Trick or teat?

No badgers were mangled in the production of this post.

The much coveted and fiercely contested Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ‘Award for Hollywood’s Dumbest-ass Liberal’ must be a shoo-in for Natalie Portman come next February’s Oscars.

Here she is: Natalie Portman on becoming a Vegan in The Huffington Post (which is as perfect a conservative sentence as my poor wit can conceive.)

Jonathan Safran Foer's book Eating Animals changed me from a twenty-year vegetarian to a vegan activist.

Sigh. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned American water fluoridation and rock ‘n roll music for corrupting youth?

How I miss the old days.

I've always been shy about being critical of others' choices…

Voting’s a kind of choice, isn’t it? In America, I mean: not here of course.

….because I hate when people do that to me. I'm often interrogated about being vegetarian (e.g., "What if you find out that carrots feel pain, too? Then what'll you eat?").

I believe that.

No, really.

I’m utterly certain that in Hollywood they really do ask you stuff like What if you find out that carrots feel pain?

Also they probably ask stuff like: ‘Why don’t we make the heroine too stupid to notice that her abduction and abuse by the secret police are in fact indoctrination undertaken by the Resistance to change her political consciousness, because they don’t rape her which is what genuine torturers would surely do?’

I've also been afraid to feel as if I know better than someone else…

And that, luvvies, is how to do great comedy: play it absolutely straight.

-- a historically dangerous stance (I'm often reminded that "Hitler was a vegetarian, too, you know").

Well, me too. Mrs. Northwester is a vegetarian for animal welfare reasons, and so I am for her sake. Of course, I’m also authoritarian Right-wing, non-smoking, and kind to animals nationalist. I’m also a lousy draughtsman but a dab hand with a paint brush.

Say. You don’t think?...

I mean, you never see us together in photos, do you?

But this book reminded me that some things are just wrong.

Newsflash! Famous Hollywood liberal in unequivocal assertion of absolute morality: pictures at ten; 10.20 White House rebuttal; 10.30 Portman volunteers to work unpaid for a year in The Carter Institute to atone for her ‘thoughtless remark.’

We now return you to the Elvis/Bigfoot interview.

Perhaps others disagree with me that animals have personalities,…

Not at all: many animals have personalities (or at least characters) - unlike many of the cast of Hollywood
rom-coms, but I may disagree with Portman that many A-listers have brains. I mean, I’ve know of folk musicians who never did anything as idiotic as walking through a country that lost 70,000 victims to Maoist terrorism carrying a Maoist-slogan handbag.

…but the highly documented torture of animals is unacceptable, and the human cost Foer describes in his book, of which I was previously unaware, is universally compelling.

The human cost of factory farming -- both the compromised welfare of slaughterhouse workers and, even more, the environmental effects of the mass production of animals -- is staggering. Foer details the copious amounts of pig shit sprayed into the air…

‘It’s Christmas in heaven, all the angels sing…’

… that result in great spikes in human respiratory ailments, the development of new bacterial strains due to overuse of antibiotics on farmed animals, and the origins of the swine flu epidemic, whose story has gripped the nation, in factory farms.

I read the chapter on animal shit aloud to two friends –

Hooray for Hollywood! Forget about the breaking probation and the child sodomy and celebrity killings and robbery and assault and kidnappings – if it’s a good time you want then get into your Prius, tighten your organic hemp seatbelt and head over to the Portman place for an evening of fountaining porcine scatology.

…one is from Iowa and has asthma and the other is a North Carolinian who couldn't eat fish from her local river because animal waste had been dumped in it as described in the book. They had never truly thought about the connection between their environmental conditions and their food. The story of the mass farming of animals had more impact on them when they realized it had ruined their own backyards.

Hey lass, have you heard what they’ve got now? They’re called ‘laws.’

Laws are really cool: they’re almost identical to every single liberal belief in t euniverse apart from the one tiny difference which is that - like - they can actually be made too work in this particular space-time continuum where we’re all living right now. Laws are awesome! Say there’s something that you don’t like - whether it’s ‘just wrong’ as you put it with adamantine lack of relativity or even something that’s merely utterly wacky but not actually so abhorrent that it ought to be punished; such as reading the Washington Post instead of the New York Times. It could also be spraying - you know, stuff, into the air or letting other stuff leak into the rivers to poison the ichthyovores, or publicly encouraging people to kill Jews or sticking cutlery into peoples’ bodies. Then what you do, see, is to make a ‘law’ that forbids anyone doing just such things and if people or organisations do the bad thing after that, then the police are allowed to stop them doing it and the courts are allowed to put them in prison and/or take money from them to try to make the people who suffered from the bad thing feel a bit better, if possible. We used to have Laws in Britain and they kinda worked for years and years until our very own cute li’l British liberals came up with something better.

Take the cutlery thing for example. For millions of years, human beings and their predecessors only had one or two kinds of technology: cutlery being the principal one. They got hold of sharp-edged or pointed stones and sticks and bones and antlers and stuff and stuck them into animals to slow them down so they could eat them; that being the main way they could avoid starving before agriculture was invented and with it a high-calorie vegetarian option. Please don’t take my use of the word ‘calorie’ to heart, dear starlet: in some primitive cultures beyond Los Angeles it is still commonly held by otherwise rational people that it’s necessary to eat a thousand or more calories every single day to protect against a medical condition known outside California as death.

