally corresponded with the reality, but two decades or so ago things changed when the producer and scriptwriters of the series decided that the programme  should  pay homage to the three gods of political correctness: race, gay rights and feminism.  Consequently,  Ambridge has had visited upon it sundry  black and Asian characters,  a raft of gays, a female engineer, a female vicar, a white English vicar married to a Hindu  and a steady flow of politically correct storylines .

This new politically correct regime introduced  rules  which the characters have to meet. Non-white characters  must  invariably be middleclass with professional jobs  such as schoolteachers or lawyers. They must never be shown behaving badly and any criticism of them or ethnic minorities generally  by white characters, a very rare event, must be done in a way to portray the  white character as being  utterly beyond the politically correct Pale. The men must be  generally stupid, feckless, weak  or  cruel, while  the women and girls must  be shown as either oppressed by their men or superior to them , for example, when school public examination results hit the Ambridge doormats  this year all  the boys in the cast  were depicted as being none too bright  academically while the girls all came through with honours and headed  for university.

All that is in a day’s politically correct  agitprop work for the writers and producer  of the programme. The politically correct issue which has been dominating the series lately is the  coercing and control  of women by their menfolk. This  is  a storyline  of a different  order to anything which has gone before in terms of  sustained  – it has lasted for a year or more –  and remarkably crude politically correct propaganda.

The central  character in this propaganda  is Helen Titchener (Louiza Patikas). She is  a member of the Archer clan and  has been  much put upon by the scriptwriters  over the years  who have used her as a vehicle for various feminist issues. She has been an anorexic who was hospitalised. More generally her life has been a  continual round of failed relationships  with men,  including  that of her live-in lover Greg the gamekeeper (I kid you not)  leaving their relationship in the most emphatic manner by blowing his brains out with a 12-bore.  In despair at not finding a man who hangs around for  long Helen has had a child (as you do in feminharpy world) by artificial insemination with sperm provided by an anonymous donor. The result is a son Henry who is now aged five.

In her mid-thirties the scriptwriters gave her  a married man Rob Titchener (Timothy Watson) as a lover and eventually he becomes her husband.    Rob is generally  depicted as what feminists fondly but mistakenly  imagine  constitutes the behaviour of an alpha male, namely, being a selfish one-dimensional  brute who simply wants to control and use women. He   is depicted as perpetually  controlling Helen but  this control includes   (in politically correct eyes)  such heinous things as not wanting her to work  too hard while she is pregnant and being concerned about  her driving whilst pregnant  after she has an accident. There are also episodes where rape is hinted at. More of that later.

The  plot also attempts to show the controlling behaviour is a matter of conditioning with Rob’s father being a blustering bully and his mother highly manipulative. This of course fits neatly with the politically correct view of humanity, whether male or female ,being nothing more than the product of their social environment.

Eventually,  whilst still pregnant with Rob’s child,  Helen tells him she is going  to leave him  and in a piece of ludicrously  clumsy plotting by the scriptwriters they make Rob  place a knife in her hands before  telling her that the only way she can leave him is by turning the knife on herself.  As Helen is well advanced in pregnancy the idea of her stabbing herself to death is particularly far fetched and it is clearly just a  device to get a knife into her hands without her picking one up herself and thus  potentially incriminating herself.

Soon after Helen has had the knife thrust into her hands her  son Henry comes into the room and Rob orders him back to bed. He has never hit Henry and does not hit him now.  At this point  Helen stabs  Rob three times and leaves him close to death. She makes no attempt to call for an ambulance. Subsequently  Helen is charged with attempted murder with an alternative charge of wounding with intent and is held on remand. Whilst in custody she gives birth to her second son whom she calls Jack and Rob calls Gideon.

After being charged Helen ends up with Anna Tregorran, the daughter of a regular Archers’ characte, Carol Tregorran , as her barrister. Not content to simply present Anna in her role as a lawyer the scriptwriters decide to both make her full of angst about her failure to win  past domestic abuse  cases and be in the midst of  the emotional upset of the recent breaking up of her marriage to  her husband Max.  But Max turns out to be Maxine, thus  breaking new ground for the Archers with its  first overt depiction of a lesbian relationship.  (Despite being very eager  to have homosexual relationships in the programme, the Archers has always been strangely  coy when it comes to girl on girl action. )

When Helen is appears in court  at her trial the scriptwriters are  seen at their most heavy handed. They  begin the trial scenes by pushing evidence which makes a conviction likely. Telling facts  are put before the courts such as Helen’s failure to ring for an ambulance after stabbing Rob,  Helen’s threat to kill Rob in front of witnesses shortly before the stabbing were and the evidence of her 5-year-old son  – the only witness to the stabbing – who does not say anything which suggests  Rob had  threatened him.

This scenario rapidly changes as the trial progresses not least because  the judge always comes up with a judgement  favourable to the defence whenever something happens which might well have caused evidence favourable to Helen to be excluded  or the trial to be abandoned. A juror tweets “Man hating lezzie. Gonna make sure she goes down.” The judge allows the case to continue with eleven jurors, without making any attempt to discover if the errant  juror  had made his views known to the rest of the jury. (If he had done so that would most probably have stopped the trial dead in its tracks.)   When Helen makes claims of repeated rape during her evidence , not having mentioned rape at all before she entered the witness box, the  prosecution unsurprisingly objects.  The judge allows the evidence to stand. Rob’s ex-wife Jess comes forward at the last moment to give evidence of Rob’s controlling behaviour towards her which includes rape. Again the judge comes down on Helen’s side by allowing Jess to give similar fact evidence.  When the jury send out a note to the judge after a few hours deliberation saying they cannot come to a unanimous verdict,  the judge makes no attempt to get the jury to press on for a while longer but at the first time of asking says he will accept a majority verdict of 10-1.

Obvious lines of questioning  were  ignored by the prosecution.  For example,  questions about what relationship  Helen had with Jess  leading to the question “When did you last meet or speak with Helen?”  As the pair of them had met at Helen’s request not long before the stabbing of Rob the prosecution could easily have left the jury with the firm belief that the pair of them had plotted against Rob.

Helen’s sudden claim from the witness box that she had been repeatedly raped by Rob because he wanted to have a child soon after they were married and Helen did not – hardly unreasonable on Rob’s part because Helen   is in her mid thirties –went virtually unexamined. An obvious line of question for the prosecution would have been to ask her about her sexual relations with Rob before they were married. Presumably Helen would have said they were normal because it is wildly improbable that a dominant male like Rob would have  gone ahead with a marriage if his intended was denying him regular sex.   At that point the prosecution would have been able to ask a simple but devastating question, viz:  If you had  regular sexual relations before marriage why weren’t you worried about getting pregnant then? Helen would either have had to say she had not worried about getting pregnant then or more plausibly that she used contraception. Either way her claim of rape would  have looked decidedly odd because if it was simply a case of getting pregnant all she would have needed to do was use some form of reliable contraception.

The height of this many stranded absurdity was reached in the hour-long jury room episode .  By the end of the trial on the evidence given it would have been reasonable to have looked for a guilty verdict on at least the lesser charge of wounding with intent, for there was no certain evidence that the stabbing had taken  place in response to a reasonable fear that either Helen or her son were under threat of assault by Rob.

The jury was a distinctly  starry one with some well known  names in British acting including  Dame Eileen Atkins, Nigel Havers and Catherine Tate . Just to make sure the jury passed the diversity test one of the jurors was a Muslim  woman Parveen and to make sure the listeners did not miss this fact the scriptwriters had one of the jurors  compliment Parveen on her “beautiful headscarf”.

The jurors made the jury in 12 Angry Men look like a model of conscientious and restrained citizens seeking the truth.  Dennis  (Graham Seed) , who was dead set on finding Helen guilty,  Catherine Tate’s Lisa  was  the working-class white woman who had little patience with the idea that Helen had acted reasonably,  while Nigel Havers’s Carl, who was the jury foreman,  railed against the injustice of excuses only being made for women in the course of recounting how the courts had given his children to his wife after they split and added insult to injury by banning him from the family home whilst requiring him to pay the mortgage.   Jury vetting is nowhere near as through or as comprehensive as it is in the USA but I really do wonder whether all of those on this fictional jury , especially Carl, would have made it through the vetting system as it now exists which includes a criminal records check.

Set against them was the terminally irritating Jackie (Eileen Atkins)  who in the hectoring tones of  what used to be called a “county”  voice kept on repeating  with excruciating condescension that the point which  mattered was whether Helen had thought she or her son were in danger.  In fact that is not all the jurors have to satisfy themselves when it comes to self-defence  under English law.  They also need to address the question of whether “ a reasonable person would regard the force used as reasonable or excessive”.  Stabbing someone three times and nearly killing them when no certain  evidence had been produced to show that Helen had reasonable grounds to fear that she or her son was in serious and imminent danger from Rob is clearly not what a reasonable person would regard  as reasonable force.  All the jury had to go on was Helen’s word that Rob had given her the knife and told her she should kill herself, a story which in itself sounded far fetched  to some of the jury –   Rob of course denied  giving Helen the knife and telling her that she should kill herself.

The end of the trial comes with ridiculous abruptness. One moment the jurors are still arguing sixteen to the dozen (with six of the eleven for conviction on one or other of the charges), the next we are back in the courtroom with the foreman of the jury giving not guilty verdicts.   No explanation is given for the sudden change of heart of the majority.  Simply  as a piece of drama  this plotting was ridiculous. It was  as if the scriptwriters   had either been told the trial had to be over by a certain date  and simply wrote implausible tosh to meet the deadline or they  could not think of a plausible way of extricating Helen from the weight of evidence against her and the attitudes they had given the jurors, both of which pointed to a guilty verdict on one or other of the charges,  and got to the verdicts of not guilty as soon as they could in the hope the vast majority of the  audience  would not  notice the implausibility of what was going on because they wanted Helen to be found not guilty.

