The white tribes are desperately unhappy

Some readers might perceive this as a racist post. It is not. It is an awareness post and one which recognises that when people are unhappy and distressed with the way their world is changing, it is too simple a solution to sling 'racist' at them if their focus appears to be on the number of immigrants from different cultures who have arrived in this country over the last few years.

People who support, for whatever reason, laissez-faire immigration always point to what they see as emotive terminology, terms like 'flooding the country' as evidence that white Britain is mindlessly racist.

But if 'flooded' is a subjective term then in parts of inner city England, the influx of migrants of various colours and cultures has been at a rate which has appeared to be saturating in some parts of Britain's cities....and in a documentary to be shown on BBC shortly, it is clear that Britain's 'white tribe' is far from happy. These are not skinheads, members of the British National Party or people who have an aggressive dislike of those who don't look like themselves. They are the local butcher, postman, retired head teacher who see the country in which they grew up and the culture and mores they learned as children, changing at almost blinding speed before their eyes..and they are desperately unhappy about it.

It is a sociological fact, proven throughout history, that new tribes are not readily welcomed in any community. They bring new customs, lifestyles, challenges to existing patterns of behaviour...and disruption to conventional 'tribal customs'. The fact that we no longer wear loin cloths and pray to ju-ju's doesnt change any of this. The human comfort with those of his own kind is a very old one and one not easy to change.

No matter what our politicians might say, no matter what statistics they quote about assimilation of immigrants, they only ever do so on a nation wide basis...more lies, damned lies and statistics. In the UK countryside the pattern of life and make up has not changed much in 100 years. In the inner cities it has changed to a remarkable degree.

In London alone, our capital city, one third of the residents are immigrants and half of all children born in the capital are born to foreign mothers.



It is hard enough for an indigenous population to accept such a volume of immigrants even when they make an effort to integrate, but in the case of many Muslims, in particular, no such attempt has been made and indeed, as we have seen, a proportion of British-born Islamic youth has become dangerously alienated.

In some cities, and the Yorkshire city of Bradford was cited in the documentary, nearly all the traditional white working class institutions have disappeared, swamped by services provided for the, predominantly, asian population of the city which is close to becoming the majority..if that has not already become the case. Working mens clubs have closed, once the mainstay of a working class population in every town...and the white population is not happy

The government has, at last, started to put curbs on immigration...but is it too little too late? I don't blame the Labour government solely except that they walk on so many delicate political eggshells that the impression is often gained that they are frightened to take unpalatable action. What's more their statistics are either pitifully inept or blatant lies..and I suspect a mixture of both. Under the EU charter allowing fellow members of the EU to enter Britain and work, the Government claimed that only 13,000 work permits had been given to Eastern European migrant workers over the past four years. Yet examination of Home Office records proved that the actual number exceeded 800,000!!! How could they make an error of that magnitude? Its either very sloppy or deliberately devious. But its clear why problems are building in British cities.

Past governments back to the 50s all have a share in today's problems and, while they had a clear eye on the economic benefits of cheap labour from the Empire, they seemed to think little about the social consequences of an open door policy.

The native English - for it is England rather than the rest of the UK where immigration problems are rife - are a patient lot in general, not given to mass demonstrations. They tend to reserve their protests for the ballot box and then its not always clear what they are saying. But the rise in the number of right wing fascist party candidates, and their success in local elections, tells its own story.

I don't believe that the English are turning nazi on any large scale. I do believe that there is a huge swathe of white native English voters across, particularly, the inner cities of England who are screaming at the government, 'I don't like what is happening to my country, to my city, to my street, to my way of life....and you are doing nothing about it. I feel helpless as this tide of foreign culture rolls all over me.'

The British government, most of whose ministers live in areas untouched by this massive cultural upheaval, would be wise to listen. The consequences, if they don't, could soon be disastrous.

Exciting stuff - but will McCain divide and rule?

The current round of American primaries must be more exciting to the politics watcher everywhere than has been the case for many a year, and of course that is entirely down to the gripping series of contests between the two Democratic contenders - one who could be the first woman President and the other who could be the first black to hold the office. Groundbreaking stuff - and holding political pundits in thrall all over the world.

And of course its about more than just the cosmetics that appeal to the popular press. There are some considerable policy differences between the two Democratic candidates too. Obama has been more forceful in his support of 'green' climate policies and a little more wishy washy about anti terrorism moves than has Clinton. On health care Obama is more cautious, suggesting America start by insuring its children while Clinton wants universal cover from the off - a policy that failed to get off the ground while her husband was in office. Obama is 'softer' on illegal immigrants than is Clinton. On America's limping economy, Clinton says she would cut tax incentives to big companies and put the money into encouraging new jobs while Obama seems a little more vague, talking about more scientific research.





