Film Review – They Shall not Grow Old

Director: Peter Jackson

Running time: 99 minutes

Robert Henderson

This is literally a unique film in terms of  its making. Peter Jackson has taken contemporary footage from the First World  War (the Great War)  and  coloured  the original black and white film in the most detailed and lifelike  fashion  and used special software  to bring the film to a speed which makes the movement  entirely lifelike. (Amongst the many arresting sights  in the film are the  early tanks which were  surprisingly efficient at riding over the very difficult rough ground created by the vast trench systems which  all too easily dissolved into seas of mud. )

Jackson used lip readers to discover what people were saying and then voiced their words using the most probable accents the speakers would have been using based on their regiments (British regiments have a strong tradition of recruiting from particular areas, and what were known as Pal’s Battalions” ).

Finally, he added sound effects for  such things as guns, shell and bomb blasts and even a yellow green mist to replicate the use of chlorine gas.  In short, the attention to detail is astonishing.

They shall not grow old opens with film untouched by sound, colour or speed alteration.  When the remastered and altered film arrives it is like watching a magician perform a particularly spectacular trick.  The original jerky, silent and drab film of the period  suddenly becomes as vivid and real as any modern  example of cinematography.

The film starts   by showing the  Britain of the immediate days after war was declared is shown preparing for  the battle to come as recruits are inducted and trained, all very chipper as they doubtless waited for “a crack at the Hun”.

There were also extraneous surprising  sights, for example the very   large number of motor vehicles in places such as London  despite the motor car being very expensive and barely out of its childhood.

The film concentrates on the war on the Western Front  (the primary  theatre of war in WW1) and deals with the infantry soldier, artillery and tanks.  There is nothing about the war in the air or at  sea, but that does not matter because the story Jackson is telling is about the soldier on the ground, especially the “poor, bloody infantry”.

Jackson decided not to use a single narrator. Instead, when comment and explanation  is needed he allows recordings of the words of men who served in the war drawn from the vast library of recordings held by the Imperial War museum. to provide it.

The voices of those  used in the opening passage are surprising ones, men who even after they had experienced the horrors of the trenches still spoke, always   matter of factly,  about doing their duty, of doing their job. Some went further and admitted that the war was the happiest time of their lives.  This is reflected in  the faces of the men who  are more  often than not smiling and joking  is  rife. There was little  if anything by way of combatants lamenting the futility of it all.

These were men of a stamp whom I can remember from my childhood (I was born in 1947) because there were plenty of men who had  served in the Great War still alive and kicking.  They rarely complained and would take in their stride setbacks which would floor many today.  Those from a  later generation who served in WW2 were much the same.  This difference in mentality compared with now is unsurprising because these were ordinary men who had stormed the beaches on D Day, served on the Russian convoys  (where,   after being torpedoed,  being in the water  for a few minutes signalled death from the cold)  or flown  with Bomber Command where the death rate for aircrew was 50%.   Such things put life into perspective and made trivial many of the daily annoyances of living,

All this  goes very strongly against the general idea of the Great War as being an unmitigated horror for those who served.

Even when talking about their feelings on days when they were scheduled to go over the top  the tone was down to earth. The soldiers were  more afraid of being severely injured than of being killed. Like a batsman waiting to go in  to bat the  nerves they felt evaporated once they were out of the trenches and marching towards the enemy.

But this  is not a film which sentimentalises war. It is unsparing in showing the physically disgusting aspects of life in the trenches, everything from the shattered and  decaying bodies of the dead  (both British and German) and examples of  gangrenous “trench feet”  to the oceans of mud and the general  privations  that war brings.

This is a very rare film  in that it offers no obvious grounds for criticism. It does what it says  on the tin without forced sentimentality or undue  reverence. It has the attributes of a first class documentary which in a strange way it  is , an act of reporting a hundred years after the event.

One last thought. I saw the film in a cinema. If you can catch it on the big screen rather than  your television or computer screen do so because it is much more impressive .

Film review of Churchill

Cast

Brian Cox as Winston Churchill

Miranda Richardson as Clementine Churchill

John Slattery as Dwight D. Eisenhower

James Purefoy as King George VI

Julian Wadham as General  Bernard Montgomery

Danny Webb as  Field Marshall   Alan Brooke

Jonathan Aris as Air Chief Marshall  Trafford Leigh-Mallory

George Anton  Admiral Sir  Bertram Ramsay

Steven Cree as Group Captain James Stagg , a Royal Air Force meteorologist

Angela Costello as Kay Summersby chauffeur and later as personal secretary to Dwight D. Eisenhower

Richard Durden as Jan Smuts   South African general  turned politician

Ella Purnell as Helen Garrett (Churchill’s secretary)

Director:  Jonathan Teplitzky

Script by Alex von Tunzelmann

This was a disappointing film in terms of its general theatrical quality which veers towards the melodramatic ,   but even more because it is a travesty of Churchill’s character. That fine actor Brian Cox might have been made for the role of Churchill and with a script which reflected Churchill’s  personality , opinions  and behaviour   accurately I have no doubt that he  would have produced a great depiction of  the man. But here he  is  bound by a script which  makes  Churchill seem like a tempestuous child, and child who more often than not could be  side-lined  and insulted to his face despite being Prime Minister  in the midst of a most terrible and threatening  war.  It is difficult to think of any scene involving  characters with power and influence  which shows him as s being the dominant character, for example, he does not chair the meetings with Eisenhower and the other military men. In real life he did.

The film is set in the four days before D-Day and the execution of t   Operation Overlord, the invasion of  Normandy.    Churchill  is portrayed as being pathologically anxious that the  invasion should not be another  bloodbath like Gallipoli in the Great War, a failure for which Churchill had been widely  held wholly or largely responsible. As a consequence the film  has him interminably prevaricating over the   D-Day landings  and after the decision is made to  invade Churchill is shown   praying  for unfavourable weather  to stop the operation: “Please, please, please let it pour tomorrow. Let the heavens open and a deluge burst forth such as has never been seen in the English Channel. Let the sea churn into peaks and troughs and tidal waves!”

That passage encapsulates the tone of the film.  Churchill is not seen as being either in command or as  a figure of authority but as a man frightened for his reputation and perhaps his soul.   So strong a part of the film was the  obsession with the failure at Gallipoli I could not help wondering if this was in some part   a consequence of having an Australian director Jonathan Teplitzky.  Australians are frequently more than a little angry about Gallipoli even  today and blame the British for the loss of Australian lives there. Film scripts are not sacrosanct and  It would be interesting to know if the subject of Gallipoli loomed  as large in the initial script as  it did in the film.

