The Coffee House Wall – 2nd/8th March

Posted on March 2, 2015

This is the Coffee House Wall for this week. I won’t say that it is your chance to communicate with us, as we are all in this together. It is, nevertheless, the Conservative Blog post that has no particular theme, and where everything is on topic. Let’s just remember that we want to avoid ad hominem attacks on others. We don’t want to engage with trolls. We want to moderate our language ourselves as responsible and mature adults, choosing to use fruity language only where it is necessary. This is our opportunity to show what the Spectator Coffee House Wall could have been like.

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444 thoughts on “The Coffee House Wall – 2nd/8th March”

  1. There are a couple of excellent articles in this month’s Standpoint. John Ware’s article on Islamism in the UK is worth a read.

    “If you want to know just how much our deference to Islamic sensibilities has muddled our Left-Right thinking, look no further than the current “Stand Up To Racism” campaign, sponsored by the MCB, trade unions and the Communist newspaper the Morning Star. One of its speakers last month was billed as Shakeel Begg, for the past 14 years the chief imam of the Lewisham Islamic Centre in south London.

    “Some of the speakers whom Begg’s Islamic Centre has given a platform to are very regressive indeed. Like the Saudi cleric Sheikh Muhammad Salih Al-Munajjid, who runs an online Q&A about Islam. Asked online what should be the punishment for gays, the sheikh quoted sacred texts saying they should be burned, or “thrown from a high place, then have stones thrown at them”.

    “Again quoting from sacred texts, here’s what the sheikh says about taking non-Muslims as friends: “Allah forbids all this.” Why? Because Muslims are “forbidden” from appointing kaafirs [disbelievers] to positions where they might “find out the secrets of the Muslims and plot against them by trying to do all kinds of harm” like “bring[ing] our children up as kaafirs”.

    “Why would Shakeel Begg, the imam of an Islamic Centre in London, which has given a platform for clerics like Sheikh Al-Munajjid, Murtaza Khan, Haitham Haddad and other regressives be seen by the “Stand Up To Racism” campaign as a champion of progressive thinking?”

    http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/features-march-15-john-ware-inside-nonviolent-islamism-jihadism

  3. The Sheikh should perhaps be offered burning or being turfed off a cliff. Onthe other hand does the bible not say similar things about Gays?

  4. Colonel Mustard (09:56/09:59).

    John Ware was the last of a lost generation of good TV investigative journos and continues to write interesting, albeit plaintive, inside skinny; even though he’s now apparently ostracised by the predominately leftist MSM.

    O’Bore is a sanctimonious windbag and takes himself far too seriously. The prolix piece you cite is a good example – even with the help of a co-writer (who she and why?). He needs a good shave with Occam’s razor. His recent outburst over the ‘ethics’ of advertisers influencing editorial content was naive, hypocritical and risible, IMHO. His physiognomy oozes the pomposity and disdain which riddles his cheesy writing like the mould in Danish Blue; except the latter leaves a less rancid taste in the mouth. Sorry Colonel, only half with you this time.

  5. I don’t like Oborne either but I thought his piece was interesting enough and well observed on the emotive creep of modern politics and journalism. That might be linked to the feminisation of our society too.

    The mass hysteria of worn on the sleeve emotion seemed to start with the death of Diana but now extends to almost everything from the tearful court steps bleatings of senior police officers referring to “victims” on chummy first name terms to the latest VC award hug – or “abrazo” if you will. Why? Where has it all come from?

  6. Scientists at Rolls Royce built a gun specifically to launch dead chickens at the windshields of airliners and military jets all travelling at maximum velocity.

    The idea was to simulate the frequent incidents of collisions with airborne fowl to test the strength of the windshields.

    American engineers heard about the gun and were eager to test it on the windshields of their new high speed trains.

    Arrangements were made, and a gun was sent to the American engineers.

    When the gun was fired, the engineers stood shocked as the chicken shot out of the barrel, crashed into the shatterproof shield, smashed it to smithereens, blasted through the control console, snapped the engineer’s back-rest in two and embedded itself in the back wall of the cabin like an arrow shot from a bow.

    Horrified, the Yanks sent Rolls Royce the disastrous results of the experiment, along with the designs of the windshield and begged the British scientists for suggestions.

    Rolls Royce responded with a one-line memo:

    “Defrost the chicken.”

  7. Kylie Minogue, Robbie Williams and Elton John were walking over a bridge.

    Kylie trips and gets her head jammed between the railings.

    With a sideways glance, Robbie pulls aside her G-String, and bonks her senseless!

    He stands back and tells Elton, “Your turn!”

    Elton bursts into tears.

    “What’s up?” asks Robbie.

    Elton sobs, “My head won’t fit through the railings!!”

  8. And this, old but still relevant:-

    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/seanthomas/100284604/the-self-loathing-of-the-british-left-is-now-a-problem-for-us-all/

    Does anyone know the origin of the attributed Jack Straw quote that the “English as a race are not worth saving”? I’ve tried to track it down but cannot find any solid evidence for whether he actually said it, when, where and it what context, although it is widely repeated and attributed to him.

  9. Colonel, in a 2000 BBC interview he seems to have said…

    “The English are a violent warlike people and the world would be better off without them”

    Which has then been paraphrased.

  12. Thanks for that Peter and Frank. The links are from 2000 which was shortly after the establishment of the Scottish parliament and the cynic in me suspects that it was probably a deliberately orchestrated New Labour attempt to de-legitimise any English nationalism from stirring as a result.

    It is also revealing that Conservative politicians either joined in or kept quiet. Trying to instil a sense of shame in being English seems to have been part of both parties multi-culti and devolution policies.

    A transcript of that radio programme would be most interesting.

  13. Peter from Maidstone – 13:23

    Does anybody know the “ethnic” breakdown of the British army.
    i.e. English vs Scots vs Welsh & Irish etc. ?

    Over the years, I have somehow gained the impression that, in percentage terms, the Jocks were always punching above their weight, so to speak, in their contribution to the total of enlisted men.

  14. If only the English were still ‘a violent and warlike people’ when, as is currently the case, England is under existential threat from inimical forces both foreign and domestic. Though most here would be able to define what ‘English’ once meant – and still means to them – the numbers who would accord with that innate, instinctive pride diminishes daily, as the stock is diluted and poisoned with the toxins of ideological and religious infiltration of the expedient unholy alliance of communism in cahoots with Islam. As it is, the nation has become confused and susceptible to the divers agitprop of the last half-century and the sinews of patriotism are both limp and ever-weakening. As the Colonel rightly implies pithily (and Oborne/Williams attempt to say with their abstruse hypocritical waffle) heart on sleeve appears to have replaced fire in belly as far as the English are concerned, the latter extinguished by the inculcation of Gramsci’s ethos by the Halls of Academe. And we are about to elect as Prime Minister the spawn of Adolphe ‘Ralph’ Miliband, one of the main architects of that subversive plan; his disciples still infest our education system and his son is about to usurp the highest office in the land, aided and abetted by an ovine electorate.

    https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ralph+miliband+grave+location&rlz=1C1AVNC_enGB559GB559&espv=2&biw=1280&bih=598&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=U3X0VKjwK86vabS1gbAP&ved=0CDMQsAQ

    Wake up ye Yeomen of England. The end is nigh!

  15. Frank P – 14:52

    “Wake up ye Yeomen of England. The end is nigh!”

    The “ice axes” and my garden fork are at the ready! However, I’d prefer to be armed with something less physically demanding. One of Baron’s AK47’s would do at a pinch but I’d really like a milspec IWI Tavor with some decent sights, thanks.

  16. EC (14:42)

    During my childhood the term English tended to encompass anyone residing in the British Isles who spoke the ‘King’s English’ (more or less), abided by English law derived from the Magna Carta and were allied to the general concept of law ‘n’ order and fair play. From the English viewpoint it certainly included the Scots and the Welsh, though because of the ‘problems’ of Erin’s Isle, less so the Irish. Whether the Scots and Welsh saw it that way, is another matter, but there is no doubt that one of the fiercest elements of our armed services comprised the Scottish elements. Seems a shame that as the Irish have become (sort of) assimilated, some Scots and Welsh seem to be hell bent on schism. (Not suggesting a linkage there, of course, but why do you think the antipathy has increased in recent years). The once gentle chiding between the nations of Britain seems to now be tinged with more corrosive acid than was the case 70-80 years ago?

  17. I have responded to Amin’s initial comment at ConHome:
    “As humans, all of us have a natural tendency to favour people like ourselves, and to feel somewhat distant, perhaps even hostile, when we encounter people who are very different from us.”

    ‘There is no limit to their depravity’ Islamic State FEED mother her own SON
    A DESPERATE mother was tricked into feasting on cooked meat from the body of her son by Islamic State militants, it has been claimed.
    http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/561385/Islamic-State-Mother-Feed-Corpse-Body-Cooked-Son-ISIS-Kurdish-Fighter

    No, apparently not. of course, the islamic state has NOTHING to do with islam. 🙂

    And people wonder why we don’t want any to return to Britain!

    Depravity hardly describes it. And now, after the report on Rotherham, we are due the Oxford report. It really is a nightmare, isn’t it?

  18. As far as the apportionment of credit or blame to the various ethnicities within our nation, I doubt that anyone would ever dare breakdown the ethnic or nationality percentages of those with English criminal records over the past century or so. It would make very interesting reading. I have a rough idea of how it would breakdown from first hand experience of dealing with the ungodly over the years via the streets, courts and various levels of records and criminal intelligence, forming the somewhat unscientific impression that people born and bred in England of parents of similar ilk were far less likely to commit crime than those of first or second generation immigrants. I guess national loyalty has something to do with it, but no doubt many factors contribute to the statistics (if indeed it is so). The incursion of the illegal drugs trafficking skewed the balance from the 50’s to the the time I retired in the 80s. I guess that phenomenon has continued exponentially.

  19. Frank P, the Armed Forces statistics can be broken down by ethnicity but I can’t find those that deal with place of birth, and especially the countries of the United Kingdom.

  20. Given that the Scots were amongst the principle architects of the British Empire, the history of border strife between England and Scotland and the fact that Scotsmen are not especially known for a lack of martial ardour or holding back from a fight I would say that Straw’s specific denouncement of the English as violent and warlike amounts to an incitement to racial hatred. If he really said it he should have had his collar felt under the 1976 Act.

    Which would have meant one of Labour’s finest being hoisted on a Labour petard by New Labour’s Armed Wing. Could you imagine a politician repeating that generalisation with any other nationality exchanged for ‘English’? And of course who is there to object as a representative of our nation?

    But of course we all know that Labour’s 1976 and 2006 Acts contrived to muzzle free speech were never intended to be part of an inclusive and impartially enforced rule of law.

  21. Out of the British national prison population, 11% are black and 6% are Asian. For black Britons this is significantly higher than the 2.8% of the general population they represent.

    Overall black prisoners account for the largest number of minority ethnic prisoners (50%).

    At the end of June 2012, 29% of minority ethnic prisoners were foreign nationals.

  22. Picking up on Frank’s criminality theme and without naming any names, if you check the backgrounds of some of the most prolific Anglophobes amongst the political classes who purport to speak for a “new” England and against the characteristics they attribute to the historical English you will find that they are seldom of English stock. Most of them turn out to be second or third generation Irish, Scots and Welsh or other non-English origin with plenty of baggage and shoulder-borne chips.

    It is also quite revealing how many Scots, Irish and Welsh MPs represent English constituencies.

  23. 13% of the Prison population is Muslim (against 4% in population). 13% are black (against 2.8% in population). 7.9% are Asian (against 5.8% in population). 3.9% are Mixed (against 1% in population). 73.8% are White (against 88.3% in population).

  24. Peter from Maidstone March 2nd, 2015 – 16:15

    The usual suspects would no doubt attribute that to institutionalised racism and persecution by the police and/or seek to excuse it on grounds of their alienation, deprivation, poverty, etc. If they can form a phalanx to find Jihadi John’s fault due only to factors beyond his own control rather than admitting that he is simply evil and freely chose the path of evil himself, then they would find it easy to excuse and justify lesser offences by blaming the shortcomings of the host nation.

    The left have been doing that all my life. They are drawn to the romance of insurgency from wherever it comes except if it is English and right wing whereupon their bitter condemnation knows no bounds. As we see.

  27. Peter (16:15)

    Of course the prison population represents only a small proportion of those convicted of criminal offences; much of the prison population comprises those involved in illicit drug abuse/trafficking and other crimes emanating there-from (crimes committed to obtain money to feed the habit).

    But as I say, no politician dare initiate an in-depth analysis of crime over the decades through an ethnic-nationality prism, as it might dispel the myth that ‘immigration is overwhelming good for the nation’. Whereas what we all know is that untrammelled immigration is good only for the dependency culture and, ergo, socialist politics. Which is why Cameron is no Conservative, as he has failed to stem the tide, miserably, as the libtard tail has wagged the Tory poodle.

    HTF we are going to change this descent into dystopia remains a mystery – to me, anyway. Colonel Kemp should enter politics – pronto! Or in view of his recent affiliations, perhaps I should say, “Keydeftik!”

    We need a mature, experienced, disciplined and charismatic leader to get a grip of our country – England (it may be too late for our nation – the UK) and lead us out of the encircling gloom. And unless we free ourselves from the tentacles of the EU we will eventually become its sewage farm and gigantic human-detritus-tip. It is a shocking indictment of both mainstream parties that we have come to this. With just 66 days to go, I still can’t decide who to vote for or indeed whether or not to vote at all.

    Let’s have a straw poll Peter. Who is voting for whom (or not) as of this day? Numbers only – no names, no pack drill :-). While it is a small segment of the electorate, it could give us an idea of what is in store for us in May, based on the discourse here, which has overwhelmingly been skewed towards UKIP for several years. Think about it Wallsters, before you opt.

  28. Emendation to para one of my 17:06: I should have added within the parentheses … and crimes of violence involved in turf wars arising from drug trafficking).

  30. Frank P @ 17:06

    Even if we could get many to vote here, Frank, it would tell you nothing about the outcome of the May count.

    The first past the post system ensures the outcome of the vote is decided by some 50,000 voters (out of 46mn registered voters), and this one cannot emulate in any sample whatever. The division of the popular vote has no bearing on the number of seats in the House.

  31. Frank P @ 17:24

    Didn’t we agree to avoid speculating, Frank? Or is it that only you could put forward questionable evidence, Baron is barred from doing the same?

    Just for the starters, how do you square your stance with the answer to cui bono, you, a former top cop? Come on, let’s have you, how does it benefit Vlad? (Amazingly, Mr. Boot, so keen on quoting from Greek and Roman greats, has missed the cui bono guide, too).

  32. Frank P – 15:16

    Why the antipathy between the home nations in recent years?
    As you say formerly it was usually benign. Today it is more strident and usually one sided, but still not something that the English care to over indulge in

    In recent years the manner in which Alex Salmond and his YEStapo conducted the run up to last year’s Scottish Independence Referendum has had a lot to do with it. In an attempt to garner votes they whipped up anti-English sentiment and racism to the point of criminality, imo. That has been where the drip feed of the corrosive acid has come from.

  34. Baron (17:28)

    No doubt that is right and it demonstrates what a duff deal our democracy is (and always has been). But it still leaves my question unanswered – what to do to stop the rot? And it would be interesting to hear from the active opinionate of this ‘ere little cabal about which way they intend to vote and the rationale for their choice. It may be a gnat’s piss in the Pacific, but it’s our wee world of activism and could be a sign of things to come. 🙂

    You never know, it might influence my decision, as I’m still a ‘don’t know’ at this stage and taking a look at the potential of the constituency in which I reside, there seems to be little shift in the current support for our local Tory MP, Henry Bellingham, who pulled off a coup here by supporting the campaign to stop a waste disposal furnace at King’s Lynn (it cost us ratepayers £30m in cancelled contract costs, but may in the long run be worth it). Anyway … you are right, the sheeples have, by and large, already made their choice based on the delusions we all act upon. The shitbags of sleaze have it sewn up and all we can do is watch it unfold.

  35. Baron – 17:42

    “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
    Lord Acton

    Discounting his previous god-like role and status, whether as PM or President, Vlad has been in absolute charge of Russia for 15 years. Regardless of his culpability, or not, for recent whackings the guy must surely be well on the way to being as insane as Robert Mugabe. There were sound reasons why the founding fathers of the USA limited their presidents to only two terms of 4 years in office. Looking at the current POTUS thank God (if you’ll pardon the expression) that they did!

  36. David Ossitt – 17:50

    Thanks, David. Interesting, but it lumps indigenous English, Scots and Welsh all together as “white”.

  37. Baron (17:42)

    We’re apparently having two conversations at the same time here.

    Right – “cui bono?”.

    Strident opposition to the kleptocrat capo can’t be too good for him, can it? So if that opposition is silenced (and feckin’ effectively in this case) isn’t that to Vlad’s benefit? Not only in the case of the deceased but ‘pour encourager les autres’, as Voltaire mused in his whimsical satire “Candide”.

    But then, as you say, every Russian doll conceals another … and another … but smaller and smaller, remember. And I was only passing on a link that I thought might interest you (albeit with a qualifying quip). So don’t be barking at me like a Tazi on heat.

    Like Bill O’Reilly, I report … you decide. 😉

  38. EC (17:43)

    One wonders whether the camaraderie and esprit de corps of WW1 & WW2 (and even earlier wars such as the Boer War and previous Afghan wars) between all the nationalities fighting under the British flag is still as strong as the numbers have been decreased and the previous groupings have been merged or even abolished. One never sees it discussed these days by serving personnel. Neither does the incursion of open homosexuality – nor women introduced to front line combat, get reported from the inside. I assume it is verboten to discuss these issues under disciplinary threat. But one wonders what ructions it has caused covertly among the rank and file.

    As far as my old calling is concerned there has been vigorous suppression of opposition to the sweeping changes and two generations have now passed since the cultural engineering commenced; it’s now accepted, begrudgingly, as a done deal as activists have taken over the levers of power and there is no way back.

    We’re ripe for plucking and boy! Are we being plucked?!

  39. Geopolitical contradictions:

    http://bernardgoldberg.com/believe-kerry-clapper/?utm_source=BernardGoldberg.com+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6e7d9c62eb-NEWSLETTER&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c1903183b6-6e7d9c62eb-284964857

    And remember that Kerry is in charge of the negotiations with Iran – and Clapper is the twat who looked like like a rabbit caught in in the headlights when he was being questioned by the Senate about the Benghazi debacle.

    I’ve been watching the re-run of Jeremy Isaac’s “World at War” series first broadcast back in ’73. Considering the gigantic cock-ups that were made during those campaigns I suppose we should comfort ourselves with the thought if we could get through that show and win (?) it, we can get get through even the Obama era and survive … can’t we??

  40. Frank P @ 18:24

    You’ve heard of this chap Nemcov before he got gunned down, Frank? Of Navalny, perhaps, of Nemcov, never. The guy hasn’t been on anyone’s radar, he was about as well positioned in Russian politics as is Peter Kellow here (you know who he without googling it?). He was disliked because of his past. Amongst his sins was a video recording of his asking for a large sum of money for writing an article favouring deals connected with his business interests well before Putin appeared on the scene. The opposition Nemcov was a part of is not what scares Putin, it has only a small following in the country, just google the composition of the Duma.

    A new speculative theory exercises Baron though, that of a struggle amongst the political elites in the Duma, of which the Putin’s grouping is the largest. The one who’s depicted in the West as the chief villain has been under increasing pressure from the communists cum nationalists to drop his attachment to Europe, cut off oil supplies, sever other ties, get rid of foreign capital and stuff like that, and align Russia much more with China, create a strong block of ‘the hungry’ nations. This block may take over if Vlad loses it, Baron reckons.

    In fact, many on the liberal Left in Russia are also far from united, the pro-American fraction is the smallest, (the ordinary Russians hate the American political elites) other fractions are more belligerent, dislike the sanctions, believe them to be a declaration of war by non-military means. This was the big problem for the liberals before the March 1 event planned by Nemcov, his murder united them.

    If you watch the only video clip of the assassination you may notice there is a strong flow of traffic before and after the murder, not when the killing took place. This hints that it may have been planned by a powerful insider group opposed to Putin that could manipulate traffic lights in Moscow. Also, the actual act of killing is obscured by the snow cleaning truck. Coincidence? Many of the cameras were off, apparently because of maintenance, even though there are supposed to be back-up cameras just for such eventuality.

    Does this suggest to you the one who strips to the waist is that powerful?

  41. EC @ 18:07

    Good point, EC, but you tell it to the Russian unwashed.

    We are told that hoi polloi of Russia have been brainwashed, confused, sidetracked by the pro-Putin PR machine. That’s bollocks, the ordinary people are genuinely backing the KGB colonel in a manner the Chinese have been content with their communist rulers in the last twenty years. They are richer, have more freedoms that ever before, could move freely in and out of the country.

    Not many in Russia compare themselves to the Americans or us, they compare with what the life was under the Bolsheviks or under Yeltsin, both in material sense and in terms of freedoms. Their salaries, pensions are not ideal, but immeasurably better than they were when Vlad took over. The wealth from mostly natural resources has trickled down sufficiently for people to be grateful. Baron’s claim that the Russians have never had it so good since the first sitting of the Duma in 1612 is right. Could they have it better still? Probably, but not if the Americans have anything to do with it.

    When the time comes, Baron will tell you a real story of business and corruption in Russia (he cannot say anything yet for the case is still ‘ongoing’).

  42. Frank P @ 18:24

    And another thing, Frank, how could you even think the poorly educated Slav would dare barking at you? You, the guru of this site, the wordsmith extraordinaire, the bright star on the horizon of deception, mendacity, shite? Arghhh

  43. Frank P @ 19:06

    Here’s another puzzle linked to the wooden Secretary of State. When told about the Nemcov’s murder he said: “Four men jumping out of a car, I think it was four, in the middle of Moscow in daylight is — is not sort of a common affair”.

    Why did he say ‘four men’ and ‘in daylight’? The murder took place at night, the recording doesn’t show four men jumping out of the car.

  47. EC @ 20:45

    The Americans will do what they please whatever the man says. They are playing a higher stake game, the survival of Israel is only a part of it.

  48. I’ve linked to RUSI’s site before, despite an irritating infestation of common purpose in recent years there are often papers of interest on various matters beside defence.
    In particular I found this one on organised crime in the UK to be both informative and depressing.
    Informative, in that it helps to explain why, in regions of real poverty and depression the numbers of BMWs and Range Rovers are as great as in Chelsea. Depressing, in that the forces of law and order are incapable of addressing the problem; due not least to the pervasive anarchism of political correctness and is corrosion of the justice system.

    https://www.rusi.org/publications/whitehallreports/ref:O54DB446798BA2/

  49. On Ukraine, Russia and NATO.

    ” Long before Putin came to power, Yeltsin had urged the west not to move Nato eastwards.

    Even today at this late stage, a declaration of Ukrainian non-alignment as part of an internationally negotiated settlement, and UN Security Council guarantees of that status, would bring instant de-escalation and make a lasting ceasefire possible in eastern Ukraine.

    Advertisement

    The hawks in the Clinton administration ignored all this, Bush abandoned the anti-ballistic missile treaty and put rockets close to Russia’s borders, and now a decade later, after Russia’s angry reaction to provocations in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine today, we have what Sakwa rightly calls a “fateful geographical paradox: that Nato exists to manage the risks created by its existence”.

    http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/19/frontline-ukraine-crisis-in-borderlands-richard-sakwa-review-account

    H/T Hitchens

  50. Noa @ 21:22

    Thanks, Noa, the link’s very useful, the argument of Sakwa ‘cool’, Baron wouldn’t disagree much, if at all, if asked, and if his view was worth listening to. You recall the barbarian’s analogy of the WW1, WW2 and the fall of the communist Empire? Sakwa’s line of analysis fits it well.

    This, for inst. is spot on: “As for Putin, Sakwa sees him not so much as the driver of the crisis but as a regulator of factional interests and a temporiser who has to balance pressure from more rightwing Russian nationalists as well as from the insurgents in Ukraine, who get weapons and help from Russia but are not the Kremlin’s puppets”.

    Baron will acquire the tome, read it.

  51. Noa @ 21:11

    It may be a coincidence, Noa, but not that long ago, Baron has been offered cigarettes at a price that differed noticeable from that charged by the one surviving independent tobacconist in the nearby town. He declined, said his weed used to be pipe tobacco called Balkan Sobranie, no longer made or sold here, in Europe available only in Switzerland. Amazingly, the guy said: you place an order, I’ll get it for you’. Baron declined, smoking as ‘an avenue of pleasure has been closed to him’.

    In Czecho, a box of 20 filtered Benson & Hedges, Carlton or any other leading brand retails around £2-00, in Russia is half of that, here the price is over £6-7 quid.

  53. Noa (21:11)

    The staple business of Organised Crime is based upon demand for illicit goods or services by the so called law abiding public. ‘Twas ever thus and ever will be. The mob adapts itself to those demands and buys immunity from corrupt politicians and police. The generations of crooks and cops come and go and the game reinvents itself with each of those generations, according to the tastes and mores of the day. No matter how the laws are enforced, adapted or changed, the game will go on as long as folks want naughty, or cheaper, or tax-free services. Gambling, commercial sex and pornography, loan-sharking, narcotics and hallucinogens are the life blood of OC. Legislation relating to each of these is in the hands of politicians; need I say more? Until politics and law enforcement become populated entirely by incorruptible
    public servants and the general public live according the ten commandments there will be no end to the lucrative business of Organised Crime. And new young crusaders of criminal investigation will continue to believe that they can change the game and clean the Augean Stables. God bless ’em. I was one one of those myself, once upon a time. May they forever go on trying and not get too disillusioned when they inevitably fail, as they must, I’m afraid, human frailty being what it is. 🙂

  54. Baron, you’re welcome. I may buy the book myself when it becomes available. If I do it will the two foot high pile of reading material awaiting my attention.