Now, human beings all over the world have over the millennia survived only thanks to this cutting technology and, later on - say for the past eight or nine thousand - years occasionally stuck cutlery into each others’ bodies for a number of motivations, possibly even including the promotion of liberal ideas. Who knows? However, except for special stabathons known to your pals as wars, this kind of killing was mostly held to be wrong and so laws were passed to punish those who informally (that is, without the permission of their traditional line managers or certain religious texts) stab each other. And you know what? Stabbing didn’t stop altogether, but lotsa crazy folks never did it any more after the laws and their enforcers found them out. What you need is a bunch of folks to make laws against spilling stuff into food and water and darn well punish them if they still do it, because the alternative might well be worse than dungy fish. Imagine that! Now, imagine a prehistoric world in which people like you felt afraid of the harmful side effects of food technology such as stabbing. Say that they had then banned the use of cutlery for fear of harm to human beings, yeah? How many of our primitive ancestors could have survived to reproduce and hence to produce modern humanity if cutting technology had been taken away and all they had left to hunt with were rudimentary accordions?

So, maybe a law against polluting food and water would be better than banning or severely limiting those technologies that feed almost everyone on the planet apart from those who maintain their clear complexions and perfect figures with a handful of raw leaves, fruit, nuts and roots each day.

But what Foer most bravely details is how eating animal pollutes not only our backyards, but also our beliefs. He reminds us that our food is symbolic of what we believe in, and that eating is how we demonstrate to ourselves and to others our beliefs: Catholics take communion -- in which food and drink represent body and blood. Jews use salty water on Passover to remind them of the slaves' bitter tears. And on Thanksgiving, Americans use succotash and slaughter to tell our own creation myth -- how the Pilgrims learned from Native Americans to harvest this land and make it their own.

It’s important to remember at this point that before the Columbian colonization of the western hemisphere by witch-hunting Spaniards and Englishmen and rack-hunting Italians and Japanese, the native Americans lived at peace with the plains bison, turkeys, and whatever Orioles are made from. The woolly mammoths, saber-toothed cats, terror birds and giant cave bears died out on the very day that Columbus landed at Bel Air and shot them all with his Uzi.

Sorry, his Luger.

Sorry, his Colt 45.

And as we use food to impart our beliefs to our children, the point from which Foer lifts off, what stories do we want to tell our children through their food?

How about; “There’s a little kid in Africa who’d love to eat that chopped liver, but unfortunately they’ve got something like a vegan diet over there thanks to all that land reform their governments got into when the colonial left, so eat up kiddo because Granny Weismann nearly starved to death and both her parents did starve thanks to 1930s-style ‘anti-war protesters’ and, frankly, it sucks.”

I remember in college, a professor asked our class to consider what our grandchildren would look back on as being backward behavior or thinking in our generation, the way we are shocked by the kind of misogyny, racism, and sexism we know was commonplace in our grandparents' world.

I think I know the kind of college professor she’s talking about, don’t you? He never remembers the millions of ordinary Americans and others who uprooted themselves and faced death and intolerable hardship against the genuinely genocidal Axis Powers and later to underwrite his freedom from the multi-million murderous Soviet world so that college professors such as him can sit and sneer without fearing a single round sent his way unless some crackpot breaks and come loaded for disarmed students…

He urged us to use this principle to examine the behaviors in our lives and our societies that we should be a part of changing. Factory farming of animals will be one of the things we look back on as a relic of a less-evolved age.

Fair point. We do know how to farm intensively and without great cruelty to livestock, and many farmers do indeed farm that way. Also vegetarianism is an option with a wide variety of commercial suppliers, so if you feel it’s morally wrong to kill to eat, then they don’t have to do so. But by the same logic now that almost no-one outside the Greater Los Angeles Area believes that The Great Goddess sends babies to the world, and most people are aware that it takes an activity a little like that most reminiscent of liberal politicians but with at least one more adult human being involved to bring children into the existence, then if people can refrain from eating meat every single day in favour of something less harmful then they might be justly held responsible for their sexual actions without any killing involved, yeah?

I say that Foer's ethical charge against animal eating is brave because not only is it unpopular, it has also been characterized as unmanly, inconsiderate, and juvenile.

“Brave?” I wonder how many ranches, steak houses, biker bars, US Marine Corps barracks and taxi ranks he hangs about at, handing out vegan screeds to their unfriendly denizens? Matrix-like, I suspect that he’s the other kind of brave: the one where you only say stuff to extremely like-minded people in carefully controlled environments where no-one seriously has a chance of disagreeing in any sustained or acceptable manner.

But he reminds us that being a man, and a human, takes more thought than just "This is tasty, and that's why I do it." He posits that consideration, as promoted by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore's Dilemma, which has more to do with being polite to your tablemates than sticking to your own ideals, would be absurd if applied to any other belief (e.g., I don't believe in rape, but if it's what it takes to please my dinner hosts, then so be it).

Liberal rationalism; “That’s a silly superstition that wouldn’t work anywhere outside its particular cultural context.”