Not content  with the criminal trial the scriptwriters then had  a custody hearing for Henry and Jack held a week or so after the end of the criminal trial. The scriptwriters have the judge who acting in  the criminal trial presiding over the custody adjudication.  At the beginning of the hearing the judge warns counsel for Rob that having heard the criminal case he is going to take a great deal of persuading if custody is  of either boy is to be given to Rob. Could this really have happened in the real world? The judge then  proceeds to give custody of both boys to Helen,  denies Rob any access to Henry and only a few hours a week of heavily supervised access to Jack/Gideon.  This is done on the grounds that Rob – who has never harmed Henry  and has been an exemplary stepfather to the boy – represents a danger to the boy, while  Helen, an unbalanced neurotic who has shown herself to be very violent indeed, is deemed to present no threat at all.

Since the trial Rob has been s portrayed as being given the cold shoulder by the residents of  Ambridge.   No one argues his case by, for example,  pointing out the seriousness of his injuries or the fact that Henry is missing him.  Instead the script writers are making him more and more angry and uncontrolled in his behaviour  to provide one suspects further justification for Helen’s acquittal and grounds for ostracism and vilification by the other characters  and there are already hints that the police may investigate the alleged rapes

This type of black and white characterisation and plotting is pure agitprop. The ideological points are made in  the most blatant way so even the dimmest listener cannot miss them and  the  villain of the piece is deliberately  left with nothing more than a handful of traits which delineate the particular  “incorrect “behaviour which must be both condemned without qualification and punished.  This despite the fact that the scriptwriters have with the characters of Rob’s parents tried to demonstrate that Rob’s behaviour is all down to his upbringing. The scriptwriters want to have their cake and eat it by both punishing  Rob and saying he not responsible . It is what Orwell called doublethink.

Doublethink also applies to the discord between the portrayal of Helen  and what she allows to happen to her. Helen  is presented as  passive being completely  lacking agency within a relationship,  despite the fact that  the scriptwriters throughout  kept on emphasising that the character  started as a confident woman very much in charge of her own life. Well, a confident and capable woman should have the  capacity to say no or to simply walk away from a bullying man. Moreover, Helen was not dependent on Rob for money as they both worked for the family business and Helen could have left Rob at any time knowing that she had a ready made refuge the family farm for both herself and her child.

Part of the purpose of the year-long storyline was to undoubtedly  attract more listeners (which it reportedly did in large numbers ), but even more it was intended as  a cautionary feminist tale. It was designed  to indoctrinate the audience  with the idea that men are often if not invariably ruthless exploiters and groomers of women, who are reduced to being sexual, emotional and psychological slaves, and that  women may  physically attack their men viciously and get away with it provided they say they are being controlled by their men and believed they were in danger.

This  propaganda has probably  been put out now because there is a recently passed piece of UK legislation – Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 – which makes the coercion of those in a close relationship, family members or a sexual partner,   a criminal offence carrying a maximum sentence of five years. The Crown Prosecution Service  guidance on behaviours which are included in coercive control  include “Repeatedly putting them down such as telling them they are worthless” and  “Reputational damage”.    Talk about dangerously broad and subjective .

There are two complaints to make of the BBC’s resources being used to make this type of material. The first is  the utterly inept scriptwriting which most importantly  made Helen’s acquittal unbelievable; the second, the use of the BBC as a propaganda  tool in the politically correct interest.  The BBC often does this,  but the Helen/Rob propaganda tool  was extraordinarily one-eyed in intent and astonishingly  crudely  executed.

When the BBC is challenged about bias in a programme their favourite justification is that they attain balance over the whole range of BBC programmes relating to a topic. The use of the Archers over more than a year to promote the “coercion of women”  line unquestioningly is  probably the best example one could find of the BBC not only not  achieving balance over various programmes dealing with a particular subject but making no effort whatsoever to do so.

The intentions of this new law  are made crystal  clear in the Crown Prosecution Service guidance that “The Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Strategy provides an overarching framework for crimes identified as being primarily committed, but not exclusively, by men against women within a context of power and control.” Do not hold your breath waiting for a woman to be prosecuted under this law.

The Archers originally  went out in 1951  with the tagline an everyday story of simple countryfolk. Today it should  have the tagline An  everyday story of paranoid feminist folk.

White Lives Must Matter (to US politicians)

Robert Henderson

The Dallas police shootings by a black man Micah Johnson who before dying made it clear he wanted to kill whites, has opened up a new front in the unacknowledged  insurrection of blacks in the  USA.  Insurrection  a wild  exaggeration , you say?  Well, what else can one call a growing idea amongst American blacks that to kill whites and in particular white police officers  is justified because of an imagined or at the least greatly inflated  general oppression, both historical and contemporary,  of blacks by whites .

As the frequent Muslim terrorist attacks in the West  show all too vividly, the  Internet is a   most efficient instrument to radicalise people  to reject the very idea of the rule of law, politics practised within a democratic system  or the toleration  of any ideas but their own.  There are now unmistakable  signs that the Internet is  being seriously used  in the radicalisation of blacks to adopt  an anti-white  mentality and to incite attacks on whites, for example, The Black Lives Matter group  is being used as a vehicle for incitement to harm whites.

There are also already  nascent black  militias forming, for example,  the  Black Panthers, a group which is  threatening to parade in numbers  with guns around the Republican convention in Ohio.  They can do this legally in Ohio because the carrying of guns openly is permitted there, but it is one thing to carry guns legally as a single person or even as a small group without any intent to threaten; quite another to be doing so in force outside a political convention of a party they demonise  whilst claiming that white America is practising genocide against black America.

The idea that black America is  being persecuted by white America  falls on fertile black ground because of the  victimhood promoted in blacks by white liberals since the 1960s and the sense of entitlement created by positive discrimination/affirmative action.    The first provides blacks with  an excuse for black failure and misbehaviour generally and a  justification for black violence, especially black violence against whites. The second feeds into the victimhood where an individual has not benefited from positive discrimination/affirmative action, or worse, it has been applied to  a black individual to get them into a job or a university course only for them not to be able to seize the opportunity they were given.

The ostensible reason for the rising  black militancy is the killing of blacks by police officers. It is true that many blacks are killed by police officers in the USA but then so are large numbers of whites and ethnic minorities other than blacks.  Comprehensive official figures for police killings are not collected in the USA,  but it is clear from what statistics there are including research by private bodies such as the media that more whites are killed by police  than blacks in the USA.   The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has stats on “homicides by legal intervention”. These are killings  by deadly force by anyone authorised to use such force by the state,  in effect,  the police.  In the period 1999-2011” 2,151 whites died by being shot by police compared to 1,130 blacks”. Another more recent source is the Washington Post which found just under  50% of such killings were of whites.

The fact that so many whites are killed by the police suggests that the police kill not because of race but because of the behaviour  and circumstances of suspects and the state of mind  of police officers when they are in a situation which results in the killing of someone they have stopped either to arrest or question..

Why do black men get killed by police officers more often than whites or minorities other than blacks in proportion to their  proportion of the US population? The quick answer is that they  engage in far more crime and especially  violent crime than whites and other minorities so the likelihood of them coming across police taking an interest in what they are doing is increased.   They are also perceived, probably correctly, to be more likely to carry a weapon, especially a gun, and  more likely to resist arrest with violence. Black males  are also on average physically larger than other racial groups.  All of this inevitably makes police officers jumpy when they are dealing with blacks,  a nervousness that goes on top of the natural tension created by officers being armed.

On the black side of the equation, black men are very reluctant to accept any criticism from whites let alone the imposition of authority such as a police officer carries. This will  probably make black men less likely to obey a police officer’s commands. The individual police officer is aware of all this and more inclined to draw and use their weapon.    The Rodney King case is a good example of both this and the willingness of the media to censor video evidence to make the police look like violent hooligans by not showing what led up to their attack on King.    The full video evidence showed King, a young and powerfully built man,  refusing to  obey police orders and  charging an officer.

High rates of black delinquency also show up in the interracial violence statistics. Official US statistics for the 2012/13 period show 560,600 violent crimes against whites, whereas whites committed only 99,403 such crimes against blacks.

Apologists for black violence say that the   difference in the frequency of  violent crime by blacks on whites compared with whites on blacks is  because there are far fewer blacks than whites in the USA  and therefore a black person is much more likely to encounter a white person. This  will not stand up because  the argument works both ways. Because there are many more whites than blacks that will mean that many more whites will encounter blacks. If  the propensity to commit violent crime is the same in both white and black populations this should mean that blacks are subject to more assaults by whites because more whites meet them.  The fact that blacks commit so many more crimes of violence against whites can only mean that either/or blacks have a greater natural tendency to be violent generally or they are frequently choosing white victims simply because they are white,

There is also the question of how often blacks and whites meet. Much of the United States  is segregated by race and ethnicity.   This means that the likelihood of blacks meeting whites will be substantially below what a simple arithmetic calculation based on respective group population sizes gives. It could be that the crimes of violence committed against whites by blacks is even more dramatic because on average blacks encounter whites far less frequently than is thought because of the ghetto effect. .

Arrest rates of different races  will  depend on the type of crimes committed.  Those committing  very visible  crimes such as street dealing  and mugging  – crimes favoured by blacks – are probably more likely to be arrested and charged than those committing less visible crimes such as  burglary  or a mail order fraud  – crimes favoured by whites.

Finally, because blacks have a higher conviction rate than whites they will have a far larger proportion of their  population  who are known  to the police as convicted criminals.   This will make the likelihood of them becoming involved with the police much higher than it is for whites who commit fewer crimes.

Those who claim that the black experience in the USA  is unique  need to explain why other non-white groups in the USA  such as Asians  do not display the same antisocial and often violent behaviour  that blacks  in the e USA  frequently display.  The idea that it is all down to the legacy of  slavery becomes thinner as each  year passes.  Slavery in the US  was abolished 151 years ago. Taking a generation as 25 years that is six generations and two of those generations have seen the bestowing of privilege on blacks through affirmative action. Moreover, many of the blacks in the US today are not the  descendants of slaves but the immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa, many of whom are recent incomers. It is also telling that where blacks are in the majority in a country their  behaviour is  broadly  reminiscent of that of blacks in the USA and the West generally, that is,  prone to antisocial behaviour especially violence.

