In the West with easy contraception and abortion humans need security to breed

Robert Henderson

Security is what the vast majority of humans want.  It is part of our evolved nature. If you offer a man or woman a guaranteed income of £25,000 pa or a ten percent chance of gaining an income of £100,000 pa most will choose the certainty of £25,000.

When it comes to having and raising a family in a country which has readily available contraception and safe abortion practices a sense of security becomes vitally important.   Without those two hindrances to producing children birthrates will normally look after themselves by at least maintaining a population and in all probability increasing  it if the availability of the essentials of life – food, clothing, heat and shelter – is sufficient to maintain increasing numbers of people.

Where contraception and abortion are readily available individuals can and frequently do refrain from having many children. That is the case in rich industrialised countries where the number of children a couple have is to a very large extent a matter of choice.  Because of this  birthrates in the West are currently  either  below replacement levels  (which require 2.1 children per woman) or  are only just meeting the replacement level . Moreover,   the Western  countries which do meet the replacement level often  do  so only because of  the higher fertility rates of black and Asian  immigrants  and their descendants , who at least for several generations after the initial act of migration  maintain a higher rate of breeding than the  native white populations of the West.

Why are the native populations of the West failing to reproduce in sufficient quantities?  The fact that abortion and contraception are readily available is part of the explanation, but the reduction in children is also the consequence of changes in general social circumstances and the mentality of people rather than an immediate cause.   Infant mortality is low so having a large family to guarantee that enough children survive to adulthood is no longer necessary.  In addition, the creation of full blown welfare states means that people are no longer necessarily dependent upon their children for help in their old age so they do not see their children as an essential  insurance policy for their future.

There are attempts to explain the decline in births in the West by claiming that fertility is falling.  This does not meet the facts. Take abortions.  185,824 were undertaken in England and Wales in 2015. The birthrate for England and Wales in 2015 was 1.83 with 697,852 live births. Had no abortions been performed in 2015 the England and Wales birthrate would have been comfortably over the 2.1 replacement rate.  In short, the UK (and the West generally) does not have a fertility problem but an abortion problem.

But none of this explains why reproduction has become so depressed that it has dipped below replacement level. Contraception and abortion together with the changes in social organisation mentioned above might explain if most people were stopping at, say, three children.  A proportion of the population will simply decide for whatever reason that they do not want children,  most people still want to have children and most people actually have children. The problem is they frequently do not have enough children to replace themselves. So what is going on? The missing element is insecurity.

Cultural insecurity

The huge numbers of unassimilable immigrants which have been allowed to settle in the West have not only depressed the material conditions of the Western native populations (especially the poorer parts of those populations) through competition for jobs, housing, welfare, health and education. They have also  by their failure to assimilate created a constant and growing anxiety amongst the native population, especially those parts of the population which have found themselves living in areas heavily settled by racial and ethnic minorities.

Allied to the changes wrought by unassimilated immigrants is the grip political correctness has on Western societies.  This is an ideology which covers an ever wider range of subjects in which “discrimination” is zealously   detected by its adherents , but at its core lies the idea of multiculturalism.  This asserts  that all cultures are equal and results in the  pretence that the native culture and native population have no greater status than that of the immigrant derived  communities and  that consequently  all immigrant cultures should retain their ancestral ways. The result of this is  the creation of ghettos in which the larger immigrant groups live lives that are separate from the rest of the population and to all  intents and purposes  the ghetto represents a  colonisation of the areas affected    All of this is dangerous  for both the native population and the immigrant because  it promotes anger amongst the native populations and unreasonable expectations amongst the minorities created by immigration.

The politically correct internationalist elites have gone to great lengths to suppress  resistance by the native population to mass immigration and its consequences.   The culture and ethnic interests of the minority populations are relentlessly promoted while  the culture and ethnic interests of the native populations are suppressed.  Any criticism of immigration or its consequences is met with accusations of racism which both the mainstream media and politicians promote routinely. Punishments are exacted such as hate-filled media witch hunts, the loss of a job and, increasingly, criminal charges for saying politically incorrect things about immigration and/or its consequences. The fact that similar though generally lesser punishments  are meted out to anyone who it is claimed has  breached other aspects of political correctness – most commonly  accusations of homophobia and sexism – intensifies the sense of claustrophobia which  the imposition of strict limits to what may and may not be said naturally creates.

To the suppression of complaint about mass immigration Western elites have added the denigration of the native cultures from which they have sprung.  The history of countries such as the UK and USA are constantly portrayed as something to be ashamed. Collective guilt is laid upon the shoulders of the current native white populations for the existence of colonialism and the slave trade. Anything which is praiseworthy in white history is suppressed or diluted by ahistorical claims that it was not really the work of the whites or that if it was whites who were responsible they were only able to produce the praiseworthy thing because of white oppression of non-white peoples. Any expression of national feeling by the native white populations is immediately decried as nationalism at best and racism at worst.

The constant brainwashing has its effects,  for example,  in 2112 a substantial minority of English people said   when questioned that the St George’s flag is racist, ,  but it  is by no means wholly  successful in obliterating the non-pc feelings of much of the population. The politically correct find in particular the resistance of the native poor to eagerly  assume the politically correct agenda tiresome at best and   unforgiveable at worst.  As a consequence the white working class have gone from being the salt of the earth in the 1950s and 1960s to being seen as irredeemable now.

There is also another cultural aspect. It has become fashionable in the West to say that large families are antisocial, that breeding freely is a form of selfishness for it both takes up resources and  endangers the planet  because Western countries use per capita  much more of the Earth’s resources (especially energy from fossil fuels)  than the developing world.   This has given those who could afford to have as many children as they wanted,  or at least many more than they do have, a pseudo-moral  “green” reason for not breeding freely, something they can readily  ensure with reliable and easy to get contraception and abortion.  This pseudo-moral reason is bolstered by  people in the media peddling the same idea and by the social circle of each individual doing the same. It is all part of the Western guilt trip so assiduously  developed and tended  by  the politically correct.

Material insecurity

The feeling that a person is not culturally secure in the place where they live is the most fundamental and corrosive cause of insecurity, but even without that there are plenty of material circumstances which can rob people of their security,  for example, a lack of affordable and secure housing, the absence of a secure job which pays enough to raise a family and inadequate schools and medical services.

The wealthier people are the more security they both have and feel they have.  For the rich having as many children as they want is purely a social and personal choice because affordability does not come into it. But the truly rich are by definition very limited in any society and the creation of ever increasing differences in wealth stemming from the combination of globalisation and laissez faire economics has led to the shrinking of the proportion of Western populations which can really feel economically secure. Today what were once the comfortable middle classes are feeling the pinch, especially those who have not got on the property ladder.  In most parts of the UK  the only way a mortgage can be afforded by those getting on the property ladder  today is for both the man and woman in a relationship to work full time, something which inevitably reduces the enthusiasm for and opportunity to have children. But  even the dual income property purchase   is increasingly a pipe dream as property prices have reach absurd levels  with the average UK price in  2017 being £317,000. In fact purchasing a property is becoming impossible even for those with what would be regarded as very  comfortable incomes.  To the horrendous price of property  can be added the insecurity generated by the fact that jobs are no longer secure even for the highly educated and skilled.  Consequently, the middle classes are feeling more and more insecure and less and less likely to have more than two children.

But if the middleclass are struggling to keep up appearances the poor in the West are really in the mire. They suffer from the same problems as the middle classes, the cost of housing and the insecurity of jobs, but in an  amplified form, not least because they rely much more on state provision than the middle classes and state provision is being squeezed  by the legacy the 2008 crash, the continued extravagance of an Aid regime which currently costs around £13 billion pa,  the cost of being in the EU,  the  offshoring of jobs to the developing world,  and most obviously and painfully  to the ordinary Briton  by the  huge numbers of immigrants arriving in the West who compete for healthcare, school places, social housing and jobs, especially those which have traditionally been done by the native Western poor.

Historically a sense of security for the poor has largely come from them  providing aid to one another, either individually or through organisations which helped and protected the poor such as churches, trade unions, friendly societies and the co-operative movement.  Such mutual help is almost gone now amongst the native poor  in the UK (and most of the West). This is partly because state-provided  welfare has substituted for  the help from churches, trade unions, charities and suchlike and partly  it is down to the fact  that the  native poor  have had their social circles fractured  either  by being  shifted from the areas  they used to dominate  to places where they are not  in the majority or they still live in their original  areas but these have been subject to  mass immigration of those who cannot or will not assimilate. Either way this has produced the same end of the native poor living in areas which they do not dominate.

The particular problem of housing

At first when the native British poor were moved from the slums after WW2 there was a plentiful supply of what is now called social housing and was called council housing then. These were let on lifelong tenancies, tenancies which could also be passed down the generations.  This  provided a secure base to raise a family.  Private rents were also controlled. This situation remained until the 1980s.

In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher did two things to greatly reduce the social housing stock. She created a Right-to-Buy for those in council housing which steadily reduced the existing stock of publicly owned properties to let at rents which those on low wages could afford and came close to killing off the building of new council housing. Controls on private rents were also removed.

The shrinking of housing at reasonable rents was temporarily ameliorated by the relaxing of the rules controlling mortgages so that those on even modest wages could afford to buy a property. This together with  Right-To-Buy initially swelled the number of owner occupier but d that id not last  for  UK owner occupation rose to a high of 71% in 2003 but has since sunk to 64%.

Had pre-1980 levels of house building been maintained with immigration at per-1997 levels there would have been something of a housing shortage but nothing like the crisis we now have.  The problem is that immigration did not stay at re 1997 levels but skyrocketed under Blair and has remained huge ever since . In 1997 the estimated UK population was 58 million, today it is 66 million. Most of this huge increase is down to immigration.

In recent years the  UK has been building less than 200,000 new build  homes pa.  Immigration in the year to September 2016 was 273,000. The idea that the UK can somehow build itself out of the current chronic shortages is clearly nonsense as things stand.

