The image on the right is a good example of modern xenophobia. Its not racist in the traditional sense, with a picture of some black guy running off with a white woman for example.

It’s part of a narrative that says: the Muslims are not only here, but they’ll take over by multiplying and destroying us. The bomb is the womb… etc. I don’t even have to deconstruct it too much - its obvious what the message is.

Stuff like this has a long tradition. Decades ago the narrative was that the world was controlled by a “Jewish copnspiracy”, and you can still this prevalent on far-right websites where they talk of the ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government).
Continue reading…

I have spent about five hours so far collating reactions to last night’s Who and am still not done yet, so if this is a bit disjointed, blame Russell T Davies. When I’ve finally done I’ll be making Liberal use of this and picturing Rusty in the role of Boss.

Tips to the usual address: all submissions will be considered, although there’s no guarantee of inclusion.

Andrew Hickey has a great post about why the Lib Dems’ current strategy is completely arse-about-face, which neatly encapsulates my own feelings on the matter and chimes with Mike Smithson’s recent post too.

Stuff White People Like dissects Godwin’s Law: “all human beings can be neatly filed into one of two categories: People I Agree With, and People Who are Just Like Adolf Hitler.”

Shakesville reports on a fiscal fly in John McCain’s soup.

On my blog there are tips for those who wish to pile the pressure on Heinz like Lynne F. Continue reading…

It’s a dark day for me as a Liberal, but I find myself in agreement with the Daily Fail. I despise the Mail, and pretty much everything they stand for, but Harperson’s Equality Act definitely has a sting in the tail.

In my view, Positive Discrimination is still discrimination and it is wrong. Even in this limited way, endorsing discrimination perpetuates it, rather than eradicating it. It adds vast amounts of resentment for little perceivable benefit.
Continue reading…

This week’s events have corroborated my belief that we can learn more about society and politics from Big Brother than from Today in Parliament.

Alexandra’s expulsion from the house for “intimidating” behaviour demonstrates our ruling class’s terror of anything remotely resembling a physical threat; violence is something done to foreigners, not “respectable“ white people.
Continue reading…

In case you didn’t know, Refugee Week starts today. While The Guardian has been doing an excellent job of countering the anti-immigrant bias in the media, this excerpt from Mark Haddon’s piece on visiting the Migrant Resources Centre in Victoria, London particularly drives home for me how far we have slipped in this country:

How did we end up treating human beings in this way?

Mario, the MRC’s legal adviser, came to the UK in 1978, with his wife and sister-in-law, after escaping from Colombia, where the government had 68,000 of its opponents behind bars. They were terrified and knew nothing about asylum law. All the immigration officials who dealt with their claim, however, were helpful, courteous and surprisingly knowledgeable about Colombian politics. The three of them were granted temporary admission. The following year they were given full refugee status. ‘I can only be grateful to the UK for the protection offered to me and my family during those difficult days… After nearly 30 years here, I have two children and one granddaughter. We feel British. When I come back to the UK after visiting my elderly parents I always feel as if I am coming home.’

Mario’s is not an isolated case. I’ve spoken to a number of refugees who arrived in the UK 10, 15, 20 years ago. Most were impressed and surprised by the warmth of the welcome they received, and none of them went through the demeaning experiences that many of today’s asylum seekers go through.

What happened during those intervening years? Of course, there has always been racism and intolerance, but only in recent times have these sentiments been allowed to drive and shape official government policy.

Let’s see if the right-wing press will take a one-week amnesty, at least, from their racist/xenophobic anti-immigrant reporting. (Recent headlines: “Has mass immigration wrecked Britain?”, “Do you think immigration is to blame for rise in violent crime?”, and a classic - “Immigration out of control”. Meanwhile last week the Daily Mail served up this dehumanising headling: “Father of four finds 12-strong colony of illegal immigrants living in his LOFT”.)

Incidentally, any UK readers seeking inspiration on this issue from across the Atlantic could do worse than checking out the fairly recently-launched blog The Sanctuary.

The story that two Christian evangelicals were stopped from preaching in Birmingham has had tons of bloggers literally creaming their pants. So much so that my article yesterday on CIF attracted about ten comments just posting it so they could derail the thread, or erm, say I must be pleased by it. What?

Melanie Phillips predictably called the story Britain’s slide into dhimmocracy. I’m assuming she didn’t use ‘dhimmitude’ because there were already 47372 posts titled that.

