The trial of Alison Chabloz

Day 1 – 10 1 2018

Robert Henderson

Presiding: District Judge John Zani sitting without a jury

Karen Robinson – Prosecuting counsel

Adrian Davies – Defence counsel

Witnesses  for the Prosecution

Gideon Falter,   chairman of the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA)

Stephen Silverman Director of Investigations and Enforcement  CAA

The background to the prosecution 

Ms Chabloz denies three charges of sending obscene material by public communication networks and two alternative charges of causing obscene material to be sent. The case involves three songs which the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) claim are anti-Semitic: Survivors,   Nemo’s Anti-Semitic Universe and I Like The Story As It Is.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) refused to prosecute the case originally but after the CAA started a private prosecution and threatened a judicial review of the CPS’ refusal to prosecute, the CPS agreed to reverse their original decision and take over the private prosecution.

At the same time the CAA had sought and been given permission to take another case of alleged anti-Semitism   – that of Jeremy Bedford-Turner –  to judicial review  but before that happened the CPS agree to prosecute Mr Bedford-Turner.  It is reasonable to assume that the CPS’ change of mind on Ms Chabloz’s case was linked to the decision in the Turner-Bedford  case.

The events of the day

Alison Chabloz  arrived with a healthy band of supporters (around 2 dozen) who filled the public gallery. There was a significant media presence outside the court and a  sprinkling of  reporters in the courtroom .  Miss Chabloz’s song Survivors  was played early in the proceedings and drew a round of applause  which filled the courtroom. Judge Zani warned those in the public gallery that a repeat of such behaviour would result in those responsible being removed from the court.

Karen Robinson began the day by outlining the prosecution’s case. Importantly she made it clear  in her opening remarks that the case was not about whether the holocaust existed or how many Jews died.  Rather, it was  the level of insult generated by Miss Chabloz ‘s songs which was the issue.  Robinson allowed  that  material resulting in insult was within the law but gross insult was not.  She offered no explanation  of how an objective distinction between insult and gross  insult was to  be determined . Instead  she  merely baldly asserted that  ‘ by the standards of an open and multi-racial society, they are grossly offensive’.  This opened up a can of worms.

To begin with it is objectively  impossible  to distinguish between lesser and greater  degrees of insult. Then there is the function of criticism in a democracy.  The idea that there can be limits to insult in a democracy is chilling. Moreover, there is a long tradition in England of the most devastating political insults most notably in the cartoons   of the likes of  Gilray and Rowlandson. Take away the freedom to be as insulting as  you like and British politics would become a constricted fearful business. Indeed, this  is already happening for political correctness generally  is being imposed through a mixture of the criminalising of opinions which oppose the dictates of  political correctness and the non-legal penalties such as being driven out of a job.

It is also a fact that laws relating to “hate crimes” is rarely if ever applied to the politically correct. Indeed, the claim  by  the prosecution  that  ‘ by the standards of an open and multi-racial society, they [the songs]  are grossly offensive’”  is  an unequivocal  statement of  politically correctness .  It assumes that the  standards of political correctness  on the subject of race are  shared by the vast majority of the UK population for unless they are shared by the vast majority they cannot be the standards by which UK society operates.

There is strong objective evidence that  the standards of an open and multi-racial society  are not the standards which the large  majority of the UK population shares.   Polls on immigration consistently show a solid majority of  those polled concerned about immigration and its effects.  This concern played a strong role in achieving  the Brexit vote. Research by the think tank British Future published in 2014 found a strong majority for ending  mass immigration   and 25% of those questioned wanted the removal of all immigrants already  in the UK.

The question of veracity

Truths are often “grossly insulting”.  The implication of the Prosecution’s case  is that  truths could be illegal.

The accusations in  Miss Chabloz’s songs of falsehood and misrepresentation  by the likes of   Holocaust survivor Irene Zysblat, the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, and the teenage diarist Anne have substance as  Adrian Davies showed  during  his  efficient  cross examination.

The prosecution witnesses

I found both the CAA’s witnesses unconvincing . Falter was simply feeble.  Not only was he unfamiliar with texts which one would have thought he would have known, he gave signs of  working from  a prepared script, always a fatal thing for someone under cross examination because all the cross examiner has got to do it keep pressing buttons until the inevitable happens and the prepared script fails to provide meaningful answers.

Silverman was more assured and collected but his performance when  being questioned by prosecuting counsel was giving evidence by numbers.  He gave explanations for various words and phrases but they were  for  the most part obvious to any non-Jew.  He didn’t add much to the evidence available simply by reading or listening to  the song lyrics. His explanation  of the word “goy” (plural goyim)was of interest because he  falsely  said it was a non-offensive word for non-Jews.

The difference between words in a song and words in a speech.

Miss Chabloz performances of her songs is  accomplished . These are not  easy songs to deliver   not least because of the complexity and sophistication of  her  lyrics. Her enunciation  is first class. That she executes  the songs  well and they are very  lively and engaging musically may help her  case. It is one thing to express sentiments in a speech,  quite another in a song.  When it is done in song and the song and performance are engaging,  the emotional response of the listener will be  first and foremost   a response to an artistic act not a political one.

The case will recommence on 7  March (This is not a misprint, the next hearing is in March).

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Day 2 – 7   3  2018

Robert Henderson

Presiding: District Judge John Zani sitting without a jury

Karen Robinson – Prosecuting counsel

Adrian Davies – Defence counsel

Witnesses  for the defence

Alison Chabloz

 

The background to the prosecution 

Ms Chabloz denies three charges of sending obscene material by public communication networks and two alternative charges of causing obscene material to be sent. The case involves three songs which the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) claim are anti-Semitic: Survivors,   Nemo’s Anti-Semitic Universe and I Like The Story As It Is.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) refused to prosecute the case originally but after the CAA started a private prosecution and threatened a judicial review of the CPS’ refusal to prosecute, the CPS agreed to reverse their original decision and take over the private prosecution.