    Meanwhile the integration of UK military forces-and interests- into NATO and the EU proceeds apace. I fail to see how the UK’s active maintenance of Russia as a cold war enemy through the alliance benefits anyone other than Germany. As well as being demonstrably incompetent at their profession (witness Basra, Helmand) and their silent acceptance of the demolition of our military competencies), our military elite are as supine creatures to the teutonic hegemony of the EU as their political masters.
    If being a member state of the EU means, as German officers first said of the alliance with Austro-Hungary, then our continued membership of NATO means that the British corpses of future wars are increasing likely to have been suffered for no demonstrable UK benefit.

    The cause of this ramble? The following speech, by a senior British officer, Sir Adrian Bradshaw, Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe (WTF!), which I found disturbing in almost every way: the suppression of national interest, the commitment of resource without control of consequence, the controversial analysis of threat and treatment. Anyway, judge for yourselves, fellow Wallsters.
    https://www.rusi.org/go.php?structureID=videos&ref=V54E7621089708#.VPTXDSkjhFJ

  55. Frank P,

    Wise words, Frank, though the opportunities for illicit fortunes to be made seem to fall most notably to the new vibrant communities among us.
    The heroin trade and VAT carousel fraud industry are two roaring success stories for the Indian sub continentals that, for reasons best known to themselves, our political elites have failed to trumpet in their usual peans to diversity and ‘Asian’ business acumen.

    And I apologise for still not having responded properly to you yet. Most remiss and ill-mannered of me. The matter is pending. In mitigation I plead pressure of work, (self induced, as I didn’t have to de-retire) and family bereavement and illness.

  56. Noa

    My understanding is that the output from the newly revived Afghan heroin trade is in great part flown directly to Chicago. Why that town of all others, I have no idea.

  57. Baron,

    Noa remembers buying his packs of 200 Benson and Hedges for 30 Saudi Riyals (£5).

    A habit now long renounced, (although the desire for nicotine still recurs at odd moments). Gold tipped Balkan Sobranie I remember with as much affection as Gitanes and Disque Blue, far better tasting than British virginia tobaccos!

  59. Only for the ones who want to know:

    The proceedings of the Kiev Government, the minute taking is in Russian, (everyone in Ukraine speaks Russian, only a minority speak also Ukrainian). Peter Poroshenko, the President has Israeli and Swiss citizenship, Klicko, the Mayor of Kiev has German citizenship, Boris Kolomoisky (the richest of the oligarchs), the Governor of the Dnepropetrovsk region is a citizen of Israel and Switzerland, his deputy is citizen of Israel, and a chap named Valentin Nalivaichenko in charge of the Ukrainian Secret Service has a US citizenship.

    Amongst the many business interests of Poroshenko, there also is the largest chain of funeral parlours in Ukraine. Not a bad business to be in by the look of things.

  60. Malfleur,

    Perhaps its because Chicago is a hub airport and ideal for onward distribution by air, water and road.
    I’ve spent countless, long, tedious hours in the airport bar there, waiting for onward connections, having an O’hare of the dog…

  62. “NATO is increasing its pressure on Moscow by organizing bellicose provocations at Russia’s north-western border and announcing further training programs for the Ukrainian military forces. A few days ago, about 100 NATO soldiers participated in a military parade on the Estonian Independence Day, marching in full combat gear, just a few meters from a Russian border checkpoint. Estonia provides one of the NATO’s “spearhead” rapid response force bases, currently being developed under German leadership. It should soon be ready for deployment against Russia. At the same time, Great Britain has announced, it will join the USA in training Ukrainian military forces. The discussion of arms deliveries continues. NATO is now also taking an aggressive posture toward Moldova. “Russia could target Moldova,” the media affirms, quoting NATO’s Supreme Commander, Gen. Philip Breedlove. These unsubstantiated allegations are good examples of the western war alliance’s reaction to its waning influence. Disapproval of the EU and sympathy toward Russia have recently been growing within the Moldovan population.”

    http://www.german-foreign-policy.com/en/fulltext/58830

  64. Forgive me for a little levity on a day which the wall has been a little intense and serious, but the naughty niece has just weighed in with a whimsical contribution:

    When I was young I decided to go to Medical School. At the entrance exam we were asked to rearrange the letters PNEIS and form the name of an
    important human body part which is most useful when erect.

    Those who answered ‘spine’ are doctors today, while the rest of us are sending jokes via email.

  65. Baron 2nd, – 21:51

    “In Czecho, a box of 20 filtered Benson & Hedges, Carlton or any other leading brand retails around £2-00”

    It’s still a rip-off! I used to be sent to the garage to buy them for my dad…for 3/7.

    That’s three shillings and seven pence! 🙂

  68. Ostrich (occasionally) @ 23:31

    Baron remembers buying the upmarket brand Peter Stuyvesant in the 60s in twos and threes, that’s individual cigarettes, not packets. Now, he can only dream about it.

  69. “Let’s have a straw poll Peter. Who is voting for whom (or not) as of this day?”

    We need “game changers” to be elected to parliament in order to break the hold of the venal cabal of Lib/Lab/Con professional political parasites currently on the benches there.

    If we are talking about UKIP as the game changers here, then it is going to take some thought and A LOT of tactical voting by disaffected Labour and Conservative voters to get UKIP candidates elected. Are the electorate up to the job?

    The trouble is, if they do get elected then how long before the game changers “go native”?

    Thought for the day: Politicians are always waffling on about trying to reawaken or engage the public interest in politics to get people voting. To that end… Wouldn’t it be nice if a hung parliament resulted in just that! Might keep ’em on their toes 🙂

  70. I sadly live where Farage and Cameron do not have a prayer.
    I will vote Green, the best way of disposing our Blair worshipping laggard.

  71. Huktra March 3rd, 2015 – 09:18

    “I will vote Green, the best way of disposing our Blair worshipping laggard”

    Have you read their agenda or manifesto, they are insane.

    On the other hand Nigel Farage is completely sane.

  72. Baron March 2nd, 2015 – 23:58

    “Baron remembers buying the upmarket brand Peter Stuyvesant in the 60s in twos and threes, that’s individual cigarettes, not packets. Now, he can only dream about it.”

    After completing my Saturday evening news-paper round, I would be paid for that week’s work, five shillings, on my way home I would call in at a little corner-shop.

    I would politely ask for 5 Woodbine’s, these fives came in a little open top paper packet, the little old lady would every week without fail put 5 ‘Turf’ on to the counter and looked me in the eye, as if to say ‘we both know you are under age’ and I would then pay for the 5 Turf.

  74. Where I’m currently registered to vote they could pin a red rosette to a corpse, nobody would notice, and it would still get elected!

    FWIW I’m voting UKIP. Easy for me, but others might have a more difficult decision to make.

    [ I was going to use “nuanced” (I dislike that term) instead of “difficult” until I realised I might have to shoot myself. 😯 ]

  75. Baron 2nd, – 23:41

    “on paper Putin doesn’t have a chance, and hopefully, he realises it.”

    But budgets can often be trumped by the motivation (or lack thereof) of the troops. Russia has just spent several years watching NATO’s woefully organised performance in Afghanistan…they know what they’re up against, and that the NATO nations won’t put up a real fight until the enemy is across their individual borders…and maybe not even then!

  76. “”Before this week is up, we’ll be deploying a battalion… to the Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces for the fight that’s taking place,” stated US 173rd Airborne Brigade Commander Colonel Michael Foster said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC on Monday.”

    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-02/despite-russian-warnings-us-will-deploy-battalion-ukraine-end-week

    A commentator comments:
    “NidStyles

    The 173rd is not a training Battalion. It’s a combat unit.

    The field advisors and trainers are already in the Ukraine, they announced that like three weeks ago. This is a build up for open war.”

  77. And some good news:

    http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/mar/03/simon-rattle-appointed-music-director-london-symphony-orchestra

    After Obama has been arrested, he should be brought in chains to London and chained to a seat for all rehearsals and performances under Sir Simon’s baton. He should be forced to sleep on the site of the new concert hall for the orchestra which George Osborne is sponsoring. Of course upon completion of the structure, there would have to be an exorcism and ceremony of cleansing before the hall was dedicated.

  80. Not sure about this new idea if a compulsory levey instead of the licence fee to pay for the BBC
    It means that no-one will be able to escape paying for it.

    OK maybe a small levy for core functions, but the rest should be subscription.
    I am sure they could make i-player behind a paywall. and lumps of the BBC internet offering.

    of course the luvvies at the BBC are worried people will pay for the BBC if forced to. but when given the choice may well say they don’t want it. And that would wipe out a lot of the BBC’s revenue.

  81. Malfleur 10.59

    I agree that Obama should be forced to listen to Rattle’s work but only because there might be a small chance of him being a music lover and would therefore suffer possibly as much as I do when faced with a Rattle’s banalities! Really, the worst Beethoven conductor ever and everything else a mindless vacuity!
    And in case you think I’m some old stick-in-the-mud, for 20 years I worked with the best baroque orchestras and sang with Colin Davis and the LSO, though I didn’t rate him much either.
    I don’t want to rain on your enthusiastic parade especially when there is so little in the news to give any pleasure, but for me the problem is that once ones ears, heart and soul have fed insatiably by Beecham, Toscanini and Klemperer, inadequate poster boys like Rattle are put where they are to serve a different, non-musical narrative.

  84. Looks like there is some confusion over the difference between a Brigade and a Battalion.

    The 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team consists of a Brigade Special Troops Battalion, two Airborne Infantry Regiments, a Cavalry Regiment Squadron (1/91st), an Airborne Field Artillery Battalion (4/319th) and a Brigade Support Battalion.

    They have already deployed troops to Ukraine (200 in 2014 for Exercise Rapid Trident), Hungary (750 last month for Exercise Warlord Rock) and four companies to the Baltic states in 2014 for joint training and exercises with NATO forces.

  85. Emwazi family is questioned in Kuwait
    “The district of al-Oyoun, a few miles outside the Kuwaiti capital, was in virtual lockdown yesterday as the area where the Emwazi family lived was placed under close surveillance by authorities in the Gulf state.
    Stripped of their Kuwaiti citizenship in the 1990s amid accusations that they had sided with the invading Iraqi forces of Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, the Emwazis returned to the emirate after gaining British passports in 2002”
    http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4370480.ece

    Are the British authorities questioning any of the family or neighbours?
    Are the British authorities stripping them of their British passports?

    That’ll be the day.

  86. Word Hunt spectacular!

    Can you find the words ‘muslim’ or ‘islam’ in the following main article:
    ‘Indescribably awful’ child sexual abuse in Oxfordshire revealed as report finds as many as 373 girl may have suffered at the hands of vile sex predators
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2977034/Police-social-services-face-brutal-criticism-report-revealing-hundreds-young-people-groomed-sexually-exploited-gangs-Oxfordshire-15-years.html

    I did find ‘Asian’.

  87. RobertC March 3rd, 2015 – 12:03

    Classic. I bet they came here as asylum seekers too. I listened in disbelief to the news report that the murderer’s mother recognised his voice from the start, no doubt rushing to alert the authorities of the host nation she and her family were exploiting. And the British media insist on describing them as ‘Britons’ even though they are Iraqi asBidoon who lived in Kuwait and scuttled back there when it suited them.

  88. Have you noticed how the BBC refer to Mary portas partner as her wife, a word that was virtually banned for real wives of real men.
    But now she’s not a partner ,or any other once fashionable word to mean traditional values don’t count.
    No, she’s a nice homely traditional wife.
    Hypocritical bastards.
    Nothing new there then.

  90. Israel’s Prime Minister addresses Congress in 15 minutes time. That should be an event.

  92. RobertC
    March 3rd, 2015 – 12:12

    A quick glance and I saw Pakistani twice?

  93. RobertC
    March 3rd, 2015 – 12:12

    Having endured heckling here and on Speccie, I feel the most important piece of news today concerned the local authority

    From 2005 to 2013 it was under Conservative control. The Tories remain the largest party on the council

  94. Frank P @ 15:02

    The one thing the narrative of Mr. Boot misses on (Baron has furnished the link to his piece yesterday) is how did the assassins know the guy will walk after dinner across the bridge. Whoever was planning the assassination – the snow contraption, cameras off, the killers, the escape and whatever else was needed – must have known in advance Nemtsov will walk exactly where he actually walked. If the guy were to call a taxi, take the Metro, walk a different route, the preparations would be of little use.

    Also, watch this, please. it only takes a minute or so.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69Qwju5nJ-w

  95. Ostrich (occasionally) @ 10:25

    Good point again, Ostrich, but let us hope it will not come to testing whether you’re right or not. Another war in Europe would be a disaster for everyone. Baron’s motivation for kicking the Republic’s political elites for the shenanigans in Ukraine is to avoid a conflict, they seem to be doing everything to engineer one.

  96. RobertC @ 12:03

    Quite, Robert, and more to the point, is anyone looking whether there are more families like the Emwazis living here?

  97. Baron – 17:24

    “…how did the assassins know the guy will walk after dinner across the bridge.”

    Well, Baron, the female of the species is more deadlier than the male.

    “Oh darlink, it’s sucha beautiful heevnink, vy dont vee take a walk across the bridge to look at the pretty lights…” etc.

    I would assume that his young female companion was in on it until proven otherwise.

  98. The BBC pretending to be shocked by Oxford.
    It happened because they are part of the problem.

  99. Here are few some remarks from ‘The Weekly Standard’ on the ‘Manufactured Israeli – US Crisis” by 

Elliott Abrams (apologies for the length of it, the points, however, are well made):

    The crisis between the United States and Israel has been manufactured by the Obama administration. Building a crisis up or down is well within the administration’s power, and it has chosen to build it up. Why? Three reasons: to damage and defeat Netanyahu (whom Obama has always disliked simply because he is on the right while Obama is on the left) in his election campaign, to prevent Israel from affecting the Iran policy debate in the United States, and worst of all to diminish Israel’s popularity in the United States and especially among Democrats.

    First comes the personal relationship and the desire to see Netanyahu lose the election. Recall that Obama became president before Netanyahu became prime minister, and it is obvious that the dislike was both personal and political before Netanyahu had done anything. Obama does not like people on the right, period—Americans, Israelis, Australians, you name it. Obama also decided immediately on taking office to pick a fight with Israel and make construction in settlements and in Jerusalem the central issue in U.S.-Israeli relations.

    The second reason is Iran policy. The administration is desperately seeking a deal with Iran on terms that until recently were unacceptable to a broad swath of Democrats as well as Republicans. One after another, American demands or “red lines” have been abandoned. Clearly the administration worries that Israeli (not just Netanyahu, but Israeli) criticisms of the possible Iran nuclear deal might begin to reverberate. So it has adopted the tactic of personalizing the Israeli critique. Arguments that are shared across the Israeli political spectrum—that the likely Iran deal says nothing about Iranian ballistic missile development, says nothing about Iranian warhead development, does not require that Iran meet IAEA demands that it account for past warhead work, allows Iran thousands of centrifuges, will allow Iran to escape all monitoring and limitations after perhaps ten years—are attributed solely to Netanyahu and his election campaign. So Democrats are told they must oppose such arguments, and stiff Netanyahu, lest they contribute to his reelection. Clever, in a way, but of course completely misleading. And irresponsible when it comes to the deadly issue of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

    The third Obama administration reason for building up this crisis is also deadly serious: it is to use the current tension to harm Israel’s support in the United States permanently. All opinion polls in the last several years show a partisan edge in support: overall support for Israel is steady and high, but its composition is changing. More and more Republicans support Israel, and the gap between Democratic and Republican support levels is growing. President Obama acts as if he sees this as a terrific development, one that should be enlarged as much as possible before he leaves office. That way he would leave behind not just an Iran deal, but weakened support for Israel on Iran and everything else. Support for Israel would become less of a bipartisan matter and more a divisive issue between the two parties. It is not hard to envision Obama in retirement joining Jimmy Carter as a frequent critic of Israel, pushing the Democratic party to move away from its decades of very strong support for the Jewish state.

  100. EC @ 17:46

    Your assumption is fully backed by Baron, EC, she may have been duped because she was a staunch supporter of his. The question is ‘duped by whom’?

  103. One of the most depressing suggestions I have heard from a so called Prime Minister was today’s proposal that those in authority who ignore or willfully neglect to report child abuse should be imprisoned for up to five years. Apart from the dubious and legal practicalities of a law to implement these envisaged offences, does he not realize that by even making the suggestion, he has admitted that for 5 years he has been at the apex of an administration that has ignored and wilfully neglected to police and prosecute a vast national network of conspiratorial immigrant Islamic abusers of children and failed to ensure that local and central police and social services are equipped, trained and competent to enforce existing laws in relation to child abuse and sexual exploitation; that ultimately the buck stops with him and the previous incumbents of No.10.

    Go directly to gaol for five years, Mr Cameron, and do not pass “go” in order to collect your unearned pension.

    What a shallow prick is the oily spiv who masquerades as the leader of our land!

  104. EC & Frank:

    OK, explain, please. Did the poorly educated Slav use the word wrongly? He thought it meant ‘easily deceived, fooled’ that sort of meaning. He wrong?

  105. Frank P @ 18:40

    What irks Baron is another thing, Frank.

    What has led to so many vulnerable kids to suffer was the fear of being politically incorrect of those who should have been there for them. Get rid of the laws that encase the PC idiocy, and those in charge of the agencies for the young will behave as the job references require. We never had cases of this kind before the PC legislation got pushed onto the statute books, we will not have them again, if it gets removed. Far better solution that what he proposes, brainless twit.

  106. Baron – 20:00

    Hi Baron,

    There was absolutely nothing wrong with your spelling or usage of the word duped.

    All I was saying was that if I was investigating the case then I would not assume that the young lady had been duped.

    Frank P was just playing with words.

    eg. If you insert the missing consonant “m” into “duped” then you get “dumped!”
    >
    If she had been forced to be complicit then why leave her alive?
    Was she an FSB sleeper?
    Was it a reverse whack? i.e. Did he order it up for her because she had become a problem, but then the tables were turned on him ?
    Was it her Dad?
    Was it Vlad in person?

    The imagination runs riot with alternate scenarios…

  107. Frank P March 3rd, 2015 – 18:40

    Agreed. That stupid idea was effectively discredited on Daily Politics but unfortunately the clowns who rule over us think the answer to everything is either to throw money that they don’t have at it or to impose more knee-jerk bad law.

    The common law offence of misprision of a felony was abolished by the clowns who ruled over us then by the Criminal Law Act of 1967 in the face of cogently argued objections and subsequently the gap it left has had to be addressed with specific cobbled up offences relating to money laundering, terrorism, etc.

    English law has now been turned in a quagmire by forty years of foolishness because the more specific and tailored it becomes, a new law for each new permutation of wrong doing whilst existing law goes unenforced, the less well served the public is by it. Someone once said that the more law there is the less it is respected or complied with – and isn’t that ever true as we look around us today.

  108. Stop whining telemachus. You have been heckling every top comment at the Speccie for years and in some threads heckling every comment. Your “comments” here amount to little more than heckling too – or deliberate provocations.

  109. David Ossitt – 16:11
    The P word was certainly not in the body of the article, though there is a faint chance it was in the sub-headline. However, the article has been updated (UPDATED: 21:24, 3 March 2015) and both the P and the M words are used:

    “Today Thames Valley’s Police and Crime Commissioner, Anthony Stansfeld, said the abuse could have been a ‘hate crime’.

    Mr Stansfeld said that ‘from the outside looking in’ it appeared the abuse was in some way racially motivated.

    Mr Stansfeld backed the review’s call to look into why so many Pakistani or Muslim people had been convicted of child sexual exploitation compared with other groups.

    He said: ‘I think it’s in two parts. One is did people ignore it because of the racial issues? There is no evidence for that in Oxfordshire.

    ‘The other is was there a racial element in the perpetrators doing this to another community?

    ‘I’m not an expert, but as an outsider looking at it I think probably there was.

    ‘It needs looking at whether this was hate crime. I think it most certainly could have been and it needs looking at.'”

  110. Colonel Mustard (21:35)

    Exactly right! When I was issued with my first Metropolitan Police Instruction Book in the early 1950s, it contained advice and directions about existing legislation , procedures and powers, that enabled me to deal, at the sharp end, with any conceivable unlawful behavior and bring the miscreants before the appropriate courts. During my first five years of policing in the heart of the Metropolis I never once felt that the law that existed was inadequate for the purposes of dealing with criminal dishonesty; theft in all its forms and gradations; violence and malicious damage; sexual exploitation solicitation and importuning; public disruption and domestic disputation, while keeping the Queen’s Peace.

    The law was also sufficient to control the flow of pedestrian and vehicular traffic and allow people to lead productive lives comparatively unimpeded by excessive police control.

    Most of that was achieved at street level by experienced and dedicated constables, who were comparatively unambitious personally and effective whether on foot or in well organized police car patrols and managed by the light touch of experienced sergeants and Inspectors who patrolled with them. I never lacked the backing of senior officers nor did I resent the occasional admonition if I cocked up, because policing is always a learning process at all stages of service from police constable to Commissioner (or Chief Constable). The disciplinary strictures were then firm but fair and morale was high.

    Because petty crime was dealt with effectively at street level comparatively few criminals reached organized crime status back then. Mr Bigs were rare and even those who achieved such ‘status’ did their share of porridge.

    Magistrates dealt on a daily basis with petty crime and neither police nor offenders were routinely represented or hindered by the interference of shysters. It worked well without them. When legal advice became necessary in more complicated circumstances, the police retained its input and its authority – and rightly so.

    In the intervening 60 odd years between then and now things have deteriorated beyond belief. What was once an apolitical system of policing and public order has become a politicized and catastrophic travesty of what once existed providing all the law abiding among us with a secure and pleasant modus vivendi with comparatively free and untrammeled movement.

    Politicians of all stripes and the legal beagles who have corrupted our system should hang their heads in shame.

    But the small cadre of venally corrupt senior police officers who in the 60s and 70s exploited the changes in law, which enabled mafia connected organized criminals to build vice and narco based empires first in London, then nationally and internationally, by selling The Job up the river are even more to blame, because they provided the Gramscian Culture Vultures with an opportunity to undermine The Job by effecting draconian changes needed by leftist politicians and jurists to effect their politucal purposes and plans. For those of us who witnessed this from the inside and were betrayed it was a heartbreaking experience. Some of us fought from within to reverse the process and made some headway, but the counterculture warriors have now won and I sincerely believe that it is now irreversible and the quality of life for our issue will be commensurately damaged as a result.

  112. Monday 3 March 1661/62

    ….

    I am told that this day the Parliament hath voted 2s. per annum for every chimney in England, as a constant revenue for ever to the Crown.1

    Footnotes

    Although fumage or smoke money was as old as the Conquest, the first parliamentary levy of hearth or chimney money was by statute 13 and 14 Car. II., c. 10, which gave the king an hereditary revenue of two shillings annually upon every hearth in all houses paying church or poor rate. This act was repealed by statute I William and Mary, c. 10, it being declared in the preamble as “not only a great oppression to the poorer sort, but a badge of slavery upon the whole people, exposing every man’s house to be entered into and searched at pleasure by persons unknown to him.”

  113. UKIP criticise Cameron for failing to meet immigration targets
    *
    Fine but we will hear today what he will do
    *

    “The UK Independence Party would not set an “arbitrary immigration target” if it helps form the next Government, Nigel Farage has said in an article for The Telegraph.
    Mr Farage – who is making a major speech on immigration policy on Wednesday – also said Ukip would seek to close the “open” border with Europe and try to attract doctors and skilled workers from Commonwealth countries. ”

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/11448037/Ukip-will-not-set-arbitary-immigration-targets-says-Nigel-Farage.html

    *

    So no targets

    But let us poach doctors who have had expensive training from countries, many of whom are poverty stricken and have inadequate health infrastructure

  114. Colonel Mustard
    March 3rd, 2015 – 21:37

    EC
    March 3rd, 2015 – 09:05

    “Let’s have a straw poll Peter. Who is voting for whom (or not) as of this day?”

    Not heckling; I nail my colours

    Will you

  116. I refer back to the main news yesterday about the Oxford Rapes/Abuse
    There was a lot of comment linking this to Islam
    But it is not related to Islam but cultural norms in Asian Societies
    A BBC programme to be shown Sunday 8th at 8pm will show this clearly in relation to a predominantly Hindu Society

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-31710244

  117. Labour’s candidate for the London Mayoralty, David Lammy, was on BBC Newsnight last night giving us a glimpse of his law ‘n order policy.

    It’s all relative apparently. Shoplifting is a heinous crime when perpetrated against corner shops but it is not such a big deal when perpetrated against supermarket chains (operated by old whitey) and therefore, he said, the felon should treated more leniently in the latter case.

    If that wasn’t enough then at the last gasp Evan Davis called in John Sopel from Washington [@38min] to conduct some sneering at Netanyahu and anti-Israel bashing on behalf of the hurt feelings of Princess Barry.

    I hope Evan has got a head for heights because if Israel goes then we all go, and Evan may well find himself entered for the Iranian high jump.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b054q5yt/newsnight-03032015

  118. Teletubby@March 4th, 2015 – 08:06

    So the paedophile mohammed and his witterings in some book have nothing to do with it then?
    Have you not heard of thighing?

  119. EC 3rd, – 09:05

    “Let’s have a straw poll Peter. Who is voting for whom (or not) as of this day?”

    While not contravening the ‘Representation of the People’ act of 1947, whereby I, if I were to tell you, would be committing an offence, and you, by asking me, are committing an offence. 🙂

  120. Alexandr
    Mishkat al-Masabih states “So Aisha would be 19 years old at the time of the consummation of her marriage, and 14 or 15 years old at the time of her nikah”
    *
    This was the norm at the time

  121. Colonel Mustard – March 3rd, 13:04
    RobertC – March 3rd, 12:03
    “Classic. I bet they came here as asylum seekers too.”

