The End is Nigh?

Mrs Paine and I had a great holiday. We talked and talked and, for once, came to some conclusions. Unless there are serious changes in Britain (unlikely, with the Conservative Party on its current tack) we want out.

France tipped the balance. It is just so civilised. People are polite. The streets are clean. There are enough roads for the peoples' needs. Official notices make suggestions, they don't give orders. There is no need for signs warning against "verbal assault" on public servants.

I am a gentle enough man, but I am often in the presence of British public employees I could cheerfully kick, so triumphant are they in their hour of victory over a private sector cowed into meek submission.

Our daughter needed medical help there. We had a full set of tests and a diagnosis within 48 hours. Had we been French, we could have claimed the costs back from the State, but the State did not own the clinic or employ the doctor and all the staff treated us with the same courtesy (I do not exaggerate) as the staff in the expensive shop where I bought my wife's anniversary present.

We know it's no paradise. France has her problems too - e.g. an even greater population than England's of Muslims hostile to native values. Yet, time after time, we asked ourselves "Why can't England be like this?" We can accept that the English don't care about food. That's their choice. We can live on poor fare ourselves when we need to, much as we enjoy French cuisine. We know that the French are theoretically more Socialist than the Brits. But that doesn't deter us from wanting to move there. The English talk Capitalism but act Socialist. The French talk Socialism but act Capitalist. In the end, handsome is as handsome does.

Much as I hate Socialism, I have finally realised that it is not really the main problem in Britain. Puritanism is. It is the Puritanism of the British that elevates good ideas like "let's save energy by recycling" or "let's encourage people to give up the dangerous habit of smoking" into quasi-religious fanaticism. It's Puritanism that turns people with different viewpoints into dangerous heretics whose thought-crimes must be punished. It's Puritanism that is turning the cradle of freedom into a police state, day by day.

I don't smoke. I would rather have one glass of really great wine than a case of plonk, so I drink in moderation. It was no hardship to be on a driving holiday because I can forego even the fine wine for the pleasure of driving my car. By French standards, perhaps I am a Puritan. But I enjoyed being in a country where I was not constantly badgered and nagged by know-it-all goody-two shoes trying to invoke the powers of the State to tell me how to live.

I got angry once in over two weeks away. That was over a personal matter. But in England I was in a sustained state of fury for my first seven hours as I laboured from traffic jam to traffic jam on roads deliberately neglected for allegedly "green" reasons. When not fuming in stationary traffic, I was in fear of losing my licence to a speed camera if I took a rare chance to make up some time stolen from me by the Ministry of Transport's incompetence.

France was not so much another country as another world. A calmer, politer, frankly more civilised world. In the name of equality, tolerance and multiculturalism, Britain is descending into the barbarism of which the French have always accused it. I would have fought for my country's good name against such accusations in the past. I have found great relief in simply accepting them. I can no longer defend the indefensible. Britain was great, but is no more. Labour and its fellow travellers have destroyed everything I held dear and the only way is out.

I love my country. I am sad beyond belief to feel this way. But enough is enough.

Mrs Paine says I should "let go". She thinks I waste too much time and spiritual energy worrying about the future of a country that has only a past. She says that she has already put the place behind her and accepted that it has passed the point of no return. It will decline, in her view, until it hits bottom. It will be rebuilt, she thinks, perhaps as an Islamic Republic but certainly as nothing to which she could feel any loyalty.

I fear she is right. If so, this blog makes no sense. It is making no difference to anything and there is no hope - if Mrs P is right - that it could ever do so. I shall have to think about that.

Privacy row erupts over child database

If the Government believed in (or cared about) the security of this database, it would not be exempting the children of "celebrities" (code for "nothing on there about the Blairs"). Our children are as important as theirs not to mention, by some accounts, rather better brought up.

If the Social Services were the answer to the problems of our children, they might well like to take an interest in the children of some of our political leaders. Of course, they won't get the opportunity to do so. Nor will they be able to take an interest in the children of anyone who buys "celebrity" by, for example, donating to the Labour Party.

Any idea that a database to which 400,000 people have access will be confidential is ridiculous. So is the notion that £200 million spent on this technology will save any Victoria Climbies of the future. Poor Victoria's fate was well-known to the social workers. However, it seems our public servants were too afraid of accusations of thought-crime to intervene when the responsible adults were from ethnic minorities.