English translation – morals are historical constructs derived from centuries or millennia of experience and the competition between voluntary behaviours. Liberals just make them up to suit the itch or appetite of the day.

But Foer makes his most impactful gesture as a peacemaker, when he unites the two sides of the animal eating debate in their reasoning. Both sides argue: We are not them. Those who refrain from eating animals argue: We don't have to go through what they go through -- we are not them. We are capable of making distinctions between what to eat and what not to eat (Americans eat cow but not dog, Hindus eat chicken but not cow, etc.). We are capable of considering others' minds and others' pain. We are not them. Whereas those who justify eating animals say the same thing: We are not them. They do not merit the same value of being as us. They are not us.

Look for The Silent Scream on the Movie Channel tonight, huh Nat? Will you and your pro-choice Democrat friends be watching and supporting its message of protecting the weak and the notion that human beings have moral agency and aren’t merely big bags of glands that just want to do stuff, huh?

And so Foer shows us, through Eating Animals, that we are all thinking along the same lines: We are not them. But, he urges, how will we define who we are?

And just what kind of a chump is it who thinks it’s okay to portray a supposedly feisty and heroic individual who just gives up the ghost and dies in childbirth just because her husband turns out to be a jerk in the end?

She’s small and sweet and so’s a humbug and I wouldn’t want either in charge of the human race’s food supply.

Thank you, thank you. Thank you sall. I want to thank Big Hollywood, Michelle Malkin, my agent, my hairdresser, Ms. Portman’s dressmaker…

The impotence of being earnest

I hate being right sometimes. I hate it. Hate it.

Almost everyone in the intelligentsia (you know: those brilliant people who’ve been in charge of the unprecedented successes of our glittering education, welfare and criminal justice systems over the past forty years) believes that traditionalist conservatives such as me are unimaginative, petty and petit-bourgeois: joyless souls slavishly dedicated to the proposition that all men are created evil and whose chief concern is the vindictive suppression of spontaneity, sexuality, personal flair and freedom of expression (especially when freedom of speech takes the form of the sexual taunting of the non-intelligentsia, republicanism, or blasphemy). They imagine that our idea of an evening’s entertainment is staying at home and listening to a recording of Winston Churchill’s collected speeches over a background track of Elgar - all the while obsessively polishing our porcelain farmyard animal figurines on tables covered with pages from The Daily Mail. This is absurd; I never do anything like that. Why, last night it was Enoch Powell, Holst and horse-brasses. And I loosened my tie later on when it got especially exciting. The Daily Mail; natch.

Dreamy is a nice woman and a good person.

She’s a loyal friend and a loving mother to her fatherless children; both of whom are growing up to be well-behaved, imaginative, polite, patient and intelligent people. Our kids played together when our friends and neighbours got together socially or for tree hugging or picnics, and after my divorce we had continued till quite recently to babysit for the other or to ride shotgun on a gaggle of children including our own. I trusted her with my offspring and she would trust me with hers, and I would trust her again without question. But this is not about easy divorce: and especially not mine.

Dreamy moved heaven and earth for her kids’ pretty useless fathers to visit and spend time with them, and she made every effort to make such occasions compatible with their limited paternal instincts. They weren’t much interested, and as far as I’m aware they never paid their offspring much heed in the past. But this isn’t about perennially absentee fathers.

We’d lost touch until recently but at the time we last met she’d been doing part-time self-employed work whilst maintaining her home (which she was buying with help from her family). Tax Credits and Income Support and Child Benefit would make this lifestyle make sense. Till very recently, she could scarcely expect to work much as her children were pre-school age. A husband might have changed that, but somehow the thought never seems to have come up. Why not? Who knows? But this isn’t about welfare benefits.

I met her on the very day that I posted this intemperate and more-in-apoplectic-outrage-than-in-anger rant and learned that she is now A) married, and B) expecting another baby. Her children; named after a mediaeval noblewoman and a fashionable mass-murderer played politely around us in that dreary public space, and took part from time to time in the Mummy’s having a baby conversation with only the younger one moderately eager to point out especially attractive consumer goods to her that her straitened circumstances might never permit her to buy. But this isn’t about material poverty.

Dreamy and her new man did it right this time. First came the marriage and then came the baby. She was very proud of that and I was able to cheer her and her husband in the great Dance of Life and Generating and Connubial Conviviality and all that stuff.

There’s a snag about the marriage and baby thing, though: Mister Dreamy isn’t allowed into Britain.

He was born, and dwells to this day in a non-EU country: one furthermore with no historic ties with Britain. The sun never set on anything jolly, ripping or stalwart there; the colonial power’s troops and missionaries never taught his ancestors to play cricket or sing passages from The Gondoliers, and there was never (even during the customary pre- coup month of Independence celebrations) anything like a Westminster Parliament presiding over the land’s newfound statehood and sovereignty. But this is not about the retreat of the West and the subsequent corruption of its former colonies and provinces.

Dreamy thinks that the Immigration people are being naughty in that they won’t let Mister D come to join her amid fair Alba’s green pastures and join her in her multicultural travels and lifestyle experiments. Despite having a job already lined up - and for a countryman of his, at that, who will therefore be able to speak truth to power for him – the ‘crats are concerned that he speaks no English yet. Dreamy points out that he doesn’t need any English for the job on offer which is of the transporting hot, cheese-covered snack food products around Castle City late at night variety. But this isn’t about any value to the economy of adult human beings being able to speak to each other.