Work

The absence of a secure affordable home is surely the biggest material  barrier to starting a family, but insecurity of work runs it a not too far distant second  and of course bleeds into the question of whether a secure home can be afforded.   Margaret Thatcher came to power with a mission to reduce state ownership through the privatisation of all  the large nationalised industries and a desire to see market forces produce what was blithely called “creative destruction”  of our manufacturing  industry (much of which was off shored)  while the  British coal industry was wilfully destroyed. This resulted in a huge loss of  jobs  of the sort which had been the  staple of the native working class.

The  increase  in immigration has led to competition not just for skilled jobs but also the unskilled and semi-skilled  work.   Wages have been suppressed by this competition   and cemented into place by the payment of in-work benefits  which have become an excuse for employers to keep wages low and to generally degrade conditions of employment. For example, there is the growth of self-employment  from necessity rather than inclination and the rise of the zero-hours contract which does  not guarantee any work  but supplies work  only when it suits the employer. A person might work 40 hours one week and 15 hours the next and zero hours the week after.  This may suit  a student or  a couple where the person who is on a zero hours contract is working  not provide the basis for a couple to start a family.

Finally, there is the threat posed by robotics and AI systems to employment. This has not reached the point where most jobs can be done by robots and/or AI systems.  Nonetheless  the technology has already  devoured many jobs, especially  manual ones,   and the thought of what may happen as robots and AI systems get ever more powerful and intelligent will play on the fears of people  especially if they have been made redundant through the introduction of such technology.

This is one case where the overwhelming majority  are ultimately “all in it together”

All of these  sources of insecurity come together to suppress Western reproduction.  This is unsurprising. If couples cannot get a secure home and are  constantly  uncertain about whether they will be employed the next week; if they can only get low paid work; if they are constantly fighting   with immigrants over  public goods such as healthcare and education; if  they have no social support as once the poor had; if they  are constantly  told they should be ashamed of their country  and that it is selfish  to have many children is it any wonder that with ready contraception and abortion  that Western  countries have birthrates below replacement level?

If insecurity is the answer to low birthrates  then the answer must be to increase the sense of security  within  Western populations by raising morale by ending mass immigration,  improving security of employment  and engaging in massive house building programmes to dramatically increase the available property which is either within the scope of people to buy or  allows them to rent at a reasonable price with the type of security of tenure found in the best publicly owned rental property.   There also needs to be a clear understanding that the native populations  of Western countries have priority over  foreigners and  an  end to  multiculturalism .

The perilous demographic  position of Britain  (and  Western nations generally)  can be seen in the fact that whereas it was the native British poor who were at risk of experiencing crippling insecurity fifteen or twenty years ago, today it is virtually anyone who is either not unreservedly rich or is old enough to have bought a property before prices rocketed  is living in a  seriously insecure world .  No longer can the better off  think that they are safe. Moreover, even the  rich must wonder now and then  if  they are secure  as the number of stable and  prosperous countries   in the world diminishes through a combination of mass immigration and  terrorism.

Racial preference in babies

Robert Henderson

Two studies by researchers in Canada , US, UK, France and China examining the response of babies of six to nine months old to people of different races  have shown  the babies to have a preference for people of their own racial type

The first study  (published in Developmental Science) tested the response of babies to associating music with own-race faces   and other-race faces with the result that from six months happy music began to be associated with own-race faces and sad music with other-race faces.

The second study  (published in Child Development) found that   “Infants rely more on gaze cues from own-race than other-race adults for learning under uncertainty”  and  six to eight months old babies  were “were more inclined to learn information from an adult of his or her own race than from an adult of a different race.”

The studies involved “babies who had little to no prior experience with other-race individuals. “

Dr. Kang Lee, professor at OISE’s Jackman Institute of Child Study  and the  lead author of the studies states  “The results show that race-based bias already exists around the second half of a child’s first year.  This challenges the popular view that race-based bias first emerges only during the preschool years.” ……

‘“When we consider why someone has a racial bias, we often think of negative experience he or she may have had with other-race individuals.  But, these findings suggest that a race-based bias emerges without experience with other-race individuals,” said Dr. Naiqi (Gabriel) Xiao, first author of the two papers and postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University.’.

Racial bias is natural

That racial bias is either directly inbuilt or at the least developed very early  in humans as a response to  the racial type which surrounds them should surprise no one because it is a  natural result of homo sapiens being social animals. Behaviours and physical differences which signal that an individual belongs to a particular  social group are a  sine qua non of being a social animal for without such signals trust cannot develop and without trust there can be no social animal.  That humans should be biologically  programmed to respond more favourably to those of the same racial type is an example of the necessary signals required  to determine the boundaries  of their  human group.

Those who will not have natural selection determining human responses to racial difference at any price will doubtless claim that if there is racial bias at such an early age it is environmentally determined, that it is nurture not nature. For example, it might be thought that a  baby’s  preference is for  those who have provided care for the child during the early months after birth. Plausible enough at first glance . However,   the research demonstrated  that   babies showed a general preference for those of racial type like their own  not simply a preference for individuals with whom they are familiar. Of course this could be the consequence of being accustomed to same race faces – remember that the babies  were specifically chosen to have had little or  no experience of different race faces and  the babies  could have  been imprinted with a positive response  to same-race faces and to see other-race faces as either unrecognisable as faces or simply  as not being faces containing the trigger qualities to inspire trust.

But even if nurture did determine the infants’  preference for those of the same race by making  babies  identify with the race of those who  cared from them  for the first six months   or so of their lives the nurturists would still be faced with the problem  that there must be an innate behaviour in babies which  makes them favour those  of the  racial type who brought them up in the first six months or so  of their out of womb  existence.   Even if every baby was removed from their parents and given to those of a different racial type to raise – an obvious and deeply sinister absurdity –  the  babies would, if it is nurture at play,  still end up favouring the racial type who raised them in the early months.  Racial bias would not be eradicated merely shifted from the baby’s race to another race with,  presumably, the  baby then favouring  those of a different race to themselves.

Beyond infancy

The significance of the research reaches far beyond the behaviour of  babies. If the babies naturally develop a preference for those of  the same race as themselves, whether though an innate preference or because of the race of those who raises them,  who  will be in the vast majority of cases the same race as the baby,  then it is reasonable to expect that preference is carried through to adulthood and through adulthood.

Nothing  better demonstrates the  natural tendency  of human beings to  remain racially distinct than the remarkably low rate of inter-racial breeding even  in circumstances  where there is every opportunity for  it,  most particularly in the great cities of Western Europe and  North  America, where the populations are increasingly varied and the prevailing  elite ideology positively encouraging of such liaisons.

Even   societies which have had very racially mixed populations for a long time  display a  remarkable  ability to maintain retain racial distinctions over  very long  periods  of time – Brazil is an excellent  example of  this,  with social class being very much graded by skin colour. To argue that racial difference is  not important to the choice of a mate is as absurd as arguing  that the attractiveness of a person is irrelevant to the choice of a  mate.

In  Freakonomics Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner  cite a study made of a  US dating site (the full story is on pp 80-84).  The site is one  of the  largest  in  the US and the data examined  covered  30,000  people equally  divided  between San Diego and Boston.   Most were  white  but there was a substantial minority of non-white subjects.

The  questionnaire the  would-be  daters had to  fill  in  included  a question  choice on race as “same as mine”  and “doesn’t matter”.   The study  compared  the responses  by white would-be  daters  (those  from non-white were not analysed) to these  questions with the race of  the emails  actually  sent soliciting a date.   The result  in  Levitt  and Dubner’s words was:

“Roughly  half of the white women on the site  and  80  percent  of  the white men declared that  race  didn’t  matter to them. But the response data tell a different story  The white men who said that race didn’t  matter sent  90  percent of  their e-mail  queries  to  white women. The  white women who said race  didn’t  matter sent about 97 percent of their e-mail queries to white men.

“Is  it  possible that race really didn’t  matter  for  these  white women and men and that they simply  never  happened  to browse a non-white date  that  interested them?”

Or,  more likely, did they say that race didn’t matter  because they wanted to come across  especially  to potential mates of their own race as open-minded?”

In short, around 99% of all the women and 94%  of all men in the sample were  not  willing  to  seek a  date of a  different  race.   How  much stronger  will  be  the tendency to refuse to breed with a  mate  of  a different race?

Another  way  of testing the desire to remain racially separate  is  to look at social class and inter-racial  breeding. The higher up the social scale a  person is the less likely they are to have a partner of a  different race – if you doubt this try to find examples of the rich and  powerful who  have  a  partner of a different race. Those who  have the most choice overwhelmingly choose members of their own racial type, despite the fact that they have the protection of their wealth and position  to shield their spouses and children  from the effects of racial discrimination.

If sexual desire will not commonly override the natural disinclination to remain racially separate nothing will.

The fact of identifiable races

The  fact  that  humans  have external  racial  differences  which  are sufficiently distinct to allow  people throughout the world to  broadly categorise an individual into categories such as  white and  black is in  itself  indicative of the innate human tendency to  breed with those who are racially similar, even though for several thousands of years large human populations of different racial types have existed in close proximity. If  human beings did not have an innate preference for those who racially resemble themselves, humanity  would have bred itself  into something approaching a uniform racial type, at least in those parts of the  world  which  were not very isolated – different  races  have  had regular  and  numerous  contact  with each other  for  at  least  three thousand years. The alternative explanation to an innate tendency is the truly fantastic one that Man everywhere spontaneously developed cultural barriers to breeding which had nothing to do with any innate tendency. If anything is a social construct it is not race but the liberal idea that Man is a single species.

Race is  much stronger as a mediator of who to mate with than ethnic (cultural) difference – think of the very  high proportion of those in Britain who have Irish/Welsh/Scottish/English mixed ancestry. Nonetheless, ethnic differences are culturally potent amongst racially similar populations. For example, on either side of the England/Scotland border,  the inhabitants  born and raised close to the border retain Scots and English accents even though they may have lived their entire lives only a few miles apart.