A more plausible explanation for the  fact that blacks commit so much more crime and especially violent crime is likely to be found in their biology.  Blacks have an inferior  IQ distribution compared with whites and Asians of the Chinese type.  American blacks have an average IQ of 85, whites 103 and Asians 106. It could be that Blacks as a group simply find it harder to cope in  a sophisticated first world society such as the USA and their frustration in not being able to cope leads to criminality and violence. See my A low IQ individual in a high IQ society.   The frustration of those who have benefitted from affirmative action and have failed to cope  would  probably  be unusually sharp.

Blacks also have substantially higher testosterone levels compared to white. If testosterone leads to greater aggression this could be a partial explanation for  the prevalence of black violence. Another partial explanation could be higher rates of  the gene MAOA-3R — the “original warrior gene” – in blacks than whites, although this research is still questionable not in the sense that the amount of the gene which blacks have in comparison with other races (substantially higher)  but in connecting the gene to violent behaviour..

Whatever the cause of black behaviour one thing is certain, the present radicalisation of blacks to in some cases  a red-hot hatred of whites can only lead to more and more violence, more and more disorder. Already the violent crimes committed by blacks on whites are at a level which  should have long ago brought US government action  to protect whites.  (Just imagine the elite uproar if  the propensity of  whites to  assault blacks  was the same as the actual current propensity of blacks to assault whites). Only political correctness has prevented this happening or a white grass roots really making waves in the US political mainstream.  But political dams are like real dams, sooner or later they burst. Indeed, the bursting may be close to hand with Donald Trump making a realistic run for the White House.

There is a crying need  for a  politicians in the USA to  breach to fantasy world of the politically correct clique which hold the reins of power and influence in the USA.  White politicians must stop making excuses for black misbehaviour  and give whites generally the confidence to complain when blacks behave badly, something which would require the dismantling of political correctness related to race including the ending affirmative action.  On the black side of the matter, blacks with a public profile need to stop playing the victim and make it clear that blacks going around killing white police,  far from dissuading the police from shooting black men  will almost certainly  increase the killing of black men not just out of revenge, although that  will come into it, but also because white police  officers will be ever more nervous when tackling a black suspect. In short, there needs to be a complete culture change in the USA’s attitude towards blacks.

Those with power and influence in the USA  need to get a grip on this now because if the killing of whites by blacks continues it is easy to see how vigilante wars will break out with blacks and whites regularly killing one another for no  reason other than  they are black and white.

 

The West is a sitting duck while Muslims are in our midst

Robert Henderson

The latest Muslim terrorist massacre has been particularly savage. A Tunisian with French citizenship Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel  deliberately drove a heavy articulated lorry along a crowded road full of people for more than a mile deliberately  killing 84 people  including ten children and injuring dozens more. The injuries to many of the dead were so severe that they  could not  be identified because their faces had been crushed as they went under the wheels of the lorry. The terrorist organisation ISIS  has claimed that the attack was in response to their urging of Muslims in the West to attack non-Muslims with any means they could find including motor vehicles.

What can be done to stop such outrages? The brutal truth is that while large numbers of Muslims are in the West nothing much can be done to stop this form of subcontracted terrorism which is of a  very different nature from  what might be called conventional terrorism. In a conventional terrorist war in a society with a substantial minority (or even an oppressed majority ) from which terrorists are drawn support for terrorism is pyramidal. The troubles in Northern Ireland  are a first rate  example of such a war. At the top are the planners and executive players. Below them are the bomb makers and armourers. Alongside them are the active terrorists carrying out bombings, shootings etc.   Below them come  those willing to provide safe houses for people and weapons. Below them come those who can be relied on to  demonstrate with a degree of violence at the drop of a hat. Below them come the mass of the minority many of whom say “I don’t approve of their methods but I agree with their ends”.  Members of this slyly complicit majority of the minority  are also most unlikely to give information to the police about terrorist activity, not least because they will fear  violent repercussions.  Their passivity and ambivalence provides in Mao’s words “The sea in which the terrorists swim”.

All this interlinking activity provides plenty of opportunity for the security services dealing with such an insurgency to gather intelligence which thwarts planned terrorist acts. Often the intelligence comes into their hands because of the inability of terrorists to keep their plans to themselves, either because they allow themselves to be infiltrated by agents of the state or simply out of vanity. ( Ask any police detective about identifying criminals and they will  tell you a large proportion of criminal convictions come from the inability of criminals to resist the temptation to boast about what they are up to). The need to source weapons and munitions is another weakness because that  brings in people from outside the terrorist organisation and the number of arms suppliers will be limited and more likely to be identified by security services.

Muslim terrorism in the West is something different. To begin with its practitioners are only too willing to commit suicide.  This is rare behaviour amongst conventional terrorists. Members of the Provisional IRA had no such appetite.  It is also a very effective form of terrorism and long recognised as such.  George IIII said  that anyone who was willing to lose their life in an attempt on his life would probably succeed because it was simply impossible to guard against such a determined assassin who would only have to get close enough to stab or shoot him.  The suicide attacker also deprives the attacked of any chance of punishing him or her, a substantial psychological benefit.

It is true that some  of  the circumstances of the conventional terrorist war exists in the war that is now being waged by  Islam against the West  (Islam is waging war over the globe but I shall not deal with that here, although the same basic problem exists everywhere ).  The providing of the “sea in which the terrorists swim”, the at best ambivalent  attitude of many Muslims in the West towards Western society and the sense of victimhood which readily excuses any action they take against Western societies are all active,  but because of its diffuse and laissez faire nature most  of the elements of conventional terrorist war is missing. There may be some outside direction and assistance from the likes of ISIS and Al Qaeda  but plainly it is possible, as the latest atrocity shows, to cause mayhem if the terrorist is simply an individual who uses  as his weapon  a motor vehicle.   Moreover,  even if a would-be terrorist wants to use a bomb or a gun it is not that difficult to find instructions on the Internet to make the first and in many parts of the West getting a gun and plenty of ammunition is not difficult. As to getting training in using weapons, if we believe the media reports and security warnings, there are thousands of radicalised Muslims who have come back to the West after receiving such training and battle experience  from places such as Syria, Afghanistan and Libya.  Lone wolf terrorists or terrorists working in small groups have a wide range of terrorist acts they can choose from and it is unrealistic to expect Western security forces to make much of a dent in the number of attacks by such people.

But even where a plot is more substantial and/or may include foreign direction and consequently leave more possible openings for the security forces to come across the plotters, things are not simple. Political correctness puts up  barriers to rigorous investigations. The ready formation of immigrant ghettos make infiltration difficult not least  because wannabe terrorists are  often of an ethnicity  alien to the country in which they are living. This  means that if their group is to be infiltrated it can only be by someone sharing their ethnicity and speaking their language. There is not  a huge number of such people willing to spy on their own community and even if such people are recruited there is a strong likelihood that a significant number will have joined to get information about the security services, that is,  to act as a mole for terrorists.

The last difficulty is the sheer numbers of potential terrorists. To take the UK as an example, there are an estimated 3 million Muslims here.  If one in a thousand was a serious terrorist that would be 3,000  serious terrorists; if one in a hundred there would be 30,000. But whatever the numbers of really serious terrorists to do their work meaningfully  the security services  would have to  investigate many more Muslims, perhaps hundreds of thousands, because polls and research often show, for example, alarming numbers of  Muslims in the West supporting suicide bombings.   These are numbers  which are utterly beyond Britain’s security resources (or those of any other country)  to identify and monitor.

Why  were these very  obvious fifth columns allowed to settle in the West? Because of  an  irrational belief in the potency of human rationality at best and a treasonous hatred of their own societies at worst  of the internationalist elites which have dominated in the West during the last 50 years.  These elites  imagine that human beings are interchangeable and  that claims of culture and  race count for nothing, that human beings can simply be “educated” into accepting mulgticulturalism. Some actively hated their own societies and wilfully encouraged  mass immigration to ensure that their societies were in their words “enriched” by becoming less homogeneous.

The madness is  going on with huge numbers of Muslims still being allowed into the West because Western elites cannot break themselves of their addiction to the internationalist fantasy or are terrified of what will happen now such large numbers of Muslims are in the West. In any sane society the permitting of the mass immigration of those who are antagonistic towards the values of the country which is receiving them would be seen for what it is, treason.  Sooner or later that is what it will be called.

Article 50 is a poisoned chalice – Don’t drink from it

Robert Henderson

Those who think that British Europhile politicians   will  play fair if Britain votes to leave the EU in June will be horribly disappointed. The public may think that if the British people have voted to leave the EU and that is an end of it regardless of the wishes of the Government.   Sadly, there is every reason to expect that Brexit will be anything but a clean break from the EU.

To begin with there has been no commitment by Cameron to stand down as PM if the vote goes against him.  Quite the opposite for he  has publicly stated several  times that  he will stay on and many  Tory MPs, including some of those in favour of leaving like Chris Grayling ,  have said that he must remain in No 10 whatever the outcome of the referendum .

If Cameron stays on as PM after a vote to leave Britain would be in the absurd position of having a man in charge of  Britain’s withdrawal who has shown his all too eager  commitment to the EU by the feebleness of   the demands he made during  his “renegotiation” and his regularly repeated statement before the conclusion of the “renegotiation”  that he was sure he would get new terms which would allow him to campaign for Britain to remain within the EU.   

A post-referendum   Cameron  government entrusted with negotiating Britain’s departure from the EU would mean that not only the  PM  but  the majority of his  cabinet and ministers below  cabinet  level  will  be  drawn from the same pro-EU personnel as he has today.  In those circumstances Cameron and his fellow Europhiles would almost certainly try to stitch Britain back into the EU with a deal such as that granted to  Norway and Switzerland. If that happened Britain could end up with the most important issue in the British  public’s mind –  free movement  of not only labour but free movement of anyone with the right to permanent residence in the EU – untouched .

But if Cameron leaves  of his own accord soon after a vote to leave Britain could still end up with a Europhile  Prime Minister and Cabinet.  Why? By  far the most likely person to succeed him  is Boris Johnson. If he  does become  PM there is every reason to believe that he will also do his level best to enmesh Britain back into  the EU.  Ever since Johnson  became the Telegraph’s  Brussels correspondent in the 1990s he has been deriding the EU, but until coming out as a supporter of voting to leave in the past week he has never advocated Britain’s withdrawal.  Johnson also gave a very strong hint  in the  Daily Telegraph article in which he announced his support for leaving the EU that his support for Britain leaving the EU was no more than  a ploy to persuade the EU to offer  more significant concessions than those offered to Cameron. Johnson has also been a regular advocate of the value of immigration.