Little Duchess and tiny Hermann are chattering excitedly about Christmas by now and I’m able to hide my inner bigot’s frothy-mouthed psychic tarantella at the importation of tainted DNA into the innocent wombs and wholesome bloodlines of my dear countrywomen. I swap perfectly heartfelt smiles and banter with the children about the appearance or otherwise of Santa. But this is not about what the United Left accuses the cultural Right of secretly believing in our pedigree-obsessed, pitch black and whiter-than-white hearts.

Dreamy suggests that in a world suddenly without borders Mister D would be able to join her in domestic bliss; albeit on a shift system - she looking after the children between conventional and hippy schools and their bedtimes, and then he’d perform his nocturnal duties to our economy using native wit and high-fat semaphore. Melted mozzarella: the international language of the soul. She doesn’t seem to care that if he does come to live with her in her family-subsidised home, that if Mister D ever loses his job, everybody else in the country will foot the benefits bill including the locals who might have wished (or should have been strongly invited) to move certain margheritas around the North West themselves. There’s no question that he’ll fit right in and go along with the way we do things here, and it’s axiomatic that he’ll be a perfect gentlemen to all and sundry whom he meets in this our very different land. He probably will be gentle to her: I’m reasonably sure that she’s lost the will to breed with men unwilling to take part in her and her children’s lives by now. Someone who names her children after a mediaeval aristocrat on the one hand and a well-known and equally foreign but republican brutal killer on the other isn’t going to be all that on the ball where national cohesion is concerned. But this isn’t about patriotism or any other sense of loyalty to familiar people, culture and institutions.

Dreamy is, I should say, in many ways a model citizen. She’s gentle and friendly and willing to help her fellow creatures and she quite literally wouldn’t hurt a fly. She seeks to support herself to some degree within the bounds of New Labour’s Britain, and once the kids are properly at mainstream schools I have little doubt that she’ll find work of some sort. She’ll be picky : it’ll have to be ‘ethical,’ so don’t spend your lower taxes yet. Of course that’ll be six or so years off now, assuming that she puts the Expected D into part-day sessions at the local hippy school for a couple of years. This is to protect the child from what she considers to be excessively early development of literacy. It could be worse: it’s all too easy to live off others nearly lifelong, and she has pride and integrity in spades. She’s a good person, I repeat; and treats other folk and indeed the rest of the world as worthy of respect and consideration. Her day-to-day morality is of a very high order. In an honestly governed country she’d be - bar some of the welfare costs - pretty much the sort of person for whose protection we traditionalist conservatives do our thing. The squawk of alarm that is The Daily Mail concerns itself mostly with the threats to safety and peace – conditions in which women and children should live safe from acts of violence and other crimes. Quite why she thought it was okay to hitch up with and have a child by someone who was not assured an entry to Britain, I don’t know. I’ve done some fairly daft things for love myself, and you’d have to be pretty heartless to actually say it to her face that a more careful choice of husband might have been more sensible for almost all concerned. It’s blasphemy these days to point out too that a wiser decision would be much, much better for the strangers who she’ll never meet but who’ll be obliged to fund Mister D’s medical care and possibly his subsistence for many years to come if Pisa Express goes bust and there’s nothing to replace it. She’s sweet and friendly, and doesn’t need to listen to any preaching of obviously imperfect me on how to live her life. But this isn’t about personal morality and its effects of self and others.

Is Dreamy the vanguard of the invading Marxist counter-culture or its victim? Does her casual acceptance of the system’s function of exporting the consequences of individuals’ choices to everyone else mean that she’s knowingly subverting what remains of a culture that once extolled free will to such an extent that it actually held individuals themselves to be responsible for those choices, and which held folk to account for them? Or is she a robotic slave: trapped between the exclusive tramlines of strictly limited imagination that consider that the original ‘Hermann’ was ‘inspirational’ - rather than the blood-soaked kill-crazy pervert that he in fact was? (You never really believed that his name was anything at all like Hermann, did you, Dear Reader?)

So: subversive agent or collateral damage?

I don’t think she’s either. I think she’s the product.

You can’t hurt Dreamy. You wouldn’t want to: she’s sweet and nice, and now in my second (and actually happy) middle-aged marriage I feel mostly avuncular about her gamine though currently bulging good looks. I don’t think that she ever dreamed that Duchess and Hermann were disposable inconveniences, and so they made it out alive; cute as buttons and adding to the fun and colour of life. I’m grateful for that.