Because the tendency to mate with those of a similar race is so strong  and universal,  both in place and time, it is reasonable to conclude  that the  behaviour  is innate and that cultures  necessarily include  the requirement for a member of the society to be of a certain racial type. The  consequence of this is that someone of a different racial type  is effectively precluded from full integration because one of the criteria for  belonging has not been met.  That is not to say,  of course,  that many  of the habits of mind of an alien culture may not be  adopted  by someone  of  a  different race.  What is withheld  is  the  instinctive acceptance  of the alien and his or her descendants  as members of  the society. Just as no human being can decide for themselves that they are a member of this or that group, no individual can decide that they belong to this or that nation because it is a two-way process: the other members of the group they wish to join have to accept them as a true member of the group. (Stephen Frears the English  film director once wryly remarked that he had known the actor Daniel Day-Lewis “before he was Irish”).

Assortative mating

There is a widespread  biological behaviour  known as assortative mating.   Members  of  sexually reproducing  animals  select  mates  by certain criteria.  In that much loved laboratory animal,  the fruit  fly drosophila,  this may be the number  of sternopleural bristles;  in Man it  includes  many criteria including racial type.  Other  human  prime assortative criteria are size, intelligence, education and class.  Some of  these criteria such as education and class are more clearly  linked to  nurture  than  Nature,  but even they can be  direct  or  indirect expressions  of   qualities which are at least largely innate  such  as intelligence. I  say  direct  or  indirect  because  the  beneficial qualities  may not be in the individual, for those with  superior education and high social class may lack the  innate qualities of their parents  or earlier ancestors and their privileged position may  simply be a residue of the superior innate abilities of their parents or other ancestors.

For the purposes of inter-racial mating, size,  intelligence, education and  class all come into play. There are clear average  differences  of size  between the three major races:  blacks largest,  whites  in  the middle and Asians smallest.  This would mean that on average members of one  racial  group  would be less likely to choose  another  member  of another racial group. The differences in IQ would have the same effect, with  blacks  being  less likely to mate with the  other  two  races because their IQ is further removed from them than  they are from  each other. Differences in IQ will also be reflected, directly or indirectly in  educational achievement and social class and hence in  mating, for example,  if a minority population of blacks amidst a  majority  white population  have proportionately  more people of low education and  low social  class than the white majority,  something which  should  happen other  things  being equal because of their inferior  IQ  distribution, they are less likely to mate with members of the white majority simply on the grounds of education and class.

The hopeless and dangerous quest for behavioural change

The lead author of the two studies Dr. Kang Lee has no doubts about the  scope and power of racial preference,  but  like so many  academics who  work  in the field of racial difference  he wants to try to fit his findings into a politically correct shape, viz:

“Implicit racial biases tend to be subconscious, pernicious, and insidious. It permeates almost all of our social interactions, from health care to commerce, employment, politics, and dating. Because of that, it’s very important to study where these kinds of biases come from and use that information to try and prevent racial biases from developing,” he said…..

“These findings thus point to the possibility that aspects of racial bias later in life may arise from our lack of exposure to other-race individuals in infancy,” …

“If we can pinpoint the starting point of racial bias, which we may have done here, we can start to find ways to prevent racial biases from happening,” he said.

“An important finding is that infants will learn from people they are most exposed to,” added lead writer  Dr. Xiao, indicating that parents can help prevent racial bias by, for example, introducing their children to people from a variety of races.

The idea that babies could  be programmed to not differentiate between different racial types is practically impossible .  The impracticalities range from most people not having ready   access to people of other races or the social contact which might allow babies to experience people of other races to the fact that there are in practice many different racial types  beyond the basic racial classifications of white, black and so on, for example, an Ethiopian  looks radically different from a Nigerian and a Mongolian very different from a Han Chinese.   In short, the idea that showing babies people of different  races would not condition them to react to all racial  types in the same manner.  Moreover, is it realistic to imagine that people would generally  be willing to seek out those of a different race to accustom their children to  different races? I think that most people would think that extremely improbable.  What then, state coercion to force such  associations?

The experiments also leave some important questions untested.   What happens with  mixed race babies  where the parents are not mixed race?  For example, how  would a child born of a white father and black mother respond to such an experiment?  Or how about a child born of a black father and a Chinese mother?

The belief that behaviour which is innate can be eradicated  is downright dangerous because an innate behaviour evolves for a good reason. The reason for the preference in this case is to  maintain  the integrity of the group to which the individual belongs.   If it was possible to change the bias towards those of the same race the logical result would be to weaken the group to which  an individual  belonged.

It is also extraordinarily  difficult to see how such a change might be effected  because if the behaviour is innate by definition it would be what the individual  naturally wants to do.  If pressed on the subject the politically correct would say it was a matter of education,  by which they mean indoctrination or brainwashing. This of course is what many Western elites have been practising for the past fifty years or more as they have  gradually placed  political correctness at the centre of  Western  politics. But despite the immense attempt at politically correct indoctrination (which begins in schools at a very young age) mixed with threats of penalties such as the loss of jobs, the exclusion from most public offices and  criminal charges  for saying politically incorrect things , preference for those of the same race has remained stubbornly unmoveable amongst most of those upon whom the indoctrination  has been  practised.

But the politically correct  indoctrination and threats  are not  even handedly  applied.  In the West it is the white native populations which bear the brunt of these practices.  Indeed, racial  and ethnic minorities are effectively left unmolested by the politically correct.  The result is to  allow these minorities to  have free rein to still exercise the innate preference for those of the  same race and by extension the  same ethnicity, while the white native populations are constantly denigrated and increasingly punished by the state and the mass media if they  attempt to do the same, namely, to  favour their own racial type and their own cultural practices.  The result is to strengthen the racial and ethnic minorities in the West and to weaken the native populations.

Of course most people amongst the native white populations of the West will supply the politically correct words when they are in  public but it is remarkable that so many native white people , including those with a public profile, do breach the politically correct  diktats, something which is doubly remarkable because of all the politically incorrect sins it is those which deal with race and ethnicity which attract the heaviest penalties. The fact that people so often behave in such a politically incorrect fashion when it comes to race and ethnicity tells its own story, namely, they still have the innate preference for their own race and ethnicity and the attempt to make them deny this, or at least pretend to deny it,   produces a kind of emotional claustrophobia which results in a politically incorrect transgression.

Perhaps in the future it may be possible to genetically change the way human being relate to those of a different race but there is no sign of any  possibility of that at present. But suppose it was possible, how could such a profound alteration in the human psyche be embraced by any society which called itself free or democratic?

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 Thomas Mair Affair

Robert Henderson

Thomas Mair has been convicted of the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox (Batley and Spen) . His sentence was  a whole life tariff which makes it very unlikely  that he will ever be released.

That is the bare bones of the matter, but there is something distinctly odd about this case for the reported facts  relating to it do not seem to hang comfortably together. That Mair killed Cox is clear  and  his ostensible  motive for committing the murder , namely,  that she was a supporter of the remain side in the EU referendum is established, but precious little is else is satisfactorily explained.

The strangeness of the killing

Mair  has no revealed previous history of violence , yet his attack on Cox was both sustained and involved not only the shooting of Cox but  multiple stabbings.  For a supposed first time killer Mair showed surprisingly little panic or squeamishness when confronted with the actuality of attacking someone in such a physically  intimate manner.   Instead , he  was remarkably self-possessed during the attack and afterwards according to media reports, so much so that when a man called Rashid Hussain tried to intervene  during the attack on Cox Mair coolly told him “ Move back, otherwise I’m going to stab you.”  He also reloaded his .22 gun twice, shot Cox three times and stabbed her 15 times.  Such determined and  unflustered behaviour is unusual to say the least  for someone who had never done anything like it before.  About the only thing  amateurish  about the attack was the fact that he did not kill the MP quickly.

After the attack, Mair made no meaningful  attempt to flee – he was arrested a mile away from the murder – and he  did not disguise himself.  A number of people witnessed  the attack on Cox  and as  the killing was near Mair’s  home the odds against him not being rapidly identified were vanishingly small.

The discontinuity between Mair’s behaviour before the trial and in the trial

After being arrested  Mair refused to answer questions put to him by the police including questions about his political  leanings. Again he  appeared very self-possessed.  Photographs showing him in a custody booth  could have been taken of a man waiting quietly in a hospital  before he is  called for an examination.

During the act of killing he was reported to have shouted   “Britain first”, “this is for Britain”, “Britain always comes first” and “keep Britain independent”  and when  he made his first appearance in court he  gave his name as Death to Traitors, freedom for Britain”.  There is some dispute about the exact words but the discovery of  a good deal of  hard right literature  in his home makes such statements plausible. Mair’s behaviour to this point suggested  he   wanted to be caught and to use his trial as a platform to complain about the EU and the support MPs such as Cox gave to it.

At his trial everything changed. When called upon to plead he refused to do so and  pleas  of not guilty to the various charges  were entered on his behalf,  as is usual in English courts.  The refusal to plead could be interpreted as Mair  doing what many politically motivated people do when placed on trial, namely,  attempt to remove legitimacy from the court by refusing to acknowledge it.  However, people who take that course generally, one way or another,  make it crystal clear what they are doing. All that Mair offered was silence until he had been convicted for he did not give evidence in his own defence.

What his attitude or strategy was in behaving in this manner is debatable because he can have had no meaningful expectation that  the verdict would be anything but t guilty. Hence, he would have had no reason to fear cross examination because the fact that he killed Cox could not be reasonably said to be in dispute and prosecuting counsel  would have had little to grill Mair  about because the facts of the killing  were not in dispute.    Mair would have been able to have his own barrister lead him through whatever  he wanted to say without  much fear of the prosecution  making him look silly in cross examination because there would have been precious little the Prosecution  could have gained from cross examination as not only were the facts of the killing clear Mair  defence did not include  any evidence  of mental illness.

Mair’s attempt to speak after conviction

After conviction  Mair  did try to speak before sentence but was refused leave to do so by the judge Mr Justice Wilkie .  The ground for the refusal  was Mair’s failure to give evidence. This struck me as very rum so   I asked an experienced  lawyer whether such a refusal was sound judicial practice and their  answer was an unequivocal no. The refusal  seem  more than a little rather strange not least because little if any mitigation was presented by his barrister

The right to make an unsworn sentence before conviction was abolished in England in 1982 (by section 72 of the Criminal Justice Act. However, the Act gave a convicted defendant the right to speak in mitigation, viz:

“2 Abolition of right of accused to make unsworn statement.