Amid so many imagined victims of "racism" (e.g. those children of Caribbean descent who perform below average in school, despite the fact the children of Chinese and Indian descent perform above average), Victoria was a real victim of racism. The racism that allowed her to be killed is the same racism that allows the murder of so many Muslim girls every year.

Dismantling multiculturalism and holding everyone in our society to the same standards would have saved her life. This database wouldn't.

Privacy row erupts over child database | the Daily Mail

Restriction order on cab driver cleared in terror case - Britain - Times Online

This story makes exactly the point I was seeking to make when I started this blog. A man is charged of terrorist offences, acquitted by a jury and put under house arrest anyway because the Government says so. A society which tolerates such behaviour from its government is lost.

Restriction order on cab driver cleared in terror case - Britain - Times Online

Footballer gets criminal record for making sign of the cross

If Mr Boruc's reverent sign of the Cross was so serious a provocation to Scottish thugs as to merit a criminal record, why is not the public wearing of the "hijab" or the "kufi?"

Scotland is truly the advance guard of New Labour's totalitarian state.

I hope the Catholic Church will now help in the Resistance as it so signally failed to do at the same stage in the development of totalitarianism in Germany. It has an opportunity to redeem itself for its shameful history of craven responses to Fascist and Communist regimes around the world.

Certainly, its spokesman's comments reported here are far too mild. The Church should demand the dismissal of the police officers and the Procurator Fiscal concerned.

The British people now have little influence over the Blair regime. It is arrogant and utterly out of control. Through the Blessed Cherie, however, the Pope has far more than mere influence. Let him use it.

Footballer gets criminal record for making sign of the cross | the Daily Mail

Biggest migrant influx in Britain's history

I hate blogging about immigration. It's a minefield. Almost any opinion is likely to attract accusations from one direction or another. I don't subscribe to the BNP "foreigners taking our jobs" theory. Nor do I share the Guardianista view that our country's culture is so disgusting that it can only be improved by foreigners. I have the extra dimension of having lived and worked in other people's countries for more than half my working life. I have been on the receiving end of both points of view as the foreigner in question - and I know them for the nonsense they are.

Far from "taking our jobs", many immigrants are doing the jobs "we" would rather sit on our fat chav behinds than do. The Labour heartlands where I grew up contain an archipelago of idleness, funded by disability, unemployment and other benefits, insurance fraud, fake personal injury claims, drug dealing and other crimes. My wife tripped and fell on an uneven pavement in our home town and was advised by the next three people she met how to sue the council (i.e. get free money from the taxpayer). People who don't read for pleasure and find Big Brother demanding viewing know the intricacies of "the system" inside out. Don't get me wrong. Those three were nice people. They were all in gainful employment, but they have been hopelessly corrupted by living near to the rip-off culture of the archipelago.

Unless we are prepared to take measures so drastic as to be politically unthinkable, I am afraid we have to accept that our enormous underclass will now do anything but work. There are now third-generation idlers who don't even know anyone with a job. They are sanctified as "the most vulnerable members of our society" and indeed there are some such amongst them - held up rather like the photos of "martyrs" at a march of Islamic fascists, as justification for future crimes.

So we need immigrants. Hard-working immigrants who will do essential jobs to make our country livable. Immigrants who will appreciate what a free society has to offer.

Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers have arrived in recent years from new EU members, notably Poland. I know Poland well. I lived there for over a decade. It is a country of which I could be proud to be a citizen. It has a good education system, strong family values and a work ethic. I am no fan of Britain's membership of the EU, but I was there as Poland prepared itself to join and the EU's influence was good. It required many reforms - legal, administrative and social - as conditions of membership. Poland dutifully delivered them, as did the other candidate countries. Any Pole, Hungarian or Czech who comes to Britain to work is not a refugee from a failed state or a primitive religious fanatic. He or she is a citizen of a civilised European country, sharing all of our key values and simply looking for a better job. The proportion of social security claimants amongst those migrant workers puts our native population to shame.

The same will be true of the Bulgarians, Croats, Serbians and Romanians when their time comes. If we need migrant workers - temporary or permanent (and most of these people would prefer to live in their own more polite and civilised countries if they could, so many will eventually go home) - then the EU is finally providing us with a benefit for our massive membership fee.