But as she goes about her life spreading the warmth that most people feel in her company and gracing Castle CityBritain. I hope she’s not on the Tube when their faith goes expansively physical. And she’ll regard any restraint on who dwells here or how they get their kicks with as much fear as previous generations dreaded having their lives changed by invading armies. And she’s never, ever going to desire the reduction of corporation tax or the higher personal rate, because she knows in her heart of hearts that the rich in general and the corporations in particular put mercury into tuna and want to melt the Arctic. So scratch many of the jobs that her kids might otherwise be able to get. with her smile and happiness she will, through other choices, take part in the further burial of Christendom. The very Christendom that taught much humanity - eventually - to treat individuals as children of God, and therefore worthy of respect and decent treatment irrespective of their status or nationality or sex. She’ll elect politicians who’ll encourage judges to put vicious hooligans onto the streets, and some of them back into the mainstream schools, where they will bully and assault little Duchess and tiny Hermann as they grow up. Somehow, someone else will get the blame as they come crying home from school, because punishment is cruel; as much an abomination as sodomy was once held to be. She won’t even think that people survive together in polities by living according to long-established rules and by sharing common expectations about life, and so can understand and recognise their neighbours’ rights to do quite a lot of things as they please without asking for permission. She’s never heard such notions articulated by anyone she hasn’t bee n taught to distrust. Thus, Dreamy will let every neophile crackpot wreck any and every remaining traditional right in the name of abstract Freedom. She’ll recoil aghast from any suggestion that Mister D’s compatriots should not settle here in droves for fear of their bringing their folksy, traditional, and sometimes barbaric customs into

Many of her major decisions in life would have sent family and friends in earlier generations into angry tirades and eventually (perhaps) gentler offers of help in getting back onto the strait and narrow. Should anyone try to offer such advice now then she’d view such suggestions as somehow obscene and unnatural. So she won’t be providing quite the comfort for her children as many of their classmates enjoy; certain as she is in the belief that her love for them is more valuable than material things (which is true), and also sure that living without selling out to ‘the system’ - by which she means recognizing that the economy runs according to rules which it is almost always bloody and disastrous to break - is worth nearly as much as her love (which is not true.) Our earnest attempts to persuade her that there are other, better ways to understand and protect the good life than hers won’t get past her carefully nurtured lack of historical knowledge. Thus she’ll never know how we got here from a Europe where Duchess’s namesakes were savage and remorseless killers who conquered the continent on horseback and who ruled it at sword point for centuries - because her ears can only hear what she’s allowed to hear, which is that those of us with the different ideas from hers want to kill all the polar bears and concrete over every field and forest in these islands for a few quid. We are powerless in the short term to persuade her and millions like her that, for example, human rights grow out of specific historical circumstances and institutions, and that if they are to survive if at all it is likely to be only amongst the remains or continuance of those circumstances and institutions. Dreamy is what you get when the culture war is all but won by the other side.

This, as much as the silence of the conservatives, is what Burke was alluding to when he said that evil needs good people to do nothing in order to triumph, because Dreamy is one of the good people.

But this isn’t about cultural beliefs and how their consequences effect the lives of people in outer, material world as well as the inner world of the imagination and emotions.

Well, I can’t sit here all night gossiping about my life. The new carriages for The Flying Scotsman have arrived, and my diamond-pattern knit tank tops won’t alphabetize themselves, you know. Rock and roll.

Stand Firm President Klaus

Apologies - I've been like an MP lately.

Instead of doing my blogging job properly, pressures of work, family and travels have led me to rant, post, and disappear for days this last week; without taking the time to reply to comments which some of my readers have been interested enough and kind enough to make.

Okay, I'm not asking for help with my moat or my duck house or a mortgage I long since paid off, but still, I'm sorry.

And in similar vein today, I'll just point you where the job is being done and done well: at Old Holborn, The Devil's Kitchen, and Voice of the Resistance: all pointing out that, irony or ironies, the Czech President is the last active and wiling defender of Britain's freedom and independence in his resistance to signing the Lisbon Treaty, and thus sending us all into a much more centrally controlled European Union - a state in all but name.

That Britain threw Czechoslovakia to the Nazi wolves to buy time (in the most charitable interpretation of our then-imperial government's motives) to rearm, and that we now have to rely on Czechoslovakia's smaller successor state to preserve the freedom of a nation that once shaped the world and policed its oceans, is a bitter and shameful irony.

We need this one man in a small country of which we still know nothing much, but to whom we might owe our continued existence as a nation, to hold out against the pressures placed on him to betray his own people.

Here's the link to a petition that can send him our weak voices of support.

In an age when our elected representatives, our supposedly most patriotic press and our national broadcaster stand four-square against our entire history as a county; betraying their duties and any pretence of honesty as the do so, it is pathetic that the voices of a nation that has liberated more peoples than any other, that abolished much of the four thousand year old slave trade and (eventually) brought the idea of representative democracy to continents that had never known anything like the blessed state of liberty, can be heard only so quietly and so sparsely.

Please vote and send President Klaus your support t for his country's continuing freedom and ours.

It's war. Smell the coffee

Phrenology: it could come back.

In what way are the following examples not part of a full-scale cultural war?

Huge increases in immigration over the past decade were a deliberate attempt to engineer a more multicultural Britain, a former Government adviser said yesterday. Andrew Neather, a speechwriter who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, said Labour's relaxation of controls was a plan to 'open up the UK to mass migration'.

As well as bringing in hundreds of thousands to plug labour market gaps, there was also a 'driving political purpose' behind immigration policy, he claimed. Ministers hoped to change the country radically and 'rub the Right's nose in diversity'.