The historian Andrew Roberts has unreservedly  slated the film for its many inaccuracies relating to Churchill’s state of mind leading up to the Normandy landings, viz: “The only problem with the movie–written by the historian Alex von Tunzelmann–is that it gets absolutely everything wrong. Never in the course of movie-making have so many specious errors been made in so long a film by so few writers.” Roberts attacks the film on the grounds that it wrongly shows Churchill as dithering over D-Day, being seriously at odds with his wife, at war with the generals and being bullying to his staff.

To  the lack of historical accuracy  about events  and Churchill’s state of mind can  be added  the portrayal of  his physical state .  Churchill in real life was far from the physically lumbering man obese to the point  almost of physical handicap that was depicted in the film.  He played polo into his fifties and rode to hounds into his seventies  (in 1944 he was seventy) . This physical misrepresentation   fed into the  picture the film painted of Churchill being a man who by that stage of the war at least was a spent force at best and a positive hindrance to the successful prosecution of the war.

The depiction of Churchill’s relationship with the military is also improbable.   He is shown displaying a chronic fault of  Hitler, namely, playing at being a military mastermind  by suggesting  different strategies  such as decoy operations to mislead the Germans, tactics which fed into the film’s  Gallipoli complex.   There are also some startling and incongruous in the circumstances language involving the military with  Montgomery  calling Churchill a ‘bastard’ to his face and casting aspersions on his commitment  to the Normandy landings  by accusing Churchill of  ‘doubt, dithering and treachery’. The PM  later  describes  Montgomery (not in Montgomery’s presence)  as a ‘Puffed-up little s**t.’  It all seems very unlikely, not least because it implies that  the military not  the politicians were the real government of the UK at that time.

In fact the film plays to that idea for there is a  strange  absence of other British  politicians in the film and or   indeed of any  civilians in position of authority and influence.  For example,    Churchill’s leading scientific advisor Frederick Lindemann   had a very close relationship with him and  the two met often  during the war.. It is a little odd that he did not appear at all because apart from his value as a scientific advisor Llindemann  had a real friendship with Churchill and at a time of great stress for Churchill it is probable that he ill would have welcomed having  Lindemann around.

Then there is Churchill’s relationship with his wife Clemmie.  She is  shown as  being very ready to criticise Churchill either directly through confrontation as when she scolds  him for his drinking and indirectly by  her general  behaviour towards him which includes her apologising for Churchill’s behaviour towards his staff .  She is also shown slapping him at one point for which there is no evidence.   There is also rather too much angst from  Clemmie  about how Churchill had neglected her and a feeling that somehow her life has been unfulfilling.  Churchill is shown playing up to this, at one point  saying ‘I would understand if you left me. I’d leave me if I could.’  Real?

Even if there had been any substance to this behaviour would Churchill’s wife  have been  raising it just before D-Day?  However, again the evidence for such behaviour  is lacking.  This element of  the filmic Clemmie’s   behaviour smells  suspiciously like an inappropriate and anachronistic  feminist implant designed to show that men behaved “badly”, that is, displayed politically incorrect behaviour, in 1944 and women spiritedly rebelled against such  treatment.   The fact that the scriptwriter Alex von Tunzelmann is female may have something to do with this , a suspicion strengthened by  her  being a Guardian columnist. It would be very interesting to see Tunzelmann justifying her script in terms of historical accuracy.

Is the film worth seeing?  Probably not for  as a pure piece of drama it fails. The action flits from scene to scene  in rather stilted  fashion which robs the film of cohesion and leaves the impression  that each scene is being ticked off as having covered a particular issue as a stamp collector might  congratulate themselves on having acquired a particular stamp to add to a set.  Nor apart from Churchill and just about  his wife is there much character development for the film has a substantial number of historically  important  characters but little time is  allotted to each.  These  supporting characters are,   as one can more or less take for granted in a film manned by British actors,  adroitly executed  in as far as their very limited roles  allow. Within the  confines of this  hindrance  of Julian Wadham’s  Montgomery stood out.

That should be enough  to say don’t waste your money. However Dunkirk is one of those films which has an importance  beyond its qualities as a film. Its effect is to turn Churchill from a war hero into an irresolute,  fearful and   incompetent. In fact the misrepresentation of  Churchill  is  so complete that it qualifies as character assassination . The danger is that it will colour the public’s view of the man.   Consequently, see it  so that you can afterwards refute its view of Churchill.    In short, it should be seen  for its faults not its virtues .

 

 

Film review of Dunkirk

Dunkirk

Cast

Fionn Whitehead as Tommy, a British Army private

Mark Rylance as Mr Dawson, a mariner and Peter’s father

Tom Glynn-Carney as Peter, Mr Dawson’s son

Jack Lowden as Pilot Officer Collins, a Royal Air Force Spitfire pilot

Harry Styles as Alex, a private in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders

Aneurin Barnard as “Gibson”, a French soldier masquerading as a British Army private

James D’Arcy as Colonel Winnant

Barry Keoghan as George, a young man who helps to crew Dawson’s boat.

Kenneth Branagh as Commander Bolton the pier-master during the evacuation

Cillian Murphy as frightened soldier

Tom Hardy as Farrier, a Royal Air Force Spitfire pilot

Michael Caine appears in a spoken cameo role as Fortis Leader

Director Christopher Nolan

The year is 1940. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) has been sent to  Europe to help repel  the Germans. This fails and the BEF eventually make their way to Dunkirk, a French port  six miles from the Belgian border. Here they wait, more in hope than expectation, to be  evacuated back to Britain. But against the odds  between  27 May  and  4 June over 300 thousand, British,  colonial and French troops were evacuated, most by Royal Navy  (RN) ships but some by civilian boats, many  very small,  crewed  by  a mixture of RN personnel and civilians. (Small boats were useful  because they could get near enough to shore  for soldiers to wade out to them.  Larger boats had to either wait offshore to have soldiers ferried to them or they used a form of jetty called a mole to take people on board. )

The Germans did not press forward into Dunkirk with their army as might have been expected . Instead they attacked using  planes and submarines. Why they took this course is unclear but it was sanctioned by Hitler.  It may have been Goering persuading Hitler to allow the Luftwaffe to  gain the kudos of finishing off  the British forces.  it might have been Hitler believing  that once the British forces were out of continental Europe they would never come back. It could have been caution on the part of Hitler and his generals. Whatever the reason during the week the evacuation lasted the troops on Dunkirk beach  were  subject to bombing   and British vessels  engaged in the evacuation  were bombed and torpedoed. That is the bare bones of Dunkirk.