So why has Labour admitted over a million immigrants from non-EU countries? Why has it done so without questioning their motives or their objectives? Why is it continuing to do so even when it has become apparent that a dangerously significant minority of those immigrants not only don't share our basic values but despise them? Even after, in their self-imposed apartheid, they have bred British citizens so primitively fanatical as to murder by suicide bombing, Labour continues to admit them.

This is not a question of racism. Many non-EU immigrants from Hong Kong, India and elsewhere make a superb contribution to our country. So far from finding us so racist and hostile as to alienate them and justify terrorism, they have rolled up their sleeves and got down to work. Their children have the highest rates of educational achievement. No excuses from them, and no complaints from us. They are welcome. However, it is time for "profiling" not just of airline passengers waiting in line for security checks, but of immigrants waiting in line to come to our country. To the extent that the New Europe can't supply the skilled workers we need, we should take them from the countries that have the best history of providing productive, law-abiding, and well-integrated citizens to date.

And that - call it racism if you will - precludes any further immigration from the Islamic world. One does not have to be a paranoid who suspects them of following their false prophet's advice to infiltrate infidel nations to say this. One just has to use common sense. No more immigrants from communities whose leaders advocate, justify or excuse terrorism. No more immigrants from communities which don't share our views on female equality, religious tolerance or minority rights.

What has been done so far already puts our society in mortal danger. But it is never too late to start fighting back. Today would be a good day to begin.

Telegraph | News | Biggest migrant influx in Britain's history

Mutiny as passengers refuse to fly until Asians are removed

How exactly are passengers supposed to react if they observe passengers who match the profile of a typical suicide bomber dressed in clothes too bulky for the weather, talking nervously to each other and checking their watches at frequent intervals?

Of course these circumstances don't mean the men in question are terrorists. There are many other explanations for their behaviours. But other passengers are entitled to worry about their families' safety. It is certainly unfair that passengers who were alert in reporting security concerns should be denounced (by Patrick Mercer, the Tory "Homeland Security spokesman" no less) as racists for their pains. They were polite, but insistent and expressed no racist sentiments, according to witnesses.

On far less substantial (and equally circumstantial) evidence, a Metropolitan Police hit squad killed an innocent man on a Tube train. If these passengers' polite refusal to fly with these men was "racist", then what on earth was that?

Mutiny as passengers refuse to fly until Asians are removed | the Daily Mail

Rumpole author claims UK is selling out to fascism - The Herald

God bless John Mortimer. He may be an old leftie, but anyone who has ever read his books or seen an episode of "Rumpole of the Bailey" knows he believes first and foremost in liberty and the rule of law.

He has argued for socialist ideas all his long life. To his enormous credit it seems never to have occurred to him that they could be implemented against the informed will of the majority. Unlike Blair, Brown, Campbell and Cameron, he has always seen the people as being there to be persuaded, not manipulated.

Rumpole author claims UK is selling out to fascism - The Herald

Home thoughts from abroad

Epernay, France.

Blogging was interrupted during a stay in a beautiful “Hostellerie” with more civilised guest services than Wi-Fi. It was probably good for me. If I had the now standard-issue victim mentality, I would consider myself an "addictive" blogger. A rest will do me good; not to mention my overworked readers who shoulder the heavy burden of making my theraputic ramblings seem less pointless.

Political thoughts continued to surface however. Mrs Paine’s mother sat in the cramped rear cockpit of the Painemobile for our 7 hour journey from oop North to the place where Champagne comes from. She is a lifelong Labour woman, chatty and decent. She’s the sort of person the toffs who run the Party imagine “the workers” to be (when they are not shamelessly attributing ridiculous views to them). I blogged [here] about the Party’s corrupt pitch to her to run for the local council.

Listening to our last English radio news on the way down to the Eurostar, she said that “something doesn’t ring true” about last Thursday’s terror scare. I affected surprise. Surely she didnt’ think "our Tony" and the boys would make something like that up? She said, “I think they want us scared.”

There was much cynicism in our high-speed political capsule about the downgrading of Britain’s terror alert status. “They’ve overdone it so people are calling for Blair to come back from holiday. So he’s told them to downgrade it to take the heat off” was the consensus.