(1)Subject to subsections (2) and (3) below, in any criminal proceedings the accused shall not be entitled to make a statement without being sworn, and accordingly, if he gives evidence, he shall do so [F1(subject to sections 55 and 56 of the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999)] on oath and be liable to cross-examination; but this section shall not affect the right of the accused, if not represented by counsel or a solicitor, to address the court or jury otherwise than on oath on any matter on which, if he were so represented, counsel or a solicitor could address the court or jury on his behalf.

(2)Nothing in subsection (1) above shall prevent the accused making a statement without being sworn—

(a)if it is one which he is required by law to make personally; or

(b)if he makes it by way of mitigation before the court passes sentence upon him.”

Plainly Mair could have wanted to make  a plea in mitigation and it would almost certainly have been a plea of mitigation in the sense that he wished to explain his actions which would whatever they were bear on mitigation even if he was to say he thought his action justified because Cox was a traitor for supporting the EU.

The refusal to allow him to speak should have been challenged by his barrister but appears  not to  have been.

Another oddity of the trial was the reading into evidence, that is, before Mair was convicted, of the Labour MP  Stephen Kinnock’s statement about how praisworthy he thought Cox  was. That was simply bizarre because it could have no bearing on Mair”s guilt or innocence. Again Mair’s brief appears to have made no protest.

After sentencing there was one last loose end put into the public arena. The police announced that they were  trying to find the person, if any,  who sold Mair the gun with which he shot Cox.   (The gun was legally held by someone other than Mair before it was stolen in August 2015.)  By the time of the trial  the police  had had more than four months to  start such a search and it is somewhat surprising that they have made no progress to date. It may even be that the police  have only just started looking because the Daily Telegraph on 23 November 2016  stated that “  A major manhunt was underway on Wednesday night for the person who handed the 53-year-old loner the modified bolt-action rifle, which was stolen almost a year before the murder.”  

Mair’s silence

What are we to think about Mair’s failure to give evidence? If  the man  was driven by  his politics his natural course would surely have been to make a statement to police detailing his reasons for killing Cox.  Moreover, he was  distinctly bullish about his motives and politics during the killing and at  his first court appearance. He might have been overwhelmed with what he had done and the reality of the circumstances he found himself in.  But his calm demeanour  after arrest  and during  the trial itself  makes this unlikely and in any case he wanted to speak before sentence.

It is possible although  improbable that Mair  decided  he would  refuse  to acknowledge the legitimacy of the court by failing to either plead or give evidence  until he was convicted and then give whatever message he wanted to put before the public . If so he was thwarted by the judge. I   can find no media report  which either carried details of a protest in court  by Mair at being denied an opportunity to speak   or of his barrister making representations on his behalf that he should be allowed to speak. It is conceivable that the media collectively decided not to carry details of Mair protesting or his barrister arguing that he should be allowed to speak,  but that would surely  be stretching credulity past breaking point.

The only really plausible  explanations for Mair’s  behaviour  would seem to be that  he  is  either mentally ill or that he was intimidated by the authorities into not giving evidence.

Mair’s history of mental illness

One of the most surprising things about the case  is that no psychiatric evidence was offered in court. This was noteworthy for two reasons. The first was the obvious one that Mair’s behaviour and the nature of the crime itself was such as to make  an assessment of his state of mind  necessary if justice was to be seen to be done. The second was the fact that Mair had not only received psychiatric treatment in  the past for depression  but on the day before the killing he attempted unsuccessfully  to get help for that condition.

There is plenty of opportunity within the justice system for mental illness to be picked up. The police have powers to order a psychiatric examination of  someone they suspect  has a mental illness.   The question of fitness to plead may be raised before arraignment by the prosecution, defence or Judge.  Requesting psychiatric reports after conviction but before  sentencing is  often done. It is important to understand  that an accused cannot simply declare himself or herself as fit to plead.

Despite all these opportunities  there was no psychiatric evidence presented to the court. Of course if Mair instructed his lawyers not to bring his mental health issues in court as a defence or mitigation they could not do so if he was considered fit to plead which he was.  However, the court itself could have ordered psychiatric reports before sentencing took place and  apparently  did not do so.

But if Mair instructed  to his lawyers  not to use his medical history in the case that would make it  all the more extraordinary  that he failed to  either give evidence or to make a public protest when he was being  denied an opportunity to speak.

Had his  psychiatric history been used at his trial  it is possible it could have made a significant difference to the sentence Mair received . The charge could have been reduced  to manslaughter  if  Mears  was judged to have diminished  responsibility  or lead to a sentence of something less than a whole life term.

Intriguingly the Guardian reported that Mair had undergone a psychiatric examination but no evidence of mental illness was found, a rather surprising conclusion because of the nature of the crime, Mair’s behaviour during the attack and the fact that Mair had been treated for depression.  However, the Guardian report does not say who commissioned the assessment.

The behaviour of Mair’s barrister

Judged by the media reports Mair’s barrister Simon Russell-Flint QC  was virtually inert throughout the trial. He challenged only one minor point of the prosecution’s evidence, did not bring any evidence on behalf of Mair  and failed to challenge the judge’s refusal to allow Mair to speak after sentence.  H

A barrister’s attempt at explaining Russell-Flint’s behaviour can be found here.

It is worth noting that Mair received £75,000 in legal aid for his defence.  It would be fascinating to see the detailed breakdown of  how the money was spent.

What the British state had to gain from Mair’s silence

The alternative explanation that  state  actors have  frightened Mair into keeping quiet  raises the question what did  they have  to gain?   The British elite are very twitchy about having trials in which those charged with breaches of the totalitarian ideology known as political correctness are unwilling to plead  guilty. Moreover, even those who do  plead not guilty very  rarely rest their defence on the right to free expression seeking instead to blame their behaviour on things such as the side effects of  prescription drugs.  Often those who start off with a not  guilty plea will be gradually worn down by officialdom until they agree to plead guilty.   A first rate example of this is the case of  Emma West who, after complaining on a tram about the level of immigration,  was first held in the UK’s nearest to a maximum security prison for women and,  after being given bail , was then harassed for  months simply because she would not plead guilty. Eventually worn down by the delay and fearing that her young son might be taken away from her, she pleaded guilty to some lesser charges than those originally laid.

The reason why our politically correct powers-that -be  fear a not guilty plea in such cases is they do not want their willingness to suppress free expression attacked or simply made starkly visible in a public forum or for those in the dock to challenge the politically correct view of the world.  Part of the politically correct narrative is that political correctness does not impinge on free expression. This is self-evidently absurd, but it is an essential  plank in the enforcement of political correctness.   For the politically correct  to say  otherwise would be to undermine their crand show it nakedly for what it is, a totalitarian creed which insists the only acceptable view of anything which political correctness touches is the politically correct one. In  principle this means everything  important in human existence because the  concept of discrimination lays every aspect of life open to intrusion by the ideology.  No totalitarian ideology can survive if it is questioned  and political correctness is more vulnerable to intellectual demolition than most because  it is  series of injunctions  which conflict horribly with human nature .

It could have been this elite fear of having political correctness challenged which prompted the judge to refuse Mair leave to address the court.  Mair’s  case was of course very different from those prosecuted for non-pc speech  because of his undisputed crime of murder, but the threat of someone calling those with power who supported the  UK’s membership  traitors, as Mair  most probably would have done judged by his previous public statements during the killing and his first court appearance,  might have seemed a little too close to home for our politicians in particular to view with equanimity.  Treason is a unique crime. Whether it is on the statute book or not, whether it is formally defined one way or another, everyone knows in their heart  of hearts  what it is,  the most  heartrending of emotional blows, namely, betrayal.

There was also  the possibility of elite fear of what one might call  the Anders Breivik effect. If Mair had spoken in court and given a purely political motive for the killing and justified on the grounds that Cox was committing treason this would  almost certainly this would have  created an ambivalent response amongst the public.  The British experience with Irish terrorism are a good example of the tendency where Irish Republicans would often say after a bombing atrocity “I  don’t approve of their methods but….”   There would have been condemnation of the act of killing of course, but along with that in quite a few  minds there would  be a sense that Mair’s political reason for the attack, that he was killing  a traitor, somehow softened  the purely  criminal sharpness  of the deed. There will also be a hard core of those who  were unambiguously glad to see her dead .  A piece of research carried out by Birmingham City and  Nottingham Trent Universities on tweets about the murder of Cox found that  at least 25,000 out of 50,000 tweets studied celebrated her death.

A  silent or at least a Mair not allowed to speak publicly is a perfect  fit to fill  two roles for the  UK’s politically correct elite’s narrative.  First,  he could be  typified as the  type of person the remain side of the referendum said was the typical leave voter, someone who  was ignorant and potentially  violent;  second he  could be pointed at as a  “far right”  terrorist  to balance  against the many Muslim terrorists.  This has already happened : here are a few example  links  one, two, three .

There is also the possibility that  the security services  or the police knew about Mair and did not take any action because they  hoped  that he might do something which would promote the idea  of that those who wanted to leave the EU are  dangerous extreme rightwingers . It is conceivable  although very improbable , that in some way the security services surreptitiously encouraged Mair to  attack  Cox to feed into the general propaganda of the pro-EU side of the  Brexit referendum that portrayed leavers as racist far right know-nothings.   More plausibly  the security services  might  thought that Mair would not do anything more than engage in a public protest or perhaps a bit of criminal damage and they seriously misjudged the situation.  It  would be very damaging  if that was the case and they had been forced to admit such a thing in the witness box.

There are those who  believe that state actors or possibly  fanatical remainers arranged the killing to play into the remainer propaganda that  Breiteers  were racist far righters. This is wildly improbable for three reasons.   First, the  large the number of people who would have to be engaged in such a conspiracy;  second, if such a plot existed why would a novice  MP with little public profile be selected to die?

