Why Britain needs a different future
contribution by Simon Mair
Last week BBC Newsnight’s Economic Editor Paul Mason ran a piece called “What’s Wrong with Britain?“.
He surmises that :
Something about the economic model we adopted over the last 20 years has just not worked. Financial speculation has been rewarded, industry has declined, wages at the bottom end have not kept pace with growth and the basic test of an economy – does it make poor people richer – has been flunked.
This, I think, is something the majority of the left can agree on. Despite the protestations of the New Labour apologists, the government’s own studies show inequalities are worse now than under Thatcher.
So how does Mr Mason suggest we should rectify the situation? By being front runners in the “third industrial revolution”.
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Griffin says people have right to “blow things up”
Nick Griffin, British National Party leader and election candidate for Barking & Dagenham, says white people “with a legitimate grievance” have the right “to hurt people, to maim and blow things up”.
BNP supporters “have a right to take up arms, arguably in fact a duty to take up arms”, using “physical force” against their enemies, he says.
Griffin’s chilling words were caught on film by journalist Dominic Carman, who spent days interviewing and videotaping the BNP leader.
Given the news yesterday of the death threats bandied about by BNP leaders, the findings from this investigation provide further evidence that violence is at the core of the party’s politics.
The revelations of Griffin’s call for armed resistance follow the jailing of BNP member Terence Gavan in January for terrorist offences after he accumulated a stockpile of bombs and weapons.
Domonic Carman will give a press briefing and answer questions on his research:
Wednesday April 7 7pm
National Union of Journalists,
308 Gray’s Inn Road, WC1X 8DP
Advanced registration: exposethebnp@gmail.com
Next week (Apr 12), white supremacist Ian Davison is on trial for producing the deadly poison ricin.
From a press release
Watch
Transcript
If the state won’t, when people have a genuine grievance, if the state not only doesn’t care, but actually, in everything it does and says, puts them down, then what choice are people left but to do something which is outside the parliamentary system.
They don’t have the right to hurt people, to maim and blow things up or whatever. People only have that right when they are not allowed any other way of expressing a legitimate grievance.
Yes, in overall morality, if a tyrannical government, establishment refuses its people any way in which to protest against genuine injustices, in particular at a cultural level – then they have a right to take up arms, arguably in fact a duty to take up arms, despite the cost.
They [white people] will be an oppressed minority – and they won’t be dealing with airy-fairy liberal fuckwits like Peter Hain, they’ll be dealing with people, who by our standards are psychopaths, and by the standards of our civilisation, psychopaths.
And the only thing when it comes to that an oppressed minority will do to preserve itself is by physical force.
Supporting the freedom to be a horrible bigot
Somewhat predictably, Chris Grayling’s secretly recorded comments on how he felt the owners of B&Bs should be allowed to behave have caused, in that newspaper cliché, a pre-election storm.
The coverage is also somewhat unfair because it is clearly only Grayling’s personal view, having voted for the legislation in question when it came before parliament.
That does make him a terrific hypocrite, but at least a honest one when questioned on it and he doesn’t think the media’s around.
Doubly though, Grayling has something approaching a point: while he would doubtless not make the full libertarian argument for why the owners of a bed and breakfast should be allowed to refuse entry to a gay couple, there’s one freedom that has been increasingly encroached upon in recent years, and that’s the freedom to be a horrible bigot.
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LGBT support for Tories drops in new poll
A poll by PinkNews.co.uk out today finds that LGBT support for the Conservative party has fallen markedly in recent days.
Last June, prior to an alliance with anti-gay parties within the European Parliament, the Conservative party enjoyed the support of almost 40% of the website’s readers.
Now the Conservatives are down to just 20%.
The further fall in support started recently following an interview where David Cameron appeared to falter when questioned about gay rights.
The new poll suggests that 20% of LGBT voters community say they will back the Conservatives. Support for Labour remains unchanged at 28%, while support for the Liberal Democrats has increased in recent months to 29%. The Greens are down 1% at 18%.
The poll was conducted before Chris Grayling’s comments even came to light, suggesting that further fall in support is likely.
Why MPs should support libel costs reform
contribution by Jack of Kent
There is currently before Parliament a draft statutory instrument on reforming the obscene costs in libel cases. It may go to a vote of the House of Commons this week after being defeated in committee last week.
Both supporters and opponents contend this draft SI will have a dramatic effect should it be enacted.
The draft statutory instrument (SI) does not have a glamorous title – it is called The Conditional Fee Agreements (Amendment) Order 2010.
Nor is it very long: it has only three paragraphs, of which only one is substantive. Indeed, one could almost tweet it. The single substantive paragraph contains a single, simple provision.
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S. Times forced to correct smear of HRW
I’ve written a few times about the willingness of certain commentators to smear human rights agencies because they’re critical of Israel. Most recently this has been happening with Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
The Sunday Times has been a key player here – running hatchet jobs on both.
Last week it ran a hatchet-job on HRW here.
Yesterday, it was forced to issue this correction.
A Magazine article, “Explosive Territory” (March 28) by Jonathan Foreman, mostly about Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) work on Israel, requires clarification and correction.
The magazine said that HRW had not published any report on the post-election abuses in Iran when in fact the organisation published one in February this year. Marc Garlasco, the former senior military analyst for HRW, was not the only person in the organisation who had military experience; a number of the HRW staff have military expertise.
In the 20-year Kashmir conflict HRW has published nine reports, not four as the article stated.
One HRW researcher has had articles published by the Palestinian pressure group Electronic Intifada without her permission but was not directly employed by that group, as the article suggests.
Although HRW never produced a full report about the shelling at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in 2007 it did write three press releases, not one as the article stated.
