Harriet Harman’s latest wheeze is to warn us that querying MPs’ disgusting behaviour will “Play into the hands of the BNP”.
There is an excellent article on the BNP by Jeremy Seabrook in the Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/09/bnp-european-elections-labour
It is absolutely true that under Blair the Labour Party abandoned the interests of the White Working Class. That hasn’t really changed. Bankers can have hundreds of billions from the taxpayers, but the Corus steel foundry on Tyneside can go to the wall.
Seabrook’s evocative description of “forlorn estates of liquor shops covered with chicken wire, leaky drainpipes, semi-wild dogs and tattered flags of St George ?” everything that symbolised the last gasp of a disappearing working class” immediately transported me back to canvassing in Mill Hill ward in Blackburn. There was little political downside to abandoning the “sinks”. Voter turnout among the hopeless voters of Mill Hill was down to around ten per cent. But I found the people friendly and engaging. I was frequently invited in for tea. They did not vote, not because they were stupid, but because they no longer believed it would do any good.
It was quite simply true that vastly more of the huge amount of public money which underpins the economy of Blackburn, ended up benefiting the immigant rather than the poor white community. But these essentially decent white people fully shared the strong British dislike of anything associated with fascism. The BNP only got just over 5% in Blackburn – the same as I got as an anti-war Independent.
Meanwhile, there was an incredible 29% of all votes cast by postal ballot in Blackburn. This was over twice the national average, and I believe the highest percentage in the country. As part of New Labour’s plan to maximise the value of their postal ballot vote farming through patriarchal power structures in immigrant communities, these postal ballots were by law mixed with secret ballots before counting, so it was not possible to record any discrepancy between postal and secret ballots. But I learnt from tellers that they looked to be “over 90%” for Jack Straw. (See Murder in Samarkand p. 365). That means Straw only got about 30% of secret, non-postal ballots.
These postal ballots came almost entirely from the Muslim community, and almost entirely went to Jack Straw. So he doesn’t need the white people of Mill Hill.
The mainstream parties exaggerate the electoral threat from the BNP because it is in their interest to do so. The astonishing thing is that the BNP do not have more support from the politically abandoned poor whites of this country. That is a reflection of the British people’s fundamental decency.
What is needed now is a politics of fairness and concern, of work and the dignity of labour, and which respects the values of liberty and toleration that still appeal to working class people as a fundamental part of their British heritage. The Labour Party can never again stand for that. New Labour never did. A radical political realignment is beginning to take place in the UK. How men of goodwill should try to influence that for the better is a grope in a forest rather than a march down an open road at present. I hope a track may be found soon. But getting rid of Brown, Harman, Mandelson and this terrible government is an obvious priority.
Courtenay, certainly you can but first as mentioned above it’s BGD not BDG. First name Ben.
CB: “The people from the Caribbean, or India or Pakistan, have direct and long associations with England, precisely because England gained historical advantage…”
I find it interesting to attempt to untangle what is explicit and implicit within your statements. “Historical advantage” seems to imply that Britain was a key beneficiary from colonialism / Empire does it not?
Is this some recently developed term beloved of sociologists? If I was putting my cynical Worzel Gummidge head on I’d say it sounded like latte-Marxism, except that it’s meaning is somewhat shrouded and no doubt one has to plough through the conceptual baggage to try to prise the meaning out of the shell.
The assumption of British net benefits is actually not the case. Cecil Rhodes, the Barings, Sassoons and Jardines and their ilk may have benefitted, so may some slavers, tea merchants and the like but as is now argued widely the colonial era actually cost Britain (and therefore her taxpaying population) more than she benefitted from it. This is not surprising as the elites have always used the common population as pawns in their nest building. Perhaps in my clawing at your meaning here I am squinting too much between the lines.
You next attempt to segue from this point into “and now those same descendants are here to eek out a living wage.”
One doesn’t have to follow the other. As I said a fait accompli was delivered and there is absolutely no inevitability about it. It happened due to politics and via politics it could have been arrested.
The empire may have accounted for a good proportion of the early immigrants but many have also come following the UN Convention of Refugees and our judicial classes interpretation of that treaty and via economic migrancy from nations where we weren’t involved colonially.
All Western nations now have significant minority populations and this is for many not directly associated with colonial past or “historical advantage.”