Then there is the idea that Cox is not dead and the killing was in fact a sham. Only one question really needs to be asked here, namely, why on Earth would Cox have agreed to taking part in such a plot?  The number of people who would have had to be in on the plot would have had to even greater than those in  an actually killing arranged by the state or fanatical remainers.

Finally,   there is the idea that the  man who was convicted as  Thomas Mair was not Thomas Mair’ but someone else who is presumably playing a part.  This theory can be easily struck down. Photos of Mair when he was younger and as he was when arrested are claimed  by  supporters of the substitution theory to  show two different people.     In fact, they do the opposite,. Both photos show a similar  growth on the right cheek ; the eye colour is the same, the shape of the distinctive nose is the same, and the hair colour is the same. There is also the fact that if the person who was convicted  was not Mair everyone who knew him,  including  Mair’s relatives, would  have had to refrain from pointing this out, an absurd idea.

What is the chance of  British elite behaving badly?

What is the chance of the British elite behaving badly. Well, consider the case of the Liberal MP Cyril Smith. Smith admitted to the then leader of the Liberal Party David Steel that when involved with the  Cambridge House boys hostel he had both spanked boys with their pants down and conducted what he euphemistically called medical examinations on the boys . Steel took no action and Smith remained within the Party and an MP.

One thing is certain about this case, we have not heard anything like the whole truth about it. We are being asked to believe that a politically motivated killer of his own volition  steadfastly failed to use his capture and trial to send a political message to the public. It makes no sense.

 

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.

The truth is the British are against further mass immigration full stop

British Future report says 25% of British adults want all immigrants repatriated

Robert Henderson

The desperate attempts of the Remain  side to paint those who wish to leave the EU as,   at one and the same time,  racist and unrepresentative of the British as a whole are ludicrous. Both claims cannot be true because  polls  show  that the numbers  wanting to vote to leave are at worst on a  par  with those who wish to leave.

Polls and research on immigration to the UK invariably give a majority against future mass  immigration despite the strong incentive of those canvassed for their opinion to give either the politically correct answer  for fear of being called a racist or to look for what they consider is a safe proxy for saying they want an end to mass immigration or at least see  a severe reduction in numbers. The proxies they choose  are statements   made by mainstream politicians which are  deemed safe to repeat simply because  they have been sanctioned  by their use by politicians.  This leads  people to say things such as “It is alright provided they work and pay their way” or “We should have a points systems like Australia”. This of course does not address express the  real wishes  of most of the British public , but those making such statements  feel  they  dare not get  nearer  to the truth  of what they feel because that is the limit of what is permitted by the  politically correct elite.

What are the real feelings about immigration  of the British? They are far more antagonistic  to it than  politicians or the mainstream media allow.   In 2014 the think-tank British Future  published  the report How to talk about immigration based on research conducted by ICM, Ipsos MORI and YouGov. This  purports  to provide a blueprint for both the pros and antis in the immigration debate  to manage the subject  most effectively in public discussion.  This is not something which they achieve because they have bought into the internationalist agenda, viz: “Some three or four generations on from Windrush, it is now a settled and irreversible fact that we are a multi-ethnic society. Managing immigration effectively and fairly in the public interest  should and does matter to Britons from different ethnic backgrounds. We should be suspicious of approaches that sharply polarise British citizens along racial lines, in whatever direction”.

Nonetheless the research  does have much of interest.  One finding  is truly startling. Faced with the question  “The government should insist that all immigrants should return to the countries they came from, whether they’re here legally or illegally”  the result was Agree 25%, disagree 52% and neither 23%. (P17 of the report).  In addition, many of those who said no to forced repatriation were also firm supporters of strong border controls and restrictive  immigration policies.

The fact that 25% of the population have overcome their fear of  falling foul of the pc police and say that they do not merely want immigration stopped but sent into reverse is  stunning. Moreover, because political correctness has taken such an intimidating place in British society it is reasonable to assume that a substantial number of those who said they disagreed did so simply out of fear of being accused of racism.

The obverse of the immigration coin was shown by the question “In an increasingly borderless world, we should welcome anyone who wants to come to Britain and not deter them with border controls” (P16 of the report).  The results were 14% agree, 67% disagree and 19% don’t know.

That only 14% support such a policy compared to the 25% who  wished for forced repatriation is striking in itself, but  it is even better for the  opponents of immigration than it looks for two reasons. First, the 14%  of those who agreed with the question will be the honest figure because to say that you want open borders carries with it no penalties from the pc police  and will gain the person brownie points amongst the politically correct elite and their auxiliaries. Second,  as already mentioned, the 25% of those wanting forced repatriation of all immigrants will understate the true position because a significant proportion of those questioned with be lying out of fear.

The report also shows that older voters are more likely to be those who are most strongly opposed to immigration (P11 of the report).  That is important because older voters are the most likely to vote.

Taking all that into account  it is reasonable to assume that a referendum with the question “Do you wish to end mass immigration?”  would result in a solid probably an overwhelming YES vote.

These facts  should persuade politicians that they would risk nothing if they move much further to restrict  immigration than they have already done and in so doing  that they would  gain  considerable  extra electoral support.

This may well happen. Public rhetoric  about immigration is rapidly hardening There will come a tipping point where  the rhetoric  has departed so far from the politically correct position that serious  action to restrict immigration will occur because the stretch between rhetoric and action will  become too great to sustain in a society where governments are elected.

A party political  bidding process on the  subject of immigration is already taking place  and there will come a point where serious action has to follow  or there will be a very real chance that either one or more of the mainstream parties will become irrelevant and be superseded, or members of the mainstream parties will wrest control of these parties from their pc indoctrinated leadership  and adopt a policy on immigration  closer to what the public wants.

The other important effect of greater political honesty in political utterances about immigration is that it makes  it much easier for people generally to speak openly about their feelings on the subject and to lobby for radical action.   In  turn this will feed the desire of politicians to gain electoral credibility by being  ever former in their immigration policies.  Indeed, the only reason that the present immigration has been allowed to develop is because the subject has been effectively wiped off the public debate agenda since the1970s.

In the immediate context of the EU referendum those supporting the leave campaign should have no fear or embarrassment in making clear that after the question of sovereignty – from which all else flows – that the most important issue is immigration.  That is what will win the referendum  for the leave side.

 

 

Brexit: the movie

Director  and narrator Martin Durkin

Running time 71 minutes

As an instrument   to rally the leave vote  Brexit: the movie is severely flawed.  It starts promisingly by stressing the loss of sovereignty , the lack of democracy in the EU and the corrupt greed of its servants (my favourite abuse was a shopping mall for EU politicians and bureaucrats only – eat your heart out Soviet Union) and the ways in which  Brussels spends British taxpayers money and sabotages industries such as fishing.  Then  it all begins to go sour.

The film’s audience should have been the British electorate  as a whole.  That means making a film which appeals to all who might vote to leave using arguments which are not nakedly  politically  ideological. Sadly, that is precisely what has not  happened here because Brexit the movie  has as   director and narrator Martin Durkin, a card carrying disciple of the neo-liberal creed. Here are a couple of snatches from his website:

Capitalism is the free exchange of services voluntarily rendered and received. It is a relationship between people, characterized by freedom. Adding ‘global’ merely indicates that governments have been less than successful at hindering the free exchange of people’s services across national boundaries.

And

Well it’s time to think the unthinkable again, and to privatise the biggest State monopoly of all … the monopoly which is so ubiquitous it usually goes unnoticed, but which has impoverished us more than any other and is the cause of the current world banking and financial crisis.  It is time to privatise money.

Unsurprisingly Durkin has filled the film with people who with varying degrees of fervour share his ideological beliefs. These include John Redwood,  James Delingpole, Janet Daley, Matt Ridley, Mark Littlewood,  Daniel Hannon, Patrick Minford, Melanie Phillips Simon Heffer, Michael Howard and  Douglas Carswell , all supporting the leave side but doing so in a way which would alienate those who have not bought into the free market free trade ideology. The only people interviewed in the film who were from the left of the political spectrum are Labour’s biggest donor John Wells and Labour MPs  Kate Hoey and Steve Baker.

There is also a hefty segment of the film  (20.50 minutes – 30 minutes)  devoted to a risibly false  description of Britain’s economic history from the beginnings of the industrial revolution to the  position of Britain in the 1970s.  In it Durkin claims that the nineteenth century was a time of a very unregulated British economy, both domestically and  with regard to international trade, which allowed Britain to grow and flourish wondrously .  In fact, the first century and half or so of the Industrial Revolution  up to around 1860 was conducted under what was known as the Old Colonial System,   a very  wide-ranging form of protectionism. In addition, the nineteenth century saw the introduction of many Acts which regulated the employment of children and the conditions of work for employees in general and  for much of the century  the century  magistrates had much wider powers than they do today such as setting the price of basic foodstuffs and wages and enforcing apprenticeships.

Durkin then goes on to praise Britain’s continued economic expansion up until the Great War which he ascribes to Britain’s rejection of protectionism. The problem with this is that   Britain’s adherence to the nearest any country have ever gone  to free trade – the situation  is complicated by Britain’s huge Empire –  between 1860 and 1914 is a period of comparative industrial decline  with highly protectionist countries such as the USA and Germany making massive advances.

Next, Durkin paints a picture of a Britain regulated half to death in the Great War, regulation which often  continued into the peacetime inter-war years before a further dose of war in 1939  brought with it even more state control. Finally, the period of 1945 to the coming of Thatcher is represented as a time of a British economy over-regulated and protected economy falling headlong  into an abyss of uncompetitive economic failure before  Thatcher rescued the country.

The reality is that Britain came out of the Great Depression faster than any other large economy, aided by a mixture of removal from the Gold Bullion Standard, Keynsian pump priming and re-armament, all of these being state measures.  As for the period 1945 until the oil shock of 1973,   British economic growth was higher than it has been  overall in the forty years  since.