I am amazed. We have known each other for over thirty years and never agreed on the wickedness of the Labour Party’s intentions before.

Unfortunately, we have also never agreed about the hopelessness of the Tories before. There was unanimity on the pointlessness of voting for a Party led by “our Dave”, whose sole political idea is to imitate Blair - now that everybody has finally concluded that Tony is as fake as his tan.

Over coffee in our Relais while they readied our rooms, we discussed what (short of violent revolution) could be done. Unfortunately we had no better ideas than trying to get involved in organising tactical voting next time.

Mrs Paine’s mum is a constant source of information about heartlands life. She told of a conversation with a midwife. When leaving a home delivery on a local council estate during the recent heatwave, the midwife had run into the postman. After a chat, he had pointed to all the local gentry who had carried their sofas out into the gardens and were drinking tins of beer while marking their race cards, listening to their radios or watching their TV’s - in the middle of a working day. “You and me are the only ones with a job for miles around, love” observed the postie, “we must be mad.”

The midwife told Mrs Paine’s mum that the mother she had just delivered had told her to “f*** off” at an early stage in the proceedings. The midwife had had the satisfaction of being begged to stay when she had made as if to take the foul-mouthed loser at her word.

We fantasised hopelessly about how good it would be to make the Cabinet live on such an estate for a year. There’s about as much chance of that as there is of Prescott developing a conscience.

En route to France. Normal service will be resumed, d.v., as soon as possible

Glancing back, they saw a small cloud of dust, with a dark centre of energy, advancing on them at incredible speed, while from out the dust a faint `Poop-poop!' wailed like an uneasy animal in pain. Hardly regarding it, they turned to resume their conversation, when in an instant (as it seemed) the peaceful scene was changed, and with a blast of wind and a whirl of sound that made them jump for the nearest ditch, It was on them! The `Poop-poop' rang with a brazen shout in their ears, they had a moment's glimpse of an interior of glittering plate-glass and rich morocco, and the magnificent motor-car, immense, breath-snatching, passionate, with its pilot tense and hugging his wheel, possessed all earth and air for the fraction of a second, flung an enveloping cloud of dust that blinded and enwrapped them utterly, and then dwindled to a speck in the far distance, changed back into a droning bee once more.

The Wind in the Willows

Back in Blighty

I am briefly in England, preparing for my motorised expedition to the Cote d'Azur. So far I have had three conversations with people outside my family.

The man who drove me from Manchester Airport (proud sponsors of the Labour Party) expressed his doubts about Thursday's terrrorism alert. "You can't believe anything this lot say, can you?" he observed wearily. If the denizens of the Northern Heartlands, who have unquestioningly drunk the Party's hemlock for generations, think Labour might lie on this scale, anything is possible.

To be honest, I have been a bit shocked that so many (including Guido) think our Government would imitate Goebbels so shamelessly. Cynicism is one thing, but that verges on moonbattery, surely? I don't even think it's good politics. If they were lies, surely Blair would have stayed home to deliver them, movingly? Leaving such powerful drama to his understudies makes no sense.

The second chat was with the guy who cut my hair. Unprovoked he observed, when hearing that I live in Russia, that I should probably stay there. He said many of his more educated customers have left England in the last 10 years. "The American tourists" [ours is a small-scale tourist town] "are amazed we can live with low wages, high prices AND high taxes" he added, sadly.

The third exchange of views was with a bewhiskered Trot who thrust a leaflet into my hand denouncing BushandBlair and calling for "immediate unconditional ceasefire" in Lebanon. "You must be joking", I said. "Children are dying!" she Gallowayed for the benefit of the adjoining counties. "But what about Hezbollah's rockets? Didn't you mind when it was just Jewish children?" I said, and started to walk away. She bellowed after me, for the benefit of passersby, "Afraid to stop and argue, then?"

I swivelled on my heel and went back. I am so glad I did. If I hadn't I would have missed the first laugh of my holiday.

"Have you read the Hezbollah Charter?" I asked. Somewhat evasively she riposted "I've read a lot of things I have. I've got three university degrees, I have. I'm not stupid."

That made my day. I hadn't called her stupid; effectively she just had. Three degrees were not enough to fill the cracks in her well-justified sense of inferiority. Nor enough to get her a job, judging by her bedraggled appearance.