The brutal reality of  war has often  not been represented honestly or convincingly in films, but  the graphic opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan arguably changed that and most war films since have been much more unsparing of the audience’s squeamishness.   Indeed, modern film makers have taken to heart the American civil war general  William Sherman’s remark   “War is hell” and created Hell on the screen.   Christopher  Nolan does so here.   Consequently, the film scores very well  when it comes to the military action, giving  a graphic depiction of the multiplicity of ways of dying in action and the sheer violence and randomness  of the killing and wounding. The effect is  to  give a nihilistic quality to many of  the scenes. Whether someone lives or dies has  no particular purpose.

The aerial battles between three Spitfires providing cover to the  men on the beach and the ships taking them off   and their fights  with German fighters and bombers  are particularly compelling , perhaps because such warfare  has the shape  of single combat and the manoeuvres of planes flying fast but not at supersonic speed while  attacking with machine guns  rather than missiles  has an intimacy that the blind destruction of men on the ground absolutely lacks. The Spitfire pilot had to get close to his target and fire his guns in sustained bursts. .

All of this makes for a complicated story to tell. To address this fact Nolan has decided on an impressionistic  style rather than a straightforward chronological narrative. He does this by dividing  the film into three separate sections entitled   land, sea and air.

The  quick  flitting from one piece of action to another the film does not give great  opportunity for character development  but   Mark Rylance as Mr Dawson, the  civilian  skipper of a small boat, knits together the progress of the sea  story and as a representative of the “small ships”.

James D’Arcy as Colonel Winnant and Kenneth Branagh as Commander Bolton the pier-master during the evacuation represent  the  experience of senior officers  while Fionn Whitehead as Tommy and  Harry Styles as Alex  give a backbone  to the experience of the private soldier.

Spitfire pilots  Jack Lowden as Pilot Officer Collins  and Tom Hardy as Farrier do the same for the air action.

Rylance  oozed  calmness under fire and  brings what he always does to the screen,  an intensely sympathetic personality  while Hardy is coolness personified, with a courage which is anything but showy.  He is a man who is brave whilst doing what he does out of a sense of duty.

The one character that I found unconvincing  was  that  of Cillian Murphy,   who plays a frightened soldier  whose nerve has gone after having been in a ship which was torpedoed.   The Dawsons  pick him up on the  way to France and the soldier in a state of panic tries without success to get Dawson to turn about and head for England.  Somehow he never managed to make his mental anguish seem anything other than histrionic.

The film  has its historical  inaccuracies and omissions. Next to nothing is made of the French army’s resistance which hindered the German advance on Dunkirk and the considerable damage that occurred in Dunkirk is absent.  But neither is the British rear-guard action to allow most of the BEF to reach Dunkirk and be rescued . The   idea of the  film is to show the British experience at Dunkirk and in  the English Channel r ather than try to give  the complete picture of the action around and about Dunkirk and indeed within  Britain itself ,  where the families  of  both the stranded BEF men and of those who  had sailed their small boat  like the fictitious Mr Dawson  might have been included in the story.

Whether  the viewer finds  the limited scope of the film  satisfying or not it,  is nonetheless a legitimate dramatic  device to concentrate on the direct experience of those on the beach and the British forces by  sea and air  which facilitated the remarkable evacuation of some 190,000 British soldiers and  120,000  French ones. If the film had been expanded to take in the French and German warfare  relating to Dunkirk or the behaviour of the relatives and friends of the servicemen trapped in Dunkirk it would have been an entirely different film .

Dunkirk  has its limitation as a coherent  drama but taken as a whole it is an invigorating and exciting production. It gives a vivid idea of the immediacy  and multiplicity of danger which war brings and the sheer helplessness of humans caught in its coils. . That is reason enough to see it.   But there is also another reason .  The World Wars left their mark long after they were over  and not just in terms of the dead and wounded.  It left its mark on the survivors.  I  was born in 1947. The war loomed very large in my childhood and  even my early adult years. One regularly  met ordinary people who had done extraordinary things: landing on the beaches on D Day; serving  on the convoys to Russia;  flying  Spitfires and Hurricanes in the  Battle of Britain or  flying sortie after sortie with Bomber Command. The result  was a toughness in people generally but particularly in those who had seen  action, which is lacking today. It is a film which will speak especially to people who remember what the war was like and its aftermath.

 

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.

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.

 

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.

Defend your national territory or lose it

Robert Henderson

The present attempts of migrants from around the Mediterranean and  beyond to effectively invade Europe have brought the long simmering immigration threat to a head.  First World   politicians can no longer pretend it is under any sort of control. The question those in the First World have to answer is  gruesomely simple: are they willing  to defend the their own territory as they  would if faced with an armed invader  and by doing so preserve their way of life and safety , or will they allow a fatal sentimentality  to paralyse the entirely natural wish to stop invaders until the native populations of the First World are at best a tolerated minority in their own ancestral lands and at worst the subject of acts of genocide.

The Prime Minister of Hungary Victor Orlan  has had the courage to point out  something which is obvious but anathema to the politically correct elites of Europe, namely, that  immigration on the current scale will result in Europeans becoming a minority in  their own continent with a consequent loss of European values.  Anyone who thinks that Europe (and the rest of the First World) is not in danger should think on these facts:

• The population of the world is approximately 7 billion. At the most generous estimate only one billion live in the First World.
• The population of the world is estimated to grow by another two billion by 2050 with all the growth being in the Third World.
• The white population of the world is projected to be in a minority in Europe and North America by 2050.
• The First World already has large minorities of those from racial and ethnic groups whose antecedents are in the Third World and who have had their sense of victimhood at the hands of whites  fed assiduously by white liberals for over 50 years. Once established in a First World  country they agitate for the right to bri9ng relatives over and to relax immigration control generally. A  recent report by the think tank Policy Exchange estimates that one third of the UK population with be from an ethnic minority by 2050.
• Political power in most of the First World is in the hands of politicians who are quislings in the service of internationalism   in its modern guise of globalism.
• Those working in the mass media of the First World share the ideology of First World politicians with bells on, missing no chance to propagandise in favour of mass immigration.
• The First World is funding its  own destruction by feeding the Third World with huge amounts of Aid . This promotes war throughout the Third World (providing a driver for Third World  immigrants to the First World) and, most importantly, increases the  populations of the Third World which rapidly outstrip the  economic carrying capacity of their societies.