Anyway the race is hotting up. When the primaries began with that sweeping win for Obama in Iowa few thought Hillary would rally in the way that she did. But it was a temporary recovery for Obama seemed to have swept the Democratic primaries with an incredible run of victories which seemed to take him to within sight of the nomination.

But yesterday, although she still trails in the delegate count, Mrs Clinton stopped the rot. She won the key primaries in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island while Mr Obama won Vermont. She still trails in the delegate count but the psychological boost to her flagging candidacy has been immense. They move next onto Pennsylvania where the Clinton support has been traditionally strong.

Its wonderful gripping stuff as these two ground breakers continue to trade blows and swap victories and it looks as if the Democratic contest is going to the wire. Fantastic ..exciting..newsworthy stuff.

But wait. This is just about a nomination. The winner doesn't get the top job. That's all to be decided in November and while all the excitement is happening in the Democratic camp, one elderly rather maverick Republican is quietly making the GOP nomination his own. The 71 year old McCain has seen off all his challengers, Mitt Romney conceding after the last round of primaries and Mike Huckabee throwing in the towel yesterday.

McCain can now quietly sit back and start planning his November election strategy while Obama and Clinton are, metaphorically, cutting each others throats. Some American members of the public, interviewed on the BBC website, in discussing who they might vote for in November offered a warning to the Democratic camp. One said 'Well I know where McCain is positioned on issues. He's clear. I don't know about Obama and Clinton. They are too busy jockeying for position.'

And this has to be the Democratic nightmare. That all the excitement and rush of blood over the first black guy or the the first female President will crumble to dust in November when the stable and settled Republican candidate has had ample time to exploit the differences in the arguments of the Democratic rivals. And that all the historic possibilities will be blown away when McCain, a good orator and a very canny politician, manages to convince the US electorate that the Democrats are divided and inconsistent.




And that all the hype will be forgotten when the results in November show that, once again, the United States is in the hands of an elderly, conservative, white man for at least another four years.

At last..the juggernaut of state control is halted!

I am delighted to report that a request from one of Britain's top police officers to have everyone recorded on a DNA database has been ruled out as 'impractical' by the Government. Furthermore there is a challenge pending in the European Court of Human Rights to the existing legislation which allows police to keep DNA on the register even when an arrested person has been subsequently released without charge - and I sincerely hope the appeal to the European Court succeeds.



Oh I know there will be whines going up from the police that murderers might not be caught or that policing would be easier if they had a comprehensive data base on all of us. Oh I'm sure it would - but I'm willing to trade that for the right to live within my country untouched by the forces of the establishment unless and until I have done something to warrant their attention

The United Kingdom is already becoming one of the most surveilled and spied upon societies in Europe. We are becoming draconian in our approach to criminality. Terrorist suspects are held without trial here longer than in most other European democracies. We have an inordinate number off CCTV cameras spying on our every movement . We have road traffic cameras. We have phone tapping on an ever increasing scale.

The frightening thing, to me, is how easy it is to slide into authoritarianism. How easy it is for government and police to glibly argue that all surveillance and monitoring 'is in the public interest'. But primarily it's in their interest.

I didn't ask to be born in the United Kingdom. It just happened that way. I'm reasonably happy about it as long as I am left alone to pursue my own life as I see fit, within obvious legal constraints. I do NOT want to be ID carded, photographed, monitored, swabbed, kept on a database for anyone to look up my details, for financial institutions and possible employers to access. I don't want to be a cypher on some civil servant's report. I want a sense of freedom , of privacy, of independence. I don't want to live in George Orwell's Big Brother society where someone is watching my every move and capturing my every personal detail - just because it makes the job of the authorities easier.

Screw 'em! I' m not living my life for their benefit. And I'm certainly not going to be oppressed by the heavy hand of authoritarianism without putting up a fight. Life's too short!

A terrible spectre haunts Bridgend

Bridgend, in South Wales, mid way between Cardiff and Swansea has nothing particularly to recommend it. It used to be a mining town before the mines closed down but, unlike some other towns, it did recover from this to some extent, the Ford Motor Company and Sony setting up plants there and Logica, the IT company have set up a major office there too. So the area has employment and a reasonably high average wage level.

True the town is - well - a dump, to be honest. There is precious little for its kids to do and loads of them hang around street corners at night and the pubs have been known to harbour the violent from time to time.

Yes, I hear you say, very dismal but what's so different about Bridgend from other similar pretty down at heel British industrial towns?

Well nothing - except that in the last year, in a town of only 39,000 people, 16 children and youths under the age of 20 have committed suicide, most by hanging and at least seven of them knew one another.