After exchanging a few more pleasantries, she decided that, so far from being afraid to argue, I was deliberately distracting her from the struggle. She turned away and resumed ranting at the bemused shoppers.

The nostalgic smell of Trotskyite fear in my nostrils, I strolled away, contentedly wondering where I could find the "Ramon Mercador Fan Club" badge I used to wear at National Union of Students conferences.

The Last Ditch

My holidays begin today, so blogging will be light, especially on driving days. Today, unfortunately, is a flying day; from Moscow to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt to Manchester.

I am not looking forward to the possibility of being forced to check my laptop as British security goes into headless chicken mode.

The Last Ditch

BBC NEWS | Politics | Terror 'may force freedom curbs'

How interesting that when our our condescending Home Secretary was making this speech yesterday and telling us that we don't "get it," he knew about today's police operation to thwart "mass murder on an unmaginable scale".

It remains to be seen if the perceived threat was real. We all hope that the people arrested prove to be real terrorists, now out of circulation. Unfortunately the source of the intelligence which led to their arrests is the same bunch of clowns who brought you Iraqi WMD capable of being deployed in 45 minutes.

The taxpayers whose travel was disrupted today may yet find themselves paying compensation

Meanwhile, on cue, Gorgeous George was on the box busy telling us that we are to blame for the radicalisation of Islam.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Terror 'may force freedom curbs'

Knife attacks surge 73% as amnesty fails - Britain - Times Online

My more conventionally right-wing comrades in the blogosphere will take offence at Chris Eades' observation, reported here, that the Government has an "implausible view that increased sentence length will have a deterrent effect." They will feel no sentence is too long for a thug who offers violence to fellow citizens. They have a point. At the risk of offending them, Mr Eades has a point too.

I worked with criminals briefly, but for long enough to learn that they are characterised by tattoos and a lack of foresight. Perhaps the two are connected? Tattooing the name of a girl on your arm when the pain from the needles is likely to last longer than the relationship demonstrates a lack of foresight.

I digress. My point is they live in, and for, the moment.

We - thoughtfully considering appropriate penal policy - would consider the consequences of being caught. They don't, because they think it isn't going to happen. That's not irrational. Statistically, they are being much more rational in their "professional" lives than - say - when they play the National Lottery.

Rational humans assume that, while a thief will risk a year in jail, he will "think again" about risking ten. To think again, you must have thought the first time. The fact is, he hasn't thought about jail at all. Time after time, I interviewed criminal clients who could hardly focus on preparing their defence, such was their sense of grievance about their "bad luck".

Most criminals are young men, between the ages of 15 and 30. They have the sense of invulnerability that only a young man can have. If you really want to affect their behaviour, you have to increase their sense of risk. A young man confidently walking across a broad bridge, doesn't care if the ravine below is twenty or twenty thousand feet deep. You need to make it a rickety bridge. And even then many young men will want to bungee jump.

PC David Copperfield at the Policeman's Blog (always an excellent read) has written amusingly and at length about the bureaucratic burdens of his work. There is little doubt that the police are currently incentivised to pluck "low-hanging fruit" to produce good statistics for the Home Office. A painstaking attempt to detect a crime with no immediately obvious perpetrator will produce - at best - one conviction. That translates to a feeling on the part of victims and criminals that serious police effort at detection is unlikely. How long has it been in Britain since anyone seriously expected more from the police after a burglary than a "crime number" for the insurance company?

If PC Copperfield and his colleagues could break free from the statistical chains that bind them and focus on detection of crime, there is a chance they could affect even a cocky young man's sense of risk. I believe that's why - to the surprise of criminologists - "zero tolerance" policies for even minor offences have reduced serious crime in New York and other cities. Subconsciously, criminals have concluded that the risk of detection is higher, the more often they have been detected - however trivial the crime.

The trouble is that higher sentences, like new laws, are cheap ways for Ministers to get good publicity and to seem tough. For a politician it's a "no-brainer." If a Home Secretary were stupid enough, politically, to focus on genuine improvements in the efficiency of the police force, he would have a long, hard slog for nothing. Why for nothing? Because the turnover of ministers is so rapid that any long term project is ultimately a gift to your successor. In a functioning democracy that might even, God forbid, be a political opponent.