I know this is hard for the bloggers creaming their pants, but let’s work through the logic here.
Continue reading…

Richard Barnbrook’s surprising description of some BNP members as “knuckle dragging junk” is very similar to Daily Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn’s description of them as “knuckle scraping scum.” However, a recent post on his Telegraph hosted blog shows that the Mail-Heil imitation doesn’t stop there.

Because when Richard Barnbrook wrote that we should ‘blame the immigrants’ there was some suggestion that he had broken the law on inciting racial hatred.
Continue reading…

The Declaration of Human Rights (article 19) states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” Which looks like a reasonable starting point to me.

Except we’ve never held to this idea in its purest form. It’s generally accepted that it should be an offence to slander someone, to incite illegal acts, to distribute child pornography - most of us don’t believe people should be able to say anything they please regardless of the consequences.
Continue reading…

Mike Ion thinks the Labour leadership should do more to combat the rise of the BNP:

Gordon Brown would send out a powerful message to his party’s core supporters if he were to personally throw his weight behind a call for a new “coalition of the willing” that will help to blunt the advance of the far-right in this country by addressing some of the genuine concerns of white working-class voters while at the same time openly challenging those concerns that have no factual or legitimate basis.

I fear Mike’s plea will go unheeded. The fact is that our electoral system gives Labour little incentive to fight the far-right, or listen to its core supporters.
Labour will not lose the next election because of the rise of the BNP in places like Stoke (Mike’s example).

It makes no difference if Labour’s 10,000 majorities in Stoke’s constituencies are cut by thousands because of the BNP or abstainers.

What will cost Labour the election is the loss of places like Worcester or Oxford West. And although abstentions or BNP votes by white working class voters in those areas could be a problem, they are less a danger than middle-income floating voters swinging to the Tories. It was his grasp of this fact that helped Blair win three elections.

So, could it be that ignoring its core support - and the rise in the BNP this threatens - is one of the prices we must pay for our first-past-the-post system?

via Jim Jay, it looks like the Telegraph website is hosting a blog by BNP London councillor Richard Barnbrook.

So far Barnbrook has written three posts, including Lily Allen and the BNP, and Blame the Immigrants. Fits right in with Telegraph editorial policy then.

Jim Jay points out:

Among other exciting proposals ubergrupen fuhrer Barnbrook has for us in his “Blame the immigrants piece” include;

- The police should disobey the government and pursue their own sort-of-legal agenda. He adds “A free society is one where the police can do their job the way they want to do it.” Although most of us would call that a police state rather than “free societies”, but the haircut knows best.

- You know there never was any violent crime until we started letting in darkies and their communist friends. “Most of it [knife and gun crime] is being done by immigrants or by the sons of immigrants who have been protected by a despicable government desperate for the Ethnic Block-Vote.”

- But what is to be done with our streets over run with all these “ethnics”? In order to clean up the streets send in the army. Yes. The army. I’m not joking, that’s what our man in the Eagle’s Nest is proposing. To get rid of guns on the streets we’ll fill the streets with… oh hold on.

- If the commies oppose this sensible measure? Well the “human rights lawyers can scream all they want.” Presumably in a basement somewhere, whilst Brownshirts tear out their fingernails.

Continue reading…

When the BNP’s Richard Barnbrook stooped forward to give his victory speech this weekend, both the main candidates and the news channels left the stage. Which was a shame. Because a better demonstration of the real man’s character and party could not have been found.

Now I have always thought that the ‘no-platform’ approach is wrong. To deny the far-right a voice is to give them a status that they do not deserve.
Continue reading…

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ diatribe, and any resulting debate on immigration cannot pass without hyperbole and hand-wringing that gets us nowhere.

No surprise that the right-wing dinosaur Simon Heffer was found squealing that accusations of racism levelled at that great chap were “a deliberate lie”, despite the fact he was specifically warning that allowing non-white people into this country would destroy it. There’s a more reasoned piece here on centre-right but to no surprise the commenters have shouted him down as a closet-communist.

Right-wingers aside, we’re also plagued by a whole section of nutbags who call themselves libertarians except when it comes to the free movement of people between countries. Irrelevant they may be in the wider population, they are annoyingly over-represented on blogs though.

Problematically, there is already too much conflation in this issue between immigrants and 2nd/3rd generation Britons. This isn’t made helpful when the media start scaremongering either. This weekend Trevor Phillips made a speech that was blown up into a “cold war” by the Sunday Times when the actual text of his speech is far more measured.

I think the problem with immigration is partly that the liberal-left doesn’t have a narrative on the issue. As Phillips rightly says, Enoch Powell made immigration controls into such a tabboo that no one excplicitly wanted to talk about it even if they tried their best to implement them.
Continue reading…

You can tell just how much the Grauniad’s report yesterday on how migrants have not brought a crime wave with them and how, unsurprisingly, they’re not committing more offences than anyone else overall has wound up the Daily Mail and Express by the vehemence of their response today.