Where this starts to sound like a grisly Stephen King novel is that nearly all of the victims engaged in 'social networking' on sites such as Bebo and Facebook, and memorials were posted to some of the dead BEFORE they committed suicide.

The police are saying that there is no connection between the deaths and it is just a series of unhappy coincidences, but the social networking connection would seem to say otherwise.

Of course, we are now getting the wise-after-the-eventers demanding that such sites be shut down, despite the fact that millions enjoy their facilities without doing themselves any harm. Surely the police need to piece together exactly the relationship between these kids - we have had two more hangings today, two young cousins - because this situation is grimly unacceptable. The web site merely facilitates contact, but what in God's name drives young teenage boys and girls, attractive kids just like Natasha Randall pictured below and apparently healthy, to take the extreme step of killing themselves? And why just in Bridgend?



I have read all sorts of crap about peer pressure and one upmanship - but you steal cars or rob post offices to do that. You don't kill yourself. What on earth drives these children to take that final irrevocable step to the grave? Whether there is a cult or some grim influence working on the minds of these children, no one knows - but I think the police and social services need to put a lot more effort into finding out than they appear to have done so far.


Update on 19/02/08

It was announced today that yet another attractive teenage girl has been found dead in Bridgend. The body of Jenna Parry, aged 16, was found in woodland. The police are saying there is no connection with any of the other deaths. They have been saying this for months with every successive teenage suicide. !!!

Kevin Rudd restores a sense of decency

Australia's new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, honoured a pre-election pledge when, yesterday in the Australian Parliament, he publicly apologised to the Aboriginal nation for the policy which dishonoured Australia for a century, that of forcibly removing Aboriginal children from their tribal homes and placing them with white families or in orphanages in order to create a new assimilated race of Australians. It is estimated that 100, 000 children were taken in this way, regardless of the distress and misery caused to their natural parents.



Rudd's predecessor, John Howard, refused to take this step arguing that what was past was past and, instead, simply offered a statement of 'regret'. The Howard government was also concerned that any formal apology might open the government up to all sorts of legal claims.

Rudd has taken a different view - and it's one for which he should be soundly applauded. It's not everything the Aborigines wanted and in fact Rudd's government is resisting calls for huge amounts of financial compensation for past misdeeds.

But it's a start towards assimilating the Aboriginal nation into the nation state, making them feel like citizens of Australia at last. He has promised to enrol every Aboriginal child into school and an accelerated numeracy and literacy programme. He has promised to do more in the area of health care to reduce the obscenely high infant mortality rate among Aboriginal children.

These are great promises - but Kevin Rudd has to deliver or start the process at least or the warm feelings towards him after his speech yesterday will be obliterated in cynicism and contempt.

Rudd has recognised quite openly what he describes as the 'contempt' between the indigenous and non-indigenous peoples of Australia and has pledged to try and eliminate that. It is a tough ask and he has a lot of work ahead of him. But I admire his attitudes and where he is coming from, and he deserves the support of the whole nation.

I have visited Australia and the situation for many Aboriginals is dreadful. Many were brought into the towns to help with building projects and , when the work was over, they were simply left there out of their tribal homelands, with no roots and no real direction. They get access to alcohol and drink it to excess to drown out the depression and the misery - and then they get violent. I remember visiting Cairns in Queensland and being told, along with the other tourists in our hotel, to be careful going into town past the Aboriginal settlements on the outskirts. If you see men hitting their women with sticks, we were told, don't get involved. It's a regular occurrence.

The Aboriginal leaders know what happens when their men are left with no sense of belonging and plenty of booze and have worked to try and help with the problem. The situation for urban Aboriginals is a blot on Australia. 25% of Aboriginal men in the cities have severe mental health problems caused by the stress of trying to cope in an alien environment. Aboriginal males have a very high suicide rate. Much of this has been due to a complete lack of a social structure in which Aboriginals who moved to the towns for work could live, allied to the disgraceful forced assimilation policy to which I referred earlier. Of course, as is common among all deprived peoples, there is a high correlation between mental illness, substance abuse and criminal behaviour.

Kevin Rudd has a massive task to redress all these situations and it would be a real pie in the sky optimist to believe that he will sort them all - and maybe the problems of todays Aboriginal adults are too far gone in many cases.

But he is right to start with the children. To try and give them an education and a health system which is the right of every white Australian. He has not promised the earth nor indeed committed Australia to everything asked for by Aboriginal leaders. But he has made a brave start in recognising grievous past wrongs and he deserves to have the good will of every Australian in his efforts to build on that apology and the consequent promises of a better future for the Aboriginal people

Sad that we need to thank people for behaving decently!