    An inspired ‘guess’? Unfortunately, it’s probably a certainty.

    It is worse than I had hoped, but not worse than I expected:

    Jihadi John family’s 20 years on benefits: How it’s cost taxpayers up to £400k to house fanatic and his relatives in upmarket areas
    * Mohammed Emwazi’s family granted asylum in 1996 after leaving Kuwait
    * They have since lived in five homes, one of which was worth £450 per week
    * Neither his father Jasem, 51, nor mother Ghaneya worked while in Britain
    * Westminster City Council is still paying rent on family’s £600,000 flat
    * One landlord described the family as ‘parasites’ and ‘tenants from hell’
    * MPs blasted family for ‘abusing hospitality’ and say payouts are ‘disgrace’
    “Jihadi John and his asylum-seeking family have milked the British benefits system for 20 years, the Mail can reveal today.
    Housing the Islamic State executioner and his relatives in affluent parts of London has cost taxpayers up to £400,000.
    One landlord said Mohammed Emwazi’s family were ‘parasites’ and ‘tenants from hell’. Incredibly, they are still believed to be pocketing £40,000 a year in handouts despite there being no sign of them in Britain.”

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2978334/Jihadi-John-family-s-20-years-benefits-s-cost-taxpayers-400k-house-fanatic-relatives-upmarket-areas.html

    Do the Bishops have ANYTHING to say about these ‘poor’ ‘asylum seekers’, wasting our money, when it could be spent on the really ‘needy’, and not spent training people to kill Christians.

    Is that the same ‘Christianity’ that the Bishops profess?

  122. Ostrich (occasionally) March 4th, 2015 – 09:51

    That sounds a bit of a rum do. You should vote according to your conscience! That’s, of course, if you happen to be conscious at the time.

  125. Serious Case Review into Child Sexual Exploitation in Oxfordshire: from the
    experiences of Children A, B, C, D, E, and F
    Approved by the OSCB February 26th 2015

    “For national consideration:

    i. The DfE should review ‘Working Together’ 2013 to ensure it gives sufficient weight to investigation and disruption aspect of safeguarding children at risk from CSE

    ii. Relevant government departments should consider the impact of current guidance on consent to ensure what seems to be the ever-lower age at which a child can be deemed to consent (for example to treatment) and attitudes to underage sex are not making it easier for perpetrators to succeed

    iii. With a significant proportion of those found guilty nationally of group CSE being from a Pakistani and/or Muslim heritage, relevant government departments should research why this is the case, in order to guide prevention strategies.”

    http://www.oscb.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/SCR-into-CSE-in-Oxfordshire-FINAL-FOR-WEBSITE.pdf

  130. Baron
    The last paragraph of Breitbart

    Some members of the family are still living in the UK and are believed to be claiming housing benefit, child benefit and student support. Kuwaiti authorities have accused them of knowing about Mohammed’s atrocities for six months. They are not thought to have given the security services any assistance in that time.

    So where are they and who is doing what to redress

  131. Frank P March 4th, 2015 – 11:23

    “Incidentally, the last paragraph and link in Kern’s chronicle would be comical were it not so spine chilling!”

    The first line of the last paragraph that Frank P refers to, is the first line below, this sentence had a highlighted link to more information that I append, headed ‘police seek man over derogatory Islam slurs on bus’.

    Finally, police in Bradford on January 29 launched a manhunt for an unidentified white male who allegedly muttered derogatory comments about Islam on a bus.

    Police seek man over derogatory Islam slurs on bus

    POLICE wish to speak to this man (right) after derogatory comments about Islam were made on a bus.

    Bradford Telegraph and Argus:

    Man sought over Islam slurs on bus

    The incident, described as a public order offence by police, allegedly happened on the 576 Halifax to Bradford bus, between 10pm and 10.20pm on Thursday, January 8.
    The man is said to have got on the bus and sat directly behind an Asian man, before muttering his comments.

    The suspect is described as white, aged 40 to 50, about 5ft 8ins tall, and was wearing a black woolly hat and black jacket that may have had a bit of red on it.

    We should all be appalled, day after day we read horrifying examples of how Muslims behave, be it ISIS beheading prisoners, innocent children raped in every area of the UK where Muslims reside, wholesale car insurance fraud, corrupt voting practices, benefit fraud, female genital mutilation and much more besides.

    We can all think of ways to smear Muslims.

  132. Baron
    February 23rd, 2015 – 10:32
    anne wotana kaye @ 09:32
    Your letter writing will make history, anne, and Baron admires you for it, wishes he, too, could use the pen rather than sending useless e-mails that get mostly ignored. The barbarian has wised up over the years, reckons it’s a waste of time, the letters end up in a waste paper basket anyway, the reply is seldom anything but a mixed bag of cliches, platitudes, PR speak.
    Dear Baron, admiration from one such as you is worn by me as a true badge of honour. Getting down to brass tacks, I am afraid you are correct in that we are mostly wasting our time, as these evil people are immune to what the public think, and continue in their wicked ways without a care. By the way, one piece of ‘good’ news. I see that neither Jack Straw nor Piss Pot Rifkin are accused of paedophile activities………

  134. “I hope Evan has got a head for heights because if Israel goes then we all go, and Evan may well find himself entered for the Iranian high jump team.”

    Whatever Iran can do it seems that ISIS can do better:

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2978890/ISIS-barbarians-throw-gay-man-building-bloodthirsty-crowds-Syria.html

    NB. Death by gravity, lynching, stoning, beheading, petroleum spirit etc.:

    No matter where and when these public events take place in the wonderful world of islam there never seems to be a shortage of pious moderate muslims prepared to show up and witness the grizzly proceedings – no doubt in silent protest.

  136. EC 08:27.
    Why as many as three? Given the gross overpopulation of this country, especially with society’s undesirables, then surely the strong case is to limit the benefit to two children only.

  137. EC 08:27.

    Why pay anybody to breed? The great unmentioned problem that lefties, greenies and the Climate Change wankers won’t face up to is that all the problems of this planet, real or imagined, are down to too many mouths competing for a finite resource.

    Africa remains a basket-case, totally unsalvageable and best left to die out if we can only seal its borders and keep the pollution in. USA seems determined, under the Great Nigwog, to fill itself up with ‘free stuff’ grabbers until whitey is wiped out and there’s no more free stuff left, at which point those of African descent will resort to type and flood into Canada and Mexico (and all points south).

    Europe is screwed totally because it’s knee-deep in murderous Islamists and being flooded by the day by self-displaced Africans.

    Here in the southern hemisphere, we have enough liberal tossers to spoil things. They are currently greatly troubled because Indonesia intends to rid the planet of two bits of human dross who planned to smuggle drugs. It’s Indonesia’s determination to stop these bastards stealing anymore oxygen that gives me hope. Orientals are not known for their tolerance and liberalism, so perhaps the future is slitty-eyed and yellow-tinged.

    Perhaps I’ll sit here surrounded by both noisy and quiet bigots and watch the rest of you fuck up your homelands in the name of political correctness. A little like the Aesop fable of the ant and the grasshopper, don’t expect to flee down here when you’ve thoroughly shat in your on backyards. You made your Muslim-infested beds, now you lie in them with your daughters and hope they’re don’t get raped too badly.

  138. Chris Morriss – 08:55

    “society’s undesirables”

    It has to be three because, just for starters, the likes Cameron & Clegg et al have more than two.

    I have to go out now, and haven’t got time right now to speculate on quite what you meant by “society’s undesirables” but perhaps, in order to save time, you might care to elaborate. Thanks.

  139. Clear Memories – 09:26

    Agreed, overpopulation id the elephant in the room. But not by europeans.

    “Why pay anybody to breed?”

    Why, indeed! Created by socialists, welfare dependancy has enslaved people since WW2.

    “You made your Muslim-infested beds, now you lie in them with your daughters and hope they’re don’t get raped too badly.”

    You, who me? Mm. If my memory serves me correctly you only retreated to OZ (Gold Coast?) a couple of years ago. Where you were resident for the previous 30 – 40 years I don’t know. Was it GB by any chance?

  140. EC
    March 5th, 2015 – 08:27
    Regarding child benefits, my non-politically correct solution would be most practical. The Anglo-Saxon race is dying out and Britain has been colonised by moslems and other undesirables, and soon their births will be in the majority. Family allowances shpuld be restricted to the British Anglo-Saxon population, those who are married and not dependent on benefits as a permanent way of life. Every encouragement should be given to these families: help with housing, work opportunities and the finest education for the children. This would cost far less than the funds leeched by all the freeloaders swamping this country and would be a good investment in the future.

  141. It’s a start:

    Senior NHS officials sacked following investigation into off-payroll earnings
    Ministry of Defence and the Department of Health fined a total of £1.5m after it emerged that they were not doing enough to stop staff being paid through companies and potentially reducing their tax bills

    “Last year, a total of 94 people across Whitehall had their contracts terminated because they were unable to “provide evidence that they were meeting their tax obligations”.
    Of those, 79 worked for NHS England, 12 worked for the environment department, two worked for the Office for National Statistics and one worked for the British Library.”

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/liberaldemocrats/11450613/Senior-NHS-officials-sacked-following-investigation-into-off-payroll-earnings.html

  142. I haven’t made any bed, “Muslim-infested” or otherwise. I grew up in one country and now find myself living in another with almost every change since being something I never voted for or was asked to consent to.

    And if I comment on it, let alone complain about it, a load of left-wing goons who seem to think they have a Marx-given right to call all the shots immediately stick labels on me, hurl abuse at me, wish me dead and tell me that I’m “on the wrong side of history”.

    Why should I flee from the country of my birth just because it is run by wet idiots for the benefit of left wing tossers? Fuck ’em all.

  143. EC – I left the UK in 2006, as the Country I grew up in no longer existed and worse still, I was expected, as a ‘small business man’ to pay for the shit hole I found myself in.

    After many adventures in mainland Europe, Africa and the Middle East, I found myself in the Sunshine Coast in Queensland (that’s a state named after a monarch, not one populated by woofters). It cost me $100,000, required a clean criminal record and a sound medical report to be granted residency here. The UK seems to let anyone in, especially if they’ve got some third-world illness (the more contagious the better) or some self-inflicted infection. And hard-working white folk are expected to pay for it. The hard-working immigrants don’t – they’re too busy shipping their wealth back to the sub-continent where they’ll retire to.

    In October, I shall qualify as a citizen. I shall take that, with a tear in my eye and murderous intent in my heart if I ever get near Blair or any other bastard socialist that destroyed my Country. I shall, like numerous other Brits, transfer my allegiance to this great empty land. Truthfully, the best of our once-great nation are here; this place will prosper because of that and so many of us here know the damage socialism and liberals can cause that we and our children will work to ensue it doesn’t happen here.

  144. telemachus @ 19:09

    As ad rem a question as they come, telemachus, but before answering it ask yourself another one. Who is it that created the system that enables these vile individuals to get money from people they are planning to do harm to? To get money legally, backed by the force of law. It is the lot you’re backing, a bunch of careerists who, whilst hiding behind noble sentiments, couldn’t care less about the plight of the unwashed.

  146. John birch @ 06:17

    Liddle’s excellent again, and not many on the Left are attacking him, which would suggest that winds may be changing.

  147. EC 5th, – 08:05

    “I hope Evan has got a head for heights because if Israel goes then we all go, and Evan may well find himself entered for the Iranian high jump team.”

    Or, perhaps, entered BY the Iranian high jump team? 🙂

  148. Clear Memories March 5th, 2015 – 10:36

    “I found myself in the Sunshine Coast in Queensland (that’s a state named after a monarch, not one populated by woofters).”

    Shortly before he died Alan Whicker did a television program that ran for quite a few weeks, based on his travels all over Australia, he ended his trip at the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, he summed up his report by saying that the Sunshine Coast was like the British working man at a Butlins Holiday Camp.

    Early in 2000 at Easter I had to fly out there to bury my Sister, nothing I saw on that brief trip persuaded me that Alan Whicker was wrong.

  149. Clear Memories @ 09:26

    In the last para, Clear Memories, you are coming on perhaps a touch too strongly. If Andy, the car parking giant had been here he may have retorted to your ‘you made your Muslim-infested beds, now you lie in them … ‘ with ‘Who? Moi?

    And he would be right for not all of us have backed the creation of this perverse world, in which common sense doesn’t get a look in.

  150. EC @ 09:53

    Apologies, EC, the barbarian has made the same point you did, waste of time and space. It happened because he read your posting after making his.

  153. Clear Memories @ 10:36

    And another thing:

    Is Port Douglas still standing? Baron’s favorite turf to relax when he had few days to spare in his working days.

  154. Are there Speccie subscribers remaining who post on the Wall? If so would they please copy ‘n’ paste and post here the Liddle piece linked above, which is blanked by a paywall? From the comments it appears to be worth a read, but not sufficiently so to add to the Barclay coffers. 🙂

  155. Having just watched the puerile and ever weirder Miliboy Minor throw down his gauntlet today and challenge the Camerloon to a duel, “anywhere, any time, any place!” may I suggest handbags at dawn in the courtyard at Dolphin Square – the loser obliged to give Cleggover a quick flip o’er t’wrist as the booby prize!

    All to be filmed by the Big Brother team and later broadcast on the Dave Channel.

    Politics is now beyond parody. If anyone has Richard Kemp’s phone number, please give him a bell and tell him the moment has arrived! It could all be achieved in a day without a single drop of blood spilled. Particularly as the Old Bill is busily distracted in a nationwide hunt to track down ‘a suspect described as white, aged 40 to 50, about five feet 8 inches tall, wearing a black woolly hat and black jacket that may have had a bit of red on it, who muttered something about Muslims on a 576 bus from Halifax to Bradford’. Just the moment for a coup d’etat, Richard!

  156. Jihadi John, Cage and the fools who give it money

    I had hoped to write an article this week demonising immigrants, but was sadly overtaken by events. Demonising immigrants is the charge levelled by charitable foundations such as the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust whenever anybody states how many people are coming into the country (and does so without a cheerful expression, arms aloft in triumph). But the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust is itself in the news, so I would like to spend a little time demonising them instead.
    You might recall that the trust has taken a bit of flak for having subsidised, with a grant, the organisation Cage, which was set up by the former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg to campaign for freedom for other Islamists. At a press conference, one of Cage’s spokespersons, Asim Qureshi — a middle-aged Asian man with a pious beard — announced that the famous Jihadi John, who spends his time decapitating people in Syria, was actually ‘extremely gentle and kind’ and ‘a beautiful young man’. Jihadi John, real name Mohammed Emwazi, had hung around the Cage offices, occasionally bringing the likes of Asim delicate and fragrant Middle Eastern pastries. There was some consternation as to why the Rowntree trust would support an organisation which appears to campaign for convicted terrorists and defend the likes of Boko Haram and Abu Qatada The answer seems obvious to me — because they are stupid middle-class white liberal dupes. But if you think that Cage is the worst of it, here are a couple of other organisations to which the trust bungs its money.
    How about the Irish National Liberation Army? Come on, you remember them. Murdered an estimated 120 people during the Troubles, including Airey Neave. Opposed to the Good Friday Agreement, opposed to the Northern Ireland peace process. So extreme that even the Provos think they’re mental. The INLA is the armed wing of the Irish Republican Socialist Party and in November last year the Rowntree monkeys bunged the IRSP £150,000 via the party’s prisoner release organisation, Teach na Fáilte. I believe that means ‘House of Welcome’ — although it could mean ‘House of Semtex’ or ‘World of Leather’; my Gaelic is a bit rusty.
    So there’s them. And then there’s JawaabUK. This was set up by a chap called Rizwan Hussain, a Bangladeshi broadcaster who had previously been the head of another charity, the Global Aid Trust. Rizwan was forced to leave it after an undercover operation by a television programme revealed that it was a nest of extremist Islamist maniacs. A preacher was filmed making ‘extremist’ comments and indulging in a spot of anti-Semitism, as you do. Rizwan subsequently decamped and set up Jawaab instead. The job of Jawaab — to judge from its semi-literate tweets — is much the same as that of Cage: to convince ordinary young Muslims that they are a persecuted minority, that the likes of the Islamic State have nothing to do with Islam and nobody should apologise for them, and that Islamophobia is a far greater threat to mankind than, uh, Islam. ‘The state has always been a racist colonial state’ was one of Jawaab’s more recent tweets. Kerching: sixty thousand quid from the Rowntree trust last November.
    So there you have it — just two more of Rowntree’s recent donations. You might be forgiven for thinking that any organisation which loathes this country and has connections to extremist murderers, people who want us dead, automatically qualifies for a grant from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Be they on the berserk far left (the IRSP) or the berserk far right (Cage and Jawaab). Although of course, being dense, the trust would not categorise any Islamic organisation as far-right. The trust think they’re all liberals, just like them. Misunderstood liberals, perhaps, but liberals all the same.
    Meanwhile, its brother in arms, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, seems to spend most of its time commissioning dubious social research to — um — prove that British people really, really like immigration and would be happy to see more of it, and that multiculturalism is the only way forward, none of this antediluvian stuff about coalescing behind ‘British values’, whatever they might be. The highpoint in its pro-immigration activities came between 1998 and 2007 — when its research was swallowed whole, and hungrily, by the then Labour government.
    Indeed, much though it claims to be politically neutral, its relationship with New Labour was symbiotic. A chief executive of the foundation later became an adviser to Gordon Brown, for example. And so over the course of Labour’s three terms in office, we had net migration of 3.6 million into the country, four times higher than over the previous 13 years. That this was a deliberate policy is beyond doubt — as Migrationwatch UK put it this week, Labour loosened immigration controls and imposed no transitional controls on the new A8 members of the European Union — and all of this done with little or no discussion and certainly without public consent. Nor was this receptiveness, this eagerness, for immigration stated in any one of the party’s three general election manifestos (for 1997, 2001 or 2005).

    ‘They’re called that because historically they had news in them.’
    Migrationwatch suggests that while Labour may have misunderstood the full impact of mass immigration, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that this was an ideo-logical commitment, even if it was not one which it cared to share with the general public. The consequence has been calamitous, both socially and economically. Those in the Labour party who worried about this policy were too frightened to speak out for fear of being accused of racism. Or maybe accused of demonising immigrants. Your call.

  157. What can one say?

    Guards for Emwazi family cost taxpayer £5,000 a day
    “The family of Mohammed Emwazi are being guarded by armed police in a security operation costing more than £5,000 a day after being moved to a secret location funded by the taxpayer.
    His mother, brother and three of his sisters fled the family home in northwest London two weeks ago when they realised that journalists had identified Emwazi as “Jihadi John”, the Islamic State killer.
    Officers from Scotland Yard’s counterterrorism command are providing round-the-clock security amid reports that Emwazi’s mother, Ghaneya, immediately recognised her son when she watched a documentary about the beheading of James Foley, an American journalist.”
    (£) http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4372813.ece

  159. Clear Memories – 10:36

    Politicians, both Blues and Reds, have been selling our country down the river for the last seventy years. With the exceptions of Winnie, SuperMac and Maggie, the short term thinking and venality of the political classes has done for us. Making a fast buck, arranging a “little pot of gold’ or for some overpaid sinecure before the next election sell by date is all they care about.

    Until UKIP came along I always voted Conservative. What more could any of us with families and jobs do?

    Colonel Mustard @10:07 sums it up better than I could ever put it.

    Queensland:

    1) I was sorry to learn that the population had gone mad and put Labor back in again.

    2) I was really disturbed to hear that Queensland had enacted draconian anti association laws. As with all totalitarian laws they were enacted on the pretext of tackling a “problem” that existing laws were perfectly adequate to deal with.

    Now there exists a law whereby if three law abiding bikers meet in a public place ( eg. a pub, cafe or even a funeral!) even if it is by chance, if they happen to be wearing their club jackets then, no ifs, no buts, they go prison! This cannot be right. The state should leave these people alone to ride, fight, get tattooed or even die …
    BUT if they interfere directly with society at large than and only then should the perfectly adequate existing laws be enforced.

    As with all totalitarian laws, these are easily extended to include any other group that “the authorities” don’t happen like.

  160. RobertC @ 14:49

    Not much, Robert, not much can be said about it, but one can certainly vote out those who created this insane construct. It is really down to the unwashed to revolt, vote against the incumbent quislings, or at least abstain from voting. Why don’t they?

  161. so where does the rowntree trust get its cash.
    Rowntreses is now nestle. I dont think they will be funding the trust.

  163. Frank P.

    As requested.

    Rod Liddle 7 March 2015

    Why I don’t feel charitable about the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust
    I had hoped to write an article this week demonising immigrants, but was sadly overtaken by events. Demonising immigrants is the charge levelled by charitable foundations such as the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust whenever anybody states how many people are coming into the country (and does so without a cheerful expression, arms aloft in triumph). But the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust is itself in the news, so I would like to spend a little time demonising them instead.
    You might recall that the trust has taken a bit of flak for having subsidised, with a grant, the organisation Cage, which was set up by the former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg to campaign for freedom for other Islamists. At a press conference, one of Cage’s spokespersons, Asim Qureshi — a middle-aged Asian man with a pious beard — announced that the famous Jihadi John, who spends his time decapitating people in Syria, was actually ‘extremely gentle and kind’ and ‘a beautiful young man’. Jihadi John, real name Mohammed Emwazi, had hung around the Cage offices, occasionally bringing the likes of Asim delicate and fragrant Middle Eastern pastries. There was some consternation as to why the Rowntree trust would support an organisation which appears to campaign for convicted terrorists and defend the likes of Boko Haram and Abu Qatada The answer seems obvious to me — because they are stupid middle-class white liberal dupes. But if you think that Cage is the worst of it, here are a couple of other organisations to which the trust bungs its money.
    How about the Irish National Liberation Army? Come on, you remember them. Murdered an estimated 120 people during the Troubles, including Airey Neave. Opposed to the Good Friday Agreement, opposed to the Northern Ireland peace process. So extreme that even the Provos think they’re mental. The INLA is the armed wing of the Irish Republican Socialist Party and in November last year the Rowntree monkeys bunged the IRSP £150,000 via the party’s prisoner release organisation, Teach na Fáilte. I believe that means ‘House of Welcome’ — although it could mean ‘House of Semtex’ or ‘World of Leather’; my Gaelic is a bit rusty.
    So there’s them. And then there’s JawaabUK, which was set up by a chap called Rizwan Hussain. The job of Jawaab — to judge from its semi-literate tweets — is much the same as that of Cage: to convince ordinary young Muslims that they are a persecuted minority, that the likes of the Islamic State have nothing to do with Islam and nobody should apologise for them, and that Islamophobia is a far greater threat to mankind than, uh, Islam. ‘The state has always been a racist colonial state’ was one of Jawaab’s more recent tweets. Kerching: sixty thousand quid from the Rowntree trust last November.
    So there you have it — just two more of Rowntree’s recent donations. You might be forgiven for thinking that any organisation which loathes this country and has connections to extremist murderers, people who want us dead, automatically qualifies for a grant from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Be they on the berserk far left (the IRSP) or the berserk far right (Cage and Jawaab). Although of course, being dense, the trust would not categorise any Islamic organisation as far-right. The trust think they’re all liberals, just like them. Misunderstood liberals, perhaps, but liberals all the same.
    Meanwhile, its brother in arms, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, seems to spend most of its time commissioning dubious social research to — um — prove that British people really, really like immigration and would be happy to see more of it, and that multiculturalism is the only way forward, none of this antediluvian stuff about coalescing behind ‘British values’, whatever they might be. The highpoint in its pro-immigration activities came between 1998 and 2007 — when its research was swallowed whole, and hungrily, by the then Labour government.
    Indeed, much though it claims to be politically neutral, its relationship with New Labour was symbiotic. A chief executive of the foundation later became an adviser to Gordon Brown, for example. And so over the course of Labour’s three terms in office, we had net migration of 3.6 million into the country, four times higher than over the previous 13 years. That this was a deliberate policy is beyond doubt — as Migrationwatch UK put it this week, Labour loosened immigration controls and imposed no transitional controls on the new A8 members of the European Union — and all of this done with little or no discussion and certainly without public consent. Nor was this receptiveness, this eagerness, for immigration stated in any one of the party’s three general election manifestos (for 1997, 2001 or 2005).
    Migrationwatch suggests that while Labour may have misunderstood the full impact of mass immigration, there was plenty of evidence to suggest that this was an ideo-logical commitment, even if it was not one which it cared to share with the general public. The consequence has been calamitous, both socially and economically. Those in the Labour party who worried about this policy were too frightened to speak out for fear of being accused of racism. Or maybe accused of demonising immigrants. Your cal

  166. Married women who are full time mothers…….[for a period from 3 months before the birth of their first baby to the 16th birthday of their youngest child]……..and who are Britons…….[to be defined;but basically from families who were here at the begining of the Queens reign]…….should if they have 6 children be given a medal and declared Heroines of the British People.If they have 10 children they should be given the title Baronet-In-Her-Own-Right.

  167. John Birch and David Ossitt

    Thank you for thwarting Frasier’s attempt to deny the blackballed exiles the benefit of the whimsy of the only columnist worth reading since the Scotia Nostra hi-jacked the magazine and turned it into the Barclay Bugle of the Westminster Bubble.

    Now I can enjoy the comments thereafter, as they are not behind the paywall. Thank you.

  169. Colonel Mustard (16:24)

    Thanks for one more eye-opener about the influence of Common Purpose. As investigative journalism is now defunct and political parties of all stripes are riddled with this pestilence, what can be done to alert the wider public? And do ‘the wider public’ even give a toss? Unlikely – as you can neither eat it, fuck it, or bet on it. 🙂

  170. Emendation to last sentence … ‘eat it, fuck it, inject it, imbibe it, smoke it or bet on it’. Remiss of me to deny hoi polloi some of the primary pleasures and diversions of New Brittania.