Knife attacks surge 73% as amnesty fails - Britain - Times Online

Adam Smith Institute Blog

The Adam Smith Institute blog is good at putting economic issues in context, allowing the less numerate among us to get a handle on them. Today's post by Dr Eamonn Butler is a good example. In the context of discussing the biggest Government IT project ever (and the most sinister since this one), he comments on the Government's record of controlling IT costs as follows:-

"I calculated recently that the budget spent on IT in the National Health Service was enough to give every doctor, nurse, porter and administrator 20,000 PCs each. "

Am I naieve in thinking that all a competent leader of HM Opposition has to do is state his arguments so clearly?

Adam Smith Institute Blog:

'Gas guzzlers should pay £1,800 a year car tax' | the Daily Mail

For me this would be the last straw. Most of the money I have earned in my life has been spent either on necessities or on goods for my family. My children's education (my finest investment, I am not complaining) has cost more than my pension fund. The only personal motivation to get me out of bed and into harness every morning has been my motor car.

I am not alone. "Top Gear" is one of the BBC's biggest international money earners, with a worldwide audience of more than 350 million, despite what one might expect to be the offputting "blokeyness" and colloquial English of the presenters. There are more than 5 million viewers per show in the UK alone. Compare and contrast the 300,000 circulation of the Guardian. We love our cars.

All I really have to show for having worked longer hours and endured greater stresses than any of my school friends is "Claudia II". She is my Mercedes AMG convertible. I love her passionately. I derive enormous pleasure merely from the memory of the sight of her deeply imposing 5.5 litre engine. She and I are going on holiday to the South of France next week, a journey set up entirely to show off her attributes.

I could easily fly to the Cote d'Azur from Moscow, but instead I am flying to England to pick her up and drive her for 16 hours from our pied a terre in the rotten boroughs of the Labour North to the sun. My wife and her mother are coming with us. They will chat amiably and enjoy the ride, while Claudia and I commune in silent, noble, ecstasy.

She produces her own weight in carbon every year (at least she would if she were driven every day). But she produces less than the 1.5 litre car I drove in my youth - and uses about the same amount of fuel, thanks to the ever-advancing technology which has always been (and will always be) the solution to Man's problems.

She doesn't just motivate me. Every time she moves, Claudia motivates passing young boys to strive for success. Even when parked, she attracts them and starts them thinking how they can achieve in order, one day, to afford something so beautiful. I can read in their eyes the feelings I had as a teenager when I first saw a Ferrari. "One day..." I thought.

Did a Toyota Prius ever have such an effect? Did a ****ing Ford KA ever inspire anyone to anything but sloth? God help us, go on "the disability" and Nanny will buy you one of those!

The effect still works on me. At the Geneva Motor Show three years ago I sat in a Bentley Continental. I shall not cease from mental fight, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand until I possess one. And every flex of my professional sinews towards that goal will create wealth and jobs. Dozens work in - and feed their families from - businesses I have built, not because I cared for them (although I liked almost all of them a bit and some of them a lot) but because I was striving towards Claudia.

The Greens who promote punitive taxes on such glorious creations as Claudia are falling - every day - for a stupid logical fallacy. They are assuming that everything bad will continue to get worse at a constant rate, while nothing good will improve. They are the same Puritans who have dogged the English speaking world and been a brake on our progress since Hengest and Horsa first set us on our path to glory.

In the great history of the Anglosphere, name me one hero who advanced humanity's cause while holding back its technological advance. Such people are not worth remembering. They are the ultimate reactionaries and we should despise them with all the force that our waning race can muster.

God rot all Luddites. Had Ned Lud's terrorists succeeded during the Industrial Revolution, millions who have lived and loved and died would never have known this Earth. Who among us honestly wants to live the life of a Plains Indian, as advocated by these nutcases? Why do we keep rewarding them by voting for politicians who gesture towards their insane ideas?

'Gas guzzlers should pay £1,800 a year car tax' | the Daily Mail

Happy Sunday

Gun fears follow Toni-Ann verdict

Here's a left-wing liberal media classic. A young black criminal kills a drug dealing rival with a gun, then shoots the man's seven year old daughter to prevent her giving evidence that he did it. He is caught, prosecuted and convicted. The judge directs he serve a minimum of forty years.