At present the mainstream media in countries such as Britain and the  USA are voraciously feeding the public what amounts to unashamed propaganda  to persuade them to accept not merely huge numbers of Third World immigrants now,  but an ongoing and ever increasing stream in the not too distant future as the invading hordes gather around the Mediterranean waiting for their chance to entered the promised land of the rich European states of the north.

It is easy to be swayed by photos of  a  young child who has died or   boatloads crammed to the gunnels with miserable looking people  to the point where the resolution to defend your native territory is overridden, but look at the aggression and sense of entitlement the invaders, for  that is what they are, as they battle to leave Hungary. They are in the position of supplicants but far from begging for help they demand as a right that they be let into the richer countries of Europe.

There are very few if any places outside of Europe and  the Anglosphere countries of the United Kingdom,  North America, Australia and New Zealand  which have any serious history of freedom and the rule of law and even amongst that group only the Anglosphere has  enjoyed  both an uninterrupted political system of representative government and been free of civil war for a century or more.  These are countries which have the very rare and valuable attribute of having worked out a social and political system which creates peace and tolerance. That seriously at risk because of mass immigration. Does anyone believe  for example, a that Britain in which there was a Muslim majority would remain a Parliamentary democracy or have any regard for free expression?

Those amongst the native populations of the  First World who propagandise in favour of mass immigration do so in the belief that they will be untouched by the immigration because they live in affluent areas where immigrants cannot generally settle. Not for these people state schools which “boast” that “there are 100 languages here”; not for these people a need for increasingly scarce affordable (social)  housing  in places such as London; not for these people having to use grossly over subscribed medical services in their area.  These people think they are safe  from the effects of mass immigration,  but if it continues their children and grandchildren will not be so lucky. There needs to be a penalty for those who promote and facilitate mass immigration, for example,  forcing them to take immigrants  into their homes and be responsible for their upkeep .

Mass immigration  is conquest not by armed force but by those who are come equipped only with their victimhood and misery and, most potently, the  mentality of the elites in the First World who subscribe to the idea of white guilt and the white populations of the First World who have been browbeaten  into believing that they cannot have any world other than a globalist world which includes huge movements of peoples. We are seeing the scenario described by Jean Raspail begin to play out.

Homo sapiens is the social animal par excellence. All social animals need boundaries to their group because trust has to exist between the members of the group. Human beings can tolerate very large numbers in their group, but there is a limit. To be a member of a functioning human group,  whether that be tribe,  clan or nation,  the members or the group must share sufficient distinguishing behaviours and  attributes to create the necessary trust. Putting huge numbers of people with very disparate background together cannot create that trust. Anyone who doubts that should try to find any society where territory is shared by different racial or ethnic groups  that does not have inter-group discord,. They will not find one in history or the present.

If you wish to save your country ignore the  misery now being waved in your face and concentrate not on the immediate present but the future.  Say no to further mass immigration by voting to leave the EU because while Britain is in it nothing can be done to stop massive numbers of immigrants continuing to come to Britain.  Leaving the EU will  remove from our political elite any excuse for not stopping the causal destruction of our country.

Islam is simply incompatible with Western society

Robert Henderson

Seventeen people have  been murdered in the two terrorist attacks in Paris  (between  7-9^th January 2015). Ten were journalists, including some of France’s leading cartoonists,   working for the  French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. To them can be added two policemen, one policewomen and four  members of the general  public who happened to be unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  The attacks were made on the Charlie Hebdo offices and  the  Jewish supermarket Hyper Cacher. The policewoman was shot in a separate incident.

The terrorist acts  were coordinated to produce maximum effect. That on  Charlie Hebdo was by the  brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi , who were of Algerian ancestry.  A third  brother Mourad Hamyd aged 18  was at school at the time of the Charlie Hebdo attack and has spoken to but not been detained by the police. The attack on a Jewish supermarket  was undertaken by a Mailian  Amedy Coulibaly.  He also killed a policewoman before his attack on the Jewish supermarket.  Coulibaly’s wife, Hayat Boumeddiene, who is of Algerian ancestry,  is thought to be another Muslim fanatic with homicidal tendencies. She is believed to have fled to Syria after  the shooting of the policewoman.

Those who died  at the Charlie Hebdo office were slaughtered  by men  shouting Allahu Akbar (God is great), “We have avenged the prophet!”  [for cartoons of making fun of Mohammed published by Charlie Hebdo) and just to make sure the message got across “Tell the media that this is al-Qaeda in Yemen” .   Cherif Koachi also said in a telephone  interview with a magazine  after the killings that the plot was financed by  al Q aeda The Jewish supermarket killer  introduced himself to frightened hostages  with the words ‘I am Amedy Coulibaly, Malian and Muslim. I belong to the Islamic State’.  All three killers  either expressed a wish for martyrdom or  behaved in a way in which was guaranteed to get  them killed.   All three were shot and killed by French security forces.

Unless  you are a particularly stupid and self-deluding  liberal  and have either persuaded yourself  that  this was a black op and the killers were agents of the wicked old West or have fallen back on that old liberal favourite  that the killers  are not true  Muslims  – congratulations to the Telegraph’s Tim Stanley for being so quick off the mark with that piece of shrieking inanity   –  you will think these are Muslim terrorists.  (The next time you encounter someone spinning the “not true Muslims” line ask them whether  the Crusaders of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were Christians).

Sadly there are many liberals who have not learnt the lesson dealt out by these atrocities. It is true that there has been almost complete condemnation of the killings by the liberal elites around the Western world, but one wonders how unqualified and sincere their regret and anger is.  Apart from the  liberal apologist  mantras  “not true Muslims”, “Just a tiny minority of Muslims” and “Islam is the religion of peace”   being  much in evidence, there has  been a disagreeable media eagerness to portray the killers as sophisticated military beasts. Here is a prime  example from the Telegraph:

“They wear army-style boots and have a military appearance and manner. One of the men wears a sand-coloured ammunition vest apparently stuffed with spare magazines. Some reports suggest that an attacker was also carrying a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

“The men attacked the magazine’s headquarters with clinical precision, killing their victims and then shooting two police officers in the street outside.

“Amateur footage shows them using classic infantry tactics. They move along the street outside the office working as a pair: one advances while the other gives cover.

“Instead of spraying automatic gunfire, they fire two aimed shots at each target – a pattern known as “double-tap” firing – thereby conserving their ammunition.”

Shades of white liberals in the 1960s drooling over the Black Panthers in the USA  .