Even if the film had given a truthful account of Britain’s economic history over the past few centuries  there would have been a problem. Having speaker after speaker putting forward the laissez faire  position, saying that Britain would be so much more prosperous if they could trade more with the rest of the world by  having much less regulation, being open to unrestricted foreign investment   and, most devastatingly,  that it  would allow people to be recruited from around the world rather than just the EU or EEA (with the implication that it is racist to privilege Europeans over people from Africa and Asia) is not  the way  to win people to the leave side.

The legacy of Thatcher  is problematic.  Revered by true believers in  the neo-liberal  credo she is hated by many  more for there  are still millions in the country who detest what she stood for and  for whom people spouting the same kind of rhetoric she used in support of Brexit  is  a  turn off. To them can be  added  many others who instinctively feel that globalisation is wrong and threatening and talk of economics in which human beings are treated as pawns deeply repulsive.

There is also a  truly  astonishing  omission in the film. At the most modest assessment immigration is one of the major concerns of  British electors  (and probably the greatest concern  when the fear of being called a racist if one opposes immigration is factored in), yet the film avoids the subject. There is a point  towards the end of the film (go in at  61 minutes) when it briefly  looks as though it might be raised when the commentary poses the question “Ah, what if the  EU proposes a trade deal which forces upon us open borders and other stuff  we don’t like?   But that leads to no discussion  about immigration,  merely the  statement of  the pedantically  true claim that Britain  does not have to sign a treaty if its terms are not acceptable. This of course begs the question of who will decide what is acceptable. There a has been no suggestion that there are any lines in the sand which will not be crossed in negotiations with the EU and there is no promise of a second referendum after terms have been negotiated with the EU or, indeed,  with any other part of the world. Consequently,   electors can have no confidence those who conduct  negotiations will not give away vital things such as control of our borders.

As immigration is such a core part of  what  British voters worry about most ,both in the EU context and immigration generally,  it is difficult to come up with a an explanation for this startling omission  which  is not pejorative. It can only have been done for one of two reasons:  either the maker of the film  did not want the issue addressed or many of those appearing in the film  would  not have appeared if the  immigration drum had been beaten.  In view of both Durkin’s ideological position and the general tenor of the film,  the most plausible reason is that Durkin did not want the subject discussed because the idea of free movement of labour is a central part of the neo-liberal  ideology. He will see labour as simply a factor of production along with land and capital. Durkin  even managed to include interviews conducted in Switzerland (go in at 52 minutes )which  painted the country as a land of milk and honey without  mentioning that the Swiss had a citizen initiated referendum on restricting immigration in 2014 and are pushing for another.

The point at issue is not whether neo-liberalism is a good or a bad thing,  but the fact that an argument for leaving the EU which is primarily based on the ideology is bound to alienate many who do not think kindly of the EU, but who do not share the neo-liberal’s enthusiasm for an  unregulated or under-regulated  economy   and  a commitment to globalism, which frequently means  jobs are either off-shored or taken by immigrants who undercut wages and place a great strain on public services. This in practice results in mass immigration , which apart from competition for jobs, houses  and services,   fundamentally alters the  nature of the areas of  Britain in  which  immigrants settle and,  in the longer term, the  nature of Britain itself .

The excessive  concentration on economic matters is itself a major flaw, because  most of the electorate  will  variously not be able to understand , be bored by the detail  and turn off or  simply disregard the claims made as being  by their  nature  unknowable in reality. The difficulty of incomprehension and boredom is  compounded by there being  far  too many talking heads, often  speaking for a matter of seconds at a time.  I also found the use of Monty Python-style graphics irritatingly shallow and  a sequence lampooning European workers compared with the Chinese downright silly (go in at  37 minutes).

What the film should have done was rest  the arguments for leaving on the question of  sovereignty.  That is what this vote is all about: do you want Britain to be a sovereign nation ? Everything flows from the question of sovereignty : can we control our borders?; can we make our own laws?  Once sovereignty is seen as the only real question, then what we may or may not do after regaining our sovereignty is in our hands. If the British people wish to have a  more regulated market they can vote for it. If they want a neo-liberal economy they can vote for it. The point is that at present we cannot vote for either . As I mentioned in my introduction the sovereignty issue is raised many times in the film.  The problem is that it was so often  tied into the idea of free trade and unregulated markets that the sovereignty message raises the question in many minds of what will those with power – who overwhelmingly have bought into globalism and neo-liberal economics –  do with sovereignty rather than the value of sovereignty itself.

Will the film help the leave cause? I think it is the toss of a coin whether it will persuade more people to vote leave than or alienate more with  its neo-liberal message.

Brexiteers: hold your nerve

Robert Henderson

Recent polls are overall veering towards   but not decisively towards a remain  win in the referendum.  It is important that those wanting  leave the EU should not get downhearted. There are still the TV debates to come which will expose the often hypocritical and always vacuous positions those advocating  a vote to remain will of necessity have to put forward because  they have no hard facts to support their position and  can offer only a catalogue of ever more wondrously improbable disasters they claim will happen if Brexit occurs, everything from the collapse of the world economy to World War III  The only things they have  not predicted are a giant  meteorite hitting Earth and wiping out the  human race or, to entice the religious inclined vote, the coming of the end of days.

There are other signs which should hearten the leave camp. There appears little doubt that those who intend to vote to leave  will on average be more likely to turn out to vote than those who  want to remain.. This is partly because older voters  favour Brexit more than younger voters and older voters are much more likely to turn out and actually vote.  But there is also the question of what people are voting for.  Leaving  to become masters in our own house is a positive message. There is nothing  positive about the remain  side’s blandishments.  A positive message is always likely to energise people to act than a negative one. Moreover, what the remain side are saying directly or by implication is that at best they have no confidence in their own country and at worst they want Britain to be in the EU to ensure that it is emasculated as a nation state because they disapprove of nation states.  Such a stance will make even those tending towards voting to remain to perhaps either not vote or to switch to voting leave.

What should we make of the polls?

What should we make of the polls?  Leaving aside the question of how accurate they are, it is interesting that the polls which are showing strongest for a vote to remain are the telephone polls. Those conducted online tend to produce a close result, often half and half on either side.  Some have the Leave side ahead. On the face of things this is rather odd because traditional polling wisdom has it that online polls will tend to favour younger people for the obvious reason that the young are much more likely be comfortable living their lives online than  older people.  Even if online polls are chosen to represent a balanced sample including age composition the fact that older people are generally not so computer savvy means that any sample used with older people is unlikely to represent older generally whereas  the part of the polling audience which is young can be made to represent  the  younger part of the population  because  almost all of the young use digital technology without thinking.

It is likely that the older people who contribute to online polls are richer and  better educated on average than the old as a group. But that  brings its own problem for the remain side because another article of faith amongst pollsters is that the better educated and richer you are the more likely you are to vote to remain  in the EU.  Moreover, if the samples are properly selected for both online and  phone polls why should there be such a difference?   Frankly, I have my doubts about  samples being  properly selected because  there are severe practical problems when it comes to  identifying the people who will make a representative sample.  Polling companies also weight their  results which must at the least introduce an element of subjectivity. Then there is also the panel effect where pollsters use panels made up of people they have vetted and  decided are panel material.  Pollsters admit all these difficulties.  You can find the pollster YouGov’s  defence of such practices and how they supposedly overcome their  difficulties here.

The performance of pollsters in recent years has been underwhelming.  It could be that their polling on the referendum is  badly  wrong.  That could be down to the problems detailed in the previous paragraph, but it could also be how human beings respond to different forms of polling.  Pollsters have been caught out by the “silent Tory” phenomenon  whereby voters are unwilling to say they intend to vote Tory much more often than voters for other parties such  as Labour and the LibDems  are unwilling to admit they will be voting for those parties.   It could be that there  are “silent Brexiteer”  voters who  refuse to admit to wanting to vote  to leave the  EU,  while there are  no  or very few corresponding  “silent remain” voters.  This could explain why Internet polls show more Brexit voters than phone or face-to-face  polls.  If a voter is speaking to a pollster, especially if they are in the physical company of the pollster, the person will feel they are being judged by the person asking the questions.  If they think their way of voting is likely to be disapproved of by the questioner  because it is not the “right view”,   the person being questioned may well feel embarrassed if they say they are supporting  a view which goes against what  is promoted every day in the mainstream media as the “right view” .  The fact that the person asking the questions is also likely  to come from the same general class as those who dominate the mainstream media  heightens the likelihood of embarrassment on the part of those being questioned.

The “embarrassment factor”  is a phenomenon  which  can be seen in the polling on contentious subjects  generally. Take  immigration  as an example. People are terrified of being labelled as a racist. At the same time they are quite reasonably very anxious  about the effects of mass immigration.  They  try to square the circle of their real beliefs with their fear of being labelled a racist – and it takes precious little for the cry of racist to go up these days – by seizing  on reasons to object to mass immigration which they believe have been sanctioned as safe by those with power  and influence such  as saying that they are not  against immigrants but they  think that illegal immigrants should be sent home or that the numbers of immigrants should be much reduced because of the pressure on schools, jobs, hospitals and housing . What they dare not say is  that they object to immigration full stop because it changes the nature of their society.

There is an element of the fear of being called a racist  in Brexit because a main, probably the primary issue for  most of those wanting to vote to leave  in the referendum is the control of borders. This means that   saying you are for Brexit raises in the person’s mind a worry that this will be interpreted as racist at worst and “little Englanderish” at best.

There is a secondary reason why  those being interviewed are nervous. The poll they are contributing to will not be just a single question, such  as how do you intend to vote in the European referendum?  There will be  a range of questions which are designed to show things such as propensity to vote or which issues are the most important. Saying immigration control raises the problem of fear of being  classified as  racist, but there will be other issues which are nothing like as contentious on which the person being polled really does not have a coherent   opinion.  They will then feel a fear of being thought ignorant or stupid if they cannot explain lucidly why they feel this or that policy is important.

That leaves the question of why online polls show more for Brexit and phone or face-to-face-polls.  I suggest this. Answering a poll online is impersonal. There is no sense of being immediately judged by another.  The psychology is akin to going into a ballot booth  and voting.  This results in more honesty  about voting to leave.