At the same time the CAA had sought and been given permission to take another case of alleged anti-Semitism   – that of Jeremy Bedford-Turner –  to judicial review  but before that happened the CPS agree to prosecute Mr Bedford-Turner.  It is reasonable to assume that the CPS’ change of mind on Ms Chabloz’s case was linked to the decision in the Turner-Bedford  case.

The events of the day

Despite having a whole day for the case  we are not yet not at the end of the defence case. Ms Chabloz gave evidence but the second witness for the defence Peter Rushton never entered the witness box.

Ms Chabloz did  well in the witness box.   Being under cross examination is very tiring because apart from the natural nervous tension – everyone is nervous when they first  experience  being in the   witness box – and  the need to concentrate intensely is draining. Moreover,   Ms Chabloz was  in the witness box for the better part of two hours. Not only did she not wilt, towards the end of  her  testimony she had prosecuting counsel a little rattled.  (Karen Robinson made the mistake of getting into a verbal  cul-d-sac when she kept repeating the same question over and over instead of  trying to get  at the answer she wanted by asking  the  question in different ways.)

Ms Robinson began her cross examination by concentrating on the songs which are the subject of the charges Ms Chabloz faces. Then she swerved into raising questions about a song which was not part of the charges and tried to make a case for Ms Chabloz being a racist generally.

Ms Chabloz picked up very quickly on the fact that Robinson had gone off piste and protested that the questioning was irrelevant,  but Robinson was allowed to proceed with the line of questioning. Eventually defence counsel Adrian Davies objected that the line of questioning was not relevant to the charges but Zani still allowed Robinson to pursue the line of questioning.

I suspect that  Adrian Davies allowed   Robinson to continue without objection by him  for as long as  she did  to provide the basis for Mr Rushton’s evidence to be accepted. However, it is  worth noting that Ms Robinson’s attempt to broaden the argument against Ms Chabloz to a general charge of racism is of a different nature to Mr Rushton’s research which is,  as far as it could be judged by what was said in court, simply concerned with validating Ms Chabloz’s claims.

At the end of Ms Chabloz’s cross-examination Adrian Davies’ second witness Peter Rushton was expected to testify.  Mr Rushton  has been down at the British Library ferreting out  evidence which objectively supported  the claims made in  Ms Chabloz’s  songs.   However, his evidence was deemed to be of a nature which did not require him to go into the witness box provided the prosecution accepted that  his  research could be entered as evidence. This  Ms Robinson agreed to  and obviated the need for Mr Rushton to go into the witness box.

The court then  turned to  the question of whether  written  not oral arguments speaking to  Mr Rushton’s research  should  be made  The prosecution wanted only written arguments . (I suspect that  the prosecution were nervous about having seriously non-pc  statements  read out in court in whole or part). Adrian  Davies  wanted  to make oral arguments.  judge  Zani  ruled that  oral arguments could be made  as well as the written ones and booked another hearing which he thought should last for around  an hour.

This is  unsatisfactory because it means that the prosecution’s attempt to present to present Ms Chabloz as a general racist was made in open court, while Mr Rushton’s evidence supporting  Ms Chabloz  will not, at least in its entirety,  be presented in open court.  (Some of Mr Rushton’s evidence  will presumably become clear during the oral submissions on his evidence).

As things stand

The upshot of all  this  activity  is:

1. Written arguments on Mr Rushton’s evidence must be submitted  by   Friday 16th March
2. Oral arguments will be made on Monday 14th May
3. Judge Zani will reserve his judgement.
4. A further hearing will be held on 25th May at which Zani will give his verdict and the reasons for it.

There were around 20 supporters of Ms Chabloz.  There were a number of interruptions from  the public gallery in support of Mis Chabloz . These annoyed  the judge  enough to make him  threaten to clear the public  gallery.

Compared with the first day’s hearing on 10 January  there was little media interest,  although Martin Bashir sat in the press section. During one of several adjournments he engaged in a n extended conversation with prosecuting counsel Karen Robinson.

Robert Henderson  11   March 2018

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Day  3 –   14 5   2018

Robert Henderson

Presiding: District Judge John Zani sitting without a jury

Karen Robinson – Prosecuting counsel

Adrian Davies – Defence counsel

The background to the prosecution

Ms Chabloz denies three charges of sending obscene material by public communication networks and two alternative charges of causing obscene material to be sent. The case involves three songs which the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) claim are anti-Semitic: Survivors,   Nemo’s Anti-Semitic Universe and I Like The Story As It Is.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) refused to prosecute the case originally but after the CAA started a private prosecution and threatened a judicial review of the CPS’ refusal to prosecute, the CPS agreed to reverse their original decision and take over the private prosecution.  At the same time the CAA had sought and been given permission to take another case of alleged anti-Semitism   – that of Jeremy Bedford-Turner –  to judicial review  but before that happened the CPS agree to prosecute Mr Bedford-Turner.  It is reasonable to assume that the CPS’ change of mind on Ms Chabloz’s case was linked to the decision in the Turner-Bedford  case.

The events of the day

The bulk of the day was taken up by  oral arguments amplifying   and rebutting the  written arguments  made by both defence and prosecution  since the previous hearing on 3^rd March and final  speeches made by  prosecution and the defence.

Much time was devoted to the question  of what constitutes a public electronic communications  network  (PECN)  and who was responsible to the distribution of material once it was uploaded to the PECN.  Frankly, this had the feel of theologians arguing about how many angels could sit  on a pinhead.  Adrian Davies said it was actually YouTube which was responsible for “sending the message”, with Ms Chabloz unable to ascertain who the recipient would be.

He said: “If someone who’s drunk or unstable or eccentric decides to phone up the Speaking Clock and shout some obscenity, it is not conceivable that they are committing an offence – it’s absurd.

“Uploading a video to YouTube – the only ‘recipient’ is a lump of silicon in a concrete bunker in California.”

Most dramatically, Davies told   Zani that his judgement would l ‘set a  precedent’ for free speech in what would be a landmark case.

Davies said his client had not committed an offence because “It is hard to know what right has been infringed by Miss Chabloz’s singing  …“There has to be a convincing argument to interfere with Miss Chabloz’s right to freedom of speech.”