The truth is that the attackers did not behave like highly trained soldiers, and some of the reporting was simply wrong, for example, after the slaughter the killers,  as was widely reported , did not walk calmly back to the stolen  car  they were using but ran.  When they abandoned the car one of the killers left his identity card behind. After the murders at Charlie Hebdo the  two killers drove around  like headless chickens hijacking cars and holding up petrol stations to obtain food and water.  If they had really been cold, calculating beasts they would either have stayed where they were after the Charlie Hebdo killings and died in a firefight with the French police or arranged matters so that they had a hiding  place  to go to and  would  carried things like a little  food and water with them.  The widespread media  depiction of them as quasi-military figures glamourized and sanitised what they were.

The British political mainstream response

But it would be wrong to say nothing changed in Britain after the attacks. The Ukip leader Nigel Farage broke new ground for a mainstream British politician in modern Britain  by speaking of  a fifth column of people who hate us within Britain.

“There is a very strong argument that says that what happened in Paris is a result – and we’ve seen it in London too – is a result I’m afraid of now having a fifth column living within these countries.

“We’ve got people living in these countries, holding our passports, who hate us.

“Luckily their numbers are very, very small but it does make one question the whole really gross attempt at encouraged division within society that we have had in the past few decades in the name of multiculturalism.”

This was predictably  condemned by David Cameron, a  man who incredibly  still believes Turkey within the EU would be of great benefit to all concerned,  despite the anger and dismay in Britain about mass immigration generally making the prospect  of 70 million Turkish Muslims having a right to move freely within the EU certain to be  utterly dismaying to most native Britons. Interestingly, a would-be successor to Cameron as Tory leader, Liam Fox,  edged a long way towards reality in an article for the  Sunday Telegraph:

“All those who do not share their fundamentalist views are sworn enemies, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, Arab or non-Arab. It is the first lesson that we must understand – they hate us all because of who we are, our views, our values and our history. Western liberal apologists who tell us that the violence being directed at us is all of our own making not only fail to understand reality, but put us at increased risk.

“We must understand that there are fanatics who cannot be reconciled to our values and who will attempt to destroy us by any means possible. They are at war with us. They do not lack the intent to kill us, merely the means to do so, and our first response must be to deny them that capability. Sometimes that will require lethal force.”

The fact that Farage also condemned multiculturalism in no uncertain terms  provoked an automated politically correct response from the leader of the Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg:

“The Deputy Prime Minister hit out after Mr Farage suggested the attack on the offices of a satirical magazine should lead to questions about the UK’s “gross policy of multiculturalism”.

“I am dismayed that Nigel Farage immediately thinks, on the back of the bloody murders that we saw on the streets of Paris yesterday, his first reflex is to make political points,” Mr Clegg said during his weekly phone-in on LBC radio.

“If this does come down, as it appears to be the case, to two individuals who perverted the cause of Islam to their own bloody ends, let’s remember that the greatest antidote to the perversion of that great world religion are law-abiding British Muslims themselves.

“And to immediately … imply that many, many British Muslims who I know feel fervently British but also are very proud of their Muslim faith are somehow part of the problem rather than part of the solution is firmly grabbing the wrong end of the stick.”

Such  condemnations are of little account because Farage has spoken an obvious truth and the general public will understand that.  The promotion of multiculturalism has been generally pernicious because it wilfully creates serious divisions within a society,  but is unreservedly toxic in the case of Islam because Muslims,  violent and non-violent, believe in the supremacy of their religion.

The change of language by public figures particularly politicians is of the first importance because the general  public need a lead to be given where a matter is contentious. In these politically correct times it is particularly necessary  because the native population of Britain have been thoroughly intimidated by the totalitarian application of political correctness which has resulted in people saying non-pc things  losing their jobs, being arrested and,  in a growing number of cases , being brought before a criminal court to face charges.

Once things  forbidden by political correctness are  said by public figures change could be very fast. More and more people will embrace the forbidden words and ideas and, like a dam bursting, the  flood  of non-pc  voices will  overwhelm the politically correct restraints on speech and writing.

A tiny proportion of  Muslims

The  claim is routinely made by the  politically correct Western elites and “moderate” Muslims  that those committing terrorist atrocities are a tiny proportion of Muslims.  That is pedantically true but unimportant,  because it is to misunderstand the dynamic of terrorism which rests on a pyramid of commitment and support for the cause. At the top are  the leaders. Below them are those willing to carry out terrorist acts.  Supporting them will be those who make the bombs, acquire guns and so on. Below them will come those who are willing to raise funds through criminal behaviour such as extortion and drug dealing and administer  punishment – anything from death to beatings –  to those within the ambit of the group who are deemed to have failed to do what they were told or worse betrayed  the group.  Next will come those willing to provide safe houses for people and weaponry.  Then there are  those willing to provide information and come out on the streets to demonstrate at the drop of a hat.  At the bottom of conscious supporters will come the  “I disagree with  their methods but…”  people.   They say they support the ends of the terrorists but do not support terrorist  acts. This presses the terrorist demands forward because the public will remember their support for the ends and forget the means because it is the ends which engage the emotions . Those who are familiar with the Provisional IRA during the troubles in Northern Ireland will recognise this  character list  with ease. Moreover, even those from a community from which  terrorists  hail who refuse to offer conscious support  will   aid the terrorists’  cause by providing in Mao’s words “the ocean in which terrorists swim”.

There are differences in the detail of how terrorist organisations act, for example,  PIRA operated in a quasi-military structure  with a central command while Muslim terrorism is increasingly subcontracted  to individuals who act on their own. But however a terrorist movement is organised  the  general sociological structure of support described above is the same  whenever there is a terrorist group which is ostensibly promoting the interests of a sizeable minority and that minority has, justified or not, a sense of victimhood which can be nourished by the terrorists . Where the terrorists can offer a cause which promises not merely  the gaining of advantages by the group but of  the completion of some greater plan its potency is greatly enhanced.  Marxism had the communist Utopia and the sense of working towards final end of history; the great religions offer, through the attainment of some beatific afterlife, the favour of God’s will for their society and the completion of God’s plan.  Islam has those qualities in spades.

All this means that  though the active terrorists may be few , the effectiveness of the terrorist machine relies on large numbers who will offer some degree of support.   Consequently, the fact that the number of Muslims committing terrorist acts may be a tiny proportion of the total Muslim population is irrelevant. What matters is the pyramid of support which at its broadest will  include all Muslims because it is the total population which provides “the ocean in which the terrorist  may swim”.