The scenario of Cameron or Johnson deliberately subverting the intention of a referendum vote  to leave are all too plausible. There has been no public discussion let alone  agreement by leading  politicians over what the British government may or may not negotiate in the event of a vote to leave.   Nor has there been any suggestion by any British politician or party  that whatever the terms offered by the EU the British public will have the right to vote on them in a referendum.  Britain could be left  with  an agreement decided by the British Government and the EU which might do nothing of what  the British public most wants and  has voted for, namely, the return of sovereignty and  the control of Britain’s borders.

Then  there is Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.  Both Cameron and Johnson are committed to doing so within the terms of the Lisbon Treaty of  2009.  Far from a vote to leave in the referendum putting Britain in the position of a  sovereign nation engaging in a negotiation for a treaty with the EU  it traps  Britain into an extended period of negotiation whose outcome is dependent on the agreement or non-agreement of  the 27 other EU member states and the  EU Parliament.  Let me quote  the Article in  full:

Article 50

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. (

Article 50  means that Britain could spend two years negotiating and get no treaty because the Council of Ministers could veto it through Qualified Majority Voting (QMV) or the European Parliament reject it. Britain would then have the option of either asking for an extension (which could be indefinite because there is no limit mentioned in the Article) or leaving without a treaty.  There is also the further complication that if a treaty was agreed by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament it would still have to be agreed by 27 EU member states,  either through Parliamentary vote or  in the case of a few including France, a referendum.  Moreover,  even if a treaty is agreed and accepted by all EU member states, this would leave  Britain up in the air for what could be a considerable time as each of the 27 members goes through the process of getting  the agreement of their Parliament or electorate.

The OUT camp must make it clear that  it would be both damaging and unnecessary for the UK to abide by this Treaty requirement. It  would allow the EU to inflict considerable damage on the UK both during the period prior to formally  leaving and afterwards if  the price of leaving with the EU’s agreement was  for  UK to sign up to various obligations, for example, to continue paying a large annual sum to the EU for ten years . It would also give  the Europhile UK political elite  ample opportunity to keep the UK attached to the EU in the manner that Norway and Switzerland are attached by arguing that it is the best deal Britain  can get.  If there was no second  referendum on the  terms  negotiated for Britain leaving the government of the day could simply pass the matter into law without the British voters having a say.

The Gordian knot of Article 50 can be cut simply repealing the European Communities Act and asserting the sovereignty of Parliament.   No major UK party could  object to this on principle because all three have, at one time or another,  declared that Parliament remains supreme and can repudiate anything the EU does if it so chooses.

If the stay-in camp argue that would be illegal because of the  treaty obligation, the OUT camp should simply emphasise  (1) that international law is no law because there is never any means of enforcing it within its jurisdiction is a state rejects it and (2) that treaties which do not allow for contracting parties to simply withdraw are profoundly undemocratic because they bind future governments. There is also the fact that the EU and its predecessor the EEC has constantly breached its own rules, spectacularly so in the case of the Eurozone.  Hence, for the EU treaties are anything but sacrosanct.

Civitas meeting 2 10 2014 – Should we seek to remain in the EU for trade only?

Sole speaker Ronald Stewart-Brown (Trade Policy and Research Centre)

Robert Henderson

I knew what a malformed disaster Stewart –Brown’s  plan for Britain to  have nothing more than a trade relationship the EU was going to be when he started his talk by warning against the Great Satan  of Protectionism by citing the example of the protectionist measures taking during the Depression of the 1930s. In fact, it was the protectionist measures taken by Britain, together with  Britain moving from the Gold Billion Standard and the Keynsian public spending  on things such as council housing which  allowed Britain to recover more quickly than other  large industrialised nations. (I go into this in more detail in my email to Stewart-Brown  which I reproduce at the bottom of this post).

When I challenged him on this,  instead of admitting that he had misrepresented the protectionist effects in the Depression,  he simply blithely ignored what he had said and feebly added that unemployment had not been cured before WW2.  In fact, the level of unemployment in 1939 was around 10 per cent, the type of level it had been at  during  most of the  1920s when the Free Trade mania was still dominating British politics.

This type of historical ignorance  or the wilful denial of historical  reality is part of the stock-in-trade of the laissez faire worshippers and makes most of what they say on  economics a literal nonsense because the doctrine itself denies reality. Human beings are not the base advantage seeking automata  beloved of classical economists; individuals will not normally  have anything approaching perfect knowledge of a market. Instead, they will be doing what humans have evolved to do, being social animals who care most about relationships with other humans, raising their children and so on.

Stewart-Brown’s plan was to have Britain effectively  leave the EU but remain in a customs union with it.  This he advocated because he thought  this would (appeal to the British electorate; (2) would avoid the major manufacturers such as those making cars in Britain panicking at the prospect of EU trade barriers being raised against them and  (3)reassure the rest of the world that world trade would not be  disturbed. ( Strange  how we are so often told that Britain is hugely insignificant in the world economy these days by the class of people Stewart-Brown comes from,  but when it suits their purposes Britain is suddenly a massive influence on that economy. They make it up as they go along).

The idea that the other 27 members of the EU would fall down at Britain’s feet  and agree to such an arrangement is   risible, as several of the audience pointed out. But even if it did take place,  Britain would not be simply in a trading block because (1) the other EU members would keep introducing new rules and regulations, for example, health and safety legislation, into the remit of the Customs Union administration even though they  would have nothing to do with trade and (2) most British politicians would be only too happy to go along with this re-establishment of ever tighter EU tentacles around Britain because they do not want Britain to be detached from the EU.  The head of Civitas, David Green also  pointed out the incongruity between Stewart-Brown’s plans for a custom’s union and  his plea for free trade. This disconcerted Stewart-Brown, and all he could find to say was that  he was proposing what he thought was possible.

The nadir of the Stewart-Brown’s address came when he rather curiously  claimed that Britain  would get what he was proposing because a custom’s union which allowed the EU members’ goods and services to come to freely into Britain would give Britain —wait for it … “the moral high ground”.  What does he expect if the other EU members do not fall into line below this, in internationalist eyes, crushing fact? That such malefactors  will be, as Michael Wharton delighted in saying, “brought before the bar of world opinion”?  It was sublimely naïve.  I managed to have a second go at him and pointed out that the whole movement of global politics was away from the  unnatural internationalist ideas which had held sway in varying degrees since 1945 towards the natural state of humanity, which is tribal and catered for by the nation state.  In particular I cited China as being a and economic and political Goliath which had shown repeatedly in recent times that it would not play the internationalist game, vide its persistent refusal to let the Renmimbi  rise in value, despite being pressed strongly by the USA to do so.

Judged by their questions to him the audience was widely unsatisfied  with Stewart-Brown’s ideas , which were strong on wishful thinking and very short on realism.  Stewart-Brown was also very keen on saying a consultation most be started on this and an investigation begun on that. He struck me as the type who would never come to the point where the end-game would actually begin.

There was one audience contribution which may have more than ordinary significance. The erstwhile Tory MP David Heathcoat-Amory was scathing in his condemnation of Cameron’s negotiating position on the EU, saying it was essential Britain went into the negotiations with the clear intention of asking for a vote to leave if nothing substantial was conceded.  He also supported Stewart-Brown’s idea of just being in a customs Union, but   only if those negotiating made it made clear Britain would simply walk away from the EU if no agreement was reached. Heathcoat-Amory may  represent a strong band of thinking amongst current Tory MPs.

It was all too familiarly depressing, Stewart-Brown is yet another person with some public influence who  really is not fit to have any hand in deciding what Britain’s relationship with the EU should be simply because he has been captured by the laissez faire ideology and is, I suspect, an internationalist at heart.

Email sent to after Civitas meeting –  I will post any reply here

Mr Ronald Stewart-Brown

Trade Policy and Research Centre

29 Great Smith Street, London SW1P 3BL

Email Ronald@tprc.org.uk

2 10 2014

Dear Mr Stewart-Brown,

A few thoughts on your Civitas talk today. Your commitment to free trade and doubtless free markets  generally is a gigantic stumbling block  to producing a realistic plan for Britain to remove herself from the EU.

How far you are entrapped within the free trade ideology was shown by your claim that the  great mistake in the  Depression was to engage in protectionism. In fact, that  was what protected Britain from the worst of the Depression years, along with coming off the Gold Bullion Standard, large scale state action which included building 500,000 council houses in the period  and the fact that British banks had already undergone considerable consolidation and thereby avoided the horrors that the USA experienced with their huge number of small banks, thousands of which went to the wall. The fact that Britain also had a national welfare system can also be thrown into the mix for it both gave the  unemployed an income  and making those who feared being unemployed less uncertain. These things probably kept consumption levels  significantly higher than they would otherwise have been.

In 1933 the unemployment rate was around 23% of the workforce; by 1939 it was around 10 per cent, the sort of figure incidentally that it had been throughout the 1920s when the free trade mania was still dominating British politics.  It is also true that Britain between 1950 and the early 1970s enjoyed a period of considerable growth and very  low unemployment behind protectionist barriers and great state involvement in the economy.

The reality of laissez faire economics is it is an intellectually incoherent doctrine – see my “Free markets and “free trade” =  elite propaganda” essay below – which does not do what its proponents claim. In fact it leads countries which practice it into dangerously distorting their economies which greatly undermines their self-sufficiency and leave any country unwise enough to go down this path open to manipulation by foreign powers and potentially to shortages of vital goods and services.

To imagine as you do that countries will abide by treaties is dangerously naive. At the present time we are seeing throughout the world a strong movement towards protectionism, whether that be overtly or by covert means such as hideously complex and time consuming bureaucratic procedures or the use of justice systems to intimidate foreign companies – China is a past master at this, but the USA is no slouch either with its laws against trading with certain countries in certain goods and the absurd fines US regulators and courts hand out to foreign companies. In the case of the EU, to believe that your plan would succeed because quote “We shall have the moral high ground” is wishful thinking on stilts. As several people pointed out it only takes one member state to veto a proposal. To expect 27 EU states to all refrain from doing so is wildly improbable.