Prosecuting counsel Karen Robinson denied Chabloz’s songs were for comic affect,  and claimed they were “ not political songs… which were “ no more than a dressed-up attack on a group of people for no more than their adherence to a religion.”

There was a strong turnout of supporters of Ms Chabloz.

Day  4 –   25 May 2018

The background to the prosecution

Ms Chabloz  has denied   three charges of sending obscene material by public communication networks and two alternative charges of causing obscene material to be sent. The case involves three songs which the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) claim are anti-Semitic: Survivors,   Nemo’s Anti-Semitic Universe and I Like The Story As It Is.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) refused to prosecute the case originally but after the CAA started a private prosecution and threatened a judicial review of the CPS’ refusal to prosecute, the CPS agreed to reverse their original decision and take over the private prosecution.

At the same time the CAA had sought and been given permission to take another case of alleged anti-Semitism   – that of Jeremy Bedford-Turner –  to judicial review  but before that happened the CPS agree to prosecute Mr Bedford-Turner.  It is reasonable to assume that the CPS’ change of mind on Ms Chabloz’s case was linked to the decision in the Turner-Bedford  case.

The events of the day

The hearing  was  to render  a verdict.  Ms Chabloz was found guilty on  three charges , namely, two counts of sending an offensive, indecent or menacing message through a public communications network and a third charge relating to a song on YouTube.

Zani emphasised two things, remorse and the fact that he judged  Ms Chabloz  had comfortably passed the standard of offensiveness required for a custodial sentence.  Arrangements were made for Ms Chabloz  to attend an interview with a probation officer on 31 May who would prepare a report  for Zani to consider before he pronounced  sentence.

On remorse Zani  said this in his written judgement (para 108) : “Far from there being any real remorse for or appreciation of the offence that this court finds will have undoubtedly  been caused  to others, Ms Chabloz remains defiant that her claim to free speech trumps all else and that any attempt to curtail  her right would be quite wrong,”

The impression left was clear: Ms Chabloz must express remorse if she wished to escape a custodial sentence.

There was a strong turnout of Ms Chabloz’s supporters, some of whom were physically attacked  outside the court building by supporters of the prosecution of Ms Chabloz.

Day  5 –   14 6   2018

The background to the prosecution

Ms Chabloz has  been found guilty of three charges of sending obscene material by public communication networks and two alternative charges of causing obscene material to be sent. The case involves three songs which the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) claim are anti-Semitic: Survivors,   Nemo’s Anti-Semitic Universe and I Like The Story As It Is.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) refused to prosecute the case originally but after the CAA started a private prosecution and threatened a judicial review of the CPS’ refusal to prosecute, the CPS agreed to reverse their original decision and take over the private prosecution.  At the same time the CAA had sought and been given permission to take another case of alleged anti-Semitism   – that of Jeremy Bedford-Turner –  to judicial review  but before that happened the CPS agree to prosecute Mr Bedford-Turner.  It is reasonable to assume that the CPS’ change of mind on Ms Chabloz’s case was linked to the decision in the Turner-Bedford  case.

The events of the day

This  hearing  was for sentencing.

Prosecution counsel  and defence  counsel both made oral  representations before  the sentences were announced;  prosecuting counsel at some length; defence counsel  quite briefly   The idea that these could have had any meaningful effect on the judge ‘s sentence was absurd because Zani  announced the sentences immediately after the representations.

Ms Chablis was sentenced to   20 weeks of imprisonment suspended for two years, 180 hours of community service,  victim surcharge and costs.  She was also barred from using social media for a year.

There was a distinctly odd element in Zani’s  sentencing.  When he  gave his verdict on 25th May he emphasised  two things, remorse and the fact that he judged  Ms Chabloz  had comfortably passed the standard of offensiveness required for a custodial sentence.

On remorse Zani  said this in his judgement (para 108) : “Far from there being any real remorse for or appreciation of the offence that this court finds will have undoubtedly  been caused  to others, Ms Chabloz remains defiant that her claim to free speech trumps all else and that any attempt to curtail  her right would be quite wrong,”

The impression left was clear: Ms Chabloz  must express remorse if she wished to escape a custodial sentence.

Bearing in mind these remarks on remorse and sentencing it was somewhat of a surprise that Zani imposed suspended sentences because  he  stated during sentencing that Ms Chabloz  had shown no proper remorse  and repeated his previous statement about the case having passed the custodial sentence test.

What was going on here?  The  most plausible explanation would be that Zani never had any intention of sending Ms Chabloz to prison and his performance on the 25th May was simply  to intimidate her into collapsing in heap and saying she was sorry and how terrible had been her actions and words. When that ploy did not work Zani decided  that he would nevertheless  give a suspended sentence (plus costs plus community work, plus victim’s surcharge).

Why would Zani have been unwilling to give a custodial sentence?   For an explanation of that one must look at the reason for prosecutions such as this. Out politically correct elite (which includes the mainstream media)   want the convictions to frighten the general public  (and maintain politically correct discipline within the agencies of the state who enforce political correctness). But what  our politically correct elite do not want is widespread mainstream media coverage of such trials. In short they want the convictions but not the details, not least because they wish at one and the same time  to censor and maintain a claim that they are in favour of free expression. There was a marvellous moment  during  sentencing when Zani dilated on the necessity and value of free speech in a democracy before saying  in the next sentence, with no sense of irony  that  there are limits to free expression. This is very obvious nonsense. Free expression is a very simply concept you either have it or you have a range of permitted opinion which can be altered at any moment. Joseph Stalin would feel increasingly at home in present day England.

Yet again there was a very healthy turnout  of supporters of Ms Chabloz.  When Zani announced the suspended sentence several supporters of the prosecution yelled loudly and ran out of the public gallery.

Unlike the previous hearing there was no physical violence.

The ever narrowing range of permitted opinion in England

Robert Henderson

On 14 May 2018 Jeremy Bedford-Turner  known as Jez Turner was convicted at Southwark Crown Court in London of inciting racial hatred during a speech he gave in 2015 outside Downing Street. He was sentenced to 12 months, six of which will be served in prison and the rest on licence.