There is also good evidence that large minority of Muslims in Britain support the methods of  Islamic terrorists, for example an NOP Poll in 2006 found that around a quarter of  British Muslims  said the  7/7 bombings in London in July 2005 were justified because of Britain’s involvement in the “War on Terror”.  There is also plenty of British Muslim support for the imposition of Sharia Law on Britain and some  Muslim children are confused as to whether it is Sharia Law or British Law  which is the law of the land. There are also growing numbers of Sharia Courts in Britain which allow disputes between Muslims to be decided outside of the British legal system.

Importantly,   it is not a case of just  the poor and the ignorant only holding  such views. Young educated Muslims are  if anything more enthusiastic than the average British Muslim to have Sharia Law with 40%  in favour and no less than 32% favouring killing  for Islam if the religion is deemed to have been slighted in some way. All of this points to a considerable reservoir of support for the ends of Muslim terrorists if not always the means.  Many Muslims in the West  would not be prepared to engage in violent acts themselves ,  but they would quite happily accept privileges for their religion and themselves won by the sword.

How should the West react to Muslim terrorism?

How should the West react?  In principle it should be simple. There is no need for gratuitous abuse, no need for laboured reasons why Islam is this or that. All that needs to be recognised  is that Islam is incompatible with liberal democracy because in its moral choices it is a belief system  which runs directly counter to liberal democracy and has as  its end game the subjugation  of the entire world.

What effective  action can Western governments do to prevent the gradual  erosion of  the values upon which their societies are built? ? There are three general  possibilities. These are:

1. Logically, the ideal for any Western government committed to their country’s national interest would  be to expel all Muslims from their territory as a matter of policy with no legal process allowed.   That is because  (1) there is no way of knowing who will become a terrorist;  (2) a large population of Muslims provides the “ocean in which the terrorist swims “ and (3)  any action disadvantaging Muslims short of expulsion will breed terrorists.
2. A less comprehensive programme would be to block all further Muslim immigration, ban all Muslim religious schools,  cease funding any Muslim organisations, deport any Muslim without British citizenship, remove the British citizenship of any Muslim with dual nationality and deport them back to the country  for which they hold citizenship.  The question of legal aid would not arise because  their would be no appeal allowed as the policy deals in absolutes: you are a Muslim either without British citizenship or with dual nationality and you qualify for deportation . The difficulty with that set of policies is it would  allow a large population to remain within the West and would create resentment amongst that population which could lead to terrorism.
3. The least dynamic government action would be to implement programme 2 but allow any Muslim with British citizenship or long term residency to appeal expulsion through the courts. That would have the disadvantages of programme 2 plus the added opportunity for endless delay as appeals are heard and re-heard. Such a system would also require legal aid to be given if the judicial process was to be sound.

Will anything like this happen? Most improbable at least in the short term.  The West is ruled by elites who worship at the altar of  political correctness.  Theirs in a fantasy world in which human beings are interchangeable and institutions such as the nation state  are seen as  outmoded relics as homo sapiens marches steadily towards the sunlit uplands of a world moulded and controlled  by  the rigid totalitarian dicta of  political correctness .

For such people the mindset of anyone willing to die for an idea is simply alien to them.  Even more remote to these elites  is the belief that there is an afterlife which is much to be preferred to life on Earth. Most damaging of all they cannot conceive of people who have no interest in compromise and consequently will be remorseless in their pursuit of their goal. The liberal  mistakenly believes that simply by contact with the West will  the values the liberal espouses be transferred to the rest of the world. This incredibly arrogant fantasy can be seen at its most potent in their attitude to  China, which is  quietly but efficiently creating a world empire by buying influence, and in the Middle East and North Africa where the attempt to transfer liberal  values by a mixture of force and material aid has been a shrieking failure which mocks the liberal every second of every day.

Because of such ideas Western elites are only too likely to keep fudging the issue and conceding, not necessarily right away, more and more privileges to Muslins within their societies. They will also probably greatly increase funding for “moderate” Muslims to enter Schools and Mosques to teach Western values. This will drive many young Muslims towards extremism not away from it because however the teaching of British or Western values is conducted it will inevitably be seen as a criticism of Islam.  Older Muslims will also be angered at such  teaching of their children.  Anything the liberal is likely  to do will simply be throwing  petrol on the fire.

What is required is the replacement of the present elites either by removing them from power or by them changing their tune utterly.  The first is improbable in Britain because of the structure of the voting system  which hugely protects the status quo and a complicit mainstream media which shares the devotion to political correctness and manipulates access to favour parties and politicians which play the politically correct game.

But the changing of political tune is a real possibility because liberals are starting to get truly frightened as they realise things could get seriously out of control if Muslim terrorism continues to occur. There is also the fact that white liberals  recognise in some part of their minds that what they ostensibly espouse – the joy of diversity – is bogus.  This can be seen by how they so often arrange  their own lives  to ensure that they live in very  white and in England very English circumstances. The  massive white flight away from places such as  inner London and Birmingham bears stark witness to this.  Being capable of the greatest self-delusion they explain their hypocrisy by telling themselves that this is only because the great project of producing a country, nay a world, fit for the politically correct to love in, has tragically not been fully realised yet because  the outmoded non-pc  ideas and emotions still exists  as people have not yet been educated to see the error of their primitive ways such as believing in the nation state and a homogenous society. But in their heart of hearts they know they would dread to live in the conditions to which they have sanguinely consigned the white working class.

Liberals  may also have the beginnings of a terror that their permitting of mass immigration, the promotion of multiculturalism and the suppression of dissent from their own native populations will soon come to be called by its true name, treason. All these fears will act as a motor to drive the liberal elites to become more and more realistic about what  needs to be done.

The question every non-Muslim  in the West needs to answer is this, do you really believe that if Muslims become the majority in a Western country they will not do what Islam has done everywhere else in the world where they are  in the majority and at best place Islam within a greatly privileged position within the state or at worst create a Muslim theocracy?  Even Turkey, the liberals’ favourite example of a Muslim majority secular democracy, is rapidly moving towards a position when it cannot meaningfully be called a democracy or secular as Islamic parties gain more and more leverage and the Prime Minister Erdogan becomes ever more autocratic.

If a person’s answer to the question I posed is no, then they need to answer another question, do I want to live in such a society? If  their answer is no then they must  be willing to fight for their way of life or the “religion of peace” will change their society beyond recognition.

When I hear someone describing Islam as the “religion of peace”  I am irresistibly reminded of the aliens in the film Independence Day emerging from their spaceship yelling “We come in peace” before blasting every human in sight.  The white liberals who peddle into the “religion of peace” propaganda should be constantly called upon to explain why it is that a “religion of peace” can be so unfailingly successful in attracting people who say they subscribe to it yet are unremittingly cruel and violent.