  172. Frank 1728
    Julia Unwin is one of the good eggs of our National Life
    She is on the side of the angels and among other things draws attention to our indifference to the plight of the disadvantaged

    “In the UK, 13 million people live in poverty, according to the New Policy Institute. This poverty is not restricted to adults. In 2012, Save the Children launched a campaign against child poverty in the UK warning that children were missing regular hot meals, failing to wear warm coats or shoes, and struggling to take part in school trips because their parents did not have enough money. The situation is dire: in 2012/2013, food banks run by the Trussel Trust gave emergency food to 346,992 people in the UK including 126,889 children, with the Trust stating that “rising food and fuel prices combined with static incomes mean more people are hitting a crisis where they can’t afford food”.

    As the Chief Executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Julia Unwin is better placed than most to write a book on the fight against poverty. At just over 75 pages, Why Fight Poverty? is not an in-depth analysis of poverty, but a short and easily accessible book, reflecting Unwin’s intention that Why Fight Poverty?, together with essays published in Prospect, will help “to kick-start a national conversation … about the need to eradicate poverty in the UK”. There are three questions at the heart of Why Fight Poverty? that this review shall explore: “Does poverty matter?” (Chapter 2); “Why is there little public support for solving poverty?” (Chapter 3) and “Is poverty inevitable?” (Chapter 4).”

    http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2014/03/20/book-review-why-fight-poverty-by-julia-unwin/

  175. Colonel Mustard – 16:24
    Frank P – 17:28

    Julia has been on Twitter in the last 24h tweeting about jobs going at one of her mates places – The Young Foundation, CEO Simon Willis.

    Dontcha just love this guy in his Hugo Boss suit waffling on about poverty and inequality.

    http://youngfoundation.org/about-us/

  177. Telemachus – 18:22

    If nothing else, I grant you that Julia and Simon and their respective organisations are living proof that there’s a shed load of money to be made out of poverty and inequality.

  179. I see Cameron is doing a runner from the idea of a head-to-head debate with Miliband, presumably on the advice of Lynton Crosby. This is stupid, because he will probably lose more votes from frustrated would-be viewers by refusing to appear, than if he were to appear and somehow messed it up (unlikely, given Ed’s lack of articulacy). Much as I hate Cameron, no-one can deny his smooth, snake-oil salesman eloquence, and possibly he will be giving Ed a golden opportunity to appear alone, with just Paxman to do the grilling. Ed must be praying for just that to happen.

  180. EC March 5th, 2015 – 19:17

    Again the face says it all. The dead eyes and that petulant spoilt mouth. But the words:-

    “We bring the tools of social innovation and disruptive innovation to bear on the structural and institutional causes of inequality . . .”

    Yeah right. In other words they are subversive revolutionaries who have taken it upon themselves to artificially re-engineer society to a communist model, thinly disguised with benign intent.

    Another Australian import whose cv is about as creepy as it gets:-

    ” . . . grew up in Australia and moved to London in his early twenties where he worked with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Society of Friends (Quakers) and Amnesty International before moving to Geneva to lobby the Human Rights committee on international torture negotiations. After studying PPE at Oxford as a “mature” student, he joined the UK civil service fast stream working in benefit policy, finance and operations. Simon spent the next several years as the Director of a large disability charity, after which he returned to the UK Treasury where he headed up their financial crime operation. He moved to the IT industry where he worked on application development and large data set anomaly identification.”

    WTF? Who funded all this? Revolving doors between the civil service and Third Sector – unelected uber apparatchiks greasing each others career prospects – provided you talk the right talk – or more correctly the left talk.

    “. . . he set up the European operations of mass social movement incubator, Purpose.com.”

    Mass social movement incubator? The mother ship has landed. Look at this page – it has Common Purpose written all through it:-

    http://www.purpose.com/about/

    About as subtle as a brick.

    “We are purpose.com”

    Translation:-

    “We are the Borg. Resistance is useless. You will be assimilated.”

  182. Frank 22.32 5/3/15
    Paranoia leads me to this
    http://biblehub.com/luke/4-24.htm
    *
    A moderate reasonable student of Coffee House Wall in 2011 became exercised by attacks from five particular posters including the lamented Richard of Moscow, Verity of Mexico and a shadowy character, Nicholas of flounce
    At the time he was reading again the Aeneid which took him back to the original Homer
    He was enormously impressed by the resolution to the abuse of Penelope by the suitors
    He saw the future
    Nicholas created him
    He is grateful

  183. At Westminster, SNP minds would not be focused on the well-being of the United Kingdom, but on their own party interests,’ he added.

    ‘In collaboration, the two parties would make common cause at the expense of their natural enemies. For Labour, that will be to pick the pockets of the Tory shires; and for the SNP, to boost Scotland at the expense of the rest of the UK.’

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2982025/Pact-Labour-SNP-end-union-warns-Major-Former-PM-says-coalition-two-parties-lethal-cocktail.html#ixzz3TaZOBHyY

    How do we move from a position of trying to rescue the Union to rule of England by the Scots?

  184. Meanwhile that evil pair Greening and Bennett are trying to get in on the domination
    *
    In her conference speech, Ms Bennett will say her party offers a “message of hope and real change” and would create “a political system that puts the public first”.

    The Green Party in England and Wales is fielding its largest ever slate of candidates, aiming to stand in 90% of parliamentary seats on 7 May. The Green parties in Scotland and Northern Ireland are separate organisations.

    Ms Lucas will say: “With the rise of the SNP, and with our own Green surge, we have the chance to forge a new grouping in Parliament. A progressive alliance.

    “Of course, in Scotland and in Wales we’ll be fighting hard for our distinctive values and policies. Just as we do against those individual Labour and even Lib Dem candidates with whom we have something in common.

    “That’s the nature of British politics under the first past the post system.”

    The SNP is riding high in the polls, threatening even the safest Labour seat in Scotland.
    *
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-31759733

  185. telemachus, your fairy story bears as much relationship to truth and reality as the original Aeneid.

    We well remember the bombastic way that you announced yourself at the old Wall and declared that you would impose your “reasonable” charter with its rules as to what might be said and what might not. Faced with a certain resistance to this attempt to dominate proceedings you began a sly and malevolent campaign of trolling which included scurrilous references to this site and its owner when you were not permitted entry here – oh blessed days. We also remember the incredulity at your assertion of being a “one nation Tory” amongst your many, many other subterfuges.

    “However I will not admit to the label communist. Although some aspects of the dialectic has attractions and any caring poster will agree that “to each according to needs and from whom according to abilities” is an appropriate philosophy of life , I recognise human frailty. This is why I was a founder member of the SDP and why I am in truth a One Nation Tory in the Disraeli Sybil tradition” (telemachus, Coffee House Wall, 5 Dec 2011)

    An aspiration to dominate the narrative continues to be the main characteristic of your presence anywhere and with breathtaking hypocrisy you dare to project that as a fault of innocent others.

    Your grasp of reality is suspect, your hubris fantastic and your desire to control every narrative is revealed by your daily “marking” comments here (dogs do the same thing).

    We’ll gloss quickly over your propensity for labelling and smearing those who dissent from your SWP orthodoxy, sufficient merely to raise eyebrows at all that in juxtaposition with your brazen Christian boasting.

    And as for being “reasonable”. If ever a word represented the direct opposite of actual telemachine practice it is that one. I have never in my long life encountered a person I would consider more UNreasonable. In fact ‘reason’ and ‘telemachus’ have become an evidence-based oxymoron.

    Now I suggest, gently, that you forget Nicholas and stop obsessing about him and his flounce. I also suggest that you accept the reality of pluralism in politics and that your welded adherence to the SWP (whilst masquerading as a “reasonable” Labourite) should not elevate you to the cloud cuckoo dementia of thinking that your brand of politics has a quasi-religious moral right to prevail over all others.

    Nicholas no more created you than any of your other cherished myths and misrepresentations. The Jihadi John gambit that you are somehow not responsible for the tedious misery that you relentlessly inflict won’t wash. You arrived as telemachus and you have peddled the same merchandise from day one. You are here now, as then, because you are, quite simply, a malevolent bully wrapped in a startling self-delusion that you are God’s gift to those “unreasonable heathen” who do not subscribe to a rather extreme, soviet-romanticised and Methodist infused left wing cant.

    God please keep madmen like you away from power.

  186. Thank you Colonel

    Two points
    *
    1.Using Emwazi to underline opposition to attempts to provide a countermeasure to sycophantic right wing orthodoxy is reminiscent of what today would be called the Jeremy Bowen unreasoned attack on a respected Prime Minister

    http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/mar/05/bbcs-jeremy-bowen-antisemitism-holocaust-card-twitter-benjamin-netanyahu

    2.In using that analogy you accept the concept of radicalisation. Many of us were along the way founder members of the SDP seeing the pathetic political skills of Foot. As David Owen sold out the reasonable became more reasonable

  188. telemachus March 6th, 2015 – 09:36

    1. Not really. The point I was making was that you were trying to justify your online personality and agenda as the “creation” of others and taking no responsibility for what you have, in fact, created entirely by yourself and for yourself. “A big boy made me do it and then ran away” is one of the oldest excuses in the book and it is not so much surprising that the left continue to peddle that excuse for almost every unpleasantness impacting our modern society but that they still expect people to believe it. As a left wing belief system (e.g. every ill perpetrated by individuals is the result of a “social construct” and not their fault) it has caused untold harm in Britain, from education, through the benefits culture to law and order. The “social construct” they scorn is invariably of the making of political or societal structures that the left opposes or disapproves of. The extent of their duplicity is evidenced by the fact that they will never admit to ills caused by their own “social constructs” within society. Thus the ghosts of supposed past crimes always loom larger in the socialist mindset that their own more recent and real abuses. They perpetuate and self-justify in a form of conspired mythology which operates in an absence of consolidated and cogent counter-narrative.

    2. I do accept the concept of radicalisation but I don’t believe that excuses the radicalised one bit. One of the most commendable traits of man is to be able to exercise self restraint in the face of provocation and the influence of evil. It is much less marked in our present society than it used to be, ironically when there are more laws and clamour for regulating behaviours than ever before. By undermining the masculine ethos the left have also robbed it of its protective inclinations and responsibilities.

    As to the SDP and permutations thereof there are simply too many left wing parties and political or politically motivated organisations in the UK, their number wholly disproportionate to their actual level of support within society as a whole. This speaks of the essentially controlling nature of the left. Determined to control everything they even fight amongst themselves for control of the right to control and thus fracture into power hungry factions – hence Labour, SWP, SDP, Lib Dems, Greens, Respect, SNP, etc., as well as umpteen campaign groups and the likes of CP and Purpose.org.

    The right are not even entitled to one fracture, hence the united leftist clamour against UKIP.

    But, to revert to the masculine ethos, whilst others might fumble over the true meaning of l’homme armé, there is no such confusion in the spiritual life of our own military order which patiently awaits the call to arms.

  190. Here we go again, wall to wall snot, if things carry on like this we will be a dead ringer for the Speccie in it’s current guise. I live just across the road from the Cage headquarters, I am sure if I told them I was from the Joseph Rowntree Trust and bunged them a few bob, they would slice the head of the resident troll. Conversely, if I changed my name to Ahmed, I could do it myself and the Government would pay my rent for the next ten years.

  191. UKIP should exploit this article:

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2982046/The-terrifying-prospect-Scots-ruling-England-real-MAX-HASTINGS-nightmare-scenario-facing-Britain-Election.html

    It is obviously designed to deter disaffected Tories from voting UKIP, but skilfully juxtaposed it could be used as a spur to garner UKIP votes from both Tory and Labour. Is there sufficient political cunning within the ranks of UKIP to craft it, though?

    Unfortunately, Hastings does lay out a very plausible scenario, regardless of his motivation.

  192. Cage director Asim Qureshi refuses to condemn stoning of adulterous women
    This Week presenter Andrew Neil appears shocked at failure to refute Sharia law
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11453846/Cage-director-Asim-Qureshi-refuses-to-condemn-stoning-of-adulterous-women.html

    He might even be shocked!

    http://www.cageuk.org/content/help-us-donating
    “You can donate by:
    …
    Call us on 0207 xxx xxxx or email xxx@xxx.org if you are based in London, we can arrange for someone to pick up the cash donation from you.”

    Or a lack of traceability needed? I was checking to see if it was a charity. 🙂

  195. EC

    Correction: 63 days to go to the BEGINNING of the result – of electoral insanity, Perhaps the ensuing chaos will cause the necessary uprising, but that sort of optimism is hardly justified given the vox pops of late. The vast majority of the indigenous population has been castrated/speyed and dumbed down and the invaders and quislings are on a roll.

  196. Frank P – 13:01

    If I lived in a Conservative – Labour marginal constituency then I’d vote Conservative instead of UKIP in order to keep rED out of Downing Street. BUT in terms of descent into chaos then does it really matter who wins? All we are talking about is the speed at which it happens , aren’t we? We need an uprising but, as you said yesterday, the majority of the electorate are too busy pleasuring themselves, in one way or another, to see or care what’s in store for them.

  197. EC (13:31)

    Well having asked everyone else here about their voting intentions, I suppose I should declare my own. Regardless of the fact that it will probably be a piss in the ocean in my constituency I shall vote UKIP. It’s the least anyone can do as a protest against the conliblab carve up and the quangocracy that has been fostered over the past 25 years or so. If we get Marxist Miliboy as a consequence, so be it! If Labour rigs up a deal with Wee Eck/Rab Nesbitt’s sister, then perhaps even the dimmest of our compatriots will begin to see the light; but regardless, the EU is in imminent danger of a catastrophic economic implosion, if not indeed an even more apocalyptic EXplosion if Moscau goes even more bonkers. And that little duo of scenarios doesn’t even factor in the insanity of Obama’s mishandling of Iran and the increasing chaos of the Middle East. Fuck knows what alliances will emerge from that lunacy.

    So imho the Old Farts Brigade should at least register a personal headcount of anti-EU support, regardless of whether UKIP is yet ready to govern or even has the potential number of credible candidates to become the main opposition. Europe is the millstone around our necks, excess immigration is destroying our country and the political class must be eventually dragged into freeing us from both.
    UKIP is the only party that is willing to do that (or so they say, so let’s give ’em a chance, at least). No other party deserves my vote. If enough of us espouse this COA, who knows? Maybe it will spring a surprise. Cynic though I am – I can still dream, can’t I?

    Here’s an old piece from Hastings that’s worth a timely reprise.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2036704/EU-disaster-blighting-lives.html

    I blow hot and cold about Max, but sometimes he get’s it right and his old Dad was a good ‘un!

  198. Stephen Mayberry

    Don’t fret, it’s like watching an ant crawl up the hind leg of an elephant with intent to rape.

    Just enjoy the Colonel’s exposition of the iniquities and follies of the ideology of the Left that the ant facilitates. You can skip past the provocation, which is obvious from the counter-attack. If mucus didn’t exist, we’d probably have to invent him to keep the bite in the English Mustard.

  199. Btw. I’m glad Peter didn’t accede to my suggestion a few weeks back, when a fit of frustration and low spirits I suggested that perhaps the time had come for the mucus to be scraped from The Wall. The Colonel has produced some of his best ever sallies since then. Luckily the pseudo bubble is too ego-inflated to realise he’s the trigger for the big ‘un, and that it’s not his puny personality that is the target, but the ideology to which he subscribes and exposes with his idiotic scribblings.

  200. I’ve been reading an interesting blog post about the White Rose, the German student resistance to Hitler. There was a passage in one of the leaflets they produced and tried to distribute…

    Aristotle, Politics: “Further….[a tyrant] should also endeavor to know what each of his subjects says, or does, and should employ spies everywhere…and further, to create disunity and division in the population: to set friend against friend, the common people against the notables, and the wealthy among themselves. Also he should impoverish his subjects; the maintenance of guards and soldiers is thus paid for by the people, who are forced to work hard and have neither the time nor the opportunity to conspire against him…Another practice of tyrants is to increase taxes, after the manner of Dionysius at Syracuse, who contrived that his subjects paid all their wealth into the treasury within five years. The tyrant is also inclined to engage in constant warfare in order to occupy and distract his subjects.

  201. ‘scuse the outrageous mixing of metaphors or even mataphives up there, but I know I can rely on you hardened warriors to unscramble the hyperbole and too much auto-emendation can cool the ardour, at times. 🙂

  202. James Delingpole [‏@JamesDelingpole 23m ago] reminding us of Cameron’s amazing lack of judgement in sponsoring this twat…

    “Isn’t it about time Baroness Token got Debaronessed?”

    http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/03/06/islamist-sympathiser-launches-muslim-manifesto-in-british-parliament/
    By Donna Rachel Edmunds

    A response from Austin Barry:

    Austin Barry • 10 minutes ago

    The Muslim Manifesto can be summarised in one word: Submit.
    Our response should also be one word: No.
    But our Ruling Elites’ response per Shadow Cabinet Office Minister Jon Ashworth is: “I do think this manifesto is really important and a great initiative. I will be studying it very carefully and I will be passing it on to our Shadow Cabinet.”

    Madness. Utter Madness.

  204. Re: @16:54 – Another robust response from “WhattheFK”.

    WhattheFK • an hour ago
    It’s been said before but needs saying again. We are being undermined by them and useful idiots in power.

    ”A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”

    Marcus Tullius Cicero, 58 BC, Roman Senate

    ogga1 -> WhattheFK • 37 minutes ago

    Whatte, if the likes of miliband,cameron, and clegg and their ilk were idiots there would be a viable excuse, the idiots are the supporters, the toxic trio are out and out purveyors of treachery, eu assets.

    WhattheFK -> ogga1 • 29 minutes ago

    I fear you are 100% correct. The leadership of the west are neo-Marxist thanks to the infiltration of the education system from the 60’s onwards. Saul Alinsky anyone! They think that using radical Islam to wreak western democracy will result in a Marxist revolution . It will end in head loss

    Saul Alinsky 12 rules for radicals

    * RULE 1: “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood. (These are two things of which there is a plentiful supply. Government and corporations always have a difficult time appealing to people, and usually do so almost exclusively with economic arguments.)

    * RULE 2: “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone. (Organizations under attack wonder why radicals don’t address the “real” issues. This is why. They avoid things with which they have no knowledge.)

    * RULE 3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty. (This happens all the time. Watch how many organizations under attack are blind-sided by seemingly irrelevant arguments that they are then forced to address.)

    * RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules. (This is a serious rule. The besieged entity’s very credibility and reputation is at stake, because if activists catch it lying or not living up to its commitments, they can continue to chip away at the damage.)

    * RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions. (Pretty crude, rude and mean, huh? They want to create anger and fear.)

    * RULE 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones. (Radical activists, in this sense, are no different that any other human being. We all avoid “un-fun” activities, and but we revel at and enjoy the ones that work and bring results.)

    * RULE 7: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Don’t become old news. (Even radical activists get bored. So to keep them excited and involved, organizers are constantly coming up with new tactics.)

    * RULE 8: “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new. (Attack, attack, attack from all sides, never giving the reeling organization a chance to rest, regroup, recover and re-strategize.)

    * RULE 9: “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist. (Perception is reality. Large organizations always prepare a worst-case scenario, something that may be furthest from the activists’ minds. The upshot is that the organization will expend enormous time and energy, creating in its own collective mind the direst of conclusions. The possibilities can easily poison the mind and result in demoralization.)

    * RULE 10: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog. (Unions used this tactic. Peaceful [albeit loud] demonstrations during the heyday of unions in the early to mid-20th Century incurred management’s wrath, often in the form of violence that eventually brought public sympathy to their side.)

    * RULE 11: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem. (Old saw: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Activist organizations have an agenda, and their strategy is to hold a place at the table, to be given a forum to wield their power. So, they have to have a compromise solution.)

    * RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

  205. EC (16:24/17:16)

    From Gramsci, through Alinski, to the Muslim Brother Project (Yusuf al Qaradawi) and now Mend (note the Livingstone link therein – through the Querishi shysteress) – TAAAI! Same game plan, same methodology, same covert crap, but now they are getting bolder and bolder as the generations get more polluted and they have more and more offices in the COP as the long march oozes out into tributaries that other queers could not reach. Mend? We should form an organisation called BREAK. I’m working on suitable words to flesh out that acronym. Suggestions please, something violent, cleansing and immediate. Time is getting as short for our country as it is for me.

  208. Fred on everything is a super site, but it seems to be having problems lately.
    I know it’s bizarre but when I can’t get it on the net at home, I can in a pub in town ???.
    The opinions are most definitely not correct, accurate yes , but not correct.
    Is the site being investigated.

  212. 1906
    An almost telemachian post
    *
    The whole tale:

    “The planet as a whole is doing what was expected in terms of warming. Sea ice as a whole is decreasing as expected, but just like with global warming, not every location with sea ice will have a downward trend in ice extent,” Parkinson said.

    Since the late 1970s, the Arctic has lost an average of 20,800 square miles (53,900 square kilometers) of ice a year; the Antarctic has gained an average of 7,300 square miles (18,900 sq km).”

    So a net 13,500 square miles loss

  213. “Despite the best that has been done by everyone–the gallant computer models of our academics, the diligence and assiduity of our servants of the State and the devoted service of our 100,000,000 useful idiots – the climate change situation has developed not necessarily to our advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against our interest.”

    (The Emperor with No Clothes)

  214. Frank P at 18-34……….only climate alarmists allowed on TV.

    This is the official policy of the BBC for which they have been advised by their chief scientific adviser.I forget the name but he is one of the guilty men from the East Anglia University Climate Change Unit involved in `climate gate`…….You remember certain e-mails were made public…….They got one of their mates to conduct an independent enquiry who found them `not guilty`.

    This man has told the BBC that free speech does not come into it because some things are so certain and the facts are so established that there is no doubt about the matter so `deniers`should not be given equal time.This is the point that has been made by BBC spokesmen to complaints raised on Feedback(Radio 4).

  215. Teletubby – every time you reach for the keyboard, you reveal your vacuity.

    The thickness of the ice sheets? The overall volume of ice? Like all changists, you just choose you data to suit and distort that which doesn’t fit.

    No warming for 15 years and counting. No rise in sea levels. Simple facts.

    You are what we call here a DF (and that’s not a Dear Friend)

  217. Telemachus 19:36
    So the Arctic has lost ice, while the Antarctic has gained it. The net result of this will be a lowering of the sea level, as the Arctic ice is floating on water and has no effect whatsoever on sea levels, whether it totally melts or not. The Antarctic is however a continent, so ice build-up there takes water out of the sea.

  218. Bloody hell! Gawd Save The Queen! The policemen who handed letters about the disturbing plans of three young girls, to THEM rather than the parents are about the level of the Keystone Kops. Competition – please CHWs compose sonnet about this to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Three Little Girls from a Seminary”.

  219. Labour and Censorship:-

    http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/vote-labour-get-lord-justice-leveson/16753#.VPrBTyhLr8u

    This is the really important bit:-

    “— A complainants’ charter, under which the new state-backed arbitrator would hear complaints not only from individuals alleging press mistreatment, but from ‘representative groups’ and third parties who don’t like something/anything they have seen or read. The members of the great and good on the panel would have the power to order the publication of a correction or apology, and to determine how and where it is printed. Look forward to future front pages edited by judges.”

    Oh, they love their freedom-limiting ‘charters’, eh telemachus? This is effectively a continuation of New Labour’s 1997-2010 assault on freedom of speech and freedom of expression (unrepealed by the Coalition) to make anything published concomitant upon no individual or pressure group being offended by it on their own or anyone else’s behalf.

    It won’t matter if the regulator ultimately finds in favour of the ‘accused’, the chilling effect of the risk of being dragged into a lengthy and costly “investigation” process will be enough to extend self-censorship and empower the intimidatory aspirations of the most vociferous and intolerant pressure groups. We live in an era where the usual suspects of the Left routinely seek to deny a platform to legitimate political parties.

    And don’t be fooled that this is just about the print media – it will be extended to blogs and anything else construed as “publishing”.

    It is a staggering, outrageous intrusion on the liberty of the English people and I condemn it and object to it without reservation.

    “Labour, the traditional top-down party of state socialism turned managerial machine, has never been a friend of press freedom and seems the natural ally of the Hacked Off clique. Harman’s previous insistence that her party is ‘not the political wing of Hacked Off’ prompted thoughts that the deputy leader doth protest too much. On the other side of that alliance, Hacked Off seems relatively unmoved by current revelations of widespread phone-hacking by the Labour-supporting Mirror newspapers, certainly compared to its feather-spitting hysteria over lesser offences by the despised, New Labour-deserting Murdoch press.

    “There is no need to imagine that the Conservatives are the freedom-friendly alternative to Labour and the Lib Dems (despite the presence of chief whip Michael Gove, the one politician to tell the Leveson Inquiry that press freedom was not in the gift of the good lord justice). The Conservatives are no more of a positive alternative to Labour than IPSO, the ‘tough’ regulator set up by the newspaper industry, is better than the system of regulation-by-Royal Charter. Both IPSO and the Tories have publicly swallowed the ‘Leveson principles’.

    “It was Tory prime minister David Cameron, after all, who set up the Leveson Inquiry/inquisition in 2011, haughtily announcing that, while it’s all well and good for the press to speak truth to power, ‘it is equally vital that those in power can tell truth to the press’. Cameron’s Tories were party, along with the Labour and Lib Dem leaders, to the late-night deal with Hacked Off that agreed the Royal Charter two years ago — the first system of state-backed press regulation in Britain since 1695.”

  220. Sometimes a sub-headline does encapsulate the whole story:

    DM: For Prince Charles, the dismay of seeing much less than he expected of his first grandson is heightened by his dreams of ‘mentoring’ the future king

  221. I wonder if the term “disruptive innovation” is behind the propensity of this government to suddenly announce new and unexpected legislation out of the blue and ram it through the system in unseemly haste and with little or no proper consultation or debate?