I think because of your interest in globalisation you think that like the weather this is inevitable. That like King Croesus it’s futile to fight the tide, just accept it, fling the borders open. It would appear you invest the concept of globalisation with some almost supernatural qualities, like Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Obviously from my statements I wholly disagree and given any chance to express their opinions so consistently have the populations of most Western states.
I’m not sure what Powell adds to the conversation and he is an easy fall back for some. I have to say there are no posters of Enoch on my wall. EP did have something to do with small numbers of immigrants coming to this country, particularly around the NHS. We’ve probably all seen the “Till Death Us Do Part” tirades of Alf Garnett on this fact. He was a free trader, Austrian school etc. Then he decided in some important ways he’d been wrong and tried to honestly reverse the prevailing consensus of the political class on this. But the immigration levels were minor in comparison to today.
I have to say sorry, but I cannot understand your final paragraph at all even after reading it four times.
In sum, yes, the current situation is a fact. There is though the possibility of difficult decisions ahead. The political class are somewhat in agreement with immigration reform but not reversal which means just a change of degree.
The immigrants that are here illegally it is suggested may well be given leave to remain (no doubt Cameron will come round to this view once in government). The proportion of immigrants that settled here now have children that still live lives not as wholly British so much as one foot here and one foot still having a strong adherence to their ancestral roots (interestingly in the US they seem to have overcome this and to some limited degree in France too).
The laws of the country have been changed to coerce the acceptance of the host population; the media and the education system are used to inculcate the ‘right’ attitudes to continue the process and certain professions demand you give your allegiance to this process on pain of dismissal. The laws of this country are being slowly amended to give consideration to Sharia elements. The electoral system is being corrupted in some important ways which is where the post from Craig started this discussion.
That’s your globalisation for you. Unfortunately in between are ordinary men and women and their families on all ethnic sides living their daily lives but on the macro level there are powerful demographic and cultural changes afoot.
Please go away, Mr Griffin. I’m sure you are a lovely soul underneath it all, and I appreciate how miserable it must be in your position, but your misinformation, insinuations and racism are spoiling my supper. We all know that the BNP are in favour of mass forced deportations and stuff. Can’t you take six months off and go travelling and have adventures and like yourself again, or something?
Technicolour you need to see all the shades of an argument not just the monochrome ones, like man.
It’s a post about the BNP and allied issues and I’m not a member.
I have periodically (albeit infrequently) posted here never touching on this issue because that wasn’t the discussion at hand.
I am civilly putting a point of view in response to criticism that’s made of things I have said that relates to this topic and might interest some. If you don’t like it you know this is the internet super highway why not just walk on by.
Your kindergarten psychobabble and your belief that I may be concerned over your supper are somewhat misplaced.
Ben: Where this has reached is that I have to convince you of what actually is fact, and I shall try:-
“Cecil Rhodes, the Barings, Sassoons and Jardines and their ilk may have benefitted, so may some slavers, tea merchants and the like…”
That is a pretty big slice of colonialists you have there referenced – who we then must assume, on your line of reasoning, benefited themselves exclusively but not Britain from whence they came?
“… but as is now argued widely the colonial era actually cost Britain.”?
In one way, I can agree ?” if you completed the sentence ?” “Actually cost Britain what otherwise might have been a good name”. Argued by whom Ben? Supported by what facts? I suggest that there are a lot of revisionists around who would rather mask and hide the evils of the British Empire. Odd thing to have built an Empire and then profess great losses while having extracted – people and resources out of Africa; labour and resources out of the West Indies; advancing slavery and racism as cornerstones of empire building; further impoverishing an already impoverished India to bleed benefits for Britain; the Amristar massacre by Dwyer added for good measure; British theft of Kenyan lands, rounding up of Kenyans in their own land in the mass concentration camps and subjecting them to torture ( a subject that my earlier quote from Enoch Powell was making reference to); and – what Britain did to the Irish during the famine and the partition of Ireland could be thrown in as additional spice for the “evil stew of Empire”.