We regret the errors.
Mr Foreman quoted a critic of HRW saying the group “cares about Palestinians when mistreated by Israelis but is less concerned if perpetrators are fellow Arabs”. In fact Human Rights Watch has reported on abuses of Palestinians by the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Iraq, Kuwait and Jordan.
Mr Foreman cited unnamed sources that said Mr Garlasco resented what he felt was pressure to sex up claims of Israeli violations. HRW and Mr Garlasco both say HRW never pressured Mr Garlasco to change his findings. We are happy to clarify HRW’s position.
In other words Foreman didn’t really do his research properly and ran a hatchet job that smeared HRW. If he approached HRW in advance with these points that could have been corrected.
So why didn’t he? Why did it require HRW to contact the Sunday Times after the article had been published?
via Ben White
Catherine Bennett, free speech and the Chinese Communist Party
There was a time when I’d be awestruck by national columnists because of their stature and the belief that they had cast-iron arguments. There was even a point when I had high regard for Catherine Bennett.
But it strikes me that when your article compares lil’ ole me to the Chinese Communist Party on the premise that I was calling for the “gagging” of Rod Liddle – then I can’t help but question the author’s sanity.
But, you may have read her column in the Observer today. In it, she says:
For some on the left, progressiveness is denoted by the denial of platforms for one or more of the following: the BNP, Islamists, Israeli academics, climate change deniers, arrogant BBC comedians, newspaper columnists pushing their idea of “free speech” that bit too far. Last week, the progressive website Pickled Politics was enjoying the humbling of its current bête noir: “[Rod] Liddle doesn’t believe in free speech,” declared Sunny Hundal, “he simply believes in his right to say what he wants without regard for facts or any blowback.” Blowback? As in a critical response to one’s opinions? If so, it seems Tory commentators are apt to be equally heedless. At ConservativeHome, Tim Montgomerie has counselled offenders that “there is constructive criticism and there is destructive criticism. There is a time for debate on the right and a time to either be silent or gun for Labour”.
God knows what reassures such speakers that their high-minded support for gagging has absolutely nothing in common with, say, that of the Chinese communist party and, moreover, that they will never suffer the consequences of their own selective approach to free expression.
Grayling’s views echo previous Tory debates on race
Chris Grayling’s comments are not going to make any substantive difference, because we now have a broad and pretty settled consensus against the type of discrimination he seems to favour.
Indeed that can be seen in how Grayling’s comments, again perhaps unconsciously, directly echo the heated debates within the party over forty years ago, when anti-discrimination legislation was first proposed by the Labour government of the day.
With his party deeply and publically split, the then Shadow Home Secretary Quintin Hogg (later Lord Halisham) proposed a distinction about who could discriminate of which his successor in the post 42 years on offers a remarkable echo.
As Enoch Powell’s biographer Simon Heffer reports in his magisterial biography ‘Like the Roman’:
Hogg, in discussing what he thought was a flawed bill, said there needed to be a distinction between individuals who, say, chose not to sell their house to a black man because of feeling for their neighbours, and great commercial concerns that systematically discriminated. He said he hoped to move amendments in committee.
Grayling OK with barring gay couples from B&Bs
Conservative Home Secretary Chris Grayling is embroiled in a row on homophobia today after being exposed as making bigoted comments by the Observer newspaper.
He is reported as having told a meeting of the Centre for Policy Studies think tank last week:
I think we need to allow people to have their own consciences.
I personally always took the view that, if you look at the case of should a Christian hotel owner have the right to exclude a gay couple from a hotel, I took the view that if it’s a question of somebody who’s doing a B&B in their own home, that individual should have the right to decide who does and who doesn’t come into their own home.
Nothing about gay couples there explicitly. But he goes on to say:
If they are running a hotel on the high street, I really don’t think that it is right in this day and age that a gay couple should walk into a hotel and be turned away because they are a gay couple, and I think that is where the dividing line comes.
The Observer has posted a tape recording of the event when Grayling made those statements.
Darell Goodliffe points out on his blog:
His vote obviously contradicts what he says in the taped remarks which tells us one thing; not that Grayling is in favour of gay rights but actually he was told to vote that way and that is why he did so. Either he was lying in what he said or he was lying when he voted; it’s as simple as that.
Secondly, if it was a member of another faith being bigoted, say, for example, a Muslim I would bet a dollar to a dime that Grayling’s attitude would not be the same.
Other recent examples of Tory homophobia:
- Norman Tebbit’s rant against Cameron being ‘too busy saving African homosexuals’
- How the Tories abandoned gay rights over Europe
- Why are gays trying to assimilate?, asks Tory PPC
- Wirral Tory councillor suspended in homophobic row
..and the Tories carry on ignoring their pledges
From Conservative Home:
[The Conservatives] will raise the threshold for Employers National Insurance Contributions, which will free up £200 million from the NHS budget every year. A Conservative Government would use that money to create a Cancer Drugs Fund to ensure that no cancer patient is refused access to drugs that have been licensed since 2005 if their doctors say they need them.
There are many examples of anti-cancer drugs which have been certified as safe, but which the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) has refused to make available on the NHS due to cost. So the money from the Cancer Drugs Fund will be added to the NHS tariff in order to pay for the extra cost of those drugs, meaning that doctors will be able to prescribe them without needing to apply to their Primary Care Trust for funding.
With £200 million pounds you might assume that the Conservatives would allocate it to deficit reduction. After all this is what they have told us time after time is their number one priority.
Rather than analysing and working out how this £200 million can best save lives or reduce suffering they are going to ring-fence it for their own pet project against cancer.
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