But there is an even bigger issue. As I pointed out at the talk, there is strong reasons to believe the EU will not remain intact as a group of supposedly democratic states. To begin most of the EU states do not have any great democratic history. The largest apart from Britain – Germany, France, Spain, Italy – all date their present constitutional arrangements  in decades not  centuries. They and most of the smaller states are naturally  democratically fragile. Also,  since the current recession stated, it is debatable whether Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal have been democracies so controlled have they been by ECB diktats. There is also the madness of the EU’s attempt to lure  the Ukraine into the Brussels net and the ongoing mess with is the Euro – see my separate email on the Euro.  Any of these circumstances could lead to anything from individual members casting aside any pretence at democracy to the entire EU blowing apart. Consequently the path you advocate with the UK still tied into the EU economic process in the shape of membership of a customs union is fraught with danger. Much better that Britain leaves the coils of the EU entirely and makes its way in the world as the vast majority of countries do. That way if the EU blows up we will not have any legal ties and obligations to it.

Finally, there is the question of winning an in/out referendum. The British may not like the EU,  but neither do they like globalism. It will be impossible to win a referendum on Britain’s membership of  the EU if the electorate know that all they are being asked to do is to swap the overlordship of Brussels for the  ideological despotism of free trade and mass immigration. (The laissez faire approach involved in globalisation is those with power enforcing an ideology by refusing to act to protect what the vast majority of human beings regard and have always regarded as the interests of their country and themselves.  It is a tyranny caused by the neglect of the rightful use of state power for the common good.) If a referendum is to be won it will have to be on the basis of Britain being master in its own house to stop further mass immigration and to protect strategically important industries.

Yours sincerely,

 

Robert Henderson

The persecution of Emma West continues

Robert Henderson

Emma West  was arrested in November 2011 after she protested about immigration whilst travelling on a bus. Her protest was captured on video and uploaded to YouTube as well as being copied by many national media outlets. The video was  viewed millions of times.

Following the upload of the video Emma was arrested, held in the UK’s highest security prison for women , released and then subjected to a year and a half’s intimidation by the state as the powers-that-be desperately tried to get her to plead guilty to charges relating to racially motivated serious crimes (racially aggravated intentional harassment and racially aggravated assault)  which would have almost certainly sent her to prison. Eventually, worn down by the stress she pleaded guilty to the  lesser charge of racially aggravated harassment, alarm or distress.

I say Emma’s outburst was a protest against immigration because that is precisely what it is. Here are some of her comments:

She says: “What’s this country coming too?

“A load of black people and and load of f***ing Polish.”

One commuter challenges West, who rounds on him telling him: “You aren’t English”, to which he replies “No, I’m not”

She then scans the tram, pointing out people one-by-one, saying: “You ain’t English, you ain’t English, None of you are f***ing English.

“Get back to your own f***ing countries.”

“Britain is nothing now, Britain is f***k all.

“My Britain is f**k all now.”

You can argue that is foulmouthed,  but you cannot argue it is anything but a protest against immigration. In fact, it is the most grass-root form of political protest there is, namely, directly engaging with the effects of policy.

Emma lives in a country which has been made unrecognisable by the permitting of mass immigration for over sixty years. Neither Emma nor any other native English man or woman (or Briton come to that) has had any say in this invasion of the country. This most fundamental act of treason has been committed by generations of British politicians who to date have got away with their crime. But to continue to get away with the crime the guilty men and women need to suppress public protest against what they have done.  That is why the authorities were so desperate to get to plead guilty. She was a refusnik and they could not let that pass.  That she resorted to foul language in her frustration is entirely understandable.

But those with power were not satisfied simply with her criminal conviction. Emma has now had her livelihood as a dental nurse taken away by the General Medical Council with this preternaturally smug judgement:

A [Dental Council] spokeswoman said: “Her conduct was truly appalling.

“It clearly has the capacity to bring the profession into disrepute and to undermine public confidence in its standards.

“Furthermore, her violent and abusive conduct would demonstrate a real risk to the safety of patients.

“In relation to her racially aggravated offence, this was committed in a public setting and received further public exposure, as a person had uploaded the video clip to the internet which has been viewed extensively.”

So there you have it, political correctness can not only send you into the clutches of the law but take your means of living away.

For the full story of Emma West’ persecution see

The oppression of Emma West : the politically correct end game plays out

Posted on July 2, 2013by Robert Henderson

Robert Henderson In November 2011 Emma West was arrested  and subsequently charged for a racially aggravated public order offence (http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/emma-west-immigration-and-the-liberal-totalitarian-state/). The charges concerned her  public denunciation of the effects of mass immigration whilst on a tram in Croydon,  a suburb … Continue reading →

Posted in Culture, Immigration, Nationhood, Politics | Tagged Emma West, ethnicity, invasion, political correctness, race|61 Comments | Edit

Emma West and the State – The State has its way (sort of)

Posted on June 5, 2013by Robert Henderson

Robert Henderson Emma West has finally been worn down. Eighteen months after she was charged with racially aggravated intentional harassment and racially aggravated assault , she has agreed to plead guilty to the lesser charge of racially aggravated harassment, alarm … Continue reading →

Posted in Immigration, Politics | Tagged birthright, Emma West, independence, invasion, liberal bigotry, political correctness, quisling elite, race | 21 Comments | Edit

Emma West’s trial scheduled for the sixth time

Posted on April 10, 2013by Robert Henderson

Robert Henderson Emma West was due to stand trial at Croydon Crown Court for  two racially aggravated public order offences  arising from her complaint about  mass immigration and its effects made on a Croydon tram  in November 2011 . The … Continue reading →

Posted in Immigration, Nationhood, Politics | Tagged birthright, censorship, crime, Emma West, ethnicity, invasion,laws,political correctness, race | 36 Comments | Edit

Emma West trial scheduled for the fifth time

Posted on March 13, 2013by Robert Henderson

Robert Henderson A fifth, yes that’s fifth,  date for the start of Emma West’s trial on criminal charges arising from her complaint about  mass immigration and its effects made on a Croydon tram  in November 2011 has been set  for  … Continue reading →

Posted in Immigration, Nationhood | Tagged crime, Emma West, English, ethnicity, invasion, laws, liberal bigotry,political correctness, race | 28 Comments | Edit

What has happened to Emma West?

Posted on January 8, 2013by Robert Henderson

Robert Henderson It is now 14 months since Emma West was charged with racially aggravated public order offences after she got into an argument on a tram which led her to make loud complaint about the effects of mass immigration. … Continue reading →

Posted in Immigration, Politics | Tagged crime, Emma West, ethnicity, invasion, political correctness, race | 31 Comments | Edit

Emma West trial delayed for the third time

Posted on September 8, 2012by Robert Henderson

Robert Henderson The trial of Emma West on racially aggravated public order offences has been delayed for the third time ( http://www.thisiscroydontoday.co.uk/Emma-West-trial-adjourned-time/story-16820636-detail/story.html ).  No further date has been set.   The trial was originally scheduled for June, then July and finally September … Continue reading →

Posted in Immigration, Nationhood, Politics | Tagged crime, Emma West, free speech, invasion, liberty, political correctness | 13 Comments | Edit

Emma West has her trial delayed yet again

Posted on July 27, 2012by Robert Henderson

The trial of Emma West on two racially aggravated public order offences has been put back to 5 September to allow further medical reports (http://www.thisiscroydontoday.co.uk/Trial-alleged-YouTube-tram-racist-Emma-West-moved/story-16543355-detail/story.html).  Her trial was meant to take place on 17th July but a request for … Continue reading →

Posted in Immigration, Nationhood, Politics | Tagged authoritarianism, crime, Emma West, English,independence,invasion, political correctness, race | 12 Comments | Edit

Courage is the best defence against charges of racism

Posted on June 12, 2012by Robert Henderson

Robert Henderson The trial of Emma West on two racially aggravated public order charges which was scheduled for 11 June has been postponed until 16 July to enable further psychiatric reports to be prepared. (http://www.thisiscroydontoday.co.uk/Emma-West-race-rant-trial-moved-July/story-16346869-detail/story.html). As Miss West was charged … Continue reading →

Posted in Immigration, Nationhood, Politics | Tagged censorship, Emma West, invasion, laws, political correctness | 7 Comments | Edit

Emma West, immigration and the Liberal totalitarian state part 3

Posted on January 4, 2012by Robert Henderson

Robert Henderson Emma West appeared at Croydon magistrates court on 3rd January.  She  will stand trial  on  two racially aggravated public order offences, one with intent to cause fear. She will next appear in court  – Croydon Crown Court –  … Continue reading →

Posted in Anglophobia, Immigration, Nationhood, Politics | Tagged crime, Emma West, Englishness, ethnicity,invasion,laws, political correctness, public order, race | 12 Comments | Edit

Emma West, immigration and the Liberal totalitarian state part 2

Posted on December 7, 2011by Robert Henderson

Robert Henderson Emma West has been remanded in custody until 3rd of January when she will appear at Croydon Crown Court (http://uk.news.yahoo.com/tram-race-rant-woman-court-052333359.html).  By 3rd January she will in, effect , have served a custodial sentence of 37 days,  [RH She was … Continue reading →

Posted in Anglophobia, Culture, Immigration, Nationhood, Politics | Tagged crime, Emma West, English,ethnicity,invasion, political correctness, quisling elite, race | 23 Comments | Edit

Emma West, immigration and the Liberal totalitarian state

Posted on December 1, 2011by Robert Henderson

Emma West of New Addington, London has been arrested and placed in “protective custody” following the publication on YouTube of  a two minute 25 second  recording labelled by the YouTube poster as “Racist British Woman on the Tram goes CRAZY …Continue reading →

The white liberal fantasy collides head-on with the reality of Islam

Robert  Henderson

NB: The territory taken from Iraq and Syria has gone by various titles: ISIS, ISIL and IS.  I shall use ISIS standing for the  Islamic State of Iraq and Syria

The present mess in the Middle East and North Africa is largely the creation of the prime political absurdity which lies at the heart of the  modern liberal fantasy, namely,  that what they call  liberal democracy  (in truth a politically correct illiberal state)  can be manufactured if only the right circumstances are created.  This woefully wrongheaded  idea  reprises the mistake made during the dissolution of the  British Empire. The British withdrawal strategy was simple: for each ex-colony create the formal structures of a parliamentary democracy – parliaments, written constitutions, electoral systems and so on – and then,  like a climbing plant covering a trellis, democratic behaviour  would grow and wrap itself around the formal structures.  It was at best laughably naïve and at worst a cynical fig leaf  to cover the unseemly haste with which Britain relinquished control of  her colonies.