In his speech   Mr Bedford-Turner attacked Jewish influence, most particularly, the  Met Police’s support for and enablement of  a  Jewish organisation  known as the Shomrim run by a charity called the Community Security Trust (CST). This  organisation   has astonishing  support from the Met Police including the use of police cars and the wearing of uniforms which look very similar to those worn by police officers.

Did Mr Bedford-Turner have a chance of acquittal?  He  had a jury trial so  that gave him some chance of an acquittal. Had it been a trial without a jury he would almost certainly have had  none. After decades of ever more ruthlessly enforced political correctness  judges in England all  subscribe to  the wonders of diversity multiracial game without thinking  and, consequently, it  is very difficult to imagine a judge sitting on his own daring to find a defendant accused of racism  not guilty.

But even with a jury the odds were heavily against a not guilty verdict. In the minds of jurors must be the fear of being called a racist, a fear  which has been so successfully inculcated in the general population that  it produces an automated reflex of panic and terror when faced with the possibility of the label being  stuck on them. Any juror faced with a case such as this must have it in the back of their minds  that to return a not guilty verdict would be to risk being called a racist. There is also the sheer shock factor of hearing politically incorrect views being unashamedly spoken. As it was the jury was out for less than two hours and returned a unanimous verdict of  guilty. (For the record there were two black women and one black man on the jury plus one other man who may have been a Turk.  The rest were white).

The Crown Prosecution Service  (CPS) initially  refused to prosecute Mr Bedford-Turner  because the case  did not meet their evidential standard for a prosecution.  The Campaign Against Anti-Semitism  (CAA)  then threatened the CPS with a judicial review of their decision not to prosecute. Faced with that the CPS caved in and prosecuted Mr Bedford-Turner. Running a judicial review is very expensive.  The fact that  the CAA managed to get the CPS  to prosecute  by starting the process to have a judicial review  effectively created two tiers of justice, one  for the rich and one  for the poor.

I  shall be writing a fuller account of the trial later but I can say unequivocally that the judge, David Tomlinson,  showed his bias against Mr Bedford-Turner  from the word go in both his actions and manner.

He began by refusing a request by Mr Bedford-Turner’s barrister to put  questions to prospective jurors to discover if any of them were members of the CAA or the  CST.  The judge’s explanation was that he valued the principle of  random selection. In a place such as London that is always likely to throw up a jury which through its diverse composition is likely to hinder any defendant charged with inciting racial hatred.

During this passage of the hearing the judge  also said with great distaste that it was shocking that such an organisation as the CAA needed to exist but that was the way of the world.

Tomlinson  also intervened on a number of occasions when Mr Bedford-Turner was being cross-examined. These  interventions were not to elucidate Mr Bedford-Turner’s  testimony for either the judge or the jury,   but were   attempts to contradict the defendant  using an aggressive tone and manner. This behaviour was highly questionable because in effect the judge  kept on  taking over the prosecution counsel’s cross-examination.  ( If I had been prosecution counsel I would have been more than a little put out  because Tomlinson’s interjections suggested that prosecution counsel was not making a good job of the cross-examination. )

The  other thing to note was the way both judge and prosecuting counsel accepted opinion as fact and were seemingly oblivious to what they were doing, namely,  enforcing the politically correct  view of the world. For example, prosecuting counsel thought nothing of citing a case DPP v Collins 2006 on the question of what is grossly offensive,  viz:

“It is for the trial court to determine as a question of fact whether a message is grossly offensive.  In making this determination the standards of an open and just multi-racial society are to be applied”

That may reasonably be translated as whatever political correctness  decrees.

The prosecution have to justify their position that the words are grossly offensive but they do not have to show anyone was grossly offended. This seems mad to the lay person,  but there are many crimes which rely on actions carried out before any harm is done, for example, preparations for committing terrorist acts and conspiracies. The real problem with this type of charge is that it allows a high degree of subjectivity in making the value judgement of what is grossly offensive.

Later in the proceedings the judge decided that although the educated classes would not be affected by  words written or spoken by Mr Beford-Turner and his ilk, the uneducated classes  might well be  prey to such blandishments . (I kid you not).

Little media coverage

The other striking thing about this trial is the paucity of media comment.  One might have thought the mainstream media would have jumped all over the matter  but the only mainstream press  with a representative attending the trial was the Press Association. Why? Well, I suspect it was because although the politically correct wanted the prosecution and a guilty verdict they did not want the politically incorrect nature of much of the evidence to come before the public’s eyes.

There was also a very curious incident on day one of the trial. The acoustics in the public gallery  were poor and I was unable to catch the name of the prosecuting counsel. After the hearing was adjourned for the day I asked the barrister in question what his name was explaining that I had not been able to catch it during the hearing. He refused to give me his name. This struck me as very odd indeed because the trial was not being held in camera so his name was public knowledge – it is Louis Malby QC. On the second day of the trial a Press Association journalist also refused to give me his name. Could it be that those involved with a trial which drove a coach and horses through the notion of free expression  are ashamed of being part of  it?

Where does all this leave us?

What has been made very clear in this trial (and that of the trial of Alison Chabloz) is that we have an elite  which is hell bent on squeezing the range of permitted opinion ever more tightly into a politically correct shape.

The reality is cases such as that of  Mr Bedford-Turner are show trials pure and simple. They are show trials because there is only one permissible  result, that is,  guilty.  The evidence is irrelevant.

The intention of the British  elite  – political, academic and the mainstream media – is to ruthlessly reduce what is permitted to be written or spoken until politically incorrect  ideas are, if not entirely eradicated , driven underground or held only by those without power. This was what Orwell envisaged with NewSpeak,  a  language so altered and stripped of important meaning that people could no longer rebel because they lacked the language with which to do it.

Free expression is essential to democracy and political freedom. Take it away and oppression soon fills the void. It also has a general cultural value

Britain and the West in general are rapidly losing that essential freedom. We desperately need to fight to save it.

Equal Pay and political correctness

Robert Henderson

Calls for equal pay for women are often not calls for equal pay  for equal work.  Rather,  they are demands for  equal pay with men regardless of  whether the jobs women do are  the same,  the experience levels are the same, the natural ability is the same and the diligence and conscientiousness is the same.