So Ben, all of this was done over a period of over three hundred years or more while Britain consistently lost money ( maybe after you finish reading Jeremy Paxman you should have a read of Eric Williams ” Capitalism and Slavery” a well researched world best seller on the subject to which the title refers). On your account, slavery and indentured labour presumably were not pursued because profits were being made? And, so I must assume, on your account, notwithstanding that no profits accrued to Britain over considerably long periods, the processes nevertheless continued over the centuries for reasons, presumably motivated by altruism?
Post-Empire you find the thought of your daughter marrying an Indian doctor appalling. And you remain either ungrateful or unappreciative of the point I sought to make earlier when I gave you the “Universal” car for your birthday present.
Ah…well….I give up….all together now, after three, “Rule Britannia…!”
PS. I am not a Marxist ?” but I do have a conscience, an honest mind about the facts, and some fairy tales about the niceness of the British Empire, which did in fact exploit quite extensively. Ultimately, at this stage of post-empire British history ?” I leave you comfortably believing what you want to about the great “humanitarian enterprise” that was the “British Empire”.
PPS. Why do you bother posting on this blog Ben? With your mind-set, frankly, wouldn’t you be more at home on a BNP blog or web site?
Courtenay : Actually I do not support the British Empire or the colonial period proper.
Where those people broadly defined as Anglo-Celts settled (Australia, NZ, US, Canada) I do take some pride in their achievements (while not overlooking the harsh ways they treated the domestic populations.)
Save your sneers, I’ve not got out my squeeze box and won’t be bashing out Rule Britannia (interestingly with its allusions to Barbary slave raids on British coastal villages: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,994562,00.html )
No White Man’s Burden from here. I find Quigley quite interesting on some of that guff (The Anglo-American Establishment) and see it as political sloganeering, cover for power politics which of course it is. Also on this period I read with interest Corelli Barnett’s The Collapse of British Power.
I read (and occasionally post) here because it troubles me that our government (and all western governments) not just allows but is actually complicit in appalling things happening to their citizens and other nationals. That behind the fluff in the daily MSM who acts like a conductor orchestrating our populations base emotions of outrage, sentimentality and titillation naked power politics continues.
I am horrified that my government is complicit and how they use the threat of Islam to subvert our shaky ‘constitution’ such as it is.
How generally the country is degrading rather than evolving. I read the site because I find it of interest once in a while to see the curtain lifted and glimpse the actors backstage.
I read it like I read other sites to see perspectives on how we are used as fodder to fight (and pay in perpetuity) for unjust wars, prop up international financiers and pollute our world.
I also have a suspicion that this globalism of which you speak and the entrenched nature of multi-racial societies in all of the West has been a fundamental part of this process and unanchors us from any common basis which otherwise might give us some high ground to do battle with it…
Just a small point Craig.Corus is on Teeside,not Tyneside.
Quite a mouthful Ben. With the words,
“That behind the fluff in the daily MSM who acts like a conductor orchestrating our populations base emotions of outrage, sentimentality and titillation naked power politics continues.” It’s you sounding a bit of the Marxist to me there.
Anyway, not much more I can add, save and except:-
A. Be appreciative that I introduced your daughter to the wonderful Indian doctor.
B. Remember to kiss your three coloured grandchildren and show them love ( you have it in you if you try a bit);and
C. Don’t forget to change the oil in the “Universal” car that I gave you for your birthday.
Try to be a lot more accepting and understanding – and – I sense that you have that potential.
“Rule humana – humanity ought to rule the waves” – or something like that…cheers.
Courtenay, that will never happen.
You try and be a bit more understanding that the engine of your monstrous ‘Universal’ vehicle is overheating and that many of the passengers are looking at ways to get off and already are shopping around for something else. That because it’s the only car in your garage does not mean that it’s the only one that has ever been built or will be built. ‘Cheers’
Ben – I agree with you. Ronald Reagan, George Bush et. al. gave the monstrous “Universal” to me. I did not want to let you know, but the secret seems to be out. I admit it, that since I value my Sunday morning exercise ?” I gave it away to you as your birthday present. Actually, I do agree totally with you on your point, and I admire your sharp come back as well ?” touche!
One thing that does give me comfort is that racist shits like BGD would never dare spew their bile in public or they’d get carted away. Hopefully their bitterness and resentment will eat them alive.
While one doesn’t as a rule, like to discomfit the weak of mind I have to tell JB that concerns over immigration and its impact on demography, culture, economics and environment is actually very much the order of the day among the general population.