    God knows we have seen the rise of ruling rather than representative politicians in recent decades, but the high-handed arrogance of deciding, apparently on the back of a plain cigarette packet, what is good for us and then announcing it as a fait accompli, is something a bit new.

    Obama is doing the same thing, ruling like a king with divine right and issuing edicts, left but not right or centre.

    It smacks a bit of that ‘leading beyond authority’ trope. There is an agenda and those who peddle it have discovered that as long as it gets all the usual gobby suspects on side there is little to fear from just shoving it through regardless. Forcing private companies to publish their private staff salaries if they have more than 250 employees is the latest wheeze to nationalise our lives, shoved at us in the interests of gender equality that only seems to have been invented since the Coalition came to power.

    It’s a strange thing but as more gender equality has been rolled out more and more ‘inequality’ seems to have been invented.

    In 2013, the UK voluntary sector employed 800,000 people, an increase of 41% since 2002 and about 2.7% of the UK workforce. Almost two thirds were female – 524,000 – no gender equality being called for there of course. 57% of employees were engaged in ‘health and social work’ with average pay of £10.59 per hour, higher than the private sector but lower than the public sector.

    5.4 million are still employed in the public sector, despite cuts, with 57% working in education and the NHS, a 15% rise since 1991.

    Together with quango staff these three sectors account for over 16% of the votes cast in General elections, enough to skew an equal division of the remaining number into an infallibly winning combination. And we know the direction of travel there even if constituency imbalance and the blessings of devolution are disregarded.

    The population is being incrementally nationalised, one might say, by a new and more subtle form of national socialism.

  222. Colonel Mustard – 11:21

    Compared to the USA, and Obumers executive orders, we are in an inactive zone.

  224. Robert C

    Our country cannot be rudderless
    *
    Our leaders must lead

    Just as Churchill did

    Our leaders must leave their comfort zones and demonstrate acclimatisation to our ever changing world, developing a new brand, not hacking on the tired old brand like Cameron and Clegg do

    Our leaders must keep going, occasionally slowing down to make sure folks are along but never losing momentum and never going backwards

    When leading beyond authority, our leaders must recognise that the people have given the democratic mandate to exercise the power to change society for the better

    This may require stepping into the unknown and takes courage – courage to start and courage to continue

    However, it isn’t as simple as blindly ploughing a furrow. It requires analysis of the issues, challenges, risks and knowing who you can ride over

    The revanchists will always throw a spanner in your drive

    Resist them

    Our leaders must remember the folks who voted them in are central to making any change happen and they have given them a mandate

    They must maintain passion. This is what we folks long for in our leaders

    But passion alone is not enough our leaders need to keep the faith

    Clegg and Cameron have no faith, no ethos

    They must be replaced by those that do

  225. RobertC – 11:34

    AMAZON £79 scam? YES! They tried anyway.

    Despite David Ossitt’s warnings here a couple of months ago I fell victim to it about 3 weeks ago.

    I am normally very careful about everything I buy from them. I think that they have subtly changed their checkout screens and I inadvertently was signed up for their “Amazon Prime 30 Day Free Trial” At the end of the “30 Free Trial” is when they hit you for £79 – Bastards! (This may have also been associated with changing a delivery address associated with a credit card)

    The only reason I knew that something was amiss was that I was no longer being offered “Free Super Saver Delivery” which is what I normally opt for. Upon investigation I found that I had been signed up for “Amazon Prime” which includes 1st Class Postage. I cancelled immediately.

    Be Warned!

  226. I have just read an article in The Times (Thursday edition of the hardcopy) about University Technical Colleges. It is strange, but I cannot find it online; maybe because I do not subscribe.

    However, it is worth popping down to the library to read. It is on page 2 of the ‘Schools Out’ section. Here is what it is about in Norwich:
    https://utcn.org.uk/what-university-technical-college

    Decisions at 14, specialisation, often in STEM subjects, 8:30-17:00, business attire.

    The main criticism from parents has been, ‘Why didn’t we know about them earlier?’

  227. telemachus peddling his usual divide and rule, labelling tripe again.

    They are not our ‘leaders’ they are our representatives. Each party has a leader, supposed to lead that, not us.

    Cameron leads the government which is meant to serve us not ‘lead’ us, ‘nudge’ us or ‘nanny’ us, let alone seek to control us. We are free Englishmen.

    telemachus fails to understand this because he is wedded to the Stalinist “strong man” model of leader worship cults (Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Cuba, etc., you get the drift) where Big Daddy knows best what is good for us all.

    Here is revanchism:-

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revanchism

    Using the term to label current dissent from hard line socialist orthodoxy is ridiculous, especially when the label “Little Englander” is deployed against the same target.

    Don’t let the communists take over your drive. Resist them.

  229. Polar Ice Caps.

    The earth’s climate, and with it the polar ice caps, has been changing, fluctuating, unaided by humans, since the planet was formed.

    It is a matter of public record that “The North West Passage” was predominantly ice free in the 19th Century – before the invention of oil/coal power stations and the internal combustion engine.

    http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/06/climate-craziness-of-the-week-nw-passage-open-first-time-in-history-and-all-that/

    NB. Teletubby.

    The polar ice caps on Mars have be fluctuating much more noticeably than the earth’s, also without the help of humans. Damn those Martians and their fossil fuels!

    The Earth? Mars? Mm, I wonder what they have in common… The sun’s energy output is not constant, it is cyclical. Its energy output varies – not massively in astronomical terms like some variable stars – but it varies nonetheless – only slightly, otherwise none of us would be here.

  230. Those suffering under the Geheime Staatspolizei were glad of strong leaders to free them
    *
    Like Churchill
    *
    And yes like Stalin

  231. Those suffering under the Geheime Staatspolizei were suffering because of strong leader syndrome.

  233. EC March 7th, 2015 – 13:59

    “The foster couple (members of UKIP) in Rotherham at the centre of a separate storm claimed Howard Woolfenden, the council’s former director of safeguarding children and families, had taken the decision to separate them from the children in their care without prior discussion. The Equality and Human Rights Commission said the decision may have breached the parents’ right to freedom of political opinion. Mr Woolfenden was not available for comment.”

    “Four years of crucial files on child sex abuse in Rotherham have gone
    missing from a council archive, it was revealed today. Professor Alexandra Jay, who wrote the bombshell report revealing 1,400 young girls were abused in the town over 15 years, said minutes from key meetings have disappeared. Rotherham Council was slammed in her report for ignoring the scandal and its leader and chief executive have both since resigned. Appearing before the Commons local government committee, Prof Jay warned her inquiry had not seen all the key information.

    “We were concerned about particular missing information, from around the
    time 1999 to 2003 (during the New Labour government). This was a period when there were a group of dedicated professionals meeting and trying hard to address these issues,” she said. “These meetings were carefully minuted. Those minutes were never available. I asked for them on several occasions, and they couldn’t be found.”

    “Council officials took possession of the group’s database of victims and offenders, which showed that almost all of the abusers were Asian Pakistani men. The database has subsequently gone missing from the authority.”

  234. EC/Colonel M.

    There appears to be a serious conspiracy to pervert the course of justice in the facts adduced by the reports you (and others) have cited here – and also deep official corruption indicated on the part of those who appointed Woolfenden without exercising due diligence as to his fitness for the office. Or indeed what could well be his deliberate appointment, based on his record of obfuscation and collusion in concealing an evil conspiracy to abuse of children and official neglect, over many years. Sounds like a job for the police.

    [I wrote that last sentence with a straight face, BTW].

    One last thing: how come a headline like this in major newspaper of the UK’s second largest city is completely ignored by national TV news outlets, when the content involves such a major scandal?

    http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/howard-woolfenden-birmingham-city-council-8618091

  235. Colonel Mustard, looking in from abroad, I am just staggered at the way the Muslim paedo rape scandals have been airbrushed by out of existence by the media.

    I had to go to Breitbart to get even the expurgated version of events in Oxford:

    The details below – according to the report – are the expurgated version. Apparently there’s other stuff so horrible the report wouldn’t print it.

    They threatened to blow up my house with my Mum in it

    I was expected to do things – if I didn’t they said they would come to my house and burn me alive. I had a baby brother

    They took us to a field where there were other men who had come to have sex with us. I tried not to do it. There were five of them

    I took so many drugs – it was just a mish-mash

    Now I feel I was raped – I didn’t have any choice

    I wouldn’t ever have said no – they’d have beaten the shit out of me

    It was always Asian men

    I got deeper and deeper into this group

    Sometimes I was driven into alleys and woods and men would have sex with me

    I wouldn’t have done this if I was sober. That’s why the men gave us so much to drink

    Both men had sex with me lots of times – oral and vaginal

    I hate them… all they do is rape you… all they want is sex… it’s happened to girls I know, not me before you ask, I not like that

    When we were at the flats I knew I was there to have sex with whichever men were brought there.

    He urinated on me

    I was spit roasted [made to have sex simultaneously with two men]

    I didn’t want to go to the places to do what I did, but it was my job

    I went to London on my own to have sex with men they arranged

    The fear is still very real for me – though they are in jail I still check the cars

    This was going on for 15 years, remember. So where, you might wonder, were the police?

    http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/03/05/how-oxfords-police-and-social-services-allowed-370-underage-girls-to-be-raped/

  236. Take a look at West Mid CC’s CV:

    http://www.west-midlands.police.uk/keeping-you-safe/about-us/command-team/chief-constable/

    One paragraph stands out like a bulldogs bollocks:

    ‘He was the Deputy Chief Executive and Director of Policing Policy and Practice at the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) based in London. Where he was responsible for: research and evaluation, doctrine development and implementation and portfolio management’.

    DOCTRINE development!??
    WTF?

  237. It is said that the phrase ‘lying arab’ comes from the Muslim principle – which all good Muslims follow – of taqqya: lying to advance the cause of Allah.

    Taqqya was something the Prophet put into The Koran to guard against a reformation – as soon as the Muslims have the upper hand, they can always say: ‘We were lying – and we have religious licence to lie.

    While the British MSM are bending over backwards to hush hush all this stuff in the run-up to the election, the Shariagraph, Spectator and Daily Mail have all run features several times over about Sajid Javid, the new Baroness Warsi, the new ‘Muslim you can trust’.

    He was appointed culture secretary depite having no interest in culture outside Star Trek.

    Well, it didn’t take long for the new ‘Muslim you can trust’ to be found out:

    https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2015/03/04/the-bbc-having-lost-newscorp-as-a-cuckoo-in-the-nest-the-government-tries-a-flock-of-stool-pigeons-instead/

    Tell you what, Cameron. You can take Boris Kemal, Sajid Javid and you can stick them up your stinking Warsi.

  239. Apologies Frank!

    I am absolutely apoplectic and pasting that list on all the chatboards I visit. It is absolutely disgusiting – and that was the edited version.

    And your point before about ‘doctrine development’ in the police, this explains it:

    wycombewanderer

    All senior officers are now passed through the Common Purpose-run Bramshill academy and fast tracked during a series of promotions and changes of force or department.

    A year in CID as a chief inspector, transfer two ranks up to chief superintendent in another force, return a couple of years later as a commander and so on.

    Why does anyone think Rotherham and all the other scandals could take place?

    A lack of experience by senior officers who learnt all they know from the same common purpose sources as those at the top of social services and council officers.

    With diversity targets now rating above ability there was always going to be an issue.

    That’s one of the reasons I jacked the job.

    http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9461322/the-shocking-truth-about-police-corruption-in-britain/

  240. So it’s the infamous Grey Coat Hospital school for Nancy Cameron, eh? Infamous not because it is not a good school (far from it), but infamous because it was Peter Hitchens writing about Michael Gove’s decision to send his daughter there that led to the latter ignoring the former ever since.

    It is a state school that isn’t like 99% of other state schools, which is why Gove and Sarah Vine didn’t send their child to Burlington Danes school nearer to their home.

    Politicians get very protective, you understand, about their children. But this subject is so important because if they don’t want a cesspit state school for their child, why should your child get one?

    And, heaven knows, there are so many UK cesspit state schools.

    I know from a relative teaching in the top boys’ grammar school in Essex that the British parents who move to grammar school catchment areas are being misled by the belief that this will help their quest to get a place their for their child.

    So keen are they to retain their top results, the top three grammar schools in Essex long gave up ago on just taking in the indigenes and will now take any child from anywhere in the world – so long as they get the top marks in the exam.

    Foreign parents have worked out how to game the state-schooling grammar system in the UK in the way the indigenes once did.

    Little Raj can be privately educated up to the gills in India for a fraction of the cost it would cost in Britain, turn up for a grammar school exam in Essex and then get what is effectively a private school education for nothing by lodging with Indian relatives living in the UK – and the British taxpayer foots the bill for the lot of it, while their child – whom they could not afford private tuition for at primary school – goes to the cesspit state school up the road.

    This lady I mentioned has a form class in the top boys’ grammar school in Essex: there are four English pupils. The rest are all foreign. So the league results table looks like success for British children. Far from it.

    Peter Hitchens:

    That Old Sweet Song ‘I want for your children what I want for mine’. Sorry they can’t actually have it.

    hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/10/that-old-sweet-song-i-want-for-your-children-what-i-want-for-mine-sorry-they-cant-actually-have-it-.html

  241. Jihadi-loving Muslim women love their men because they quite literally get wet between the legs at the thought of ‘their man’ killing another woman’s children. It is a nasty, murderous Rosemary West-style turn on for these dreadful women. It is a sexual turn on for them.

    The womb itself is used to outbreed what they call the ‘kuffr’.

    And for the Muslim men? Why if they see an infidel female, she can be subjugated either just through sexual hurt, or by spawning another Muslim, or both. A lot of the Rotherham girls kept their rape-conceived babies.

    Leo McInstry tries to explain the role that sex has in subjugating infidels to Islam:

    The explanation is right in front of civic leaders if only they would pull their heads out of the sand.

    THE abusing gangsters almost all hail from Islamic culture, which holds women and non-believers in contempt.

    It is the same misogynistic, insular and macho outlook that has given us sharia law, forced marriages, honour killings, female genital mutilation, the burka and polygamy.

    The vile Muslim predators prey on vulnerable white girls precisely because they despise them so much. Sex is an act of degradation and hostility.

    One white woman from Bradford repeatedly raped by a Muslim said that: “He told me I was making him do it because I was sinful, not a true believer and that he would not do it if I was a Muslim.”

    Some public figures have faced up to this truth. Labour MP for Blackburn Jack Straw for instance told the BBC in 2011 that “there is a specific problem” with Pakistani men who target white girls “because they think they are easy meat”.

    But such honesty is all too rare. Most of those in the social care industry still cling to fashionable notions of permanent ethnic minority victimhood and white oppression so are paralysed when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

    If they really believed in equality they would seek to uphold the law and defend the vulnerable. But instead have ended up indulging in their own form of discrimination in support of predatory brutes.

    http://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/leo-mckinstry/561997/Asian-gangs-were-allowed-to-prey-on-vulnerable-girls

  243. Frank P 1726
    Bravo
    This is the most realistic post on this site for a very long time
    *

    “Michael Gove is the most hated Education Secretary ever. Sarah Caffrey, from Bristol, at the National Union of Teachers’ conference in Torquay, called him an “evil entity who hovers around and seems to think we’re doing such an excellent job we should be working longer and longer hours for less and less pay”.

    (The teachers’ leader did add, however: “He doesn’t listen.”)

    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/what-is-it-about-michael-gove-that-makes-people-hate-him-so-much-7628063.html

    *
    The embodiment of his evil is his introduction of Educational Social Darwinism to the training of our children
    *
    For those of you who have not heard my exposition of this evil doctrine, I will explain

    He took the concept of Academies, stretched them to Free schools and then plonked them in areas with no shortage of places
    His articulation of the reason was that engaged parents would take children out of below par local comprehensives and place them in the better resourced Free Schools. The comprehensive would then wither
    The evil is that 14% of parents are not engaged and even initially their children are concentrated in these below par schools
    These parents will not move their children who therefore during their secondary school life will get worse and worse education
    *
    In short his policies were designed to condemn disadvantaged children to a life of failure
    *
    Nicky Morgan is a welcome release from this evil man

  244. Quite so Frank P!

    If you look at Hitchens blog and at the sidebar glossary, if you go to the section on Michael Gove there are endless essays asking why his child went to Greycoat Hospital when Gove had written in the Press (ie, in public) about how wonderful Burlington Danes was.

    He’s like Blair with the London Oratory. Mind you, he works for the Heir To Blair.

    Cameron has neatly forgotten that he took out that phrase at the last minute from a speech he was going to give.

  245. Don’t ‘bravo’ me, cunt! Or build a straw man with what I didn’t say. What I implied was that the teachers and Gove have more in common than either realise – they’re all a product of the Long March and none of them have the nous to know it. Useful idiots of the worst kind and our kids have been handed over to them since the 70s. We need a counter-counter-revolution and it will have to be bloody because the bastards won’t give up otherwise. You’re a parasite; why do you waste your time here? Do you think anyone here cares about what you think? Masochism is a particularly despicable form of perversion, you nonce!

  247. Peter, it may not be intentional, but Baron gets messages of duplicate postings whilst the postings fail to appear. You want the barbarian out?

  248. OK, one of the postings has come through. It may be because of the links some of the postings get into moderation. Apologies, Peter.

  249. All the hoo ha about the TV election debates is Lynton Crosby’s little distraction from where he’s really putting the legwork in this time round: online.

    No votes allowed unless you’re signed in at the Shariagraph and Spectator. Automatically the number of votes for anti-Lab/Con posts is slashed to almost zero.

    Paid Tory trolls are everywhere – pretending to be ‘oh-so reasonable’ too! Where have they come from?

    They cannot ban comments altogether because then people will just abandon MSM websites. They don’t want to lose the online audience figures but they are determined to tamper with the voting system (where did they learn to do that!), to mix in paid-for trolls, to ban people altogether who don’t lick LabCon axxx, and where the issue involves the political parties and media owners Lord Rothermere and Barclay Twins just steam rollering over people, then no comments will be allowed.

    For example. Dave promised ‘no if, no buts’ on immigration – the number one issue.

    Lord Rothermere and the Barclay Twins know this is him caught bang to rights and so, instead we get ‘serious thinkers’ (ho, ho, ho), writing in the most elevated and high-falluting prose to say what Allister Heath said this week:

    [HEADLINE}: “Immigration is here to stay. Our job is to make it work

    “Migration is the new normal, and there’s nothing either the Tories or Ukip can do about it. Instead we must make sure those who come to this country fully embrace it – and establish a British version of the American dream”

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/11450120/Immigration-is-here-to-stay.-Our-job-is-to-make-it-work.html

    Let me unspin that for you (no comments allowed on it for me to help Shariagraph readers). The message is:

    “I, Allister Heath, am a business writer (son of a famous tax exile, actually) so you can take it from me that immigration is good – so pleeeease just forget that the Tories didn’t reduce it.

    “And as for being angry enough to to something about it at the ballot box, let me tell you: you can do nothing about it. The Tories and UKIP [Heath claims – not me] can do nothing about it. So, you thought it was an election issue, but, in fact, it’s not.

    “So forget it. And when you forget that, you’ll forget UKIP. Won’t you? Please forget UKIP.

    “And I’ll tell you what, if you won’t forget UKIP, we’ll get a load of Lord Ashcroft polls tell you that ‘this election is closer than ever’. Oh, yesssirreee! Don’t you dare think of not voting Conservative. You’ve some skin in this game boyo.

    “What’s that? You know it’s worth voting UKIP because they are makes huge waves in Labour’s Northern heartlands?

    “Well, in that case we’ll get Max Hastings and everyone else to threaten you with Labour and the SNP. Neve mind that Labour are losing votes by the shedload up North in their heartlands. If I know I can’t persuade you that the Tories will ever do anything about immigration (they won’t), then I’ll frighten you with that.

    “And like a good ole’ muggins you’ll be putting that cross next to Dave’s name in May. Cowed and subdued and never getting anything you want. Ever.”

    So a journalist is used to say ‘The Tories can do nothing about immigration’ Then why did’t the Tories say that? Thinking of the alternative? Well, according to No Comments Allowed Heath, they won’t do anything either.

    Heath’s headline says: Immigration Is Here To Stay. I can tell you one place it isn’t here to stay: an island called Sark where two tax avoiding brothers who own the rag he wrote that propaganda in don’t want to live in the cesspit conditions so many indigenes find their country has turned into.

    And as for emulating the ‘American dream’, I can tell you how Americans feel about immigration – they’ve got the same open borders here and people are fed up the to back teeth with it.

    David Cameron, Paul Dacre, Boris Kemal, White Widow Theresa May, Lyton Crosby, Paul Dacre, Lord Rothermere, the Barclay Twins, Allister Heath and on and on and on – if they sounds like people who spend 24 hours a day practising how to be spiteful, sneaky and vindictive agains the British electorate – i’ts because they are.

  250. Apologies Frank, I should have been clearer: “What I implied was that the teachers and Gove have more in common than either realise – they’re all a product of the Long March and none of them have the nous to know it. Useful idiots of the worst kind and our kids have been handed over to them since the 70s.”

    I agree.

  251. Frank P @ 19:29

    The British educational system has always puzzled and bewildered the barbarian, but wasn’t one of Gove’s intentions to weed it out from the control of preciously the people you dislike so much, the local Left leaning manipulators, the Marxist infected teaching unions, the Labour appointed overseers, give more power to parents?

    As a politician he can hardly take on the whole of the educational establishment, has to tackle it step by step. The idea of ‘comprehensiveness’ has been so deeply embodied in the psyche of the nation that to dismantle it at a stroke would have buried any serious attempt at change for generations.

  252. Kermit @ 19:50

    As much as it pains Baron to say it again, immigration is here to stay, one can only control it, manage it, keep it at a reasonable level.

    Immigration is a middle class phenomenon, it mimics colonisation of the past except for the reversal of travel of the people involved. In the British colonial past, it was the sons of middle class parents who packed up, boarded a ship, went to distant lands in Africa, Far East, hired the locals to cook, clean the house, work the plantations, dig for gold … Today, the sons of middle class parents stay put, the locals come to them to carry out the same menial jobs – serve lattes, look after their kids, harvest vegetables, build patios …

    This country has always been ruled by the middle class, the Cameroon’s class. What do you reckon will make them turn against the concept? It suits them, if anything the enlargement of the incoming crowds to include the East Europeans makes immigration even more beneficial, self-satysfying for it enhances their feeling of ‘superiority’. Short of Britain quitting the EU, we’re stuck with it.

  253. If the two thugs charged with the murder of Boris Nemtsov have links to the Jihadist diaspora, one cannot completely rule out an indirect involvement by the Kremlin. Why has the FSB failed to stop it? They have the Islamist groups infiltrated from top to bottom, (they have a large recruitment pool, the many totally russofied Muslims from the Soviet era, when the two still co-operated, it was the Russians who furnished the Americans with more and better intelligence on jihadi planning than the other way round).

  254. The problem that we have, Baron, is that the Tories said ‘no ifs, no buts’ – that they would do something about mass, uncontrolled immigration. And now they are using their media mouthpieces to cover up for the fact.

    Spin doctors posing as journalists can say ‘It’s here to stay’, but at this level? I am not in the UK, but I cannot see how that is sustainable. The pressure on infrastructure is surely too phenomenal?

    School places. Hospital places. Roads etc, etc, etc, and there is no money left to pay for it. Britain has just been taken further and further into debt.

    That is before we get on to the quality of life, which in places such as Bradford, Rotherham, parts of Oxford and so on is clearly hellish for indigenes.

    ‘Short of Britain quitting the EU, we’re stuck with it.’ But therein lies the answer, surely?

    The level of discontent with the EU is only going to rise and so the opportunites to quit can only grow. But not with the Tories or Labour. If someone big leaves the EU, such as France or Italy, the clamour from others will only grow louder. That seems to be the direction formerly sovereign states are headed in? It’s only the legacy parties who are trying to keep the EU together.

  255. Kermit @ 20:25

    Spot on, Kermit, the barbarian doesn’t disagree with anything you say, the Tories are indeed as mendacious as the rest of the political class, what amazes Baron is people still vote for them, as they do the other lot.

    When telemachus says, ‘leaders should lead’ he’s right to a point. However, if the leaders’ policies aren’t endorsed by the unwashed they (the policies, or both) must change. The politicians have been trying to convince us for decades our future is with the EU, we are unconvinced, the time has come for a change.

  256. Frank P @ 15:06
    EC/Colonel M.

    When you asked: ‘how come a headline like this in major newspaper of the UK’s second largest city is completely ignored by national TV news outlets, when the content involves such a major scandal’, did it not occur to you it may because we live in a society free of censorship, be it a self imposed one?

  258. You were clear enough Kermit; my somewhat intemperate remark @ 19:29 was directed at mucus, not you. Apologies, you slipped a post in before I had a chance to absorb and reply to tele’s cant. I usually ignore him but his straw men attract my blowlamp.

  259. Baron March 7th, 2015 – 20:40

    “When telemachus says, ‘leaders should lead’ he’s right to a point.”

    Only to a point? There is little confusion in my mind about what leaders should do and I can think of few cases where they should not lead, but it appears there is a great confusion in the minds of many who seek to rule over us between a leader and a manager.

    As an ordinary citizen I for one do not expect to be ‘led’ to some bright Utopian upland (or anywhere else) by some council, quango or charity non-entity, however much he or she is paid. I am neither their employee nor their pupil and I am definitely not a member of any ‘team’ they might think they are ‘leading’.

    The self elevation of civil service managers and administrators to ‘leaders’ is part of the great switchover from those who once served us to those who now seek to rule us. It is a European import, an over-subscribed and populated bureaucracy of officious officialdom of which England was once mercifully free but is now become inundated.

    As in the corporate world of employees or the educational world of pupils and students these unelected apparatchiks now have the extraordinary impudence to presume that that they should determine how we behave and that we are somehow under their charge, that they are our ‘leaders’ – and, more, expect to ‘lead beyond authority’ to decide what is good for us.