But Mr Neather said senior Labour figures were reluctant to discuss the policy, fearing it would alienate its 'core working-class vote'. The published version promoted the labour-market case for immigration but Mr Neather said unpublished versions contained additional reasons.

'Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural. 'I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.' The 'deliberate policy', from late 2000 until 'at least February last year', when the new points-based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said.

Mr Neather defended the policy, saying mass immigration has 'enriched' Britain and made London a more attractive and cosmopolitan place.

Get that?

All this deliberate change was unannounced and indeed disguised as a labour-market adjustment.

Britain’s people were never consulted about any of this and were repeatedly lied to as a matter of official government policy as the Labour Party sought to import anyone, from anywhere, as long as they were different from the native British, with the utterly partisan intention of frustrating their political competitors.

No matter what the cost to (and the possible destruction of), public order and the civil society which had formerly consisted of native people growing up and living together under common rules and accepted, established institutions – Labour had a plan to frustrate the Tories, UKIP, LPUK, and (presumably) the BNP.

Never mind that we were sure to lose our country’s precious habit of abiding by the laws of the land when Britain was purposefully restocked from regions where the only laws are brute force or the absolute and arbitrary rule of the eldest man in a family, or the teachings of a religion that insists on a permanent and merciless war of conquest and oppression by believers against everyone else.

No thought was taken into account of the economic effect that this would have on British people at the lower end of the earnings scale when cheap labour was pumped into the catering and hotel trades, and garages, retailing and residential care industries. No account at all was taken of the likely financial cost to services such as schools, hospitals and General Practitioners, and housing, transportation and public leisure facilities; let alone of how whole neighbourhoods and entire city areas would have their character changed forever by unassimilated and intolerant colonists who would insist that the native British alone should change our ways.

We just don’t matter in our own home, we British, we don’t count for anything, nor does our civilisation – not when the United Left has a plan.

They did it on purpose, with malice aforethought as a convenient by-product of their building-boom, housing boom bubble.

And this from the telegraph on the ideological onslaught against our fee-paying schools.

Last week, Dame Suzi Leather, the head of the Charity Commission, made an unusual concession. She announced that schools which charge fees will have more time to prove that they provide a "public benefit". The commission has already decided that two fee-paying schools should lose their charitable status because they do not do so.

What is the Charity Commission, an unelected, unaccountable quango, doing deciding whether or not fee-paying schools should remain as charities?

For decades, a political argument has raged about whether private schools should be entitled to charitable status and the tax benefits that go with it. They have enjoyed that status since the Reformation. In a democracy, most of us would expect a decision to abolish it to be made democratically.

But in 2006, when Parliament passed the Charities Act, Labour found a way of changing that without any need to go through the tedious process of gaining electoral support for it. Its Charities Act dropped the old assumption that organisations devoted to education, the promotion of religion and the relief of poverty are of "public benefit" and should automatically count as charitable enterprises. Instead, it lets the Charity Commission decide what counts as "public benefit": which means it can decide when an institution can be counted as a charity, and when it will lose that status.

Does anyone imagine that any Islamic ‘charity’ will face such threatened loss of ancient, traditional rights? Still, good idea to finish off the hard core of the last few competent schools.

Finish off this creep’s work.

And via Mark Steyn, this is from a former Tory cabinet minister’s son:

It is certainly true that "fewer people equals a greener planet" is simplistic. In 2050, 95% of the extra population will be poor and the poorer you are, the less carbon you emit. By today's standards, a cull of Australians or Americans would be at least 60 times as productive as one of Bangladeshis.

As a result, NGOs such as Oxfam, for whom I've just written a report on climate change's impact on humans, insist that dealing with consumption in the rich world is much more important than tackling population growth.

Is there any part of this Better that more westerners were dead talk recognizes anything of worth in the culture whose population that Green philosophy is cheerfully condemning as a pestilence?

And the Tories have bought into the whole deal. They either won’t fight – afraid of the ultimate witch-hunt and being accused of raaaacism and so that their alternatives to open-door-breed-the-Tories-out and to hell with the white working class are woefully inadequate.

Here’s their limp-dick answer to Labour’s people-herding social engineering.

Bet that’s got the Somali warlords and their clitoris-cutting crones shaking in their council flats, right? Not much to say about the unintegrated millions already here, though, is there? Locking the barn door after the horse has bolted was made for the Cameroons.

Oh, no, silly me, they’re going to ‘tackle..unacceptable cultural practises.’

How, I wonder: handcuff the brutal old biddies until their knife-hands fall off? How about chartering Ryanair flights and a couple of dozen hefty coppers a week and flying off into the wild blue yonder back to Africa with all the parents and grandparents of any mutilated children who were born here, and adoption for the surviving kids into nice, well-integrated Afro-Caribbean families? Or white ones?

No. Not the clueless, spineless, Office Yes Please But Real Power No Thanks Cameroons.

So they can fanny around with the edges: shave a fraction off a tax rate there. new truncheon for the police there. Maybe stop them persecuting Christians for expressing age-old prejudices here.

But they’ll never rule; never govern in anything but name. Not until they realise that fighting and winning the culture wars is the only way they can translate their policy ideas into anything like good governance.