The  reason why the British post-colonial strategy failed is  beautifully simple: political systems  cannot  be self-consciously created. They are organic growths. When it comes to  representative  government elected on a broad franchise  ( a more honest description of the  reality than  democracy) ,  such growths are remarkably rare. Look around the world and see how many secure representative  political systems  there are. The Britain, the  USA,  Canada, Australia and New Zealand qualify because they have such representative systems and have  not experienced violent revolution either at all or for centuries.  All are Anglo-Saxon in origin. Who else? Switzerland and Iceland. Being generous we can perhaps add  the Scandinavians and Holland.  For the rest, including all the major European states,  there is not one which has not had governments overthrown  since 1900 by outright violence committed by the native population or by unconstitutional means.

To the rarity of stable and lasting representative government growing organically,  can be added the problem of  territories with  immense ethnic and racial variety  routinely producing disputed elections  on the grounds of electoral fraud or falling into  violence afterwards because one particular  ethnic or racial   group believes they are being hard done by.   Indeed, such ethnic and racial variety is probably the  prime reason why stable representative government is so rare.   Such disabling heterogeneity  was the situation with  the colonies Britain freed after 1945 and is the situation with the ethnic, racial and religious kaleidoscope  that is the Middle East and North Africa.

The fruits of recent Western meddling

A complaint is often made that the European colonial powers caused much of the post-colonial difficulty through their drawing of colonial boundaries which produced territories without a natural national  unity. This complaint does not hold water. It is not that the European imperial powers did not draw such boundaries, but rather that it would not have made any general difference where the boundaries were drawn because  the same problem would  have arisen as a consequence of the exceptionally diverse nature of the lands involved. There were no  discrete territories   with populations which were large enough and  homogeneous enough  in race,  religion  and culture to form a  natural nation state.   That was the case with the Middle East and North Africa.

The consequences of Western interference in the Islamic world since the turn of the century  has been  uniformly dismal: it has either  replaced harsh order with growing chaos or replaced one dictatorship with another.  Consider  how the present situation in the Middle East and North Africa  has come about. First, Bush junior and Blair go gallivanting into Afghanistan and reduce that to a battleground for violent Islam and tribal hatreds and jealousies to play out.    From there they decide to meddle in Iraq by invading on the  entirely spurious grounds that Saddam Hussein represented a threat to the West because he had weapons of mass destruction.   That the  UN Weapons inspectors reported  they had found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction and asked for more time counted for nothing. Neither did  the fact that at the time of the invasion  Saddam was being  restrained in his behaviour  by  sanctions and a Western-enforced no-fly zone over the Kurdish areas.  Having deposed Saddam and his regime Iraq was placed under a military occupation which went the way of all military occupations, gradual dissolution through the exhaustion of the occupying power.

Then came the miserably entitled Arab Spring, whose fruits  have been bitter indeed. Because there are natural  nation states in the area, the “Arab Spring” was doomed to the horrific failure it has been because the states involved were all fissile territories whose diverse populations were only held in check from internecine fighting by harsh dictators, whether republican or monarchical. The facile cheerleading of  Western politicians and liberals generally was adolescent in its self-indulgent idealism and encouraged the populations in the Arab world to rebel when they had absolutely no chance of producing anything other than chaos or another dictatorship.

Libya has been reduced to a state of anarchy with rival militias, tribes, gangs – call them what you will- making hay with the weapons made freely available by the overthrow of Gadhafi, with violent Islam joining in.   With a grim irony Egypt has swapped a  covert  military dictatorship for an overt military dictatorship,  whilst dispensing with an elected  if Islamist president on the way.  Iraq has lurched into an increasing state of disorder  as the US has gradually withdrawn  and is now divided between Iraq, Kurdistan and   ISIS.

Most gruesomely for Western politicians,  the tyrant of Syria, Bashir Assad,   has withstood the attempts, vociferously supported by the West, to destroy him and his regime by the  rag-tag  and politically indeterminate “Free Syrian Army” and is now through the emergence of ISIS  the only  plausible obstacle to ISIS ‘ continued existence and expansion.  If realpolitik ruled the West would be acting in concert with Assad , but because they have labelled him a devil they cannot bring themselves to do the sensible thing and make common cause with him so that he can restore some sort of order to Syria.  Liberals who shudder at this should bear in mind how often they have been in bed with the most insanitary  bedfellows – Stalin, Mao and  the Taliban in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation to mention a few.  Sometimes it is necessary to take the my enemy’s enemy is my friend route to protect the national interest.

What can and should be done now by the West? 

The liberal warmongers  are ever more eagerly saying that  If the West does not intervene militarily  to destroy  aggressive Islam then  parts of the  Middle East  will be breeding grounds and safe havens for terrorists to carry their terror into the West.  That may or may not be true , but  if the West does intervene militarily to successfully snuff out  ISIS,  then the likelihood would be that ISIS members, especially those who come from Western states, would  return to their various countries determined to wage terrorist war there. Moreover, the West would be committed to remaining indefinitely in the territory they have taken from ISIS, their very presence being a standing motive for violent Muslims in the West to attack the countries which harbour them.

Nor would the destruction of  ISIS in Iraq and Syria be an end of violent Islam creating havens to protect, train and send terrorists into to the West.   Afghanistan is ripe to fall to the Taliban once  Western military forces are withdrawn.   Parts of Pakistan are controlled by violent Islam.  Libya  is little more than a geographical expression filled with petty warlords  and ripe for violent Islam to go to if it is not already there.    Deeper into Africa there is  Boko Haram spreading throughout the West.  In the East   Kenya  and Uganda  suffer from Muslim  terrorist attacks,   Ethiopia  and Somalia have serious  Islamist incursions to deal with,  while  in Sudan  violent Islam holds power. Indeed, it is increasingly difficult to point to parts of Africa which remain untouched by violent Islam.

The plain truth is that even if the West were willing and able to suppress ISIS  in Syria and Iraq by force, they could never control violent Islam because violent Islam would simply keep on the move from one accommodating territory  to another.

How serious a threat to the West  is ISIS?

The potential of ISIS to create a lasting  aggressive and powerful  Islamic state is grossly  overblown.  It  has taken a great deal of territory very rapidly,  but that is unsurprising in a place like the Middle East where  there is a good deal of desert and  the  formal states whose land  has been captured  were  all  in some governmental disarray , which is  not a recipe for inspiring troops to resolutely  fight a determined  aggressor such as ISIS.   In the case of Iraq the  discriminatory behaviour of the Maliki government had seriously alienated the Sunni minority through his highly discriminatory behaviour in favour of the Shia majority.   This has provided a  reason for Iraqi Sunnis to have some fellow feeling with the Sunni  ISIS and consequently to tolerate or even welcome ISIS violence directed at the non-Sunni parts of the population.    Moreover, even where there are  large numbers of people  willing to  resist  ISIS, as appears to be the case in Kurdistan,   that  is of little avail if they are equipped with much inferior weaponry and training.

But taking territory is one thing, maintaining control of it quite another.  That is particularly the case where the territory conquered has a  population which is  chronically divided by religion  and ethnicity and is spread over several formal states.  ISIS need to  rapidly show they are up to administering the land  they have taken.  Easier said than done, especially as they are likely to be engaging in warfare for quite some time to come, both with elements within the territory they have taken and from outside. Terror tactics only take a conqueror go so far. They are not a sufficient basis for ruling.

There is also considerable scope for ISIS  to fracture because  the land they have captured is ethnically and religiously diverse. Moreover,  the ISIS personnel is very cosmopolitan and may come to be resented by even the native Sunnis in the ISIS territory. In addition,  ISIS will have to fight the remnant of Iraq (with its hostile Shia majority) and Assad’s Syrian Army.  There is also the possibility that Iran may join in to protect the Shia population of the captured territories.

Much has been made of the modern weaponry and auxiliary military equipment  ISIS have taken , but the  equipment will require considerable expertise to maintain and operate it.  Such  skills, especially those  needed to maintain the equipment,  will  probably not be available in the quantities needed. Moreover, ISIS will need to buy more modern weaponry, especially munitions,  as time goes on and it is not clear who will sell it to them in sufficient quantity and quality.

A  ghastly irony for  the West, and most particularly the USA,  is the fact that they have supplied much of the military equipment which ISIS are using , either because the equipment has been captured from Iraqi forces or because the equipment was supplied by the West to the Syrian rebels fighting Assad, significant  numbers of whom share the mentality of ISIS or may even be part of ISIS.     The fact that ISIS have had the success they have  had is unsurprising given the circumstances. Keeping hold of what they have will take up all their energies for the foreseeable future.

The enemy within

The real threat to the West comes not from ISIS but the large Muslim populations in the West , which the treacherous and deluded liberal internationalists have allowed to settle as they pursued their fatuous dream  of a  world without borders or nation states.  The last UK Census in 2011 shows  2.7 million people identifying themselves as Muslims   (4.8 per cent of the population). This is almost certainly substantially less than the real figure because the Census depends on self-reporting and  there is a significant minority of the UK population who never complete the Census form  because they are either here illegally or have a mentality which makes them think that giving any information about themselves to any  government is dangerous.

How does the West protect itself  from homicidal Muslims within its own territory?  It would be a next to  impossible question to find an adequate answer to even in  a country which has meaningful border controls because of the number of Muslims born and bred in the West.    In a country such as Britain which effectively has open borders,   the question becomes  not merely hideously difficult but absurd.