    Bollocks to that.

  260. Playing into UKIP’s hands:

    New migrant flood on way: Outrage after EU warns Britain to prepare for more foreigners

    BRITAIN could be forced to accept a new surge of migrants under Brussels plans to set up refugee processing ­centres in Africa and the Middle East.

    http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/562452/Fury-new-EU-migrant-plan-UK-forced-accept-more-foreigners

    Everyday, Cameron, Clegg and Miliband become less relevant, and UKIP the only sensible response.

    Outrage won’t get us anywhere.

  261. Baron (15:06)

    It was a rhetorical question, my Baronial old china☺and merely a follow-up to EC and the Colonel’s attempts to keep the child abuse and common purpose plates spinning. May I suggest while I’m here that it is no coincidence that ‘CP’ is a common acronym to more than one scourge on the nation.

  262. Another lie telemachus.

    Gove didn’t ‘plonk’ any Free Schools anywhere.

    They are established by application from third parties subject to approval. Even the BBC is a better source on the nature of Free Schools and how they come about than you.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13266290

    It is preposterous and you are dissembling to suggest that they are located through some devious central plan. The reason they pop up near piss-poor state schools is precisely because local people or groups want an alternative to their children being force-fed ‘Ignorance by NUT’ and pupil numbers have nothing to do with it.

  264. Cabinet office in child abuse cover-up: MoS beats attempt by No10 to gag VIP file that shows Thatcher knew about paedophile MP Cyril Smith

    Downing Street tried to block release of files exposing scale of cover-up

    Cabinet Office only caved in after being threatened with High Court Action

    Papers expose how much Establishment knew about Cyril Smith’s abuse

    Margaret Thatcher was told police had probed claims he abused teenagers

    She was warned that handing him knighthood risked damaging ‘integrity of the honours system’ – but went ahead anyway

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2984529/Cabinet-office-child-abuse-cover-MoS-beats-attempt-No10-gag-VIP-file-shows-Thatcher-knew-paedophile-MP-Cyril-Smith.html

    I know people who have seen many gagging orders in their time and they are shcoking documents, not just for the facts they contain, but the way in which they threaten imprisonment and so on if one ever talks about what’s in them. They are many and manifold around this subject.

    Cyril Smith is a sideshow here. Yes, he was a vile and important man, protected by MI5 and MI6 (a cesspit of nonces who learned to use it as a blackmail tool on foreign diplomats first and then all joined in themselves), but it takes us closer and closer to people like Ted Heath and Leon Brittan (a man in charge of law and order in one of what used to be the great four offices of state – they’re all too sullied to call them that now).

    I don’t know about other CoffeeHousers’ opinions, but I always remember Norman Tebbit going on the Andrew Marr show and saying what he said:

    [HEADLINE] Lord Tebbit: there ‘may well’ have been a Government cover-up of child abuse
    The veteran former minister says it was the instinct of people at the time to protect ‘the system’ and not to delve too deeply into uncomfortable allegations

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10949428/Lord-Tebbit-there-may-well-have-been-a-Government-cover-up-of-child-abuse.html

    And when Leon Brittan died, I remember Lord Deben (John Gummer – who was exposed last week as making millions out of useless wind farms, having sat on energy briefs in this government, Mr Credibility himself) saying this:

    [HEADLINE] Put up or ‘shut up’: Brittan’s friends demand an end to ‘wicked’ Westminster rumours over late peer’s involvement in child abuse cover-up

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2923121/Put-shut-Brittan-s-friends-demand-end-wicked-Westminster-rumours-late-peer-s-involvement-child-abuse-cover-up.html

    You cannot take these people on directly. There are too many of them in positions of power and if you threaten to say something in public, they will go after you. They’ll threaten to expose the affair you had to your wife and so on – or much nastier. But remember when you’re as powerful and unaccountable as MI5 you can do that.

    So I thought Norman Tebbit was rather clever. Because he didn’t name names or go into detail.

    He just flew his kite, gently for all to see. He always was the best character assassin in the business.

    And when Leon Brittan died, John Gummer (I’m not going to call that cxxt ‘Lord’) was fuming at Norman Tebbit. And that put up or shut up comment was Gummer screaming at Tebbit, whose words were hanging in the air as Brittan lay in the mortuary: ‘You clarify that you weren’t talking about Leon Brittan.’

    And Tebbers? He kept his lips shut. That silence was deliberate and suggestive. His kite is still up there, flying, and he’s not taking it down.

    Good old Tebbers. The silent assassin – the deadliest of subtexts. There’s no need for clarification at all, Mr Gummer. We know what Leon Brittan was. Thank you and xxxx off.

  265. The Great EU Disaster Film : Bill Emmott Hits Back

    Some of you might like to see this interesting defence of the ‘Great European Union Disaster Movie’ by one of its makers, Bill Emmott:

    http://www.britishinfluence.org/the_great_european_disaster_movie_was_meant_to_stimulate_robust_debate_on_europe_s_future_what_we_got_was_a_theological_war

    One small note. Mr Emmott says : ‘Peter Hitchens even claimed that his own paper is pro-EU (as part of a claim that no mainstream British paper has campaigned against the EU, hence the public are poorly informed). It certainly didn’t feel that way when on both Sunday and Monday we and the BBC were monstered in the Daily Mail for the film.’

    I didn’t ‘claim’ anything (this verb is generally used to express the writer’s incredulity about what follows, and is one of the favourite weapons of the allegedly ‘impartial’ person who wishes to express an opinion without obviously doing so.’Insist’ is another such word).

    I said, which is quite true, that no major British newspaper favours a British exit from the EU. ‘Even your own?’ asked Mr Emmott , to which I replied, accurately, ‘Yes’. The MoS is certainly highly critical of the EU, but I think that if it had declared itself in favour of leaving the EU, I should have noticed. So to say what I said is not (how shall I put this?) *exactly* the same as saying that the Mail on Sunday is ‘pro-EU’. There are many positions between ‘pro-EU’ and pro-exit’, as who should know better than I having moved over the years from the one to the other? The fact remains that if the famous referendum ever takes place, which has always seemed remote to me, the British media will overwhelmingly favour our staying in, as they did in 1975.

    http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2015/03/the-great-eu-disaster-film-bill-emmott-hits-back-.html

  267. Kermit (00:26)

    Who’s bullshitting who here? It’s all part of the agitprop that will ensure our continued subservience to Comintern, masquerading as an alliance of national states of Europe. There is no escape and any attempt will be put down, if necessary by state violence. But it will not be necessary because the sheeple residing within our craggy coastline are now predominately no longer English; they are a brainwashed multi-culti ethnic mélange. The minority who are proud of being English per se and entitled to that heritage and pride are in their dotage and diminish daily; the crooks of the Westminster Gasworks know that, having engineered it by importing alien votes. Which is why they all have their sinecures reserved in EU La-La lands.

    Cue Sir Dickie Mottram who after making his famous panic-stricken prognostication to his boss Tony, immediately took steps to make sure that as far he was concerned, it would not come to pass, by joining a European conglomerate and like Tony, becoming a sinistral global player.

  268. ….it’s just uz that are ‘all fuckin’ fucked’ and I note that even you have abandoned ship. Can’t blame you, but just saying’. ☺

  269. I am ever willing to learn and to this end I assiduously follow links

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-13266290

    “How did they come into being?

    Free schools were much talked about in the run-up to the general election in May 2010. They were the flagship policy of the then shadow education secretary, Michael Gove.

    What money is available for free schools?

    A total of £50m – taken out of an axed technology fund for schools – was initially allocated for free schools for the first year of the policy, up to April 2011. And in November 2011, the government announced it had ear-marked an extra £600m on building 100 new free schools in England over the next three years.”

    So Gove conceived them
    Gove pump primed them

    And
    And

    This also from the BBC site

    “… are likely to be centred disproportionately in middle-class neighbourhoods, to weaken already weak schools by attracting the best performing pupils, and will contribute to creating a two-tier system….”

    In truth this was developed to the actual policy of encouraging them to be plonked next to schools in difficulties to make such schools wither and all the children in them who did not have proactive parents over a period of 7 years

    *

    I apologise to Peter who I debated this issue on his last website (John Ball) and I know has a deep interest
    But this is the reality we see from the Manchester environs, where as you now know we are proactive in taking forward Health and Social care, that other great responsibility of Government

  270. Frank P – 01:15

    The clock is ticking, Frank, but nobody can hear it. Nor do they want to hear the whirr and thrum of 1000’s Iranian centrifuges working 24/7.

    SELMA, Ala. (AP) — America’s racial history “still casts its long shadow upon us,” President Barack Obama said Saturday as he stood in solidarity and remembrance with civil rights activists whose beatings by police a half-century ago galvanized much of the nation against racial oppression and hastened passage of historic voting rights for minorities.

    It was great to see Obama, Sharpton and Jackson out and about calming racial tension and healing old wounds in Selma yesterday, wasn’t it. It was important enough to Barry away from the golf course.

    Here’s Bill Whittle with, surprisingly, nothing but praise for “The Leader of The Free World”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOtzWwmaGfM

  271. telemachus the constant dissembler. Dodging the main issue and poring over the link to find some hair-splitting crumb that appears to reinforce your cement-lodged prejudice.

    “… are likely to be centred disproportionately in middle-class neighbourhoods, to weaken already weak schools by attracting the best performing pupils, and will contribute to creating a two-tier system….”

    That is an unsubstantiated opinion but slyly implies such locating would be deliberate. Once again you have dodged the point that despite Gove conceiving them and ‘pump priming’ them the imperative for the establishment of Free Schools comes from the third party applicants over whom Gove exercised no control.

    “In truth this was developed to the actual policy of encouraging them to be plonked next to schools in difficulties to make such schools wither and all the children in them who did not have proactive parents over a period of 7 years”

    Evidence for this ‘actual policy’ please. The actual policy is stated here and contains nothing whatsoever to substantiate your accusation:-

    https://www.gov.uk/government/policies/increasing-the-number-of-academies-and-free-schools-to-create-a-better-and-more-diverse-school-system

    In the Coalition’s programme for government they stated:-

    “The Government believes that we need to reform our school system to tackle educational inequality, which has widened in recent years, and to give greater powers to parents and pupils to choose a good school. We want to ensure high standards of discipline in the classroom, robust standards and the highest quality teaching. We also believe that the state should help parents, community groups and others come together to improve the education system by starting new schools.”

    “We will give parents, teachers, charities and local communities the chance to set up new schools, as part of our plans to allow new providers to enter the state school system in response to parental demand.”

    If you think it is a ‘secret’ policy to abandon children without ‘proactive parents’ then provide the substantive evidence for that suspicion, which of course must have had Lib Dem buy in and would actually contradict several other aspirations for education in the Coalition programme.

    Failing schools with viable competition have a choice. Improve or die. Your solution is to allow failing schools to continue to fail all the children in that location in order to preserve your precious ‘egality’ (horrible, meaningless, French revolutionary term). So you would rather condemn all children than offer some children escape and hope. As Margaret Thatcher so powerfully demonstrated with her hand gestures in Parliament the socialist aspiration for ‘equality’ is to lower everyone to the same impoverished level so that the misery of hopelessness must be enjoyed by everyone. North Korea is your model, regardless of how you dress it up and peddle it.

    Your submissions here are heavy on propaganda and light to non-existent on substantive, objective balance. Unsurprising since those are the main characteristics of the party you pimp for, Labour, and the party whose aspirations you actually reflect, SWP. You seem to think hubris is substantive and if you boast of something then that is as good as evidencing it.

  272. Colonel Mustard @ 20:55

    Of course you didn’t, Colonel, apologies, in his usual haste ‘type first, think later’, Baron was going to make a different point, switched to another one, and still managed to make it so badly that even he cannot get the point now.

  273. Colonel Mustard @ 21:31

    Good points, Colonel except perhaps to say that any group of people bound by sharing a common past has to from time to time decide which direction it will take if only to position itself vis-a-vis the changing world around it. For inst. after the EU got formed, Britain couldn’t avoid deciding whether to join the construct or not. And since our structure of governance is representative democracy, it was up to those elected to make the decision. Every party (and every party leader) when in power has advocated a membership on he basis that ‘we’re to small to go it alone’, it’s the inevitable trend of history’, ‘there’s is strength in numbers (militarily, for business)’ or whatever…. Baron interprets the advocacy of continuing membership of the EU, the policies that flow from it as ‘leadership’ for it is invariably based on someone’s take on what the future holds if whatever it is he’s trying to convince us will be or will not be followed.

    Baron’s view of the difference between ‘leader’ and ‘manager’ is that the former formulates an aim, something the group he leads wants to achieve, possibly the means of getting there. The manager merely executes the steps that the reaching of the aim requires.

    Where you’re 100% right, Colonel, is that we indeed have managers rather than leaders in charge today, everywhere. This, at the top of the societal pyramid is the result of our political elites taking orders either from the White House (foreign policy mostly), or from Brussels (on anything else). The managerial style of the civil service pack follows the usurping of freedoms, rights and powers that were once in the domain of each of us just as Thomas Jefferson said: “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have”.

  274. Frank P @ 21:36

    The barbarian understands it, Frank, but he seldom resists riding on someone else’s observation to get a fraction of a Brownie point for himself even though he wasn’t the originator of the idea. Notice, please, he does it often, what causes the urge has been a mystery to him, it’s only after he pushes the ‘submit’ button that it dawns on him that perhaps the posting is utterly superfluous, not needed, de trop.

  275. I cannot fathom how people are taken in by Gove

    He is the most hated, dangerous and destructive politician since Keith Joseph

    A respected poster hereabouts tried to link him with Gramsci

    I tell you he is more influenced by the Blood and Soil philosophy of Oswald Spengler

  276. telemachus @ 08:37

    Your ” …. and will contribute to creating a two-tier system….” isn’t meant in a negative sense, is it?

    Any educational system, if it is to satisfy the needs of as many pupils as possible must follow what nature has endowed every one of us with. We are a diverse bunch, each of us has abilities in which we excel if these abilities are identified, nurtured well. The educational construct it is that gives the abilities a start.

    You take anything that we humans do, e.g. running, counting, or the teachers ability to teach …., take enough of humans, ask them to perform whatever it is you’ve chosen, then plot the results on an x/y scale. What you get, in every and each case, is a bell curve, such as the one below:

    http://www.updconsulting.com/for-whom-the-bell-curves/

    In order to harness each boy or girl ability to the full we need an educational system that discriminates, probably a three-tier one: for the the most academically brilliant, (the right hand corner of the bell curve), the average, the bottom of the intellectual league.

    The system must be flexible to allow for an easy flow between the three compartments up to a very high age, (some of us are late developers), and each compartment ought to have a range of certificates to encourage everyone to try hard.

    Btw, in Baron’s view, the introduction of the comprehensive educational system was the biggest crime the marxists/socialists committed on the country.

  277. telemachus March 8th, 2015 – 10:48

    Well, you are taken in by the row of idiots currently sitting on the opposition front bench.

    But again you dodge the substance of the issue and simply attempt to reinforce your prejudiced perception of Gove as a demonised hate figure rather than making any subjective and balanced assessment of his education reforms. You also, again, appear to expect a conformity to your point of view and become agitated by dissent. This is what leads to gulags and mass executions.

    Your political philosophy is, in essence, that you believe you are always right and that there must be something wrong with those who might disagree that needs ‘correction’. This flaw runs through the left like the name through a stick of rock and is precisely why national socialist regimes (those with single party state aspirations even if they don’t admit it) end up as oppressive, totalitarian, murdering hellholes.

    You made an accusation about the policy for Free Schools. I ask again where is the evidence for the existence of that policy?

  278. In order to harness each boy or girl ability to the full we need an educational system that discriminates, probably a three-tier one
    *
    I cannot disagree
    Snag is that such a system must not induce or perpetuate social divisiveness and no-one has yet devised such a system

  279. Baron March 8th, 2015 – 10:20

    I don’t believe that true leadership is anything that can be taught, designated or appointed, even though there is such a current trend to peddle that. The national ‘leaders’ you write of were/are mostly mundane, marked more by failures than achievements, but in politics there are now so many competing angles to power and so much spin that I don’t believe true leadership qualities could emerge, or at least be set free.

    Beyond corporate and bureaucratic decision making there is a need to inspire and to motivate collectively, qualities sadly lacking in almost all modern ‘leaders’. The term has become devalued, like so much else, and is now debased by being hi-jacked into the mean little world of the corporate cut and thrust where consultants peddle ‘leadership’ qualities but the infrastructure is far too constrained and imbalanced to accommodate it. They act, perform, even when attempting ‘a little touch of Harry in the night’, and there are no great dents in their helmets from taking blows in the melée with the common men.

    Most modern ‘leadership’ is little more than coercion within constraining and artificial hierarchical structures continuously being re-arranged to ‘improve’. And there is lip service to that other devalued term ‘shared vision’. Nowadays an emergent Nelson would be crushed to dust by corporate mediocrity and never rise. I have seen it happen many times. The best go under and the a*******s prosper. In my professional life where organisations boasted of being able to identify ‘leadership’ infallibly I have encountered far more mediocrity and conspiracy of mediocrity than inspiring leaders. And usually those few are accidental, unrecognised and unappreciated until push comes to shove.

    When Cameron talks about ‘UK plc’ he has no idea how utterly de-motivating that is. It is not enough that he must imagine us his employees to be motivated to work in the best interests of a remote ‘board’, but it completely misses the point about the nature of English freedom, that each man is his own and the state is there to serve not master. A bunch of slippery, managerial oiks are not leaders and never will be, whatever colours they sail under. And recently we were treated to a whole bunch of them of the Euro-kind gathering in a Parisian street to make a puerile statement of complacency rather than an inspiring, motivating call to arms. Bland, corporate, be-suited wonks replete with the Theory of Spread Sheet and about as inspiring as herpes. “If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it” they said, so honed instinct, experience and touch went out, all intangible qualities measured in success rather than paper, and Death by Key Performance Indicators came in, a bean counter’s view of the world where scribbling numbers pretended to move mountains.

    And if ever there were to be an example of the sort of gormless trivia that they peddle it is uber-wonk Miliband, the opportunist, jumping on his own bandwagon to declare that the TV Debates must be established in law because they are ‘the peoples debates’ (cue Blair, Campbell and a supersized sick bag).

    There is a need for true leadership, however, and moreover the courage of a Napoleon to blast the clamouring mob that controls the political wind vane with a whiff of silencing grapeshot. But the candidate will need to break cover and then stand his or her ground in the face of anchoring adversity. Can’t see it happening. We are already in politburo territory and if Labour slither back in on the way to a suborned press.

  280. Colonel Mustard March 8th, 2015 – 11:18

    Sock it to him/it/her.

    I cannot bear to read his/it/hers drivel it gives me a headache.

  281. Colonel Mustard – 11:48

    A Work Group is where each member works with the group leader, not with each other. If they work with each other as well, it is a team.

    So many teams are really misnamed work groups.

    Unfortunately, nowhere is immune from this mistake. In fact, where a team exists, it is often by accident and can even be against policy.

  282. Colonel Mustard (11:48)

    A chilling, accurate, realistic and deeply depressing appraisal of not only the State of the Nation, but the fate of Western Civilisation.

    The parade of the self-appointed ‘elite’ of politics and ‘journalism’ appearing on our Sunday morning TV screens, babbling biased bollocks clearly illustrates your exposition.

    We can therefore only hope that the election result is so risible that the ensuing few years will seed something that will emerge from the morass of misery, to reawaken the spirit of the nation that previously saw us through many dark periods of history.

    I despair of seeing it myself now, but your wise words should be scattered as widely as we can manage, in the hope that, one day, some curious and energetic potential leader will heed them and sally forth to repel the joint evils of modified Marxism and the rampant jihad.

    Long may the mucus on the wall provoke your excoriating contempt for the idiocy it attempts to foist on us.

  283. “There is a need for true leadership, however, and moreover the courage of a Napoleon to blast the clamouring mob that controls the political wind vane ”
    *
    We have such leaders
    They are waiting
    The key deficit in the current trio is lack of passion. The fourth party had it before Farage went stale
    *
    There is a concept of leadership called emotional quotient/ emotional intelligence
    Churchill, Macmillan, Thatcher and Blair had it in spades
    *
    Balls and Burnham have it
    *
    Leadership is an intellectual concept
    However in application leadership is experienced in the moment and this is where emotional intelligence is crucial

    Leaders like Balls and Burnham have high levels of EQ or emotional quotient

    They have the 2 key ingredients

    An unfailingly positive attitude in all contexts

    And

    A very high level of personal self esteem

    *

    More
    They make folks smile
    They make folks feel good

    *

    There is a tendency of the older generation to take the “O me miserum” approach to the evolution of politics
    They are wrong
    The future has never been brighter

  284. telemachus, you really shouldn’t conflate how the whole country might feel about the Blues Brothers Evil Twins with the audience at a typically self-deluding Labour conference.

    It’s more than a little bit demented.

    Balls is not at all popular with the public:-

    “49% of respondents ‘do not have a clear view on Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls’ economic policies’, while just 19% of those surveyed do. 44% of those surveyed said they would describe Ed Balls as an ‘opportunist’, with just 19% describing him as ‘principled’. 13% said that they would describe him as ‘charismatic’ versus 48% who would not. Similarly, 48% of respondents said that they would not describe the Shadow Chancellor as ‘likeable’ compared to 17% who would and 47% would not describe him as ‘trustworthy’ while 17% would.”

    As for that skunk Burnham, here are some online views about him:-

    “I hate Andy Burnham. This twat wanted to put fluoride in our drinking water.
    This whilst previously holding the position of Vice-President of the British Fluoridation Society. No vested interest, eh Andy?”

    “And let us not forget (Burnham’s) bald faced lies about ID Cards and the NIR. This is a man who lies with great ease and facility; like a jazz saxophonist improvising. He is a totalitarian, a marxist, a mass murderer, and as we can see with this fluoride affair, a mass poisoner.”

    “I cannot bear to see this vermin for more than a minute. He’s congratulating himself for lying to the public and putting his party first. Disgusting.”

    I especially enjoyed this takedown of Burnham’s attempt to control the English language web in cahoots with Obama in 2008:-

    http://irdial.com/blogdial/?p=1487

    And the comment after his suggestion to vandalise libraries that “he is a barbarian who should be employed on his knees scrubbing the steps outside some underfunded public library rather than in any position of authority within it.”

    Burnham is a Grade A scumbag. Probably the most reprehensible reptile in the whole Labour party.

    The future would be much brighter for Britain if Balls and Burnham were fired into space on a rocket ship headed for Mars.

  286. “…Speaking on the duplicity of the European political class, Igler said the spectre of resurgent Fascism and the “far right” had been used as a smoke screen to distract people, remarking: “it’s not thanks to Philip Dewinter and Vlaams Belang [A Belgian political party that would oblige migrants to adopt local customs and culture] that the Jewish population of Antwerp is currently under guard from Belgian paratroopers, it’s the fact that Belgium has a huge Muslim population. Brussels has a 26-percent Muslim population….”

    http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/03/08/watch-a-drastic-warning-about-the-future-of-the-west/

    “…The culture is ugly. Ugly as poo. The music is ugly, violent and misogynistic. Every crime drama and suspense series is rife with the most unimaginable gore….I was watching a movie not long ago, a dated ’50s musical short on Turner Classic Movies. Something silly with the rock-and-roll impresario Alan Freed. It was bursting with life. The kids in the room wanted me to put on something gory, negative, dark and I said, no, no, watch this, this is great stuff – this is America. And one of the teens replied, no it’s not; that’s from when America was happy. And that struck me, hit me like a ton of bricks. The left has worked so hard to make us miserable, and it has succeeded…”.

    http://www.wnd.com/2015/03/the-poo-generation/#WqzsA25QSUOC2AFY.99

  288. Mars

    I guess that is the point

    Some politicians reach for the stars

    We may not get there with them

    But Oh how we profit from their presence

  290. telemachus March 9th, 2015 – 01:20

    “I guess that is the point”

    No, you have deliberately evaded the point – as usual. And done your standard propagandist’s trick of making words mean what you want them to rather than as they are intended.

    Let me make it crystal clear. England would be a safer, happier place if Balls and Burnham were consigned to a location many light years away in outer space.

    You boasted about the supposed popularity of those two wreckers. I fisked that. You dodged.

  291. there seems to be an agenda to make everyone else responsible for Mohammedan atrocities.

    First the 3 girls gone to be ISIS whores was all the security services fault
    then jihadi johnm was our fault too.
    now we are told by a moslem plod what the prevent program doesnt understand islam.

    How about Islam learning western values and stopping their stupid so called religious stuff.

  293. Alexsandr March 9th, 2015 – 08:34

    “How about Islam learning western values and stopping their stupid so called religious stuff”

    Because they are unable to do so, all of them (with the exception; to some degree of those from Indonesia) are set in a mind-set of 632AD, their paedophile prophet was a war-lord who set ground rules that would keep his followers separate from the rest of humanity, they are all shackled to his hate filled dogma.

  295. Colonel Mustard March 9th, 2015 – 07:50

    telemachus March 9th, 2015 – 01:20

    “I guess that is the point”

    No, you have deliberately evaded the point – as usual.

    He/it/her is like a constantly dripping tap, an itch that cannot be reached to scratch, he /it/she is an irritant, a weeping wound, a puss-filled ulcer.

  296. @Frank P 9th, 11:03

    “Nice to know that as the world turns into a tinder-box the firemen are all on the job with their hoses erect and ready.”

    The hoses primed with petrol?

  299. Radford NG @ 14:27

    A good spoof, Radford, except that there ought to be an even bigger picture of the messiah with Junker in his pocket with the boy in Junker’s pocket.