When large swathes of a country’s cities are populated by people with no affection for, or loyalty to, the host culture; when its public servants actively seek to destroy its ancient institutions (and some of the few schools that deliver anything like a good education); and when many of its natives hate their own kind so much they are happy to use genocide as an example of good planetary management, then the colour of the rosettes and the name of the Prime Minister are pretty much irrelevant – he might as well be a corrupt and effete Bourbon or a late Romanov, because the real power lies elsewhere.

What happens in the streets and the benefits offices; the ‘schools’ and education authorities; the ports and airports; in pubs and homes and council chambers; in the police stations and town halls and quangos matter. Power lies in the minds and imaginations of people: Westminster, not so much. Nobody’s going to work, or fight, or agitate or pay subscriptions to preserve things they either know nothing about, or care little, or have been taught to actively hate. What’s to conserve?

It’ll never change until someone at Tory HQ goes down to their IT people and borrows the lart (Luser Attitude Reconfiguration Tool) – also known as the Clue Bat, off the people who fix the computers and make the email go out. Then it’s upstairs to the suits for some reconstructive phrenology. Don’t hold your breath.

Now...accursed

Shakespeare put a speech into the mouth of Henry V at the battle of Agincourt on the 25 October 1415.

That particular war was one of dynastic pride and conquest for personal gain – the kind of warfare that our civilisation has come rightly to despise. Now we expect out just wars to be of self-defence, or survival, or liberation. Conquerors are beyond the pale – but their kinder successors are not (or shouldn’t be.)

The Saint Crispin’s Day speech plays another part in our national culture: to express not only pride in martial skill and to recognise courage and service, but to glorify ideas of nationhood: of continuity; of people and institutions coming from somewhere and being made by people to suit their present needs and the results bequeathed to us as treasures – our true heritage.

Shakespeare wrote - and his plays were performed - at a time when the idea of Englishness had emerged from two forms of government: mediaeval inernationalism (the conscious thought and political ideal of a united Christendom in Europe) and the private dominions of the landed magnates. Shakespeare was aware of something that was still informal and that would not be made real until the next royal dynasty: of Britishness. We few, we happy few in these islands of four nations were exemplified by the common soldiers, pub joke-like, with Englishmen, and an Irishman, a Scotsman, and a Welshman. He wrote confidently and proudly in the new-found patriotism of his age, and in some ways gave it its language and some of its lasting form.
He wrote with the editorial approval of the State of the day (he had to, otherwise he would not have been allowed to stage his work).

It is dificult to imagine him being able to write so confidently and unequivocally about arms and the men who bear them, and civil society and civil government’s support if he was writing in today’s deliberately and treasonously equivocal days.



What's he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin;
If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
Or feel the curses of Mussleman’s ungrateful scorn
God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
For all have been stood down from lack of thrift.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Look in my parliament for such
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
And never work or thank or serve
From idler’s cradle to their public grave
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires,
As toys unmade by such as they; enjoyed
But never earned but wished withal and given from the common purse,
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
(Bar a daughter’s death or sullen injury
As infidel prophet and his clerics teach)
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England.
God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more methinks would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
As are scribes and clerks aplenty safe at home
Or town criers, players, and priests unmanly made
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And eight weeks on the morrow shall be done
As swift as modern chancery allow
And crowns for convoy put into his purse;
Who cares from whence; not ministers civil
Nor philosophers public, sage, and loving by their
Daily, oft proclaimed philanthropy.
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Should he not need to stay in filthy hospital
Or dwell amongst vagabond knaves
My judges have decreed shall live as freemen
As rich in rights as any Duke or armsman true,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.'
And they will curse him, like as not,
For blood he spilled and ne’er question why
Nor wonder whence their freedom comes
But as a gift from God or bounteous Nature
And never think to pay or count the cost
That bought their still felicity.
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
But likelier in schools my kingdom wide
Will learn other names of sages, clerics;
And foremost slaves; but not of those who struck off
Their chains, or why, or how.
Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.
If drink be made, or law allow
Its quaffing public or in houses
Where weak and hurtful children dwell.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
Should husbands, fathers, or replacements need
To live with mothers e’er again in
England’s generous, charitable slums,
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
Unless the parish schools go silent
When England’s kings and martial glory
Need to be retold -
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
As raavagers unversed; ignorant, unlettered
And base; cursed as swordmen; killers plain
By those who think of peace as rain but not the work of men.
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
Which may be true if hospital bed it be;
Unchanged, unwatched, unsanitary
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Expect The Reaper

Didn't get much chance to blog or surf yesterday or to read anything but the headlines on the dead tree press at service station shops. One tabloid headline was something like 'a disgrace to humanity', and the Telegraph's front page article stated that Nick Griffin used his place on Question Time to 'attack Islam.'

I'd like to know how many airliners full of commuters, cars full of explosives and NHS doctors or rockets he used to attak Islam.

The BNP is largely the creation of the political class in general and the New Labour core in particular.