It is all clear enough. The killer is an evil man and has been brought to justice. End of story, right? Wrong!

First comes the usual clap trap from the "family" about the dead girl's "promising" future. Yes, right. Her mother abandoned her to the care of one of the drug dealing low lifes who just might have been her father, as the deluded fool apparently thought. DNA now shows he wasn't. Very promising. How the mother has the nerve to appear in public is a mystery. Where was she when her daughter was shot? No doubt making some other baby with a "promising future" of life with drug-dealing scum.

Secondly, we are told that young black men "lack opportunity" and "turn to gun crime". This man had the same bloody opportunities as the rest of us; the same crap schools, the same crap healthcare, and the same turn on the wheel of fortune to determine the quality of his parenting. He "turned to" drug dealing and ultimately to shooting a seven year old girl in cold blood. His choice. A choice that millions with the same opportunities (or lack thereof) didn't make.

Then "campaigner", Ms Ogole, tells us that "prisons don't really work". Right, love. Not as well as the gallows anyway. No doubt you disagree and think this scumbag should be released. Forgive us if we beg to differ.

At the risk of enraging the EU, as Poland's President has done, nothing less than the death penalty would be enough for him. Any life he has in jail will be more than he deserves, despite what I hope will be the best efforts of his cellmates to introduce him to retributive justice of the most animal kind. Please don't ask me to feel sorry for him.

Then of course the call for more gun control. How CAN there be more?! Even replica firearms are now illegal and the police only bother to turn up at the scene of a burglary if the householder has done some well-deserved harm to the burglar. We are defenceless and our police don't give a damn.

At present in Britain, it seems two categories of people have guns; trigger happy officers specialising in multiple lethal head shots to innocent targets, and dangerous criminals. What we need, it seems to me, are MORE guns, but in the hands of the respectable citizenry instead. I would willingly trade half the police officers in England for the right to keep a semi-automatic at home - and to use it freely the next time I find an intruder on my property.

I would even settle for not being afforded the special "whoops, sorry, I thought he was a terrorist" defence apparently enjoyed by the officers of CO19.

We gave up the right to bear arms in Britain as part of a social contract that our police would ensure we didn't regret it. They haven't. What now?

BBC NEWS | England | London | Gun fears follow Toni-Ann verdict

'Disproportionate' in What Moral Universe?

I feel I have no need to blog today, as I am able to link to an article which says beautifully exactly what I feel. Of course it's not in the British or European press. It's from the Washington Post. (h/t A Tangled Web ) God bless you, Charles Krauthammer.

The current shitstorm in the MSM and blogosphere is horrific. We are being taken for mugs here. If you don't want Israel to win outright, leaving Hezbollah destroyed, then what do you want? What exactly is it about misogynist primitives armed by holocaust-denying genocidal maniacs that you find so attractive?

'Disproportionate' in What Moral Universe?

Police marksman cleared over terror raid shooting - Britain - Times Online

Isn't it odd that, for the second time, the British police have accidentally shot a suspect, only to discover afterwards that he is guilty of something likely to lose him public sympathy? In both cases, it had nothing to do with the incident. With Jean Charles de Menezes, it was being an illegal immigrant. With this gentleman, it was child porn on his PC. What are the odds?

When the police take your computer away, no-one is better placed to fill it with such images. After all they, perfectly legally, have computers full of them. How, exactly, is this man to prove that he didn't download them? Even if the charge doesn't stick, he will be looked at askance forever.

Innocent until proven guilty? Not if our police manage to trash you in the media and make you an outcast in your community first. If shot by the British police, perhaps it's best to smile and say "thank you." The best solution may even be to confess cheerfully to whatever they think you might have done.

Why not? if New Labour succeed in turning the whole island into a prison camp, will it really matter if you are in or out of jail?

Police marksman cleared over terror raid shooting - Britain - Times Online

Overstated, but true

In the watery sunshine of a fading Russian Summer, I finished reading Londonistan over lunch at my local brasserie today. I was chilled both inside and out.

Melanie Phillips is a tiring read. Her style is like a jack-hammer, driving her ideas into your head. I want to find fault, because she is so bloody irritating. Unfortunately, in this book at least, she is almost completely right.