The referendum  is just the beginning of the  war

Whatever the result of the referendum that will not be the end of matters. There is a gaping  hole in the referendum debate . There has been no commitment  by  any politician to what exactly  they would be asking for from  the EU if the vote is to leave and what they would definitely not accept.   Should that happen we must do our best ensure that those undertaking the negotiations on Britain’s behalf do not surreptitiously  attempt to subvert the vote by stitching Britain back into the EU by negotiating a treaty which obligates Britain to  such things as free movement of people  between Britain and the EU and a  hefty payment each year to the EU (a modern form of Danegeld).   A vote to leave must give Britain back her sovereignty  utterly  and that means Westminster being able to  pass any laws it wants  and that these   will supersede any  existing  obligations to foreign states and institutions, having absolute control of Britain’s borders, being able to protect strategic British  industries and giving preference to British companies where public contracts are offered to  private business.

It there is a  vote to remain  that does not mean the question of  Britain leaving is closed for a generation  any more than the vote of Scottish independence sealed the matter for twenty years or more.  For another referendum  to be ruled out for several decades would be both dangerous and profoundly undemocratic.

Imagine that Britain  having voted to remain the EU decides to push through legislation to bring about the United States of Europe which many of the most senior Eurocrats and pro-EU politicians have made no bones about wanting,  the EU  wants Turkey  to be given membership,  immigration from and via the EU continues to run out of hand  or  the EU adopts regulations for  financial services which gravely  damage the City of London.  Are we to honestly say that no future referendum cannot be held?

Of course on some issues such as the admission of new members  Britain still has a veto  but can we be certain that it would used to stop Turkey joining?  David Cameron has made it all too  clear that he supports  Turkey’s accession and the ongoing immigrant crisis in the Middle East has already wrung the considerable concession of visa-free travel in the Schengen Area from the EU without the Cameron government offering any complaint. Instead all that Cameron does is bleat that Britain still has border controls which allow Britain to refuse entry to and deport those from outside the EU and the European Economic Area.  However, this is the same government which has been reducing Britain’s border force and has deported by force very few people.

You may  think that if new members are admitted to the EU a referendum would automatically be held under the European Union Act of 2011. Not so, viz: .

4 Cases where treaty or Article 48(6) decision attracts a referendum

(4)A treaty or Article 48(6) decision does not fall within this section merely because it involves one or more of the following—

(a)the codification of practice under TEU or TFEU in relation to the previous exercise of an existing competence;

(b)the making of any provision that applies only to member States other than the United Kingdom;

(c)in the case of a treaty, the accession of a new member State.

In practice it would be up to the government of the day to decide whether a referendum should be held.  The  circumstances where the Act requires a referendum are to do with changes to the powers and duties of EU members. The simple  accession of a new member does not fall under those heads. Nor does the Act provide for a referendum where there is no change to existing EU treaties or massive changes are made  without a Treaty being involved, for example,  Britain has had no referendum on Turkey  being given visa free movement within  the Schengen Area. Make sure you vote

Regardless of what the Polls say make sure you vote The bigger the victory for the OUT side the less the Europhiles will be able to do to subvert what happens after the vote.   If the vote is to stay  the closer it is the less traction it gives the -Europhiles .  Either way, the vote on the 23 June is merely the first battle in a war, not the end of the war.

A Muslim Mayor, the Labour Party, anti-Semitism and the future

Robert Henderson

This Spring Labour Party activists from senior party members down to local  councillors  have been outed as people who are either actively anti-Semitic or who associate themselves uncritically with those who are.

The examples of  anti-Semitism range from crude abuse such as that from Vikki  Kirby  the vice-chairman of a local Labour  branch  “What do you know abt Jews? They’ve got big noses and support Spurs lol” to  senior Labour figures such as the newly elected Mayor of London Sadiq Khan who has called  moderate Muslims  Uncle Toms and been very ready to share platforms with Muslims who are openly  anti-Semitic .  Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has been  identified as attending dubious political meetings  and praising Hamas , an organisation which has embraced terror.   He has also been much criticised for acting very slowly and indecisively against Labour members who have been  outed as anti-Semites  or who have been keeping uncomfortable Muslim company.  Moreover, despite Corbyn’s reluctance to accept there is a problem in his party, it is reported that fifty Labour members have been suspended for alleged anti-Semitism.   Finally, The ex-Mayor of London Ken Livingstone has  caused a good deal of politically correct heat by linking Zionists with the Nazis in the 1930s. However, his example genuinely  raises the question  of what is anti-Semitism and  what  is honest criticism of Israel. More on that later.

The most significant event in all this is Sadiq Khan’s  election as London Mayor.  Both before his election and since there has been a huge attempt by those on the genuine Left, including those in  the Labour Party, and Muslims with a public voice to explain away Sadiq Khan’s associations with Muslim extremists.   Most incredible of these have been  the strenuous attempts to portray media and political commentary on  Labour Party members’  undeniable anti-Semitism as a plot to remove Corbyn from the Labour leadership .

But however much Khan and his allies attempt to  call his association with Muslim extremists as simply the consequence of  Khan attending meetings where there is a range of opinion within the speakers, he is damned utterly by his “Uncle Toms” comment.   A Muslim cannot speak of  moderate Muslims  as “Uncle Toms” without at the very least  being willing to use the language of  Muslim extremists in the hope that this will give him “street cred” with Muslim electors . At worst Khan may have been expressing his true feelings and sympathies.  Moreover, it is telling that the  “Uncle Toms” comment was made on Press TV,  an Iranian state English language broadcaster,  where he  probably thought his use of the phrase  would not be picked up by any of the British mainstream media.  (Press TV’s licence to broadcast to the UK was revoked by OfCon in 2014 because the licence holder could not provide assurances that he controlled the station’s output. )

This is all very worrying because  Sadiq Khan now holds a genuinely  powerful  political role  in a major Western capital which contains over a million Muslims.  Indeed, he  is the first Muslim  in a Western country to hold such a position.  Even more worrying is how he came to win such an election.

How has this happened?

To understand what is driving the open  expressions of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party  it is necessary to comprehend the changes which the Labour Party has gone over the past thirty years.  Widespread antisemitism  in the modern  Labour Party is on the face of it astonishing,  truly remarkable behaviour for a party which prides itself on being  rigidly politically correct and  which has many Jews amongst its supporters including some of its biggest donors.  However,   it is  no great surprise to those who know something of the party’s history.

In the past the Labour Party  has been extremely politically incorrect, being staunchly opposed to, amongst other things,  mass immigration and  the employment of women in male dominated jobs. Part of the political incorrectness  within the party was a healthy strain of anti-Semitism. When  Oswald  Mosley  – a man who had served as a minister in a Labour-led government –  left the Labour Party in 1931 to form the New Party (the precursor of the British Union of Fascists) he drew much of his  support from people who were  natural Labour supporters, namely, the white workingclass, people who were trying to find some escape from the miseries of the Great Depression and  joined Moseley after  the Labour Party  failed them.  Most of these people were also comfortable with Mosley’s anti-Semitism .  This is unsurprising because  those who have historically  objected most vociferously  to Jews being in the UK have been  the white working class.  When Jews started to return in numbers to England in the 18th century they sporadically provoked violent  riots, most notably, the violent reaction to an Act to allow the naturalisation of Jews passed in 1753 which was repealed a year later.   As late as 1947 there were anti-Jewish riots in the UK in response to the violence perpetrated by Jews against British servicemen and administrators in Palestine. Of course, anti-Semitism was far from being restricted to the working-class as George Orwell recognised, but it was more openly expressed by the working-class who constituted the large majority of the population in the 1930s.

Labour substitutes minorities for the white working-class

In the 1980s Labour  began  to  forsake its  traditional client base,  the white working class, and replaced it with a motley rainbow coalition  based on race, ethnicity and gender. They did this for three reasons: the  white working class were stubbornly refusing to go along with what became the  politically correct agenda; Thatcher was enticing   the  part of the white working class which was aspirational to vote Tory and  large scale Thatcherite privatisation was seriously undermining the unions which traditionally provided the foot soldiers of the Labour movement.

After  four successive Labour general election losses between 1979 and 1992 the Labour Party found itself in the hands of  Tony Blair following the untimely death of John Smith.  Blair emasculated the  party, ruthlessly removing all its  traditional concerns and values and replacing those  with a devotion to laissez faire economics and  the ideology now called political correctness.  Instead of addressing the wants and needs of the white working class,  Blair produced a party which was devoted to amplifying  and to a large extent creating the grievances  of women, gays and ethnic/racial minorities whilst at the same time  undermining of the economic position of the white working class  through both the continuation of the Thatcherite privatisation agenda that destroyed what was left of trade union power, and the permitting of massive immigration, which reduced opportunity and wages for the poorer members of society.   This was done on the cynical calculation that Labour could attract the votes of  women, gays and ethnic/racial minorities while keeping the votes of the majority  of the  white working class because they had nowhere else to go as the only other party with any realistic hope of forming a government were the Conservatives, a political movement in the grip of Thatcherism   which was  deeply unsympathetic to the white working-class  at worst and indifferent at best.

But not all groups are equal  under the politically correct banner.  Pandering to the  claims of sexism and homophobia  in order to win votes came a distant second to capturing the ethnic/racial minorities. This was not simply because of a hierarchy of importance within the politically correct doctrine, although that played its part. There was also hard headed political calculation. Women and gays do not offer the same sort of group identity  that is found in ethnic minorities,  who  often live in areas where they are  the dominant population group , a situation which allows them to live apart  from  British mainstream society. In such circumstances ethnic voting  becomes not merely possible but  probable.  Such has been  the scale of immigration over the past sixty years that  in  quite a few British constituencies capturing the ethnic minority vote more or less guarantees the election of a candidate.  This tendency is especially strong in London.  There is also growing evidence that postal voting is resulting in large scale fraud  where there is a large population from the Indian subcontinent.

