This'll Be Interesting

Charles Clarke is already starting to make David Blunkett look like a woolly liberal do-gooder. The courts having binned "Britain's Guantanamo" on the grounds that it discriminated between British and foreign subjects (presumably that's why our immigration laws also seem to be in abeyance), we are now presented with house arrest without trial.

Not just for Jordanian clerics and Yemenis who may have been backpacking in Afghanistan around December 2001 ('a friend asked me to look after his Kalashnikov. I thought it was a breed of dog ...'). British subjects will also be able to benefit from this radical new form of 'care in the community'.

In a Scotsman interview, an MP of whom I've never previously heard, Stephen McCabe, floated an interesting refinement.

Speaking after the Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, announced new laws to control the movements of terrorist suspects, Mr Clarke’s adviser, Stephen McCabe, told The Scotsman he saw this extending to other groups suspected of using violence to further their ends.

The Labour MP said: "We can envisage this applying to animal rights extremists and the far-Right, for example.

"These people are locked up because we believe they are a genuine danger based on what we think is pretty reliable evidence, even if it cannot be divulged in a court of law."

There can be no doubt that ALF and its cohorts are literally terrorists. Anyone who has followed events in Newchurch, Staffs, where an entire village is the target, will note that although no-one's been shot in the back of the neck yet, a classic feature of Soviet and Nazi terror is present - the targeting of relatives.

It is only in the last few days that Mrs Hudson has finally succumbed to the pressure and left her job after activists turned their attention to her children and grandchildren. Three vehicles owned by her children were sprayed with paint stripper, causing thousands of pounds of damage. Her daughter Jayne also received a letter which warned: "If your mother doesn't quit within one week we can't be responsible for what is going to happen to you - so can you please display these yellow cards in the bedroom where your children sleep."

Yet even in this case the police and courts could stop the terror if they wanted to badly enough. Stake out the village at night with infra-red cameras and the SAS if need be. Photograph every car 24/7. Exemplary (maximum) sentences when you nail someone. You don't need house arrest - you just need the political will to actually enforce the existing law. Which they won't do.

The far right is a more interesting case. As far as I know no areas of England live in fear of BNP members bricking their windows/digging up their grandmothers/severing their power lines. All over the country ethnic mnority people live in fear of gangs of unpleasant, violent and foul-mouthed youths, but so do many natives. That's British culture, not far-right politics.

The measures include restrictions such as house arrest, curfews and electronic tagging, a ban on telephone and internet use and restrictions on who they can speak to.

A couple of months ago police arrested the BNP leader in connection with some unpleasant speeches by various unpleasant Bradford BNP members. As part of this investigation into traditional far-right practice (one of the Bradford people was filmed boasting of putting excrement through letter boxes) they took away Mr Griffin's computers.

Now I may be naive, but it's unlikely that the police were hoping to find the following Nick Griffin email.

'Hi Dave - Nick here. It'll really help us if you could put some excrement through Mr Hussein's letter box."

The police operation had all the hallmarks of a politically inspired trawling operation. Rather than investigating known wrongdoing by Mr Griffin, they were looking for evidence of unpecified wrongdoing which might enable charges to be brought. My bete noir Rod Liddle had more to say on this in the Spectator (registration required) a while back.

The BNP uses technology effectively, having the most popular website of any UK political party. I wonder if the government is thinking in terms of 'take the leadership, admin and web people away from computers and job done' ? (In passing, an arrest has been made after the BNP site was taken out by hackers least year. The alleged hacker comes from North-East Scotland - Caberfeidh country).

Watch this space - and also watch organisations like Liberty get in a twist as they defend the ALF and Captain Hook but turn the Nelsonian blind eye if the BNP are banged up. After all, if they wouldn't defend poor old Harry Hammond, they're unlikely to do much for Mr Griffin.

What's tragic in the long term is that the government will be destroying precious historical liberties for no good reason (and it would have to be a pretty damn good reason - like World War II).

As the Native Brit population declines, and natives become the minority in more and more areas, politics will almost inevitably become split on ethnic lines. The demographics are still pointing all one way, the Tories are unlikely to win this year and less likely to make major changes if and when they do ever win.

So in 20 years or so there'll be a nativist British party, representing a substantial proportion, if not a majority, of the native English. The only question is what the name of that party will be.

It may not be the BNP. It may be Veritas, or UKIP, or English Nationalist. It may even be the Tories, but it's unlikely. By the time they wake up to the fact that, with 80% of ethnic minorities voting Labour, natives being the minority in the major cities, and inward migration unchecked, they may never recapture urban seats, they may have been fatally compromised in the eyes of native voters.

So harassing the BNP is only delaying the inevitable, destroying liberty, and probably making some people pretty cross. 'After all, they locked us up without trial'.

Remember the destruction of our education system and the collapse of Brit culture. Will the Big Brother generation's kids care who's locked up, or what for, as long as there are TV cameras pointed at them ? People like Peter Hitchens, banging on about an Englishman's liberty, the Bill of Rights and 1688 will seem, as they do now, like survivors of some forgotten age.

It occurs to me that the browsing surfer may see this post as being pro-BNP, the happy days of 'I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it' being long past. My student generation are in power and 'no platform for fascists' applies.

I can only quote (approximately) from Mr John Wyndham, whose sci-fi book 'The Kraken Wakes' will have been read by many of my generation.

"If I should mention, as a matter of course, that autumn follows summer, that does not mean that I am all for getting a ladder and pulling the leaves off the trees".