Her central thesis is that Britain has failed to defend herself against forces which seek to destroy her, because she has trapped herself in a strait-jacket of multiculturalism.

This has gone beyond an updating of classical liberalism to embrace other cultures. It has become a quasi-religious belief. The heretics who oppose it are called racists. In modern Britain, to be called a racist is rather like being called a witch in 17th Century Salem. It's not something you can just laugh off.

This constraint on political thought has permitted the mass immigration of people inimical to the British way of life and most of all - ironically - to British liberalism. To question the wisdom of admitting fanatics of a foreign faith was racist. It couldn't be said, so it wasn't.

This same constraint allowed those enemies, once inside the country, to trap the majority into appeasing their every demand. Require that they learn English History? Racist. Expect them to respect English laws and customs? Racist. Expect them to integrate with the rest of the population? Racist.

The cult of the victim which underlies multiculturalism demonises the majority. The minority are victims. Victims are morally superior. Of whom are they victims? The majority. Who else? And what does that make the majority? The oppressors. QED.

Question whether you are racist and you are just expressing your subconscious racism. Accept it and you are (of course) racist. Float, you are a witch and cannot be suffered to live. Drown, and you are innocent. We have been here before.

Such thinking is so pathetic that it might almost be thought amusing. The non-PC have long joked of the ideal Conservative candidate being a one-eyed Muslim lesbian living on disability benefits. But Phillips points out that this has been far from harmless lunacy.

The young men who blew themselves up on London's trains and buses on 7th July 2005 were murderers. But they saw themselves as victims. They were prosperous beneficiaries of Britain'’s open society, but they saw themselves as oppressed. They were British, but when their leader's video tape was broadcast posthumously, he spoke of the British as "you" and the Muslims of the world as "we".

Scarily, the spokesmen of Britain's Muslims - while distancing themselves from murder - continued to portray themselves as victims. It was a technique that worked and they were not giving it up. Although - amazingly - there were no significant attacks on Muslims in the wake of 7/7, both Muslims and the media focussed on the supposed Islamophobia of the majority population.

To have your sons commit mass murder, and then win sympathy for your fear of reprisals is surely the greatest success in the history of PR.

From Melanie Phillips' main thesis, I cannot demur. "Multiculti" is not a joke, but an abomination. Immigrants should be welcomed, according to the nation's economic needs, by all means. But they should always be screened on national security grounds. Blindly admitting people raised in backward societies with views incompatible with our liberties was, and is, criminally negligent.

But Phillips goes too far. She sees a conspiracy where there is only amiable incompetence. Like Tony Blair she sees opposition to any legal measure labelled "anti-terrorist" as being evidence of treachery; whether the proposed measure would be effective or not, and regardless of the costs to the innocent.

Like Tony Blair, she blames judges for their unwillingness to give effect to repressive measures against terror suspects on "human rights" grounds. Like Tony Blair, therefore, she fails to distinguish between a suspect (still innocent until proven guilty) and a convicted terrorist.

In her sweeping rhetoric, she brands many of her natural allies as traitors - including those libertarians and believers in the Rule of Law who have most to lose and are most fiercely inclined to resist. I think it would be easier for a social conservative such as Melanie Phillips (hijab apart) to live as a dhimmi under the Caliphate than it would be for me or my thoroughly modern daughters.

I resent her implication that libertarian objections to the introduction of a police state are mere weakness in the face of terror.

There is one more respect in which I disagree with Melanie Phillips. She concludes her book pessimistically, saying that

“Britain is currently locked into such a spiral of decadence, self-loathing and sentimentality that it is incapable of seeing that it is setting itself up for cultural immolation.

In consequence, she feels there is “little chance”. I cannot blame her. Readers of my blog know that I wrestle with the same pessimism.

However, I keep writing - and I think Phillips does too - as a small token of a deeply-held conviction that "there is life in the old girl yet." England has given the world a great deal. I believe that - before it is too late - she will wake up from her torpor and give more.

Already the ordinary people have cast off multiculturalism. To start up a random conversation in a taxi or a bar is to become encouraged. After a ritual disclaimer of racism, common-sense will ensue more often than not. That gives me hope that, despite the best efforts of our leaders, Islam will not triumph, though the way to its defeat will be bloody.