This week was the 50th anniversary of the tragic Munich air crash which killed eight of the finest footballers in Britain, members of the Championship winning Manchester United team - known as the 'Busby Babes' on account of their youth - returning from a match against Red Star Belgrade. The plane had stopped at Munich to refuel and took off in icy conditions. It never cleared the runway due to, as it transpired, ice on the wings, hit a house and a fuel truck which exploded. In addition to the players, six members of the United coaching staff, eight of Britain's top sporting journalists, and four of the crew, were also killed. Their manager Matt Busby hovered between life and death for weeks before finally pulling through.



The disaster, back in February 1958, shook the football world and of course particularly in Britain the shock was felt most keenly. Ironically it changed the perception of Manchester United for ever and the consequences of that have been very divisive. At the time of the crash they were simply England's best team playing in Manchester. After the crash United were raised to almost God like status and, again ironically, the worst disaster ever suffered by an English team was the making of them. They became world superstars with supporters all over the globe, the money poured in and, along with Real Madrid in Spain, became just about the richest football team on the planet.

Of course any such elevation has its downside and, for those not among the worshipers of the 'new Deity', initial sympathy over the crash turned to hatred, and United soon became, outside its fan base, the most despised team in England. Nowhere was this more true than in their own city of Manchester where their rivals, Manchester City, had long strived to keep pace with United and whose supporters always seemed to live in the shadow of the illustrious 'Reds'. Once the United 'brand' hit world superstardom, the anger and jealousy of City supporters reached new levels of intensity and that has remained to this day.

On Sunday, the very week of the 50th Anniversary of Munich, the fixture list drew the two Manchester rivals together in a local 'derby'.

For weeks the press, police, United management had all been quoted as frantically trying to get the game postponed for fear that City fans would disrupt the one minute silence planned to honour the dead players. The fearful predictions almost reached fever pitch but still the game - and the tribute - went ahead.

As it turned out , the City fans put aside their hatred of the opposition, and to a man(and woman) totally respected the one minute's silence in honour of United's dead heroes. You couldn't hear a pin drop inside that stadium.

And that's surely how it should be. It is a pretty sad indictment on the tribalism which afflicts British football that first we should live in fearful anticipation of booing, jeering and catcalls during a respectful silence for the dead,then when that doesn't happen, that the authorities gratefully publish their thanks to City fans for NOT disrupting the occasion.

Surely thats only common matter of fact decency isn't it? The day someone justifies football rivalry as an excuse for such conduct , I'll be certain that our sense of perspective has totally disappeared.

The road to ruin paved with good intentions

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams has, this week, been literally shocked by the wave of anger provoked by his suggestion that some aspects of Sharia Law are 'unavoidably' going to be accepted into British law in the future and that maybe politicians should be considering this.





I don't doubt for one minute the good intentions of one of Britain's most renowned academics, nor for that matter, the basic common sense of allowing cultures - within the accepted framework of British law - to operate in way consistent with their cultural beliefs. It has been pointed out that, already the Jewish faith operates marital and business dealings within its own cultural ethos in the United Kingdom,and that such latitude should be granted to other faiths too.

What is surprising about the very public way Dr.Williams expounded his views is that he seems to have had no cognisance of the reaction they would provoke, not just among the media and the 'man in the street' but by members of his own Church of England synod. At least three of them are calling for him to resign over this.

It is quite clear why so much antipathy has been stirred by these remarks. Whether rational or not, there is great fear of the Muslims in this country, not helped by Al Queda, not helped by the fact that 55 people were killed by Muslim extremists on that dreadful July day 3 years ago. The fact that the majority of Muslims in the UK are law abiding doesn't wash with many people. There is a feeling that the faith is aggressive and that its laws brook little tolerance of the cultural traditions of others. The very word 'Sharia' conjures up beheadings and amputations.

Now all this might well be unfair but it is undoubtedly the perspective many Britons have. Now no doubt Dr. Williams shakes his learned head at such ignorance but as leader of the Church of England he should have been aware of it. Remarks such as these from the most powerful Churchman in England are going to have several side effects. They feed the idea that instead of Britain becoming one society, regardless of race or creed, living under a set of clearly defined secular laws, the horrors of 'multi-culturalism' with new Britons living in their own secluded ghettos and obedient to only their own culture, will only get worse.

Second, people in the C of E are asking why the leading Christian is asking for the creed of another faith to be absorbed into our laws. I'm not a Christian and thus that aspect doesn't bother me so much, but I'm surprised at the Archbishop's naivety in opening himself up to that one.

Third. Views such as this are an embarrassment to a government which is trying to find its way through the delicate mire of multi cultural Britain and Gordon Brown has already had to take steps to distance himself from them.

All in all, this is an issue on which a wise Archbishop should have sought very detailed council before opening his mouth. The fact that he didn't, and that he is 'shocked' by the responses he got really does make me wonder if he is fit for the job.