The largest of the minority ethnic groups is that of Muslims who now total three  million plus in Britain and have a strong tendency to vote  en bloc according to what their imams and political leaders  tell them to vote. Consequently, it is no surprise that the Labour Party is  becoming ever more  anti-Semitic and tolerant of anti-Semitism because they want to attract Muslim voters.

Why did Zak Goldsmith lose?

There were serious weaknesses in the campaign run by Goldsmith.  The  Tory leadership barely campaigned for him and Goldsmith, a multimillionaire who inherited his wealth,  was an unappetising candidate for  London  Mayor in  a city which has been  a Labour stronghold for much of the past century.  The London demographics were also unpromising  for there  are over a million Muslims in London  plus  another  million or more of ethnic minorities/immigrants entitled to vote.

But Goldsmith’s failure  is not   being attributed  to any of those possible causes by many if any of  those with a public voice.  Instead,  politicians (including Tory MPs)  and much of the mainstream media attribute it to his tactic of pointing out  Sadiq Khan’s propensity to associate with Muslims who  might reasonably be called extremists and  Khan’s description of moderate Muslims as  Uncle Toms. This it is claimed energised   Muslims  and possibly  white liberals and members of other ethnic minorities to get out and vote for Khan.  The problem with that claim is that only 45% of voters  bothered to vote . Nonetheless, if voters of all stripes were reluctant to vote it is possible that enough people were energised by the Goldsmith attacks to vote Khan to make the difference. In the end Khan took 56.8% of the first and second preference votes ( 1,310,143 votes) and Goldsmith 43.2% (994,614 votes).

It is also  true the Goldsmith campaign  made the crass mistake of trying to enlist  the support of other non-Muslim minorities by playing on what his team fondly imagined were the fears of groups such as Indians and Tamils. Here are a couple of  examples:

‘“The British Indian community makes an extraordinary contribution to London and to Britain. Closer ties between the UK and India have been a priority for me as prime minister. I was pleased to join Zac Goldsmith in welcoming Prime Minister Modi to the UK last year at Wembley Stadium.” Then, under the heading The Risk Of A Corbyn-Khan experiment, Cameron described the policies of “Jeremy Corbyn’s candidate Sadiq Khan” as “dangerous”. If Khan won, Cameron said, “Londoners will become lab rats in a giant political experiment”.’

And

“Under the heading The Tamil Community Has Contributed Massively To London, Goldsmith wrote: “I recognise that far too often Tamil households are targeted for burglary due to families owning gold and valuable family heirlooms.” Under the heading Sadiq Khan Will Put London’s Future And Your Community At Risk, he wrote: “As a government minister, Sadiq Khan did not use his position to speak about Sri Lanka or the concerns of the Tamil community in parliament. His party are beginning to adopt policies that will mean higher taxes on your family and your family’s heirlooms and belongings. We cannot let him experiment with these radical policies.”’

None of this helped Goldsmith but it is difficult to see them having a decisive effect  simply because of the low turnout. The real answer is demographics combined with political correctness which  prevented Goldsmith from becoming Mayor.

The demographics are the major problem. The proportion of the  population of London which describes itself as white British is well below 50%. The 2011 census has the figure at 45% but it will be significantly lower now because of  white flight from London, the continued influx of foreigners both black and white and  the high birth-rate  of the immigrants. It is quite possible that the white British population is now   around 40%.

The 2011 census also had approximately  1.2 million who describe themselves as white but not British.  Thus the  total white population of London in  2011 was approximately 4.9 million and the non-white approximately 3.3 million.  I doubt whether five years of immigration and higher non-white reproduction has resulted in whites being in the minority. However, if things continue as they are with white flight from London, ever growing immigration and  high non-white birth rates, it  will not take that long, perhaps ten years , to find whites a minority in London. As for Muslims,  by 2011 they made up 12.4% of London’ population  with an increase of  35% (405,000)  between 2001 and 2011. As the Muslim proportion of the London  population grows this will attract more and more Muslims to the city. It is unlikely that Muslims will be in the majority  within the next twenty years but in 2036 they could well be the largest ethnic group in the city.

As for  the  whites who do not identify themselves as British, they   are likely to either not vote or to vote for the Labour candidate because Labour are ostensibly more immigrant friendly than the Tories.   As those over 18 who are qualified to vote for the Mayor include  “An Irish citizen, or a Commonwealth citizen, who has leave to remain in the UK or who does not require leave to remain in the UK, or a citizen of another European Union country”  this means  that the majority of non-British whites will be qualified to vote and  thus their potential to influence  the election of  the Mayor is substantial.

Last,  there is the question of political correctness.  At no point did Goldsmith or anyone else in his campaign team or  the wider Tory Party  wholeheartedly  attack Khan by straightforwardly   asking   white voters do you want a Muslim  who has by his own words and actions shown sympathy with Muslim extremists to be Mayor?   Instead Goldsmith’s  attacks on Khan  Khan were merged into a general complaint about the Labour Party or the economic policies Khan was likely to pursue.  Goldsmith was desperately trying to remain within a politically correct envelope. To appeal to the white British electorate or  even the white electorate overall was out of the question for  a  mainstream politician in Britain’s presently politically correct circumstances.  This failure to address what Khan represented both now and as a harbinger of the not too distant future was  doubly important because whites in Britain have been bombarded  with politically correct multicultural propaganda  for several generations. This has produced a state of mind whereby  the white population  has tended to come to think that acting against the politically correct view is on race and immigration is not merely dangerous because the expressions of such opinions can lose the person their job or in some cases end up on a criminal charge , but in some ill-defined way is  actually wrong. The white electorate needed Goldsmith to give them permission to go against the constraints of   political correctness.

Conversely, Khan and the Labour Party  side of the argument were  not constrained.   Instead they used political correctness to distract from Khan’s behaviour with regard to extremist and  moderate Muslims. In the Alice in Wonderland world which is that of the politically correct it is Goldsmith who is being called everything up  to and including a racist while Khan incredibly plays the  injured party.

Ken Livingstone, the Nazis   and the  Zionists

Back to Ken  Livingstone.  His treatment after bringing the collaboration between the Nazis and Zionist Jews in the 1930s into the Labour anti-Semitism story  emphasises the hysterical refusal of  the politically correct and self-interested minorities  to take on board facts which conflict with their interpretation of the world.  They routinely do not offer argument or facts merely abuse, very often of the crudest type.

Those unthinkingly screaming anti-Semite, Nazi  and racist at Livingstone on account of his labelling of the Nazis before WW2 as Zionists hand in glove with those Jews who wanted to establish a Jewish state in Israel, are on very treacherous factual ground.   it would be stretching matters  considerably to say the Nazis were Zionists. However, odd bedfellows as the Jewish  Zionists (there have always been Jews who opposed Zionism)  and the Nazis were,  even the oddest of bedfellows may sometimes sleep comfortably together when they have  a  serious shared aim. Here that shared aim was simple: Hitler wanted the Jews out of Germany and the Zionists wanted Jews rushed into  what was then the British Protectorate of Palestine.   To this end  a company (HAAVARA) was set up  in 1933 with the agreement of the Nazis  to enable  the transfer of Jewish property from Nazi Germany to Palestine and hence expedite the immigration of German Jews to Palestine. Although controversial amongst Jews  the Zionist Congress in Lucerne (1935)  supported the plan. Some 60,000 German Jews migrated to  Palestine between 1933–1939 as a result of this Nazi/Jewish collaboration .

This was not the only other Nazi plan to remove  Jews from  Europe. In 1938 a scheme  to establish a Jewish settlement on Madagascar (then under French rule) was mooted. The  Madagascar Plan was never implemented  but survived  until February 1942 as a  project.   By 1942 the Final Solution   had moved from the mass migration of Jews, forced or voluntary,  who were to be settled outside of Europe,  to the  extermination of the Jews.

The problem with the response to Livingstone is that although he over-egged  the extent  of the engagement  between Nazis and Zionists, he was clearly working from a firm historical basis when he claimed the Nazis and Zionists had cooperated in the 1930s.  Had Livingstone been attacked on the grounds that he misinterpreted or misrepresented the motivation for the strange alliance, which he did,  that would have been reasonable. The problem is that  those who attacked Livingstone have simply  denied, directly or by their refusal to address the historical evidence,  that there had been any collaboration between Nazis and Zionists.  Moreover, the  denials of what Livingstone has claimed have been hysterical in tone more often than not. As the evidence of Nazi/Zionist cooperation in the 1930s is clear, this makes the attacks  on Livingstone seem absurd to anyone who bothers to look at the bare facts. The refusal to engage with Livingstone on the facts also distracts from the  larger questions of  the undoubted  and  often  surprisingly crude examples of antisemitism within the Labour Party and  the question of what criticism of Israel is reasonable and what is disguised anti-Semitism.

Where does this leave  Britain?

We have reached the stage whereby  our political elite  is so cowardly or so detached from reality by political correctness  that a  Muslim politician ensconced within  a major British political party cannot be criticised  by a non-Muslim for posing a potential danger , no matter  that the politician calls moderate Muslims Uncle Toms  and  provides evidence that he is content to associate with Muslims who make no bones about hating Britain and the West in general.

This election also showed that a white British mainstream candidate will not make a full-hearted appeal to the white British population for fear of being called a racist.  Instead such a candidate  is likely to make clumsy appeals to  various minorities.

The people being left out of this debate  are the native British. London is the shape of demographic things to come not only for itself but other areas of Britain with large  immigrant populations. Already those describing themselves as white British are a minority in the city. Within twenty years  they may not even be the largest minority. This  is likely to happen because the political elite in Britain have actively connived at mass immigration on and off since the late 1940s and are unlikely to change their habits.

Andrew Neather a Blair speechwriter, wrote in an Evening Standard article in 2009 that  the great increase of immigrants under Blair seemed to be  a deliberate policy to make Britain  more diverse. He wrote of a Downing Street  paper published finalised in 2001:

“…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.”

Sadly,  there is no one in Britain with  a public voice to call what is happening by its true name, treason. Until there is the situation will get steadily worse with the major British parties becoming more and more ready to compromise with the demands of larger and larger ethnic minorities.

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.