The legal definition of equal work  under the Equality Act 2010  does not simply say there should be  equal pay if the woman is doing  a job identical with that of a man at the same employer. Instead it includes different types of work being judged as being   work of  equal value.  Here is the relevant section of the Act:

65Equal work

(1)For the purposes of this Chapter, A’s work is equal to that of B if it is—

(a)like B’s work,

(b)rated as equivalent to B’s work, or

(c)of equal value to B’s work.

(2)A’s work is like B’s work if—

(a)A’s work and B’s work are the same or broadly similar, and

(b)such differences as there are between their work are not of practical importance in relation to the terms of their work.

(3)So on a comparison of one person’s work with another’s for the purposes of subsection (2), it is necessary to have regard to—

(a)the frequency with which differences between their work occur in practice, and

(b)the nature and extent of the differences.

(4)A’s work is rated as equivalent to B’s work if a job evaluation study—

(a)gives an equal value to A’s job and B’s job in terms of the demands made on a worker, or

(b)would give an equal value to A’s job and B’s job in those terms were the evaluation not made on a sex-specific system.

Such evaluation introduces a considerable degree of subjectivity and can result in what most people would not think were  jobs of equal value  or difficulty being judged as of equal value or difficulty,  for example, a clerical assistant and a warehouse operative or   an occupational health nurse  and a production supervisor have been  judged to be equal  of equal status and value.  ( I remember some  years ago a senior person, a woman, within the Equalities body policing the system at the time giving an interview on the BBC in which she said that an example of jobs of equivalent value were a school carpenter and a school dinner lady, the  former  being a job requiring a long apprenticeship and the latter a few days experience at most. )

Is there really a pay gap between men and women?

The official UK figure for the average differential between full time male and female pay  is 9% according to the latest official figures. That is not surprising when the propensity for women to take time out from paid employment to have children, their greater role on average in caring for their children and their smaller representation in more senior jobs (a c consequence of less experience due to   child bearing and childcare) is taken into account.  To those factors can be added the dubious equivalence of work mentioned above. It is  conceivable that the pay differential is not a differential of remuneration for the same work but a differential based on ability and experience.

Types of working which make equal pay impossible

There are large sections of the working population in countries such as the UK  who are remunerated in ways which makes equal pay impossible. These are:

Self-employment,   which is a large and growing  part of the working age population in the UK.  The latest official figures are  4.8 million.

Piece work – A sizeable proportion of the population receive all or part of their income from piece work.

Commission –  A sizeable proportion of the population receive all or part of their income from commission.

Bonuses for meeting targets. These are found in both private enterprise employers and public service employers.

Loyalty and experience pay rises. Much of public sector employment includes  graduated increases based on the number of  years served. These serve as rewards for experience and loyalty. Some private businesses operate the same type of schemes.  Women on average will be less likely than men to get such increases  because  they will probably have some sort of break in their careers if they have children. But that does not mean women are being discriminated against. Rather, it is simply that they are not meeting the qualifying criteria.

These types of remuneration cover many  millions of people in the UK.  Is anyone seriously going to suggest making them illegal?

Differential Ability

But even where the  form of remuneration makes equal pay in principle possible,  there may be good reason not to give equal pay even to people employed to do the same job. These reasons are:

Not all workers are equally able .

Not all workers are  equally diligent.

Competence will grow with experience.

The value of a person may rest on their reputation. This is particularly true of people in show-business or modelling. It would plainly be absurd to, for example,  expect that actors and actresses  should  be paid the same   simply because   they are working on the same film.  A film is a commercial enterprise and the employment of a particular actor of  actresses can make a considerable difference to its commercial success. A similar argument applies to models.

The selection of someone to do a job

In the end the qualities  required do a job and their assessment of an applicant have to be  a matter of judgement by the employer who will be trying to satisfy themselves on these points:

Does the person have the any necessary  formal  qualifications for the job?

Is the person overqualified for the job?

Does the person have the right experience?

Does the person have good references from previous employers?

Does  the person seem to be someone who  gets along with people generally?

Does the employer feel they can get on with the person?

Does the  person seem to have initiative?

The consideration of these questions give rational grounds for differential pay before an applicant has even begun work.

Men and women are not interchangeable in the workplace

Clearly there are significant numbers of  jobs which women cannot do at all or as well as men on average  for reasons of bodily strength.  strength. It is true that the numbers of such jobs are considerably fewer  than they were 50 years ago, but there are still plenty of them, for example in construction, where the average woman would struggle to match the average man. To that type of job can be added work  such as police officers which require people  who can deal physically with violent offenders.

Then there are jobs which in principle  men or women could both do with equally facility  but which are favoured by one sex or another. Primary school teachers tend to  be  women; engineers tend to be men.

On the grounds of biology alone  the idea that men and women would naturally have  the same desire on average to gravitate in the same numbers  to the  sorts of jobs is  dubious. Most nurses are women and  for some years  most of those training to be doctors in the UK have been women.

To start from the most obvious difference, women have babies. Amongst mammals  it is overwhelmingly the female who  takes the main burden of rearing  the young.  It would be very odd indeed if homo sapiens was radically different in terms of a basic biological driver such as the maternal instinct.

Women  with children tend to work in jobs which fit around childcare. Many of those jobs are low skilled and even when skilled   are often  part-time. Either from choice or necessity women take these jobs  to attend to the care of their children.  As most women want children and have children this inevitably means that the average pay for women is going to be lower than that of  men.

Legislation banning discriminatory pay  in the UK has been around for since 1970 when the Equal Pay Act was passed.   Since that time there has been a huge amount of public urging  by politicians, the media and academia to get women to aspire to  traditionally male work. The idea of the working mother is no longer looked down upon,  at least in public discussion. More and more women have gone on to higher education until they now substantially outnumber men.  In addition the shape of the UK economy has changed considerably with manual jobs much reduced. All of these things would seem to bolster the idea of male and female pay equality.  Yet women still show a marked preference for traditional women’s jobs, part time working and taking career breaks to have children.