    In 1988 President Reagan Designated the first Thursday in May of each year as The National Day of Prayer. In June 2007 Presidential Candidate Barack Obama Declared that the USA “Was no longer a Christian nation. In 2009, President Obama Canceled the 21st annual National Day of Prayer ceremony at the White House under the ruse of “not wanting to offend anyone” . On September 25, 2009 from 4 AM until 7 PM, a National Day of Prayer for the Muslim religion was held on Capitol Hill, inside the White House.

    How often does the barbarian have to say the messiah is half Muslim?

  300. Malfleur @ 23:34

    The poo icon just about wraps up what has become of us, Malfleur, the next stage in this process is the poo’s decay into its basic building blocks of nature, and a new start.

  301. Clear Memories @ 02:42

    An excellent analogy, too, Clear Memories, clever of you to point it out. It’s exactly what it is, we will keep on adjusting to the new circumstances until the boiling point, alas it will then be too late to get out of the predicament.

  302. telemachus @ 17:46

    If you truly believe the two clowns – Balls and Burnham – have it, you need help.

    By the mid of this century their names won’t even appear on their graves. Balls together with the dour Scot borrowed over £100bn whilst the flow of taxes into the Treasury’s coffers was running at an all time high at over £500bn, and spent it all. The other garden gnome knew about the Staffordshire NHS scandals, did FA about it.

  303. telemachus @ 11:42

    We were close to such a system before the your lot came in with the disastrous comprehensive idea, telemachus. The grammar set-up needed only a tweak or two, i t would have been easily adoptable to the needs of modern Britain.

  304. Colonel Mustard @ 11:48

    A superb lament, Colonel, one of your best, the part about the UK plc in particular.

  305. Mail having a go at the joseph rowntree trust.
    The old bugger must be spinning in his grave seeing where his money is going.

    Where were the charities commission in all this
    and why are they not all over muslim charities cos i reckon some of their cash goes to jihadis.

  306. Baron March 9th, 2015 – 15:21

    “How often does the barbarian have to say the messiah is half Muslim?”

    Would that be the top or bottom half?

    Or is it more likely that it is his right or left side.

    Personally I think he is wholly Muslim, the very worst President of the USA since Jimmy Carter.

  307. It is appalling to see what the Rowntree Trust are funding. If it was a little different circumstances it would be the Nazi Party and freedom for the leaders of the Third Reich at Nuremberg!

  308. Greece’s defence minister threatens to send migrants including jihadists to Western Europe
    Panos Kammenos, Greece’s defence minister, threatens to open country’s borders to refugees – including potential members of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) – unless Athens receives debt crisis support

    “Panos Kammenos, the Greek defence minister, warned that if the eurozone allowed Greece to go bust it would give EU travel papers to illegal immigrants crossing its borders or the 10,000 currently held in detention centres.
    “If they deal a blow to Greece, then they should know the the migrants will get papers to go to Berlin,” he said.
    “If Europe leaves us in the crisis, we will flood it with migrants, and it will be even worse for Berlin if in that wave of millions of economic migrants there will be some jihadists of the Islamic State too.””

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11459675/Greeces-defence-minister-threatens-to-send-migrants-including-jihadists-to-Western-Europe.html

    Ever closer union? What could be better?

    Stopping European wars? Mr Steinmeier said Brussels had stopped Europe going to war for decades. [Brussels!]

    July, 2013: There are no threats to Europe for now.

    Harmony and Love?

    The historical roots of the European Union lie in the Second World War. Europeans are determined to prevent such killing and destruction ever happening again

  312. telemachus is right….up to a point;and Farage is wrong,beyond a certain point.
    There is no such thing as a free lunch or a free school.If this isn’t a plot against the poor it is another example of unforeseen consequences as was/is Blair’s `education x 3`policy.
    The current underclass do not have access to the better schools.It is not their fault.After our people defeated the Hun and Japs in 1995 they (or their widows) had no idea of higher education.Under the Education Act of 1944 a system of academic triage was instituted whereby the most gifted children were offered places in the most academically orientated Council schools.Only the most gifted qualified regardless of sex,religion,or the social status of their parents.Wealthy,clever(in a bad way) parents could not get their dumbo children into these genuinely free (of payment) schools.

    This was called `the eleven plus`which gave access to Grammar schools.Amongst common people to pass this was seen as positive.It was not seen from the concept since promoted that the majority failed and were thrown on the scrap-heap.This system was destroyed by a foul-mouthed sex pervert (Richard Crossland)and has never recovered.

    Farage calls for more Grammar Schools;but hasn’t the courage to call for a system of national triage:so such schools will just be highjacked by the middle-class `monster mothers`,like most of the `free`schools,academies or C of E schools. I am particularly incensed by `free`schools;but that is a matter that needs working through.

    Emendation:that should be defeated the Hun and Japs in 1945

  313. RobertC @ 20:10

    You’ve got to han d it to them, Radford, they ain’t stupid.

    Perhaps, someone should have a look at our Armed Forces’ training, retention of trained personnel.

  315. RobertC @ 18:15

    That’s a great tactical error by the Greeks, the Germans won’t like it. They will help (they would have helped anyway), but will remember, and the Greeks will pay for it.

  317. Baron – 22:20

    It is certainly not helpful, but when your country is taken over and run into the ground, and then you end up paying for it, and blamed for it, what can one say? Not that they are blameless, but remove responsibility from someone and they will become less responsible.

    For me, it is another manifestation of Euro-insanity, and not very British!

  318. Radford NG – 21:57 ‘ a system of national triage’

    I don’t think Farage has a lack of courage on this subject, and I don’t think proposing a ‘system of national triage’ would confirm that he had courage on it either.

    He is raising a view that is very unpopular within the political elites and media, so it needs to be done in stages.

    There is a multitude of different types of schools, so trying to create a master plan would be beyond what is needed now. I only recently found out about University Technical Colleges (RobertC – March 7th – 13:11).

    We need to get away from the 5 to 18 grind of the academic treadmill, where no child gets a chance to choose, and escape! Luckily, I was fairly academic and liked sport, but being able to choose a STEM career at fourteen should liberate those wanting to do that. It might even help boys more than girls, as they are least happy with the current setup.

    There has been some whining at the lack of ‘working class’ actors, so why don’t some of these multi-millionaire film stars support a University Technical College specialising in the Performing Arts? If JCB can support a STEM focused educational establishment, I don’t see why not.

    I have seen reports where the biggest difficulty of Grammar schools is discussed: the initial exam!

    Well behaved children are much cheaper to educate, so the main criterion for selection should be behaviour. Then, if the work is too difficult, realistic discussions need to be held: it is rare for behaviour to be unaffected. Part of the problem is that, in the past, the intelligent have been given little opportunity to visibly excel.

    When I hear adults say that teenagers should be told how compound interest can quickly increase the money owed, I wonder at the intelligence of the adults. I understood this when I was still in Primary School. The same with basic household economics. Some people need to be told, for some, several times, while, for others, it is obvious, beyond the threshold of boredom!

  319. Well I knew Jagger was into dogs, but taking one them to Crufts? That was taking the piss. No wonder one of them poisoned him. Will his stones keep rolling on I wonder?

  320. It looks like ‘both sides’ have been angry:

    Defiant Greece at daggers drawn with EU creditors

    If Greeks are forced to choose between a restoration of their dignity or continued Troika humiliation, they will chose dignity, says the Greek prime minister

    “Relations between Greece and Europe’s creditor powers are dangerously close to breaking point. Both sides have issued ultimatums, each insisting angrily on fixed positions and lashing out at each other with barely concealed animosity.”

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11460214/Defiant-Greece-at-daggers-drawn-with-EU-creditors.html

    Anything to get rid of the EU!

    There is so much ‘going wrong’ and, with the Elites not wanting to lose face, it is going to be messy, so the quicker the better, and as far away from Britain as possible. We never asked for it.

  322. USA: Saturday Night Live ISIS Satire.

    Oh boy did this sketch touch a raw nerve with the Obama’s slightly more sentient useful idiots. This sketch taps into the very strong human emotion of a common place event but then comes the hammer… 🙂

    This sketch will never be shown on the BBC – somebody might be offended!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_L2fazw5Y9k

    It is amazing how one spearhead of crystalline comedy can slay its intended target – Obama – without explicitly mentioning it. This is why, historically, despots and totalitarians – particularly socialist ones – have feared and loathed real comedians and real comedy because all their dissembling, sophistry and lies can be short circuited and exposed by laughter. Too human for them!

  323. EC @ 08:08

    One of the best postings of yours, EC, and Baron’s referring not just to the clip. You should have a short column called ‘To the point’ in one of the MSM papers, the barbarian cannot think of one that would have you though. Tragic this.

  325. RobertC @ 23:11

    How about no limit on the 11-plus, Robert, (the title will have to go, of course).

  326. RobertC @ 22:40

    The barbarian’s point wasn’t meant to be judgemental on the issue of the debt, Robert, (although he blames the Greeks primarily). He merely wanted to say one doesn’t blackmail the one who can help.

  328. Baron – 09:33
    Do you mean ‘age limit’? If so, then I think with the 11+ there was the possibility of changing school at 12 and even 13. However, I do know that it becomes more difficult to have a smooth transition as courses diverge, as they would. What should be happening is that the process of making children aware that ‘choices need to be made’ in Junior School (8-11 yrs), and good behaviour is imperative for education, if only for the sanity of the ‘academic teachers’.

    Baron – 09:36
    The Greeks have contributed, but they have not been in charge for quite a while, so how can they be ‘blamed’? Having foreign rules forced on you is dire, but having your own rules forced upon you, especially by a past enemy, brings insanity, which is what we are seeing. The EU allows the Elite to float away at a most convenient time, yet still remain an influence.
    I cannot see a tidy solution, I never have, ever since we were thrown out of the ERM: Black Wednesday. The Germans don’t know how to run an empire, not successfully, anyway.

  329. the Islamic Human Rights Commission needs a good hard look at by the authorities

    1 why is it a charity? it seems to be a political thing.. The charities commission needs to investigate

    2. The have said charlie hebdo are the islamophobes of the year. despite the fact that taking the piss out of islam is not a phobia, so that makes them illeterate, it also goes against all that is proper in a western democracy.

    why are these muppets getting a tax break?

  334. EC.
    Why has this arsehole still got a job and a pension? Easy, because an arsehole is exactly what he has been trained to be, and is the only way to career advancement in the PC Gestapo which has been foisted on us as a replacement for the old fashioned copper, who had common sense by the cartload as well as our respect and affection.

  335. Another travesty is underway on Sky News under the chairmanship of the oleaginous Vaz: don’t miss it. Un-feckin’-belieavable!

  337. You’ll all be happy to learn that The Commissioner and his counter-terrorism chief, are perfectly satisfied that terrorism is nothing to do with Islam.

  338. This comes from the Guardian, but watch it, it only takes few minutes. This Islamic thug is based in London, most likely drawing welfare benefits. Even the female Muslim show host cannot stand him.

    Ukip should make CD copies of this interview, send it to all households before the election, tell people that this is the sort of deluded, stubborn, medieval bastards the LabConLib tossers are letting into the country. Sickening.

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/09/lebanese-tv-presenter-cuts-short-interview-with-sexist-islamist-scholar?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2

  341. RobertC @ 10:15

    One possible solution would be to turn the Greek sovereign debt into an undated paper a day before its maturity. The banks holding it would then be able to transfer it (the capital part) into a special account and either keep it there until such time the Greeks will be able to start repaying it, or unload it in the market. If they decided for the former, the ECB should allow them to use it (a part of it) a collateral, let them have cash.

  342. Frank P @ 16:28

    The two should have added ‘but the crusades had everything to do with Christianity’, which would have pleased the White House half Muslim no end.

  343. stephen maybery @ 16:41

    A good one, stephen, and it’s nice to hear your voice again.

  344. EC @ 10:03

    But EC, Steyn must be wrong, Russia presents the biggest threat to us, just listen to the boy, the bean counting Defence Secretary, the one in the White House, the Clinton woman, McCain ……. (btw, if you google mcCain you get the chip maker before the Senate tosser).

  345. Frank P @ 16:46

    Good on him, Frank, he’ll make even more money on the other side, the BBC fruitcakes will lose a fortune.

  347. Alex Proud has a splendid article in the DT
    *
    Here is a flavour
    *
    Here is a man with a proven track record of bigotry, taking the piss out of people he assumes to be bigots while being somewhat bigoted himself. Of course, his many fans will say, “He’s only joking!” and “He’s playing a part” but, I’m not sure the “in-character” defence works for Clarkson.

    He may once have been in character, but the character and the man are now one. Clarkson is Clarkson. Unlike Borat, he’s never going to turn into Brüno.

    I also hate the great group navel gaze we have every time he offends someone. Typically, this starts with Jeremy saying something offensive. A fuss ensues. Jeremy then denies he meant it that way. A minor investigation then determines he almost certainly didn’t mean “slope” in the sense of an inclined plane. Jeremy sticks to his guns. Something is muttered about a final warning. Columns are written. Six months down the line the cycle repeats itself.

    These are usually episodes that would get any non-Clarkson sacked. In 2011, when John Galliano was splashed across the front pages for his drunken anti-Semitic tirade, I found myself thinking, “Quick, call Clarkson’s people. With them on the case it’ll be forgotten in a fortnight.”

    But actually, in the long term, Galliano was right. He’d been really stupid and nasty and, eventually, he took his punishment like a fashion designer and slunk off to a boutique spa for a couple of years. Clarkson doesn’t own up like this. He weasels out of it.

    Take the Argentinian license-plate debacle. If you want to drive a car with a stupid, offensive number plate to the home port of a battleship we sunk with the loss of over 1000 lives as a kind of PR stunt, then fine, your call.

    But when the world at large decides that his brilliant jape sits somewhere on the unpleasant/crap spectrum, please don’t retreat into comedy’s wilderness of mirrors where everything becomes a matter of opinion, including facts, and it all degenerates into jokes about denying jokes. If you’re as plain spoken as you claim to be, own the original joke. Man up, like a fashion designer.

    But let’s move on, because there’s so much more to dislike. There’s the whole Chipping Norton set thing. Yuck. The most exclusive club you’d least want to join. But once you hold your nose and look a little more closely one question poses itself incessantly: what is a funny man doing here? What’s with the ageing rebel who strikes a kind anti-establishment pose at the very heart of Britain’s peculiarly ghastly new establishment?

    Sometimes, I imagine Cameron and Clarkson, slapping each other on the back, gazing into each others’ eyes, mutually starstruck, both laughing at jokes they know aren’t funny. I usually pour myself a stiff drink after this.

    Clarkson’s chumminess with the unacceptable face of West Oxfordshire points to another unpleasant side too. The gags are cheap. They demean and belittle. And they’re usually made at the expense of people who can’t defend themselves. This sort of thing makes me wince with self-recognition. In my teens and twenties, I played rugby. This is exactly the kind of horrible humour you get on rugby tours – but it’s a lot worse coming from a 54-year-old multimillionaire.

    Someone cleverer than me once said that satire should only be used to attack those above you, not those weaker than you. That’s always struck me as a pretty good guide to what is funny and what isn’t.

    Then there are the columns. These remind a bit of PJ O’Rourke, but without the scorching wit and 25 years too late. When O’Rourke played the anarchic, funny right-winger, it was an original and edgy thing to do. Besides, when you read him, you realise that most of time, he was telling jokes against himself or the stupidity of the world, not laughing at the lack of sophistication of Liverpudlian waitresses.

    Here, I appreciate that I too write columns that are not as good as PJ O’Rourke, but I don’t get paid £400k (?) a year for it and I try to pick more challenging targets than 22-year olds who serve me Tabasco in a bowl.

    As I said, though, I don’t hate Clarkson. I feel let down by him. I may hate some of the output, but I’m disappointed by the man who could be so much better
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11455816/Why-is-Jeremy-Clarkson-so-determined-to-be-the-nations-biggest-oaf.html

    *

    By your friends do ye know them

    “Sometimes, I imagine Cameron and Clarkson, slapping each other on the back, gazing into each others’ eyes, mutually starstruck, both laughing at jokes they know aren’t funny. I usually pour myself a stiff drink after this.”

  348. “Jeremy Clarkson Suspended By BBC ‘After Fracas'”

    I do wish that they would leave him alone, his non-pc attitude is such a pleasure in these days of stupid multi-culti-diversity.

  350. I find the continual attacks on Clarkson very silly in one program the trio built a bridge over the River Kwai (only it wasn’t they got the wrong river) the bridge was built with local help out of bamboo that was driven into the river bed and then lashed together.

    The morning after completion, standing on one side of the river the bridge looked quite dangerous and flimsy, it also was higher at the right hand side with a decided slope to the left, when Clarkson and one of the others mentioned this ‘slope’ all hell broke loose, because we are told that ‘slope’ is the equivalent of calling a black-man the ‘N’ word when speaking of Malay/Indonesian/Chinaman Etc.

    Then on another occasion off camera and never broadcast he started to recite the children’s selecting dibbing jingle Eeny, meeny, miny, mo but stopped prior to catch a N by his toe.

    PC brigade bugger off.

  352. Sorry David
    I will not cut and paste that Channel 4 say he punched a producer
    Twice
    *
    Reprehensible boor

  354. Judge Napolitano ‏[ @Judgenap 34m ago ]

    “Hillary – You Call That a Defense? I’ll Expose Hillary’s Excuses On the Kelly File tonight, 9pm eastern.”

    It’s not “mailgate” but “mailghazi” reportedly.

  355. WOT! Jeremy Clarkson apologises to Ed Miliband???

    Jeremy Clarkson [‏@JeremyClarkson 2m ago]

    “Sorry Ed. It seems I knocked your “I’m a human” piece down the news agenda.”

    🙂

    BTW online petition to reinstate Jezza now has over 65K names!

  356. I liked this one by Clarkson:

    “‘Labour’s transport spokesman says he doesn’t like Top Gear. Good. We don’t make it for people who wear pink ties.’
    – Tweeted to shadow transport minister Michael Dugher, February 2015.

    (h/t Daily Mail)

    Btw, why has telemachus taken to signing off as “Reprehensible boor”

  358. ‘US Army General John O’Conner who witnessed the tanks arriving on Latvian soil said, “Freedom must be fought for, freedom must be defended.” ‘

    He should start with its domestic enemies in the USA – it’s OK Johnny, you took an oath.

  359. Malfleur 10th, – 23:02

    “Btw, why has telemachus taken to signing off as “Reprehensible boor””

    Didn’t some wit recently (we-ell in the last 20 years or so!) say that self knowledge is the most extreme form of abuse…or something like that?

  362. A comment following Baron Bodissey’s excellent parody:

    Col. B. Bunny
    on March 8, 2015 at 2:56 pm said:

    Very good. That’s the operative hypocrisy that you point out. Infinite outrage over the transgressions of our ancestors but none over what is done to us their descendants.

    It’s quite intentional and part of the war declared against us. The dishonesty of the left is proof of that. Multiculturalism. Living Constitution. Structural racism. Marriage as rape. Reparations. Public accommodations. Interstate commerce. General welfare. Amnesty. Asylum. Diversity. And etc.

    I completely accept that any people are entitled to take over the lands of other people if they have a superior political or military strategy and the forces to carry it out. It’s still the way of the world and will be till the end of time or progressives stop undermining their own people. Whichever comes first.

    Our enemies are entirely welcome to our country especially if they can do it in such a way that we give up without firing a shot in the war. If we will not fight back then oh well.

    The really strange part is why we don’t. From the lowliest Yale freshman to Queen Elizabeth, the majority are determined not to see or to fight. As I say at the risk of being a pest on the issue, the voters of Western countries will not support their salvationist parties or politicians. When all they have to do is pull the lever or mark the paper to banish the Treason Class to the Outer Darkness, will they? Absolutely not. The nationalists measure their progress in millimetres.

    There’s no sea change of opinion in the offing. French elections this month? General in the U.K. in May? The vote will be for socialism and surrender. My bookie says go with apathy, stupidity, and weakness. She’s never been wrong before.

  364. Mr Ostrich

    Have you signed the petition for the Canonisation of Oisin Tymon yet?

  367. telly tubby

    why dont you go to syria and fight against ISIS? Do something useful for a change.
    ISIS are nasty people and I dont fancy seeing many body bags coming back into brize Norton.

  370. @telemachus 11th, – 02:26

    “Have you signed the petition for the Canonisation of Oisin Tymon yet?”

    Now why on earth might you believe that I’d want to do that?

  371. The #BringBackClarkson petition goes thru the 275,000 barrier 🙂

    ““Top Gear is the BBC’s greatest export and Jeremy Clarkson is central to the show’s success. He’s a living legend and the overwhelming success of the petition shows how popular he is with the British people. A bunch of left-wing pinkos at the BBC have been out to get him for ages, we want to see him re-instated and the BBC’s bed wetters defeated.”

    http://order-order.com/2015/03/11/dear-bbc/

  373. What a ghastly waffle of pomposity from Alex Proud @ March 10th, 2015 – 17:52.

    He should re-name himself Alex Priggish.

    He owns a gallery and club as well as writing on behalf of cultural marxists everywhere. A measure of the guy’s hair trigger offence sensitivity is his reaction to what was probably an innocent question:-

    http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/12/08/alex-proud-bar-owner-canc_n_6287474.html

    Ed West summed that up at the Speccie:-

    “Mr Proud argued in the Telegraph that ‘I do believe we should do our best to be liberal and tolerant and call out those who aren’t’ and that ‘Part of being tolerant, though, is giving people a chance to change, rather than dragging their names through the online mud – and that is why I would never publish their details.’

    But the whole point of liberalism is that you don’t ‘call out’ (ie denounce) people with whom you don’t agree, and part of being tolerant is accepting that people shouldn’t have to change because they think differently to you. Giving someone time to recant doesn’t make you a liberal.”

    http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/edwest/2014/12/wow-just-wow-liberalism-is-dead/

    The point Proud (and people just like him) miss is that Clarkson has become an icon of resistance to the depressing PC-ism of modern Britain and its po-faced champions, defenders and apologists. It matters not that he is boorish. The important thing is that he publicly sticks two fingers up at the cultural marxists and is therefore genuinely ‘edgy’ and ‘insurgent’. Would that we had a few more Clarksons on the BBC.

    Britain used to have a long tradition of ‘disrespectful’ humour. It conveyed a freedom and resistance to tyranny that is now being incrementally dismantled around us. Curbing peoples right to offend is the vanguard of curbing peoples right to resist, to object, to disagree and even to disobey when they’ve had enough.

    Clarkson is one of the embattled tigers roaming the edge of the sterile urban dump the leftists are creating here and his defiant roar reminds them, however much they might wish it, that his kind are not extinct yet.

    A hundred thousand voices need to join that roar and tell the likes of Proud to push off.

  374. Alex Proud as your Huffington link shows is a fearless champion of the ordinary guy over the bully

    As shown in his Clarkson comment(Clarkson is a big business bully)

    And as shown by this

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/11260969/A-gentrified-Soho-is-terrible-news-for-London.html

    “Of course, any skulduggery is vehemently denied by all involved. But an increased zeal for enforcement and plans for a swanky new development make for interesting coincidence, don’t they? And property developers have repeatedly shown themselves to be absolute exemplars of probity, fairness and transparency, haven’t they? ”

    *

    Those whose politics closely mirror the failed City Trader aiming for Thanet will naturally wish to denigrate him

  375. telemachus March 11th, 2015 – 13:55

    Unmitigated rubbish. I’m watching a re-run of World at War on TV about Nazi propaganda and it reminds me of you and the rest of the post-modern national socialists in your cabal.

    Regional city mayors = gauleiters.

    The whole EU/socialist cabal is nothing more than a re-run of that ghastly regime.

  376. As we all know National Socialism has nothing in common with Socialism and is best described as ethnocentric fascism

  377. EC’s post at 11:31 March 11th, 2015

    Gives the link, http://order-order.com/2015/03/11/dear-bbc/ it leads to the #BringBackClarkson petition that has gone thru the 275,000 barrier 🙂

    However if one scrolls down one will find a link to a video on “An Evening of Plain Speaking on Plain Packaging” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKjtCEz_mFc

    Though I stopped smoking in the February of 2003 after a 50 year habit and even though I suffer from C.O.P.D. I doubt that; had I the for-knowledge of my medical condition, I would have stopped smoking any sooner than I did, I truly enjoyed smoking cigarettes, pipes and cigars. Even today when I see a friend filling a tobacco pipe I will ask permission to sniff his tobacco pouch, pure bliss.

    This brings me to my point, the “An Evening of Plain Speaking on Plain Packaging” led me to researching the Government document “Overview of new regulations to ban tobacco displays in shops” and specifically section 3.3 “Prohibition of tobacco displays in shops”

    I append this section in full below.

    But back to my point, when this silly business (hiding cigarettes behind screens) first started I was visiting Booth’s supermarket in Ilkley (a northern Waitrose type store) and was stood by the tobacco counter with all of the products hidden behind sliding plain grey screens, the assistant thinking that I wanted to make a purchase offered to slide back a screen so that I could select my purchase, all the while explaining that ‘this was allowed’.

    Then I had a thought, these plain grey screens were hideous but if the fronts were to show life sized photographs of what was hidden behind ‘would that be breaking the stupid law’?