In Britain the Coalition government has floundered around talking about removing passports from people  trying to leave Britain if they are suspected Jihadis, , the banning  from Britain of those  who have been in Iraq and Syria, the reintroduction of control orders  and,  most pathetically, the idea that Muslim coming back from fighting for ISIS can be turned into good British citizens through re-education.   Even if such policies are put in force the idea that this would seriously hinder Muslim terrorists in Britain is laughable because of the numbers of Muslims living here as British citizens. The current official estimate of British Muslims fighting in in Iraq and Syria is 500. That is probably an underestimate, but even if it was only 500 that would be more than enough to create severe problems in this country. As for the British Muslim population in general, there is evidence that a substantial portion of them share the “I don’t agree with their methods but…” mentality of Irish Republicans towards the Provisional IRA.

The Western political response

Any action by Western politicians is problematic because  as a class they have  lost the ability to instinctively  act in the national interests of the people they are supposed to represent. They ignore   the first duty of a politician in a democracy which is to ask what is best for their own people. Instead their  calamitous mentality is that described in Jean Raspail’s “Camp of the Saints” where the response of politicians and the liberal elite generally to the  passive-aggressive  misery of huge numbers of migrants from the Third World  arriving in the West overwhelms the needs of their own people.

But  Western political elites are becoming seriously afraid of both the danger represented by violent Muslims in their countries and the anger of their native populations .   As a consequence there are things being said now by public figures which would have been unthinkable only a few short weeks ago.   The one-time Shadow Home Secretary David Davis pushes for  British Muslims who go to fight with the likes of Isis to be stripped of their British citizenship regardless of whether this leaves them stateless  so that  their  “trip to Syria is no longer a short violent holiday but a life sentence to the lifestyle they claim to espouse, complete with Sharia law and a desert climate”.  The Leader of the UK Independence Party Nigel Farage advocates the same thing while the  former  Archbishop of Canterbury  Lord Carey says that “ Multiculturalism has resulted in honour killings, female genital mutilation and rule by Sharia law” and supports the call to remove British citizenship from those who go to join  violent Islam.  The Mayor London Boris Johnson wants Muslims returning from Syria and Iraq to be considered guilty until proven innocent of terrorist activity, a bald reversal of the ancient right under English law to be considered innocent until proven guilty.

The journalist Leo McKinstry  places the responsibility for the present danger firmly on successive British governments :

“The fact is that extremism has flourished in a climate formed by the twin strategies of mass immigration and multiculturalism. Open borders have led to a phenomenal expansion in Britain’s Muslim population to almost three million, many of the new arrivals hailing from parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia where Islamic sectarianism is rife.

At the same time the dogma of cultural diversity has become one of the central obsessions of the state. We are constantly told that we must celebrate the vibrant enrichment of our society. But, by its emphasis on cultural differences and its loathing for traditional British values the doctrine of diversity has been a catastrophe for Britain.

In place of integration it has promoted division and separatism. We are a land increasingly without a mutual sense of belonging or shared national identity. It is little wonder that, according to one recent survey, 26 per cent of Muslims here said they feel no loyalty to Britain.”

The problem is that while the public rhetoric is changing  nothing significant  alters on the ground. The words change but the circumstances remain much  the same.  The Western  liberal elites are still  paralysed by both political correctness and the ghastly fact that dangerous fifth columns now exist because of their mass immigration policies and the consequent need to suppress native British  dissent about its effects.  In addition through their policy of multiculturalism the liberal elite has encouraged  ethnic and racial minorities to both live culturally apart from and  behave in a  flagrantly provocative manner towards the native population.  The upshot of all this is that those with power in the West  dare not admit there is a general problem amongst immigrant communities ( which live largely separate lives in their own communities)   because to do so would be to admit that the fault lay with them.

In an attempt to circumvent the danger of being held to account, Western politicians and the mainstream media try to peddle the “violent Muslims are only a tiny percentage of Muslims living amongst us; the vast majority  are well educated, peace loving, hardworking  law abiding citizens”.   This is a dubious proposition  in itself when the crime, educational attainment, benefit  take up  and unemployment statistics throughout the West show Muslims to be  more prone to crime, to have below average educational attainment  and are more likely to be unemployed or on in-work benefits than the population as a whole. But even if none of those things were true the problem of violent Islam in Britain would still be there because many of the Muslims who have been outed as  sharing violent Islam’s ideas are not from the lower reaches of society.

The important thing to understand is that it is never the peaceful minority which counts in these circumstances.  What matters is the terrorist minority. They drive the terror and enlist the non-violent to aid them  in various ways.  The Provisional IRA (PIRA) in Ireland probably never had no more than a thousand  people actively engaged in terrorism: sanctioning and planning terrorist attacks, making bombs, planting bombs, killing or  maiming those thought to untrustworthy or simply disobedient to PIRA’s will.  But there  were very large numbers who were willing to provide PIRA  with safe houses, to  store of weapons, to tell PIRA about  informers and come out  on the streets at the drop of a hat to protest in the PIRA interest.   In addition, the existence of a large population with a very well nourished  sense of victimhood  (the Irish Catholics) allowed in Mao’s words  the PIRA “guerrilla to move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea. “

But there are terrorist and terrorists. There are two  radical differences between PIRA and violent Islam.  PIRA were not driven by religious fanaticism (it was a Marxist organisation) and its members were drawn from communities which shared similar moral values to those of the British.  This meant that when the time came to make a peace  of sorts between Britain and Irish Republicans there was a great deal  of cultural similarity between the two parties.   The representatives of violent Islam, even those born and bred here, will have little fellow feeling  with or understanding of  the native British population.

The second and most important difference is that the  nature of  the PIRA and ISIS  end games. For PIRA it was a united Ireland. That was a genuinely possibility because the British government accepted that if Northern Ireland voted for union with the Irish Republic they could have it provided the Republic agreed. Although hardline members of PIRA did not want to make peace,  many PIRA members did , together with  a majority of ordinary republicans . Crucially, the republicans  in favour of peace could see it simply as a stepping stone to the unification of Ireland, not as a defeat for their cause.  In addition, the demographics of Northern Ireland were heading towards a Catholic and therefore largely republican majority by the time peace was formally made.  That also gave republicans hope.

Violent Islam does not have an end game which any Western government could concede either in  whole or in part. Its practitioners want the overthrow of Western society and the imposition of Islam.  There is no conception of compromise. If Britain existed under the control of such people it would be an unforgiving theocracy.  Because violent Islam is implacable,  no concession short of outright victory for violent Islam will end the violence.  If Western governments make concessions such as granting Sharia courts parity with civil courts violent Islam will simply pocket the bribe and march on towards the final end of total dominance.

Where does this leave the West?   It leaves the countries with large Muslim populations at perpetual risk from both terrorism and the likelihood of Western elites diluting their own cultural integrity by  attempting to appease Muslims by granting them more and more privileges. These  risks will  increase because Western Muslims  have higher  birth rates than native Western populations. In addition,  further substantial Muslim immigration  will probably occur because Western governments will try to placate Muslims by relaxing entry requirements and  border controls are always likely to be ineffective.  Black Western converts to Islam could also swell the numbers significantly.

Is there a silver lining or two amongst the Islamic clouds?   Well, at least the realities of the situation the liberal elite have created are becoming impossible to ignore. Most encouragingly, the concept of treason is suddenly back on the political agenda. This is fundamentally important because patriotism is not an optional extra but the glue which sticks a society together.  Yet t the storm cloud which cannot be dispersed is the immoveable fact of millions of Muslims living within Western societies  who harbour substantial numbers of people who are unquestioningly hostile to the countries in  which they  reside.  That is what rule by the politically correct devotees to internationalism have brought us, a huge and potentially very dangerous fifth column in our midst.  It has been an act of the most fundamental treason.

The Camp of the Saints tested against reality

English translation from the French by Norman Shapiro, Professor of French Romance Languages and Literatures Department 3089, Wesleyan University,  Connecticut, USA.   Email nshapiro@wesleyan.edu

The full English text can be found at https://archive.org/stream/CampOfTheSaints/Camp_of_the_Saints_djvu.txt

Robert Henderson

The French writer Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints  was  published in 1973. It is notorious or famous,  according to your politics,  for its story of  the Third World poor successfully invading the First World. The invaders come  armed not with guns and bombs,  but the potent weapons of  their huge  numbers and  the knowledge  that  the self-destructive  ideology of Western elites  – what we would  nowadays call  the “anti-racist” part of political correctness  – had warped the minds of most of those  elites  and also  those  of the masses of  the First World,  who  have been beaten into a state  where they either cannot see when their own interests are being sacrificed on the altar of one worldism or are cowed to the point where  they are paralysed into inaction.

At the time of its writing the  book  was set in twenty or so years in  the future. As the story opens a  fleet of 100 ramshackle ships  dubbed the Ganges Armada  gathers in India and soon  sets off  for Europe.  In the ships are one million of the subcontinent’s poor.  The intention of the Armada is to run  the ships aground on European shores – this is a strictly one way voyage – decant their cargo and present the land on which they descend  with a dilemma, namely,  allow the million  to invade or resist them with force with the ultimate sanction being mass slaughter of the invaders.

It takes  the ships fifty daysto arrive on the northern shores of the Mediterranean with Southern France as the final  destination.   As the Ganges Armada sails the Western elites are either  starry eyed about their dream of a world in which there is no us and them – no nation states, just Mankind  with a capital M –  or paralysed by the one-world propaganda which has been so assiduously fed to them.

Even those members of the elite who do not  believe in the One Worldism  have developed the  peculiar state of mind which arises  when  propaganda is not only incessant but gainsaying the propaganda is seen as   dangerous.  Such people do not embrace the content of the propaganda,  nor play along out of abject and immediate  fear. Rather, they sublimate the fear and develop a feeling that to rebut the propaganda is somehow wrong, although if asked they could not say exactly where the wrongness lay.   The state of mind is akin to that of a person who feels that a sick joke is inappropriate if expressed in company even if it makes them inwardly laugh.  In short, they have been conditioned to think of certain ideas and words as unclean for no other reason that they have been told over and over again that these things are beyond the Pale.   As for the masses,  they have variously bought into the propaganda,   had their true feelings suppressed  by the constant propaganda as described above or  been censored out of public life.