None of this means that no women will want to do jobs which are considered traditionally male jobs or that no men will want to do jobs considered traditionally female jobs. But it does mean that most women and most men will be drawn to jobs traditionally occupied by   women not because there are societal barriers against it but  as a result of biologically driven circumstances and motivations.   Once that is accepted the fact that on average  the pay of women is significantly less than that of men will  not mean that employers are often wilfully underpaying women but instead are simply reflecting  female choices.

The BBC and the Rivers of Blood speech at 50

Robert Henderson

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

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

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

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

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

In his speech Powell made these predictions:

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

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

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

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

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

Here is Powell on  the disadvantaging of the native British:

“But while, to the immigrant, entry to this country was admission to privileges and opportunities eagerly sought, the impact upon the existing population was very different. For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country.

They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. They now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by act of parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent-provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.”

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

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

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

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

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

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 .

 

 

The Grenfell Tower block fire and its aftermath

 Robert Henderson

The fallout from the Grenfell Tower (GT) fire is turning it from a very serious and traumatic physical disaster  into a political vehicle for the Hard Left who have been openly encouraged by  the  leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn  who has called for empty properties owned by the rich in the area to be commandeered and used to house those rendered homeless by the fire , while the shadow Chancellor John McDonnell  designated  the deaths murder by political decisions and called for a  “Day of Rage” on the streets.  The street level response to make this into an anti-Government matter  really took off  when  the revolutionary left became involved.  Mustafa al-Mansua  a  Jeremy Corbyn-supporting political activist  was identified as being the organiser of the  protests in Kensington Town Hall.

The newspapers, blogs and especially the broadcast media are now alive with claims of gross neglect and even murder by those in authority.  The strange thing is those making the noise are not those most intimately connected with the disaster. Media interviews with  people who either lived in the block or  those who knew people who lived in the block who were either dead or missing have not been  paeans of rage against the rich or the government. Most interviewees have been rather quiet, subdued and shocked but not bursting with anger against the authorities.

The response of the Government

The response of the Government has been jerky. To begin with the Government largely left the emergency services to get on with the job. The PM Theresa May turned up eventually  but did not meet  any of those living in the GT, confining her visit  to meeting members of the emergency services. Jeremy Corbyn did meet people who lived in the block. The contrast between May and Corbyn’s was used as the tinder to light the Hard Left’s bonfire of rage.

After days of  dithering the Government released £5 million to defray the immediate costs of  providing support for the surviving residents of the block. A public inquiry was rapidly announced and a retired Appeal Court judge  appointed to head it.  Eventually, people  from outside of the Council were appointed by the Government  to run the  Kensington and Chelsea  housing department.

The judge appointed to head the public inquiry  Sir Martin Moore-Bick has been the subject of an immediate campaign  to remove him from the position.  A black Labour MP and one-time minister David Lammy  led the way by citing Sir Martin’s  disqualifications for the role as  being the fact that he is   a  “white, upper-middle class man”.   The key word here is white. Try to imagine a black  man being appointed to such a role and a campaign immediately starting  up to thwart his appointment because he   is black.  Difficult isn’t it?

Most contentiously   promises were made by  Theresa  May in the Commons  that the immigration status of the GT residents would not be checked:

“I would like to reassure people that we will not use this tragic incident as a reason to carry out immigration checks on those involved or on those providing information to identify victims or those assisting with the criminal investigation.

 “We will make sure that all victims, irrespective of their immigration status, will be able to access the services they need including healthcare and accommodation.”

The Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan gave the same assurance :

 “No action must be taken against anybody in Grenfell Tower who comes forward.

“There may be some people who are sub-letting, breaching their tenancy agreement.

“There may be people who have got friends and family visiting, who they are worried about if they report them because they haven’t got immigration status.

“All of those people should feel confident that if they come forward and speak to the authorities, that no action will be taken.

Making such a blanket promise  is reckless  because it could be used as a precedent for not deporting  many illegal immigrants  on the ground that they had suffered some trauma whether as an individual or as one of a number  in some disaster like the GT fire.  Applying the rule to the GT residents could also lead to difficult situations where a GT resident turned out to be not only an illegal immigrant but someone  guilty of criminal acts either here or abroad. Are we really to believe that British officials will turn a blind eye to such people?

There is a third problem associated with the immigrant status promise.  The Government may already have an idea of  the number of illegal immigrants  involved. It may be embarrassingly large. If so it would be in the interest of the Government and the politically correct left-liberal politicians generally  not to have  to admit that so lax are checks on the legal status  of  immigrants  that many illegal immigrants were not only able to come to this country but somehow jump the huge queue social housing . But even if there was only a small number of such people in the GT it would still raise embarrassing and serious questions about the UK’s immigration control and the checks that Councils make on applicants for social housing.  The problem vanishes if the immigration status of GT survivors is removed from the table.

The Government appears to be having second thoughts about illegals. Today (6th July) it is reported that those here illegally can stay for up to a year  if they help the  Public Inquiry and come forward before the end of August.  The Government has also announced a relaxation of benefit rules such as not paying the “Bedroom Tax” if the flat they  move to is larger than the one they have lost.

The support given to  survivors

Apart from the £5 million from the taxpayer mentioned above  many millions more  have been raised by people making private donations to various funds for the survivors. From these sources those who lost a family member or members will be awarded £20,000 for each family member lost.

This raises two problems. The first is the efficiency and competence  and indeed honesty with which the money  is distributed.  Already one  person Anh Nhu Nguyen has been charged with obtaining money by falsely claiming to have lost his wife and son in the fire.  It is alleged that he got   nearly  £10,000 from the fund set up to disburse the £5million from the taxpayer before the alleged fraud was discovered. Nguyen  is also charged with getting food and various goods from  different charities by making the same allegedly false claims.   If this is true, and it is only an allegation at present,  then it casts grave doubts on the competence of those giving out money or goods, whether they be public servants or private bodies such as charities.  There is also the possibility of corruption by those controlling the money either through straightforward embezzlement or through collusion with claimants. The  Government should make it clear now that a strict audit of the disposal of the money from the taxpayer and from private donations will be made.