Bruges Groups meeting 24 September 2014 – The EU’s attack on Britain’s most successful industry [the City]

Prof Tim Congdon  (Founder of Lombard Street Research)

Dr Gerrard Lyons  (Chief Economic Adviser to Mayor of London )

Lars Seiet Chistensen  (CEO Saxo Bank)

Robert Henderson

The three speakers were all agreed on this

1. The desirability of Britain’s financial services sector continuing to grow.
2. The dominance of London as a purveyor of financial products.
3. The damaging effect of the EU on the City in particular and British financial services in general, both at present and the great potential for much more destructive EU policies in the future.
4. The resentment of other EU members, particularly the large ones, of Britain’s dominance as a financial centre. Congdon and Christensen suggested that this resentment led to active attempts by the EU to take away this British dominance through EU legislation.

Other points to note were (a)  Congdon and Christensen being  certain that the only way forward for Britain was to leave the EU   because Cameron’s promised renegotiation would produce nothing of consequence and (b)  Lyons coming out with the “London benefits from immigration”  fantasy (exactly who  benefits?) and claiming, curiously , that what was needed was the “financial equivalent to the Luxembourg  compromise” to protect the City, curiously because the  Compromise, if it has any practical force at all (which is dubious), already covers such  financial matters because it embraces all aspects of the EU open to majority vote, viz “Where, in the case of decisions which may be taken by majority vote on a proposal of the Commission, very important interests of one or more partners are at stake, the Members of the Council will endeavour, within a reasonable time, to reach solutions which can be adopted by all the Members of the Council while respecting their mutual interests and those of the Community”.

“However, the Compromise, which is only a political declaration by Foreign Ministers and cannot amend the Treaty, did not prevent the Council from taking decisions in accordance with the Treaty establishing the European Community, which provided for a series of situations in which qualified-majority voting applied. Moreover, qualified-majority voting has been gradually extended to many areas and has now become normal procedure, unanimity being the exception. The Luxembourg Compromise remains in force even though, in practice, it may simply be evoked without actually having the power to block the decision-making process.”

It is a little bit disturbing that someone advising  a powerful politician such as Boris Johnson  is so ill informed about the reality of the EU.

The great omission from the event  was any consideration of what the British public wants.   All three speakers  completely ignored the democratic will of the British people.  The British may not like the EU,  but neither do they like globalism. It will be impossible to win a referendum on Britain’s membership of  the EU if the electorate know that all they are being asked to do is to swap the overlordship of Brussels for the  ideological despotism of free trade and mass immigration. (The laissez faire approach involved in globalisation is those with power enforcing an ideology by refusing to act to protect what the vast majority of human beings regard and have always regarded as the interests of their country and themselves.  It is a tyranny caused by the neglect of the rightful use of state power for the common good.)

Come questions from the audience  I was unable to get myself called. Had I been able to do so I should  have raised the question of  the democratic deficit and the impossibility of persuading the British electorate to vote to leave the EU if the alternative was more state sponsored globalism.  Sadly, those who were called to ask questions complete ignored these  vital questions

After the meeting I  managed to speak to Congdon  and put the question I had been unable to ask to him.  Congdon’s response was a simple refusal to discuss the question of protectionist measures. Indeed, he  became extremely animated in his refusal  saying he would have no truck with such ideas.  This is par for the course when I attempt to debate with laissez faire religionists.  They either do what Congdon does, refuse to debate or become abusive.  These are the classic behaviours of religious believers when their ideas are challenged.  These people know in their heart of hearts that their religion, whether it be sacred or profane, cannot stand up to close examination so in the vast majority of cases they a either refuse to debate or resort to abuse  which has the same effect.

Congdon also made the fantastic  statement that come an IN/OUT  referendum,  the British would vote to come out because they “have always valued freedom”.  Apart from this being historically a highly questionable claim, the vast  demographic changes over the past 60 years wrought by mass immigration have both diluted the Britishness of the population and the British population as a whole has been cowed by more than half a century of political correctness being enforced with ever increasing ruthlessness by  those with power in the country.

The other  issue  I raised with Congdon were the implications  that ever deeper  devolution had for the UK’s relations with the EU .  I put forward a plausible scenario: an in/out referendum is held. England votes 70% to leave while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland vote 70% to stay in. I asked Congdon what  he thought would happen if such a vote occurred.  Amazingly,  he said he had no idea.

I need not have weighted the votes so heavily towards a vote to leave in England. The discrepancy in size between England and the other home countries is so huge that  England  would not have to vote YES to leaving the EU by anything like 70 for and 30% against to ensure the referendum was won by the leave the EU side.

The official number of registered electors  qualified to vote in Parliamentary elections at  the end of 2012 and their geographical distribution was as follows::

The total number of UK parliamentary electors in December 2012 was 46,353,900, a rise of 0.5 per

cent from December 2011.

The total number of parliamentary electors in each of the UK constituent countries and the

percentage changes during the year to December 2012 are:

• England – 38,837,300, a rise of 0.5 per cent
• Wales – 2,301,100, a rise of 0.1 per cent
• Scotland – 3,985,300, a rise of 1.1 per cent
• Northern Ireland – 1,230,200, a rise of 1.4 per cent

Assuming for the sake of simplifying the example that there is a 100% turnout,  23,176,951 votes would be  needed for a vote to leave the EU.  If England voted by 60% to leave that would  produce  23,302,380 votes to leave , more than would be required  for a simple majority.

But that is obviously not the full picture, There would be a substantial vote to leave  in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The combined electorate of Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland in 2012  was 7,516,600.  If  70% of those voted to remain in the EU that would only be 5,261,620 votes.   There would be 2,254,980 votes to leave.  If England voted 54% to leave (20, 972,142 votes) the votes to leave in the whole of the UK would be  23,227, 122 (20, 972,142 +2,254,980) , enough to  win the referendum.

Of course that is not how the vote would be in the real world. The turnout would be nowhere near 100%,  although  it might well be  over eighty per cent if the Scottish referendum is a guide.   How   Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would vote is of course uncertain,  but  I have allotted  such a generous proportion of the vote to the stay in side in those  countries that it is unlikely I  have seriously over-estimated  the vote to  leave.  What the example does show  is that under any likely voting circumstances there would not need to be a very strong YES to leaving vote in England to override a very strong vote to remain part of the EU  in  Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

If there was such an unbalanced result, that is with England voting to leave and the other three countries voting to stay or even if just one of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland voting to remain in the EU, this would ostensibly produce a potentially incendiary constitutional crisis, especially if  Westminster politicians keep on grovelling to the Celtic Fringe as they did during the Scottish independence referendum ( a practice which  grossly inflated the idea of  Scotland’s ability to be independent without any pain in many Scots’ minds).