But human nature has not been utterly transformed.  There is the natural  human response to trouble of thinking it will not happen. While the Ganges Armada is a long way off heads are buried in the sand with non-pc thoughts such as that the ships will all be sunk by rough weather and seas  before they reach Europe because of their decrepit state.  Hardly anyone in a position of authority or influence is realistic and honest about the outcome of the Armada if it reaches its destination , namely,  that it will be an invasion which if not resisted will overturn the societies into which the human cargo,  full of misery  and entitlement, is decanted.  Instead they either preach the  message that  the arrival of the Armada will be a great blessing for it will allow the West to show its generosity of spirit by welcoming the invaders with open arms or indulge in the hypocrisy of secretly hoping the ships will founder at sea.

But the weather is unusually clement and the Ganges Armada comes closer and closer until its arrival off the French Mediterranean coast is imminent.  This causes the vast majority of the population of the South of France  to abandon any pretence of seeing the ships’  arrival as anything other than a threat  and the vast majority  flee to the North of France. This is only a temporary place of safety and before  long much of the French elite also hot-foot it  to Switzerland ,  thinking wrongly that it will be a haven against the One Worldist mania –eventually the Swiss fall prey to the same lack of will to resist the invaders and open their borders to the invading Third World hordes.

The most naïve of the  One Worlders advance towards  the point at which the ships will make landfall in the sublimely silly expectation that they will be welcomed with open arms  by the invading one million. Once they  arrive the One Worldist simpletons are at best ignored and at worst attacked. They also find that they are at risk from the Third World immigrants and their descendants who are  already in France.

When the Ganges Armada finally  arrives and  sheds its cargo of one million there is little resistance because not only have most of the population fled , but the  French armed forces prove worthless, most having been robbed of the will to resist the invasion with  brute force by the ceaseless propaganda which has been fed to them.   The result is mass desertions.

The Ganges Armada is only the beginning.  Other fleets full of  Third World  misery to west upon the West  are being prepared. Nor is it just a seaborne invasion. Even as the Ganges Armada is at sea huge numbers of Chinese are massing on the Chinese border with the Asiatic Russian territories.

The novel ends with France overrun and the white native French population reduced to not exactly slavery but an irrelevance as power shifts to the non-white migrants who were either in France before the Armada arrived or are part of the Armada and its successor Third World invasion. The same general thing happens throughout the West, with the white native population everywhere becoming subordinate, becoming strangers in a strange land which was once theirs but is now utterly changed.

How prophetic is  the Camp of the Saints? Raspail understood when he published the  book that it would not  be prophetic in the detail of his imaginings,    but only in his  general  message. Indeed, in  his short preface  he admits that the detail of the action in the book is unrealistic: “I had wanted to write  a lengthy preface to explain my position and show that this is no wild-eyed dream; that even if the specific action, symbolic as it is, may seem farfetched, the fact remains that we are inevitably heading for something of the sort. We need only glance at the awesome population figures predicted for the year 2000, i.e., twenty-eight years from now: seven billion people, only nine hundred million of whom will be white.”

The invasion of the First World has not occurred as  dramatically as Raspail portrayed it. If it had perhaps even the Quisling politically correct  politicians of the West would have been forced to resist it with force,  both because they feared the fury of the people they supposedly represented and for fear of what the reality would be if such an invasion force had landed.  Instead the immigration  has  happened piecemeal, surreptitiously.  There has never been a dramatic massing  of Third World immigrants to gain entry to the First World Promised Land in one fell swoop, just an  incessant trickle through numerous points of entry. The nearest events  to what Raspail describes  are the various boat people  arriving in the West  from Latin America, Africa and Asia. But although large in aggregate,  each individual attempt at invasion contains hundreds at best and most commonly in numbers of less than ten. When seaborne they come not as an imposing  fleet but singly or as a small flotilla  at worst.  More commonly their illegal entry is by plane, train or motor vehicle, a handful at a time.

Where Raspail was  strikingly astute is his prediction of the immense weight of “anti-racist”  politically correct propaganda which the West has seen. He l catalogues all the politically correct grotesquery  we have today with definitive characters.   There are those in positions of authority and influence such Albert Dufort, the trendy radio journalist,  who prostitute themselves and their country by representing  the  Ganges Armada  and the other soon to be launched Third World invasion fleets, not as a threat but as a great opportunity to show their humanity.  There are those drawn from the ethnic minorities already well ensconced in French society such as the  Algerian Ben Suad (who goes by the name of Clement Dio)  whose lives are devoted to biting the hand that feeds them.  Perhaps most forlornly there are the French  young who have  had their natural tribal feeling sucked from them: “ That scorn of a people for  other races, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity’s finest — none of that had ever filled these youngsters’ addled brains, or at least so little that the monstrous cancer implanted in the Western conscience had quashed it in no time at all. In their case it wasn’t a matter of tender heart, but a morbid, contagious excess of sentiment, most interesting to find in the flesh and observe, at last, in action.”  Chapter 1

All of this is most impressive because when the book was written political correctness was in its  early stages.  In Britain  a couple of Race Relations Acts  had been passed in 1965 and 1968, and one worldism, especially with a Marxist tinge, was very popular in academia. But there was no general  propagandising of the British population and punishments for being non-pc about race and immigration had barely begun to get a hold on British society. Even in the United States, the most advanced of states promoting  “anti-racist” measures ,  measures such as “positive discrimination” and “affirmative action”  were still in their infancy.  The secular inquisition of individuals accused of pc “crimes” that we know today with people increasingly  being sent to prison or routinely losing their jobs  did not exist. The long march through the institutions still had a good  distance to go.

The book’s general argument that the West would be subject to massive immigration which would radically change their societies  is correct.  In Britain the last national census  in 2011 showed this for the population of England and Wales combined :

White was the majority ethnic group at 48.2 million in 2011 (86.0 per cent). Within this ethnic group, White British1 was the largest group at 45.1 million (80.5 per cent).

The White ethnic group accounted for 86.0 per cent of the usual resident population in 2011, a decrease from 91.3 per cent in 2001 and 94.1 per cent in 1991.

White British and White Irish decreased between 2001 and 2011. The remaining ethnic groups increased, Any Other White background had the largest increase of 1.1 million (1.8 percentage points).

The population of England and Wales at the time of the census was”  56,170,900 in mid-2011, with the population of England estimated to be 53,107,200 and the population of Wales estimated to be 3,063,800”. In a generation the white population, British and foreign , has dropped by 8% and those describing themselves as white British  were only 45 million out of 56 million.

There is also strong evidence that the idea of deliberately encouraging mass immigration of the unassimilable to change Western societies  has been practised by  Western Governments. Think of the words of a Tony Blair special adviser  Andrew Neather :

Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled “RDS Occasional Paper no. 67”, “Migration: an economic and social analysis” focused heavily on the labour market case.

But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn’t its main purpose – to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.

Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche’s keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour’s core white working-class vote.

This shone through even in the published report: the “social outcomes” it talks about are solely those for immigrants.

And this first-term immigration policy got no mention among the platitudes on the subject in Labour’s 1997 manifesto, headed Faster, Firmer, Fairer.

The results were dramatic. In 1995, 55,000 foreigners were granted the right to settle in the UK. By 2005 that had risen to 179,000; last year, with immigration falling thanks to the recession, it was 148,000.

In addition, hundreds of thousands of migrants have come from the new EU member states since 2004, most requiring neither visas nor permission to work or settle. The UK welcomed an estimated net 1.5 million immigrants in the decade to 2008.

In May 2014 the British  think tank Policy Exchange  published a report  on racial  and ethnic minorities entitled A portrait of modern Britain.  The headline grabbing statistic in the report is the claim that ”the five largest distinct Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities could potentially double from 8 million people or 14% of the population [now] to between 20-30% by the middle of the century. Over the past decade, the UK’s White population has remained roughly the same while the minority population has almost doubled. Black Africans and Bangladeshis are the fastest growing minority communities with ethnic minorities representing 25% of people aged under the age of five.”

Because immigrants and their descendants  have a substantially greater propensity to breed than that of the native white British population and that fact coupled with  the  much younger average age  of immigrants than that of native Britons means that the Policy Exchange projections are realistic.

What the Camp of the Saints should do is force people to accept at both an intellectual and emotional level what mass immigration represents.   It is a form of conquest,  and conquest of the most pernicious and fundamental   kind when it consists primarily of  those who cannot or will not fully assimilate into the native population. Oncesuch  immigrants are  in a country in large numbers,  the country is faced with two terrible choices:  either capitulate to the fact of  their conquest and allow the country to dissolve  into a motley multicultural mess occupying a single territory or forcibly remove the  immigrants and their descendants through expulsion or  massacre.  Nor should it be imagined that the dissolution of the country into racial/ethnic  blocs will mean an absence of war. History tells a single simple story about racially and ethnically divided territories: violence is an inevitable and ineradicable  part of such societies and the more the different groups within a territory begin to be of equal size the greater the risk of conflict.

The question which Raspail brings us to is this, is the invasion to be permitted through an excessive and fatal excess sentiment or is it to be  resisted through force, including in the final extremity the    mass killing of men , women and children,  or will the invaders be permitted to come, breed and settle the territory of the original population? Mass immigration is conquest, just as surely as an armed invasion is conquest.  A people who forgets that or buries their collective head in the political sand hoping the bogeyman will go away is doomed.

There are weaknesses in the novel purely as a literary work,  although the fact that I am commenting on an English translation should be born in mind. There is little character development, the dialogue is feeble,  the language flowery, there is a good deal of Gallic intellectual exhibitionism and a considerable amount of what I can only describe as a third person stream of consciousness.  The last I must confess is not to my taste. Raspail also gives his story a strong flavour of the leftist student protest of 1968 and the widespread attraction to the Western intelligentsia of Marxism, especially in its Troskyite manifestations.  This seems like another world today  even though the period  is only 40 odd years ago and may make the work seem alien or simply dated to some readers.

But these  weaknesses do not diminish the importance of the book, for it is  Raspail’s general  message which   matters. The message is important both because its general thrust is true and for the shameful fact that it is saying things which if expressed in a new work being offered for publication today would ensure that it did not find a mainstream publisher in the West.