Along with the recent immigration report by the Lords committee that, despite tabloid coverage, concluded migrants had on the whole not significantly benefited or been detrimental to the country, the crime angle is the one sure fire hit which they can rely upon to really fire minds against the current immigration policy, with their impact on public services and negligible use of benefits following closely behind. For it to blown apart just as they appeared to be getting the upper hand could not possibly be tolerated.

Hence why both have come out all guns blazing.
Continue reading…

Another report on immigration is out today - 5 years on from the signing of the treaty of accession in Athens - ACPO are claiming that stories of a migrant ‘crime wave’ are a myth. In fact, they say, crime in areas with lots of new EU immigrants seems to only have risen in proportion to the general rise in population.

The Telegraph covers it like this:

The report for the Association of Chief Police Officers appears to contradict claims made by several senior officers that forces require extra money to cope with an immigrant crimewave.

Continue reading…

I can’t work myself into annoyance over the fact that some London newspapers have taken money from the BNP over the upcoming local elections.

I guess this stems from my differing view from many on the left on how to deal with the BNP. Broadly, most of the left focuses on keeping the racists and their chums on the fringes of society.

There was a time when the BNP and the National Front posed a big threat to many ethnic minorities and were in the political limelight. Having successfully made them beyond the pale, they want to ensure they remain there.
Continue reading…

So much for that old labour movement slogan about unity being strength; Marxists of one description or another are contesting seats in the London elections on no fewer than five separate tickets.

The divisions underline a generalised lack of political seriousness, perhaps driven by some sense that the stakes are low. After all, the pumped up borough council that is the Greater Rubberstamp Assembly hardly represents Britain’s most puissant political body, is it? What does it matter that not a single socialist candidate has even a remote chance of success?

Well, it does matter, and this is why. The British National Party is looking good to secure at least one and possibly even two seats. That will confer on it greater legitimacy and a better platform than it has ever previously enjoyed.

The truth is that the BNP has built itself – in the outer eastern suburbs of London, anyway – primarily by articulating real working class grievances. Socialists that still espouse class politics need to ask themselves why the far right is succeeding where the far left has so completely failed.
Continue reading…

Every single candidate for the London mayoral elections in May - even Tory Boris Johnson - supports an amnesty which would allow illegal immigrants living in the UK for four years or more to follow a “path to citizenship”, The Independent reported yesterday.

Last month Mr Livingstone called for a “fresh start”, with a one-off amnesty for migrants without “regular status”, in spite of his party’s stance. “Migrants contribute hugely to the economic, civic and cultural life of London and the UK,” he said. “To have a substantial number of them living here without regular status because of deep-rooted failings in the immigration system, some dating back over a decade, is deeply damaging to London as well as to them.”

This is really good news.
Continue reading…

The Spectator’s leader contains (at least) two silly claims.

First:

Nobody sane can be opposed to a managed migration system that functions well

Leave aside the fact that a well-functioning managed migration system is just impossible.
Continue reading…

Here’s one endorsement he can probably live without.

The British National party has called on its supporters to give their second-preference votes in the London mayoral election to the Conservative candidate, Boris Johnson.

In a statement posted on its website today, the far-right party advised people to award its own mayoral candidate, Richard Barnbrook, their first-choice vote, and “the Tory clown Johnson” their second because he was the lesser of two evils.

Libdem candidate Brian Paddick has just released a statement saying:

Clearly the BNP have recognised Boris’s talent for causing offence and creating division. This should be a wake-up call for all decent people who could vote in the Mayoral elections to register their vote. The more votes there are for mainstream parties, the less chance there will be to give racists and extremists a seat.

We need a Mayor who does not make offensive remarks, who does not take sides and who will put all his efforts into uniting all Londoners whatever their background.

Update: A Guardian/ICM poll puts Ken and Boris neck-to-neck.

The Labour party is considering them and Libdems have expressed their support, but I think they’re a bad idea. The idea is this. In an effort to boost the number of black or Asian MPs, in certain constituencies the parties will only put forward candidates for selection of a black/Asian background.

It sounds good on paper and Operation Black Vote, who have been pushing this, say it would only be applicable for about 20 years before being gotten rid of. Those who complain this form of positive discrimination won’t let people through on merit are either not acquianted well enough with our current crop of politicians, or understand how nepotistic and unfair the system is anyway.
Continue reading…