Friday, June 19, 2009

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Is Right (and the Guardian is wrong)

"They are showing their true enmity towards the Iranian Islamic state and the most evil of them is the British government."


I don't know about emnity towards Iran (haven't they been blowing up our soldiers and shooting them with Austrian sniper rifles ?), but he's right about our Government being evil. Takes one to know one, mind.

It's this bit of Guardian translation that gets me :

The mention of Britain triggered chants of "Marg bar Ingles" (Death to Britain) from the ranks of worshippers.


Death to Britain ? I know that foreigners often call the whole of the UK 'England', but there's no need for the Guardian to lie like that. They chanted 'Death to England' - or 'Death to the English'.

Which, funnily enough, is the motto of the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties.

Thursday, June 18, 2009

A Few T-Shirts From The Curate's Washing Line

This is what happens with "target culture".

Thousands of people are being stopped and searched by the police under their counter-­terrorism powers – simply to ­provide a racial balance in official statistics, the government's official anti-terror law watchdog has revealed.

Lord Carlile said in his annual report that he had "ample anecdotal evidence" of it happening, adding that such a practice was "totally wrong" and constituted an invasion of civil liberties.

"I can well understand the concerns of the police that they should be free from allegations of prejudice," he said. "But it is not a good use of precious resources if they waste them on self-evidently unmerited searches."

"I have evidence of cases where the person stopped is so obviously far from any known terrorism profile that, realistically, there is not the slightest ­possibility of him/her being a terrorist, and no other feature to justify the stop."

He later said that while the police should not discriminate racially, it was equally important that they should not balance the statistics.
"If, for example, 50 blonde women are stopped who fall nowhere near any intelligence-led terrorism profile, it's a gross invasion of the civil liberties of those 50 blonde women.

"The police are perfectly entitled to stop people who fall within a terrorism profile even if it creates a racial imbalance, as long as it is not racist."

Former British diplomat Sir Edward Clay told BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight programme he was subjected to a stop and search five weeks ago while on his way to work at the National School of Government, near Victoria Station in central London.

He said he had found the experience "sinister" and "intimidating". He told the programme: "I'm 63, I'm a grey-to-brown-haired white male, I'm 5ft 10 ins tall, looking extremely conventional."

The latest police figures show that ­117,278 people were stopped under section 44 in 2007-08, of whom 73,967 were white, 20,768 were Asian and 15,218 black.

To be fair to the police, they're trying to stop terrorism as best they can - and they haven't done a bad job since 7/7.

But they'll also get hell from the Guardian and the BBC if they only stop people who fit a likely terrorist profile. After all, no race or religion has a monopoly on terrorism, do they ? Terrorists come in all faiths and colours. Better be on the safe side.

Hence the massive waste of resources and the unnecessary harassment of whites. Where's our equivalent of Lee Jasper or Trevor Phillips - and why aren't the BBC and Guardian giving him airtime and column inches ?

Don't answer that.


They've come over here to spray the graffiti the locals just don't want to spray.

Sentencing, Judge Michael Gledhill said it was "appalling" to see "talented" graffiti artists sitting in the dock.

Would it have been OK had they had less talent ?

Ringleader of the graffiti gang - called the AMF - Marcus Wisman, 22, was sentenced to 16 months for conspiracy to commit criminal damage. Scott Mulhearn, 21, Adrian Hing, 22, Luke Vassell, 23, Jack Shumack, 24, and Alex Wisman, 24, were also jailed over the vandalism attacks between late summer and Boxing Day last year.


More on Patrick Foster, the Times journalist who outed the excellent police blogger Nightjack (and destroyed his fine blog, which had just won an Orwell Prize), here, here, here and here. He certainly seems to be a nasty and unprincipled piece of work. Should go far in journalism. But I hope his name, and what he did, won't be forgotten.


The Romanians being attacked in Belfast are Roma, or Gypsies, something that wasn't immediately apparent from the early reports. Not that that excuses bricking in their windows. Callers to the R5 phone-in the other day said that they were earning a living by begging in the streets. Press reports say they sell newspapers or flowers. I hope they're not like the flower sellers in Malaga or Barcelona.

I don't know about attitudes in the North, but in the Free State attitudes towards travellers are pretty negative.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Where Does All The Time Go ?

Blimey. No posts since Friday. Words literally fail me.

UK politics since the 1980s has moved like continental plates. Things happen day by day, building up pressure, until one day a seismic shift occurs. From the Salman Rushdie affair and the promotion of multiculturalism (exemplified by the persecution of Ray Honeyford) to the 7th July bombings was a long journey. Ideas have consequences. But after that day, without apology or explanation, our rulers turned their back on the past, becoming integrationists overnight. Admittedly they didn't quite know what this implied, and there was often, especially in the immediate post-7/7 period, a flavour of appeasement about them.

Some pressures continue, and the seismic shift has yet to occur. Heaven knows I could fill a blog every day with examples of dreadful crimes rewarded with risible sentences, or killers who just happen to have been on early release when they killed. This cannot last - yet it's lasted more than 30 years now. On this morning's BBC Today programme we had one tearful item on poor teenagers being held on remand (Prison Reform Trust) and another on the wonderful successes of a probation service that addressed the needs of its clients ('offenders') with acupuncture and aromatherapy sessions. What kind of earthquake will change that ?

The recent EU/Council elections were such a seismic shift. Now we're back to politics as normal, the drip-drip of stories, the quiet click of the ratchet. Occasionally reporting on this gets a tad depressing. Still, say not the struggle naught availeth.

The next seismic shift will probably be Eastern Europe. Like the poor Russians, they believed that capitalism would usher in a new era of easy living. Not quite as simple as that.



PS - one blogger who's still fighting the fight is the Lone Voice. I don't like his foul language one bit. But you have to admire his fighting spirit.

PPS - one other thing. After what they have done to Nightjack, like LV I am never buying the Times again.