The second problem is the question of creating a precedent. The private donations are one thing but does the £5 million given by the taxpayer mean that anyone losing their home through fire from now on  will be treated similarly? Don’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen.  The reality is that the Government response to the GT fire has been wholly exceptional. 303 people died in fires in England in 2015-16. It would be very  interesting to know what Government assistance was given to the survivors and family members not involved in these  fires or indeed to anyone who lost a home and/or family members in other accidents.

The treatment of the GT  survivors  has been exceptional also in the assurances given by the Council of finding new accommodation within or near the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Most dramatically ,    68  newly built permanent homes have been purchased  in Kensington Row,  an upmarket development in the borough, for a reported cost of £10 million.  These  will be offered to the GT residents by the end of July.  (Some of those  who had paid £1 million plus  to live in the non-social housing part of the development greeted the news  with dismay).  Again the question has to be asked would people suffering  the loss  of a  home on an individual basis be treated like this?

The  mainstream media response

The UK media response has been rather odd. Both the GT  itself and the immediate area in which it is set have  many people drawn from  racial and ethnic minorities. Since the fire  many of the GT residents interviewed are,  judged by their accents or by biographical information they have provided,  first generation immigrants. Shocking as the fire was I suspect that there will be quite a few native Britons who have sought and failed to get social housing   who will be  wondering how it is that first generation  immigrants have been able to get such accommodation when tens of thousands of native Britons have failed to do so despite  being on Council housing lists for many years.  Understandably  the allocation of  very scarce social housing  to immigrants  causes a great deal of resentment amongst the native white workingclass and increasingly amongst the native white middle class who struggle to pay ever more extortionate private rents.

All of this leaves the UK  mainstream  media with a dilemma: on the one hand they want to trot out the usual politically correct cant about the joy of diversity, how enriching it is, how the sun would fail to rise were it not for the huge number of immigrant workers in the UK and so forth.  On the other hand the UK media is rather twitchy about publicising the reality of exactly how much social housing goes to ethnic and racial minorities and generally it is reluctant to show parts of London (or parts of other cities such as Leicester) where the number of white faces is  startlingly  small.(Astonishingly  in these supposedly non-discriminating  times there are  a considerable number of housing associations in the UK which restrict tenancies to particular racial and ethnic groups  – needless to say  white British or white English housing associations have the same degree of existence  as unicorns).  This is because the  mainstream UK media  know that the reality of what is happening to the UK is  both dismaying the native population and is at odds with the multicuturalist politically correct happy clappy  internationalist story the media – especially the broadcast media – regularly sell.

The result of the competing desires and concerns of the media  in this particular set of circumstances was a nervous and muted commentary on the heterogeneous nature of the GT and its environs at the beginning gradually expanding to more adventurous praise of the joy of diversity as time passed and mediafolk thought it was safe to bring out the old political correct mantras because  the ghastly nature of the event had  naturally  engendered  sympathy for the victims.

The  serious issue to be addressed

Stripped of  all the political posturing and ineptitude there is a very serious issue  to be addressed.  Something has gone very  wrong. Individual tenants and the  tenants association for the GT  had raised concerns about fire safety before the fire. Not only was no action taken but the block was recently renovated which resulted in the cladding of the exterior of the building with material which was flammable. Apart from burning the cladding may have both intensified the fire because it provided insulation and it could  also have funnelled the flames upwards.

But there is something missing from the Grenfell Tower story. If the type of cladding used  was seriously inflammable it would be reasonable to expect many fires involving such  cladding because it has been widely used not just on residential housing but also places of work, hospitals, sporting venues and other places of entertainment.  Yet the type of fire seen in the GT  – a very rapid movement over most of the block – seems to have been unique in the UK, certainly in its intensity and tragic results..  This suggests there is something novel about the GT case which acted as an accelerant, that is,  something which drove and intensified the fire. I would suggest the  novelty was  the communal gas supply system which was put in recently which  had reservoirs of gas on each floor. . Eye witnesses to the fire described how as the fire reached a new floor explosions were heard. This presumably was gas exploding. If so that gas may well have been the accelerant energising the fire upwards.  None of this is to suggest the potential dangers of cladding should be ignored. However, it is important to understand exactly how the fire got out of control so rapidly and to make a rational assessment of the dangers of fire other blocks with cladding present.

Could more have been done to save people during the fire? One thing which might have saved at least some of those who died was not done. It was very simple: get all the tenants to flood their flats by blocking their sinks and plugholes and  turning their taps on at full blast. That would to a degree have obviated the fact that the upper stories could not be reached by fire brigade  hoses.  The fire brigade were in contact with many by phone and could have used a loudhailer system to alert everyone else who was in the building.

Did  Right-to-Buy influence fire safety in the Grenfell Tower?

There is a complication I have not heard raised since the fire, namely, the effect of the policy of Right-To-Buy on Council properties with multiple habitation. Right-To-Buy is a Government scheme which originated under the Thatcher Government in the 1980s. It is a confidence trick whereby public assets (houses and flats)  are sold to individuals  who have been a  tenant  in a Council or housing association property for some years  at a hefty  discount from the market price . Hence, the Government has sold that which belongs to everyone .

The effect of Right-To-Buy on a  tower block such as  GT means that responsibility for the block will no longer be straightforward. Take a concrete example. Suppose a flat which is privately owned is above one which is Council owned and the top flat floods the flat below. The Council will say the owner of the flat which caused the flooding is liable to make good the damage to the Council flat . Easier said than done often enough because many flats bought under Right-To-Buy are sold on to private landlords who are looking for rental property. Such landlords are frequently very difficult to either track down or if they can be contacted, less than willing to make good the damage.  Consequently, the tenant can  be left in limbo while the freeholder and leaseholder fight it out.

The complications caused by  Right-To-Buy may have been behind the extraordinary fact (according to the Council) that Grenfell residents said they did not want  sprinklers fitted  because of the upheaval  this would cause. This could have been the leaseholders of flats whether occupying or renting out a  flat  did not want the sprinkler systems fitted because (1) their leasehold agreements would normally require the leaseholder to make a contribution towards their cost and/or (2)  where the flats are  rented out  at commercial rates the installation of sprinklers might  make renting them out difficult while the installation was proceeding.