I said an ostensibly incendiary situation because in reality there would be little appetite to leave the UK  if the hard truths of  what leaving the UK and joining  the EU would mean were placed in front of voters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. England or England plus one or two of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would be a completely different kettle of fish compared with Scotland leaving the UK with the rest of the UK still in the EU. If any of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland wished to leave the UK they would  and join the EU with the rest of the UK or just England outside of the EU,  they would be faced with an England or a remnant UK state which had regained its freedom of action and would not be bound by EU law.

The strategy of those in who want  the UK to leave the EU should be to reduce the idea amongst voters in Scotland, Wales and Northern  Ireland  that leaving the UK and joining the EU after a UK vote to  leave has taken place would be an easy choice.  To diminish  the  vote to stay in those countries  a pre-emptive strike is required before the referendum  laying before voters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland the realities of their relationship with the EU and the  UK if they  seek to leave .

This is something which should have been done during the Scottish referendum.  Indeed, the refusal of the Better Together side of the argument to point out these realties was one of the prime reasons for the NO vote not being much larger than it was, handsome as that result was.  The unionist side generally was deeply patronising  to the Scots with their  line that only Scots could have a say in the debate and that the rest of the union had to keep quiet for fear of upsetting the Scots and driving them to a YES vote.  It implied that Scots are essentially less than adults who could not either bear contrary views or have the wit to listen to hard facts.

The primary things the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish should be reminded of are:

1. Wales and Northern Ireland are economic  basket cases which rely heavily on English taxpayers to fund their public expenditure. To lose that subsidy would cripple them both. Nor would they get anything like as much extra  funding from the EU – assuming it would have them as members –  as they would lose from the end of the English subsidy.

Scotland is in a better position because it is larger and has for the present at least significant oil revenues. But it is a very narrow economy relying very heavily on public service employment – a significant part of which deals with the administration of English public service matters –  while the private business side of is largely comprised of oil and gas, whiskey, food, tourism and financial services.

The figures below are the latest official estimates of the tax raised in each of the four home countries to the end of the 2012/13 financial year. These figures should not be treated as exact to the last million because there are difficulties in allocating revenue to particular parts of the UK, for example, with corporation tax, but they  are broadly indicative of what each country collects in tax I give two sets of figures to show the differences when oil and gas is allocated on a geographical and a population basis.

Table 1 Total HMRC Receipts (Geographical Split of North Sea Revenues), £m

UK         England    %       Wales      %     Scotland   %        N. Ireland %

2012‐13 469,777   400,659 85.3%    16,337 3.5%   42,415 9.0%       10,331   2.6%

Table 2 Total HMRC Receipts (Population Split of North Sea Revenues), £m

2012‐13 469,777   404,760 86.2%   16,652 3.5%   37,811 8.0%        10,518    2.6%

Compare this with public spending for each of the   home countries in the calendar year 2013 (I was unable to find expenditure figures for the financial year but they would be little different) :

England        £456.2 billion – difference of  £56 billion approx. between tax raised and money spent

Scotland        £53.9 billion  – difference  of £12 billion approx. between tax raised and money spent

Wales            £29.8 billion   – difference  of £13 billion approx. between tax raised and money spent

9. Ireland £19.8 billion   – difference  of £9  billion approx. between tax raised and money spent

NB differences between I tax raised and money spent are based on Table 1 figures which give the most favourable interpretation of Scotland’s tax position.

The approximate  percentage of overspend  (spending less tax collected) by each of the home countries is

England      12%

Scotland     22%

Wales          43%

1. Ireland 45%

The three smaller countries are accumulating debt at a much greater rate than England. In addition, small countries which go independent would find raising the money to meet their overspends would be much more expensive  than the cost of financing the debt as part of the UK

It is also worth noting in passing  the per head differences which are substantial between England and the other home countries.

In 2012/13, public spending per head in the UK as a whole was £8,788.

–              England £8,529 (3% below the UK average).

–              Scotland: £10,152 (16% above the UK average)

–              Wales: £9,709 (10% above the UK average)

–              Northern Ireland £10,876 (24% above the UK average).

If public spending per head was reduced to the present  English level in the other three home countries  approximately £16 billion would be removed from the UK  budget.

2. The vast majority of their trade is with England. Barriers created by England’s departure from the EU could have very serious economic consequences any of other home countries remained  within the EU.
3. Much of what they export to countries outside the EU has to pass through England.
4. All three countries would be net takers from the EU budget not contributors. The EU are unlikely to welcome with open arms three more small pensioner nations. There would be no guarantee that the EU would accept any or all of them as members, but even if they did they terms they would have to accept would be far more onerous and intrusive than they experience now.  In particular, they would almost certainly have to join the Euro as this is a condition for all new members.
5. An England or a reduced UK outside of the EU would have to impose physical border controls because any part of the UK which seceded and joined the EU would be committed to the free movement of labour within the EU (more exactly the European Economic Area – EEA). That would mean any number of immigrants from the EEA would be able to enter either England or a reduced UK via whichever part (s) of the UK had seceded and joined the EU.
6. Being part of the UK gives the smaller home countries great security because the UK still has considerable military clout – ultimately Britain is protected by nuclear weapons – and the size of the population (around 62 million and rising) is sufficient in itself to give any aggressor pause for thought. The proposal for armed forces made in the SNP sponsored White Paper on independence recommended armed forces of 10,000  regulars to start with rising to 15,000 if circumstances permitted.   That would be laughable as a defence force for a country the size of Scotland which has huge swathes of land with very few people on the land.  An independent Wales and N Ireland would be even worse off.
7. They could not expect to walk away from the Union without taking on a share of the UK national debt and of taxpayer funded pension liabilities proportional to their population, have a currency union to share the Pound, have UK government contracts for anything or retain  the jobs exported from England to do administrative public sector work  for England, for example, much of the English welfare administration is dealt with in Scotland.

If  this is done,  with any luck the enthusiasm for leaving the UK to join the EU if  England or England plus one or more of the other home countries has voted to leave the EU will diminish sufficiently to make a vote to  remain in the EU unlike or at least  reduce  the vote to stay in to level where there is not an overwhelming vote to either stay in or leave.