As Labour abandoned its working class roots for a rainbow coalition led by middle-class cultural Marxists and encouraged formerly civilised banks to prey upon the natural acquisitiveness of human beings by abandoning Mr. Major's financial controls, our rulers - with their typical sense of humour - allowed the EU to compel an open doors immigration policy on Her Majesty's County Council regarding the Continent and practised a de facto one regarding the rest of the world, to conduct endless experiments with intrusive and job-destroying legislation, to raise a worthless, workless mob over those men and women who still seek to support themeslves and feed their own families, degraded every national symbol of unity, cohesion, and pride, defamed any criticism of the project as tantamount to genocidal xenophobia, and at the same time contrived to install every centrifugal force into 'national' assemblies in all but the English heartland, and expected...what?

And as for the rest of the jokers; our PC political class, what of them?

The Tories are so enthralled to bending over in the shower for their Etonian dictator that they sat meekly by as he sacked an ex-army officer for the temerity of suggesting that some black recruits use their race as an excuse for underperformance in basic training. He elevated Baroness Warsi as his spokesperson on why British soldiers are terrorists... And as for the 'Liberal' 'Democrats....' Well, they just go along for the ride as far as I can tell.

National bankruptcy matters. Immigration matters. Nationhood matters. British customs, laws and morals matter. To people.
But for the jokers - only their collectivist, post-moral 'morality' matters.

As you sow, so shall you reap.

Gone parenting

Off to my beautiful and Eurosceptic native county for the weekend to play with the now-only-Small Northwester: travelling via my Labour-riddled ancestral homeland.

There may be computers. There may not. There may be Cyberman. There may not be Blogger, like this morning. |:-(

You'll all keep hitting them while I'm away living the life of Riley and on my return I shall once more take my place in the huge Right-wing conspiracy.

Where the mad bastards are

Is this a grumpy and mardy old sod who you’d never let within a mile of any children, or what?

Parents who think the new film of Maurice Sendak's picture book Where the Wild Things Are is too frightening for children can "go to hell", the author has said.

Telling the story of a naughty little boy, Max, who is sent to bed without his supper only to journey by boat to a land where wild monsters live, Sendak's classic tale was first published in 1963 and has captured children's imaginations ever since. With a film version adapted by Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze out later this year, Sendak told this week's edition of Newsweek that he would "not tolerate" parental concerns about the book being too scary.

"I would tell them to go to hell," Sendak said. And if children can't handle the story, they should "go home," he added. "Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it's not a question that can be answered."

Truthful good sense or call the cops time if he wanders away from the press and towards the fans on opening nights?

He may also have some disillusionment issues, to say the least.

Sendak also criticised Disney, saying it was "terrible" for children. As a child himself, he'd loved Mickey Mouse as "the emblem of happiness and funniness", and at the cinema he would stand on the chair screaming "My hero! My hero!" at the mouse – who at that point still had teeth. "He was more dangerous," the author told Newsweek. "He did things to Minnie that were not nice. I think what happened was that he became so popular – this is my own theory – they gave his cruelty and his toughness to Donald Duck.

That old transfer the cruelty and toughness from the mouse to the duck gambit again: everybody does it, but it never fails to hurt. Marketing!

And they made Mickey a fat nothing. He's too important for products. They want him to be placid and nice and adorable. He turned into a schmaltzer. I despised him after a point."

He may also be working out some childhood trauma issues.

He based the monsters of Where the Wild Things Are on relatives who visited his family home as a child, speaking practically no English. "They grabbed you and twisted your face, and they thought that was an affectionate thing to do," he said. "And I knew that my mother's cooking was pretty terrible, and it also took forever, and there was every possibility that they would eat me, or my sister or my brother. We really had a wicked fantasy that they were capable of that. We couldn't taste any worse than what she was preparing. So that's who the Wild Things are. They're foreigners, lost in America, without a language. And children who are petrified of them, and don't understand that these gestures, these twistings of flesh, are meant to be affectionate."

He’s homosexual and managed to hide the fact that he lived with his gay lover for 50 years from his parents in a touching demonstration of filial concern, and from possible residual fears of cannibalism. Who knew?

Sendak also recalled a fight he had with his publisher about Where the Wild Things Are, with the safety-conscious publisher keen to change the word "hot" to "warm" at the end of the book, when Max returns from his reign as king over the monsters to find his dinner "was still hot". "It was going to burn the kid. I couldn't believe it. But it turned into a real world war, just that word," Sendak told the magazine.

He won out eventually by "just going at it", he said. "Just trying to convey how dopey 'warm' sounded. Unemotional. Undramatic. Everything about that book is 'hot'."

So he’s capable of great discretion for the sake of his family (and maybe peace and quiet for himself at weddings, funerals, etc.) – but also of crassness in public now he’s richer and famous.

I’m not wise and so I can’t decide if this is a bad, rude man who writes great stories for kids, or a nice one who got roughed up by life and is getting his own back now he’s got the publicity to do it big-style.

At first sight, I’d put this down (gratefully) to our free and varied culture allowing the pungent exposure of an open secret concerning how we are misgoverned.

After all, he’s being boorish and callous at worst. It could be worse.

Here, according to Julia and others, we see how the jokers have decided that it’s much, much better if children are sprayed like silly string out of tiny crescent-shaped bomb-holes in plummeting jetliners at 30,000 feet than to risk some airport security man seeing them in the buff.

Perspective.

PS.

Oh, and here are three of the daftest paragraphs I’ve ever read in Wikipedia. Read them ladies and gentlemen and weep for the human condition one way or another.