But even if the tenants/leaseholders  said they did not want sprinklers or any other fire safety precautions  the Council as the freeholder  should and could have overridden their wishes.

The failure of the authorities to produce a comprehensive list of those who died

The failure of the authorities to produce a list of those who died in the block is unsurprising because  potentially there  are eight classes of people who could have been  living there :

1. Council tenants and those living with them.
2. Private tenants and those living with them  in flats purchased under Right-to-Buy  which are still owned by the Right-to-Buy  purchaser.
3. Private tenants and those living with them in flats owned by people  who bought  a flat originally purchased under Right-to-Buy  from either the Right-to-Buy purchaser or from someone who purchased the flat after it had already been purchased  from the Right-to-Buy purchaser. For  example, the Right-to-Buy purchaser sells it on the free market to someone who then in turn sells it to someone else on the free market.
4. Leaseholders and those living with them who purchased under Right-to-Buy and live in the flats they purchased.
5. Leaseholders and those living with them who live in flats which they either  purchased   from someone who obtained the flat under Right-to-Buy or  from leaseholders who purchased  the flat  after it was sold on following the Right-to-Buy purchase.
6. Those who have obtained control of a flat illegally. For example, someone obtains a legal tenancy then “sells” the tenancy to someone who assumes the identity of the “seller” and takes control of the property and pays the rent. Alternatively the flat might simply be given to a friend or family member without telling the Council. The Council will assume that the person living under a bogus name is the original legal tenant
7. This who are living illegally in a sublet part of a flat. These are sublettings which have not been authorised by the Council.
8. Visitors in the GT on the night of the fire.

Of those eight categories the only readily identifiable people will be the Council tenants  and the leaseholders who live in the  flats.  These details would have to be known to the Council because rents have to be collected and leaseholders need legal documents showing  they are the leaseholder and  giving the conditions of the lease.  But  that would only provide one person per flat  whose name would be  known to the Council.

The Council will also have details of leaseholders who were renting out properties.  However, leaseholders who rent out are often difficult to track down because their contact details are not up to date or they use a company to manage their properties.

Even with Council  flats the position is not necessarily simple (see 6 and 7) . Flats may have been taken over by people other than the legal tenant or part of a flat may have been  sublet illegally. The Government has  announced that there  will be an amnesty for illegal sublettings but whether those who have illegally sublet know about the amnesty or trust the promise is another matter.

There is a further fly in the ointment. There may be people from  the block who are  illegal immigrants and consequently are reluctant to come forward to identify themselves. Nonetheless, it is not unreasonable to think that if there are those here illegally they will still be  reluctant to come forward.  As mentioned above  Theresa May and Sadiq Khan’s  have given assurances that no check will be made on the immigration status of any resident of the GT.  However, it is probable that those who are illegally here will like the  illegal subletters  either not have heard the assurances or do not believe them.

Notwithstanding these difficulties the Council  has many sources of information which should allow them to build up a fair picture  of how many people were killed in the fire and who was living there. It is probable that a majority of the flats were  legally occupied Council or leasehold properties.  Even if only 50% of the surviving  residents have  made themselves known to the Council  they would be able to give  not only information about  those living with them  but at   least basic details of their near neighbours.  In fact the situation is much better than that with the Council saying that they have spoken to someone from 106 of the 129 flats in the block.  This should allow  a well founded estimate of the people who lived in the block and  their identities.

In addition the Council will have  Council tax records, the electoral register, social work records .   Internet searches on databases such as the Electoral Register  or even simply putting a tenant or leaseholders name and address into Google  are worth a go.

If it proves  possible to circumvent the privacy  provisions of the Data Protection Act,  what could  be very effective would be  the setting up of a website with all the known names of tenants, leaseholders and any other people already identified as resident in the tower block with an invitation to the public to send in any details of others  they think lived in or  were simply visiting the building on the night of the fire.

To date the death count is 80,  but “Police investigating the Grenfell Tower fire have recovered 87 sets of human remains but cannot confirm they are from 87 individuals.”

What is a plausible number of  residents  for the GT?  Reports say around 600. If that is correct it looks as though quite a few have simply gone AWOL.

The overall impression the aftermath of the   fire has left

The first thing to note is the unpreparedness of the Council.  They were completely out of their depth. The Council’s ineptitude was  made more potent by the leaping on the bandwagon of victimhood and blame by  all shades of the left from hard left activists to leading members of the Labour Party.  The Government , already in a profoundly shaken and demoralised state after the disastrous election result in June,  with a Prime Minister lacking precious little credibility  and the mainstream media making great play with the idea of the callous haves not caring about the have nots, reacted with something close to panic and kept giving away  more and more ground.

But there was another force at work. Many,  probably the large majority of the residents of GT were either first generation immigrants or from  ethnic minorities born in Britain. This  brought political correctness into play. Imagine if the tower block had been overwhelmingly  inhabited by white Britons. Would the response have been so fervid? Would the hard left have been out in such force? Would a black MP like David Lammy have been accusing the authorities of covering up the true death toll? Would millions of public money have  been shelled out or 68expensive  flats  to rehouse those who had lost their homes?  Or would the authorities and the politically active have been much less interested? I will leave those questions to the reader to answer.

Racial preference in babies

Robert Henderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

Racial bias is natural

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

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

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

Beyond infancy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fact of identifiable races

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

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

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

Assortative mating

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

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

The hopeless and dangerous quest for behavioural change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2016 and the future

Robert Henderson

What has changed over the past year?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Henderson 17  12 2016

The Archers: an everyday story of feminist folk

Robert Henderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Henderson

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

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

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

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

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

How has this happened?

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

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

Labour substitutes minorities for the white working-class

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

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

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

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

Why did Zak Goldsmith lose?

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

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

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

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

And

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ken Livingstone, the Nazis   and the  Zionists

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

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

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

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

Where does this leave  Britain?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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