    Overview of new regulations to ban tobacco displays in shops and tobacco vending machines
    Standard Note: SN/HA/5242 Last updated: 15 June 2011 Author: Lorraine Conway Section
    Home Affairs Section
    3.3
    Prohibition of tobacco displays in shops
    Section 21 prohibits the display of tobacco products at the point of sale in the course of a business (i.e. in shop display units, often referred to as ‘gantries’). This section of the Act also gives power to the Secretary of State, the Welsh Ministers and the DHSSPSNI to regulate (but not prohibit) the display of prices of tobacco products.9 In relation to the Secretary of State only, section 21 also gives power to regulate the display of tobacco products and their prices in the course of a business on a website where such products are offered for sale.10
    Once implemented, section 21 will require retailers to cover up tobacco shelving in shops, known as gantries. However, the Government has already said that retailers will be free to cover the gantry as they see fit provided that they comply with the regulations.11 Recognizing that some customers might like to see a particular brand of cigarette packet before buying it, the Act permits ‘requested’ tobacco displays to an individual aged 18 or over.12
    It will be an offence under section 21, for a shop assistant to display tobacco products to an individual aged under 18 following a ‘request’ by that individual. However, the Act provides that, for the purposes of such an offence, it is a defence that the person making the display (e.g. the shop owner) believed the individual was aged 18 or over and either had taken all reasonable steps to establish the individual’s age, or from the individual’s appearance nobody could reasonably have suspected that the individual was aged under 18 years.13 A person is treated as having taken all reasonable steps to establish an individual’s age if:
    • the person asked the individual for evidence of the individual’s age, and
    •the evidence produced would have convinced a reasonable person14
    Under the Act it is a defence for a person charged with causing a requested display to an individual aged under 18, that they exercised all due diligence to avoid committing the offence.15 7

  378. “As we all know National Socialism has nothing in common with Socialism and is best described as ethnocentric fascism”

    You are fond of peddling that phrase “As we all know . . .” as though asserting a certainty (and presuming for others) whereas it more usually precedes yet another distortion/misrepresentation/lie.

    In this case another misrepresentation. Both Italian fascism and German national socialism had strong socialist roots. They could not be described as ‘conservative’ or right wing by any measure because both were revolutionary, radical, on the left and at the time boasted of by their adherents as ‘progressive’ (where have we heard that before).

    Hitler himself said of his national socialists:-

    “We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”

    Note well “We are socialists”. That could have been Miliband speaking.

    Both political ideologies were marked by excessive state control, the politicisation of society, the rise of bureaucratic officialdom, increasing censorship and the intolerance of other political beliefs. All traits that are currently demonstrated by socialists in general and the Labour party in particular, and were especially true of New Labour.

    “In relation to the political decontamination of our public life, the government will embark upon a systematic campaign to restore the nation’s moral and material health. The whole educational system, theatre, film, literature, the press and broadcasting – all these will be used as a means to this end.”

    The Nazi party – but again it might be Labour talking. Andy Burnham has made overtures on both moral and material health, considering himself self-appointed to determine how others should live and entertain themselves. A fascist.

    “All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.”

    The Nazi party again. Also true of the New Labour years when the dumbing down of the British population was accelerated both by design and folly.

    “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

    The Nazi party yet again, but chillingly reminiscent of Campbell and McBride – and your very own “to win is everything, by any means fair or foul”.

    When Tony Blair said:-

    “New Labour is nothing less than the political wing of the British people as a whole”

    it was a sinister portent of Labour’s design to politicise British society and Brown continued that work by stuffing the Third Sector with socialist cronies. Miliband continues the theme with his ridiculously inappropriate post-Labour devolution bleating of ‘one nation’.

    And don’t get me started on Sturgeon’s Scottish national socialist party.

    So, none of your baloney. The sooner people realise the similarities and challenge the socialist whine that the Fascists and Nazis were not socialists the more hope for a free England in future.

  379. Colonel Mustard, March 11th, 2015 – 18:17

    A virtuoso performance, maestro!

    PS. Please do get started on the SNP.

  380. Clarkson should tell them to fuck off and produce his programs with anyone other than the BBC.

  381. John birch March 11th, 2015 – 18:35

    “Clarkson should tell them to fuck off and produce his programs with anyone other than the BBC”

    I wholeheartedly agree, however I do believe that he sold his 30% share back to the BBC.

    If he were able to go it alone he could call it “definitely not Top-Gear”

    I will make a prophesy the BBC will give way within one week from today, our local news Look North tells us the fracas was at a hotel near to ‘Butter tubs pass’ they invariably use when visiting North Yorkshire, the row was over eating.

  383. 1443
    I have just watched the 1940-44 Germany World at War broadcast today
    *
    The key section on the domestic situation concentrated on the “subjugation of the workforce”

    Not quite a socialist principle

  385. There is a good article in this week’s Moneyweek, issue 732, March 6th.

    It explains why even though Britain is not growing, the tax take is not:

    Prepare for tax hikes
    “To qualify for tax credits, a couple must work at least 24 hours a week between them. So the cynics among you won’t be surprised to learn that not only does a third of the working population work part-time (nine million people in total) but that the average hours worked per person is just over 12 hours a week – ie, 24 hours per couple.

    Part-time work pays £11.24 an hour on average. That’s an annual post-tax income of £14,250 for a couple. At this level, tax credits alone would boost household disposable income for those with three children and childcare costs to £35,203 – before any other welfare entitlements, including housing benefit. For a full-time, salaried worker to earn the same disposable income, they’d have to be on £48,500 – almost double the average.”
    (£) http://moneyweek.com/prepare-for-tax-hikes

    It is worth reading the whole article as it gives macro figures as well as more detail. It is explained well and is not difficult to understand.

    It should be read by everyone, even though it frightens the horses!

    It highlights just how little the Coalition has done to rectify what Labour did, and how ingrained Brown’s incompetence has become.

    Just don’t get too down hearted. 🙂

  389. Interesting link

    “Whoever you decide to vote for, we want you to feel confident that you know exactly what you’re voting for. Here are a few tools and tips to help.
    You can review all policies in our policies browser
    Find out all parties who have candidates standing in your area
    Still not sure? Read our top tips for voters blog post
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  390. I see the New York Post has a headline on Hillary Clinton calling her “DELETER OF THE FREE WORLD”…

  394. Bring back the age of consent
    When the state excuses underage sex, what chance do our children have?

    MELANIE PHILLIPS

    In all the sound and fury about historic sex crimes against children, one crucial factor has been generally ignored. Last week, a review of the agencies dealing with the phenomenon of ‘grooming gangs’ in England said that more than 370 young girls in Oxfordshire had fallen victim to them over the past 15 years, and called for an urgent national debate into these ‘indescribably awful’ sex crimes. But the most shocking and overlooked aspect of the review was that, in Oxford, police and care workers dismissed evidence that girls as young as 11, 12 or 13 were being groomed for sex and repeatedly subjected to brutal sex crimes, intimidation and threats of violence, on the grounds that these were ‘very difficult girls making bad choices’.
    Bad choices? For heaven’s sake, these were children! Yet men in their thirties targeting girls as young as 13 were described by police and caring agencies as these children’s ‘boyfriends’.
    ‘Scores of these professionals used language which appeared at least in part to blame these child victims and view them as adults,’ said the review. So how could such professionals not see them as either children or victims?
    This pattern has been repeating itself. From Rotherham to Jimmy Savile and other child sex scandals, police and other agencies dismissed complaints by such girls on the grounds that they were ‘little slags’. These agencies were writing off an entire class of people as low-lifes, whose wretched condition was only to be expected from their debauched behaviour. That in itself was awful.
    Men in their thirties targeting girls as young as 13 were described police and caring agencies as their ‘boyfriends’
    But the Savile scandal exposed something deeper and more sinister: that countless people connived at what they knew he was doing to these girls, even though some were very young teenagers or younger. That was because his victims were not seen as either children or victims. They were instead looked upon indulgently and amusedly as little ravers, part of ‘youth culture’, merely daft girls flinging themselves at such celebrities. That was because this was the post-Pill era, when sex was uncoupled from marriage and babies and was redefined as a recreational sport. ‘Have fun, but do it safely’ was the message. A bit like skiing.
    Even those charged with children’s protection have not regarded premature sexual activity as a problem. Children’s homes have regularly shrugged aside the fact that young girls in their care are too often ‘on the game’ outside their walls. You’d hardly think that we have an age of consent.
    In her report on Rotherham council’s failure to deal with the sex grooming gangs which abused at least 1,400 children, Louise Casey, the government’s troubled families czar, identified a culture which treated pregnancies, miscarriages and terminations in children under 16 as normal. Accordingly, she felt obliged to set out in her report the terms of the law prohibiting sexual activity with anyone under that age.
    Casey was whistling in the wind. In myriad ways, our society tacitly condones and even encourages the sexualisation of underage children, right up to government level.

    ‘You’re suffering from a terrible postcode.’
    As the Oxford review noted: ‘A child may be judged mature enough to get contraceptives to have sex with an adult at an age when they are deemed in law unable to give consent to the sex itself. It is no wonder there was confusion and a lack of confidence in taking action.’ This is as devastating as it is obvious. So devastating, in fact, that the response to this crucial observation has so far been silence.
    Dishing out contraceptives to children is deemed essential by all governments. It’s obvious isn’t it (goes the thinking) that, well, children will inevitably get up to stuff? And so society must accept that they’ll be having sex at 12, 11, ten, whatever.
    All you can do is try to prevent bad outcomes that have an impact on the rest of us. That means babies. So, of course, you dish out condoms to young teenagers. Of course, you offer abortion services to children as young as 11 without informing their parents. And, of course, you give them sex education, telling even primary school children about oral sex and prostitution.
    So the idea that children having sex is always a form of child abuse is dismissed. The only people who could possibly object are by definition religious nuts and reactionaries, right?
    Well, not so fast. Last November, the Family Education Trust, which campaigns for traditional values, complained to a committee of MPs about an advice manual for professionals on sex and relationships education, which had been welcomed by the Department for Education. Its concerns centred on a ‘Traffic Light Tool’, published by the Brook sexual health charity, which sets out green, amber and red behaviour for children of different ages.
    Brook promptly hit the roof. The Traffic Light Tool, it said, had been developed by experts and ‘does not condone or encourage particular behaviours’.
    But it does assign ‘green’ status to sexual activity among 13- to 15-year-olds, which is against the law, and some of the behaviour that Brook thinks is age-appropriate under its ‘traffic light’ rubric is deeply questionable.
    For example, among nine- to 13-year-olds, ‘use of sexual language, including swear and slang words’ reflects ‘safe and healthy sexual development’. If your nine-year-old was mouthing sexual obscenities, would you feel satisfied that your child was developing in a ‘safe and healthy’ way?
    Viewing pornographic material in this age group, moreover, gets an amber light as being only of ‘potential concern’. Surely there should be nothing remotely ‘potential’ about the concern that should be felt if a nine-year-old was looking at porn?
    But when children are between 13 and 17 years old, Brook gives their interest in pornography a ‘safe and healthy’ green light, along with ‘consenting oral and/or penetrative sex with others of the same or opposite gender’ and of similar age and development. Accessing violent pornography, or making and sending naked or sexually provocative images of themselves or others, or joining adults-only social networking sites by giving false personal information, are considered to be only of ‘potential’ concern.
    Just how does all that square with Brook’s claim that it ‘does not condone or encourage particular behaviours’? Is it not, in fact, encouraging professionals working with children to condone grossly dangerous and highly sexualised behaviour among fairly young children — and with the backing of the Department for Education?
    The fact that such material is justified in this way and enjoys official approval shows that our society is no longer able even to acknowledge how far it has sexualised its children. Sex has become a massive commercial weapon aimed at ever younger ages, targeting the very young with sexually explicit pop lyrics, magazine articles, cosmetics and tarty clothes.
    In 2002, a BBC documentary looked at children at a Somerset primary school and what made them popular. An 11-year-old boy wanted to go out with girls who were ‘tarty and daring’; he thought it was ‘sad’ when they wanted to take it ‘one step at a time’. One little girl was taunted because she didn’t want to ‘snog’ until she was 12.
    Their parents were egging them on, telling their children that such behaviour was ‘cool’. These parents saw their children as adults. One mother said of her daughter: ‘She’s very mature. She’s 11 going on 27.’ Teachers were also going along with it, discussing who was ‘in love’ with whom in class.
    For many children, the age of innocence has disappeared and with it the understanding that parents should protect that innocence. Last week, a secondary school excluded an 11-year-old pupil from its World Book Day celebrations after he turned up dressed as the sadomasochistic character Christian Grey from the erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey. His costume included cable ties and an eye mask. His mother, a primary school teacher, thought that the outfit was funny. The idea that there was anything inappropriate in dressing him up as a sadomasochist was baffling to her.
    In 1885, in response to child prostitution scandals, the age of consent was raised from 13 to 16. The motive behind this progressive reform was to protect children from sexual activity which was deemed grossly inappropriate to childhood. We no longer want to protect children from this. We have gone backwards to a less civilised age.
    When we desacralised and casualised sex, didn’t we realise that our children would be harmed? Mass family breakdown has left so many children with no model in their heads of what love is and the place of sex within that. They are prey to a culture that has instead sentimentalised love and evacuated both it and sex of meaning.
    So girls of 11 or 12 think they have to have sex with their ‘boyfriends’ to show that they love them, and this is condoned by adults who dish out the condoms and abortions. Then they’re called ‘slags’ by an adult world which claims to be horrified by child sexual abuse.
    But this is a society that has institutionalised such abuse. The state itself grooms children for sex. Obsessed by paedophilia, this has become a kind of paedophile society.
    The boundary between childhood and adult life has become dangerously blurred by moral confusion, selfishness and hypocrisy. Yet we do have a way of demarcating that boundary. It’s called the age of consent. Let’s start using it again.

  395. Article is from tomorrow’s spectator.

    ‘You’re suffering from a terrible postcode.’ Is from a joke . Illustrations don’t copy to the wall.

  397. John birch – 08:00

    There was a headline a few days ago proclaiming that children were confused and had muddled boundaries – I thought that described the adults in their world, so what hope do the children have?

    Bad behaviour in schools ‘fuelled by over-indulgent parents’
    Over-indulgent middle-class parents are fuelling a rise in bad behaviour in the classroom by failing to set boundaries for their children, teachers’ leaders warned today.
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9173533/Bad-behaviour-in-schools-fuelled-by-over-indulgent-parents.html

    And even sadder, since it has been de rigueur for as long as I can remember:

    The origins of narcissism: Children more likely to be self-centred if they are praised too much
    “A study in the Netherlands of 565 children between the ages of seven and 12, and their parents, found that narcissism was more likely to manifest when a child is “overvalued” during their key developmental stage.
    …
    Those children whose parents told them that are loved but are as “special” and “good” as other people were likely to exhibit less narcissistic traits. They were also found to be more confident and secure with their identities.”
    http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/the-origins-of-narcissism-children-more-likely-to-be-selfcentred-if-they-are-praised-too-much-10098351.html

  398. Islam can be a violent faith, says Queen’s chaplain: Canon expresses concerns about 100 passages in the Koran that ‘invite people to violence’
    * Rev Gavin Ashenden said some 100 passages in Koran incite violence
    * Said Bible instead preaches forgiveness and delivering people from sin
    * Asked if Koran was ‘evil’ he said ‘I will let people decide for themselves’

    “There are passages in the Koran which ‘invite people to violence’, one of the Queen’s chaplains said last night.
    Reverend Canon Gavin Ashenden, the former chaplain of Sussex University and one of 35 who serve Her Majesty, expressed concern about more than 100 passages in the Muslim holy book.
    But the Church of England priest declined to say whether parts of the Koran are ‘evil’, instead advising people to make up their own minds.
    He was responding to comments by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who warned this week about being too quick to brand people with strong religious views ‘extremists’.”

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2990820/Islam-violent-faith-says-Queen-s-chaplain-Canon-expresses-concerns-100-passages-Koran-invite-people-violence.html

    Let us hope he tells the PoW.

  399. And included in the same article, Tristram Hunt showing some signs of common sense (my emphasis):
    “Schools cannot be expected to detect radicalised pupils if their own families do not spot warning signs, a senior Labour politician said last night.
    Shadow education secretary Tristram Hunt warned that ‘more and more’ responsibility is being placed on schools and teachers.
    He branded Islamic extremism a ‘poisonous and cancerous ideology’, which is ‘capturing the minds of many young people’.
    But he suggested that other public services, such as social work, had been stripped away, leaving schools to deal with the problem alone.
    The former TV historian spoke two weeks after three girls from Bethnal Green Academy in east London fled to Syria to join Islamic State.
    He said: ‘If the parents themselves didn’t know what was taking place, the chances of the teachers and the head teachers themselves knowing was more challenging.’”

  402. RobertC@March 12th, 2015 – 10:41

    The breakthrough comes when prople realise jihad is not a warped version of Islam but part of their core beliefs as laid down in their so called holy book.

    a book which incites paedophilia, intolerance and violence.

  405. Alexsandr – 11:29

    Indeed, a holey book?

    I’ve been there, the ME, done that.

    I didn’t get a tee-shirt: it might have been a suicide vest.

  406. Nigel says a fifth column of muslims living here want to kill us.
    Wherever did he get that idea.

  408. @15:16

    Murky Waters!

    Jobs appear to be UK jobs but “Oceanwide” do not have a UK office.
    Vlissingen is in Holland.

    Oceanwide Vlissingen

    Oceanwide Vlissingen recruits and employs Dutch- and international seafarers to ship-owners worldwide. Clients of the office in Vlissingen are well established ship operating companies, active in various branches such as the offshore support, dredging, towage and merchant shipping. Therefore a variety of vessel types can be offered, going from offshore and dredging vessels to general cargo and tankers. The office is DNV – CMO and MLC 2006 certified.

    Contracts are possible for a couple of weeks, fixed term agreements or permanent employment. Contract and payroll are depending on nationality, flag of the vessel and work location. Also interesting career development programs are offered!

  410. RobertC March 12th, 2015 – 13:44

    Alexsandr – 12:22

    “He, [Danny Cohen,] told the Observer in February 2014 that all BBC panel shows must include at least one female.”

    This twat is 41 years of age he has a salary of (note I did not say earned) of £320,000 a year £6,153.85p a week and on a five day week £1,230.77p a day, I bet his expenses are massive as well.

    His and all of the rest of the overpaid managers should be required to re-apply for their jobs on salaries of one-quarter of what they are now on, if they decline then these vacancies should be advertised in every newspaper but not the Guardian we need new blood at the BBC.

  412. David Ossitt – 15:39

    “He, [Danny Cohen,] told the Observer in February 2014 that all BBC panel shows must include at least one female.”

    It’s the only way that supremely unfunny “comedienes” like Sandi Tossvig & Jo Brand can pay the mortgage, I suppose. I cannot imagine who’d part with their own cash to go and listen to them.

  413. I am truly nostalgic
    I remember visiting Notting Hill in the 60’s as a mere bairn
    And seeing the window signs
    *
    No Blacks
    No Irish
    *
    Thanks Nigel

  414. @16:30

    “in the 60’s” – Oh go on, do give do us a year and how old you were.

    Quite shocking, but all the same, it’s a pity the signs didn’t say “No Greeks” though, ain’t it Nick?

  416. Just heard a brilliant piece on BBC Radio 4 pm about a public schoolboy with a German wife bleating about being misunderstood in interviews
    Despite very clear audio clips about
    *
    Living next door to Romanians
    Hiding away breast feeding mothers
    Abolishing the Race Relations Act
    *
    This man truly is a charlatan

  418. Telly tubby reminds me of the strange family member who no one wants at the party, but everyone is too polite to say so.
    The stains on his jumper and his strange choice of clothes make you want to keep your children close to you when he’s around.
    When he leaves there’s a sigh of relief but everyone is to polite to say anything.

  419. David Ossitt 15:59

    Indeed, a very sad day. Pratchett wrote witty, wise libertarian fantasy novels of a uniquely English type. His four “Tiffany Aching” books, intended for younger readers are examples of story telling at its very best.

    I hadn’t realised his Alzheimer’s had reached such a state. I am sure that he will be mourned by very many readers all over the world.

  420. Telly tubby you will find in years to come you are on the wrong side of history.
    Thank christ times are changing and hopefully your lot won’t murder farage the same way you murded David jelly.
    If farage has an unfortunate accident we know who it was wot dun it.

  421. I’m used to my comments being removed in the mail and telegraph, but what caused two comments to telly tubby to be removed here. ???

  422. Surely the comments about David Kelly being murded so watch out Nigel wernt a problem.

  424. Chris Morriss March 12th, 2015 – 17:53

    David Ossitt 15:59

    Indeed, a very sad day. Pratchett wrote witty, wise libertarian fantasy novels of a uniquely English type. His four “Tiffany Aching” books, intended for younger readers are examples of story telling at its very best.

    I have almost all of his work, those that I haven’t my son has.

    His early work such as ‘The Carpet People’ ‘Truckers’ ‘Diggers’ etc. though written for the young were very readable.

    I do hope that DEATH held his hand.

  425. Telemachus March 12th, 2015 – 17:31

    Just heard a brilliant piece on BBC Radio 4 pm about a public schoolboy with a German wife bleating about being misunderstood in interviews
    Despite very clear audio clips about
    *
    Living next door to Romanians
    Hiding away breast feeding mothers
    Abolishing the Race Relations Act
    *
    This man truly is a charlatan

    No he is not and unlike you the man is a true patriot.

  426. See Guardian 4/7/13

    “I don’t think Kelly ever gave an unauthorised interview in his entire life. Jones believed his post-Kuwait briefings were intended to manage public expectations after the invasion, and to make sure it was the government, not British intelligence, which got the blame for confecting claims about Iraqi WMD. Shortly before his death his top secret clearance was revoked. It would have heralded the most intrusive investigation imaginable, and to save himself and his family from the indignity, he walked up Harrowdown Hill and reduced his security risk to zero.”

    There are a lot of politically motivated souls who would wish it otherwise

  428. David Ossitt – 19:00

    Tele-Marcuse – aka Nick H. of TW10 – is the charlatan, he’s projecting his peculiar mental problem on to others.

  429. EC
    The moderator threatened me when I referred to a poster as Nick
    One law for……

  430. Nick H.

    No Blacks.
    No Irish.

    Those who feared for their families when the thin edge of the immigration wedge was hammered into England have had their fears realised many times over. The list is endless, but my old stomping ground of Lewisham was fifteen years ago, like countless London Boroughs, 90% white, 10% immigrant and now the figures are exactly reversed. Irish and Blacks since the last war have always been put on emergency housing lists so forcing yer actual English to become refugees in their own country, a minority in their capital city and surrounded by alien no-go areas in most other towns and cities. And even if they weren’t being ejected from their ancestral homelands by public authority cnuts with the same mindset as you, why would they want to stay. 86% of all violent crime in England is committed by Blacks, well that’s what the Home Office figures say, and for the record, it was Roger the Indian sub-postmaster and Sid the Indian cornershop owner who when they left some years before me, both told me not to leave it too long before I followed them. They both had firsthand experience of the reality of what the newcomers would bring.

  431. George Soros’s cash investment in inciting violence against police in Ferguson has borne its dark fruit.

  434. We don’t expect the Coalition or Labour to show for a Commons defence debate. preoccupied as they are in sending British forces to the Russian border.

    But where the UKIP members? Not down the pub I hope.

    “With this short, wide-ranging speech, Mr Stewart showed he was a worthy choice to chair the defence select committee. He disclosed that the Royal Navy currently operates on ‘attrition calculations of zero’. That means they do not budget on any of their 19 warships being sunk. What happens if we get into a war with a country that has a few torpedoes?…”

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2992402/Jagger-Tories-chilled-gizzards-QUENTIN-LETTS-Yesterday-Parliament.html#ixzz3UDUKiIXt

    Isn’t Rory Stewart a Bilderberger btw?

  438. Irishboy
    Your stats on blacks are bogus and too high, perhaps they are stats for Lewisham
    *
    You need to focus on the other side

    The victims

    *

    “7.5 million population is black, including those of mixed black and white parentage, while 69 per cent is white, according to the Office for National Statistics.
    The police figures also show that black men are twice as likely to be victims. They made up 29 per cent of the male victims of gun crime and 24 per cent of the male victims of knife crime”

  439. A different radio station.
    The RNIB runs its own radio station on Freeview 730 and the internet.It also has recently broadcast talking books available for free. Amongst the latest is “A Pelican at Blandings”.It can be found under`arts and lifestyle-talking Books`,below.

    http://www.insightradio.co.uk/programmes.html

  440. telemachus/Nick – 05:34

    “Sadly 80 per cent of gun crime in London is “black on black”
    Dianne Abbott

    Eat that, you dissembling bastard!

    PS. I note that you were recently rattling “Aitken’s Sword of Truth” over at the Spectatesman. Did you really send death threats to Melanie Phillips on Twitter as alleged? When, if ever, are you going to make good on your threats, to “Troll Hunter”? Admit it, go on, you were just peeved that he forgot your birthday last Sunday, weren’t you…

  441. telemachus still at it I see. Has gravitated from referring to me as ‘Nicholas’ to now referring to me as ‘Nick’ (!) and I’m not even involved in those exchanges.

    Asked repeatedly why he persists with that unhealthy obsession and what he hopes to achieve by it he refused to answer. Peter once said that any such posts would be deleted and it now looks as though the gremlin is provoking again.

    I have absolutely no idea why you put up with that creature here, I really don’t. He is simply trolling the site 99.9% of the time.

  442. For the avoidance of doubt Colonel, I have not referred to you by other than the respect you deserve since I was admonished
    My concern is with Troll Hunter, probably the chap who stole my avatar (a splendid rose from my wife’s gardening prowess) on Speccie last Summer
    I am particularly concerned about his heinous comments in relation to Ms Phillips
    Again, for the avoidance of doubt I respect the views of all who post here even though I might not agree with them

  443. Colonel Mustard – 08:32

    I agree, “telemachus” is 100% disruptive. He should either be banned or, maybe as a nod to free speech, his contributions/droppings should automatically be forwarded to a “Lubyanka basement” section of PfM’s CHW site. He would feel quite at home there and he could be interrogated whenever anybody could be bothered to pay him a visit.

    It is a tad ironic that he, as alleged at the Spectatesman for many years – most recently by “Troll Hunter”, shares his first name – Nicholas – with his former blogging bête noire. YCMIU as one might say!

  444. Sorry for my absence and neglect of the management of the CHW. I’ve just come back from 10 days in Milan and I only had my tablet, which did not allow very much administrative action to take place.

    This current wall is very long now so I am creating a new one, for ease of use more than anything else. I’ll address telemachus as a first comment on the new wall.

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