If you were to actually break out of the Islingtonesque mindset you seem to inhabit and visit more places than your local Narcotics Anonymous and SWP meetings you might encounter it a lot more. No doubt you long for the day when people expressing views to which you disagree will be carted off. Such is always the way with neo-bolsheviks.
None of the preceding means that one cannot both be concerned by the political system that has created this situation and also be concerned about how it has fought unjust wars, used international law as its personal plaything, taxed the poorest in the population to have its way and generally impacted upon people of all races and faiths globally in an wholly unsatisfactory fashion.
It’s OK when you meet ordinary racists down the pub, because then you can talk like human beings and find out what’s underneath the evil rubbish they’ve been fed (generally it’s fear of the bully boys, fear of debt, or fear of having failed).
But then you get someone online, and not only that, but someone who thinks they’re a thinker, with a vocabulary which includes “macrocosm” and “JS Mill”. And it’s a puzzle, isn’t it? Leave this academic racist to bang away; insinuating, lying, digressing, attacking and cajoling, on a site for which one feels a certain amount of reponsibility?
Or deal with this mindset? A mindset which, as a friend pointed out, is so alien to the vast majority of the population, and so incoherent in its justifications, and so destructive in its desires, and so blinkered about its motives, that it’s like dealing with a paedophiliac. There are people who do the latter, but a) they get paid for it and b) they get counselling afterwards.
To be in even the same board space as someone thoughtfully advocating mass forced deportation is like finding a verruca in your soup: after the initial surprise wears off it becomes distressing. Just a couple of small factual points, in case anyone missed them:
1. To ask a question is not to answer it.
2. The central lie of this platform – that we are in danger of being overwhelmed by virile, dark-skinned others – may be an old one, but it is no less of a lie for that. The “non-European” population are not “growing at a much faster rate” than the “host” population.
Astonishing how the last was left to stand, complete with its suggestion that “non Europeans” are parasites. I guess people have been feeling as disinclined to deal with this as I now am.
BGD,
You are right that Imperialism did not benefit ordinary British people. But what it did assiat was mass emigration. If all the British people who left here just since the second world war came back, with their families and descendants, and all the people who immigrated here in the same period left, plus their families and descendants, we would have a net increase in population og over 30 million.
So it’s not about population levels. It’s just bout your not liking black people. Well, that’s your personal psychological problem.
Craig it’s a matter of degree not kind. Whether you file this under special pleading or not I frequently go out drinking sociably with a black guy who is a personal friend (and who is aware of my perspective). Living in the UK near any major city (south east London for me) you can’t exist without interacting with people from the ethnic majorities. As anyone decent would you deal with them as individuals on a case by case basis. Some you like others you don’t like an race of person. It’s the country wide (and Western wide)macro level that concerns and how the culture etc is impacted.
Leftists are such intriguing and amusing creatures to study up close.
Case study of a leftist:
STAGE 1: Use psychobabble to impute an underlying mental problem. I doubt Technicolor sat at the feet of Theodore Adorno so I guess he just absorbed the technique from reading “Debating for Dummies” or whatever they are giving out at SWP meetings these days.
Technicolor says: Usual ‘racists’ views are because of “fear of the bully boys, fear of debt, or fear of having failed” or how about this gem of an example “so incoherent in its justifications, and so destructive in its desires, and so blinkered about its motives, that it’s like dealing with a paedophiliac”
STAGE 2: If it doesn’t fit in with their theories they deny the sun rises in the morning.
Technicolor says: The “non-European” population are not “growing at a much faster rate” than the “host” population. Astonishing how the last was left to stand.
Firstly let’s have some statistics on those coming to this country:
Birth rates of the non British born:
ONS Report covered by Telegraph: More than one in five births in Britain last year was to a woman from overseas. 154,000 of the 749,000 births in 2006 – 21 per cent – were to immigrants. 70 per cent of the 10 million rise in population over the next 25 years would be down to immigration – either directly or via higher birth rates. Over the past five years alone, immigration has added more than one million to the population. The Pakistani rate of 4.7 children per mother is almost three times the British-born rate of 1.7.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1572262/One-in-five-babies-born-to-migrants-in-UK.html
British born ethnic minorities:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1556901.stm
Britain’s ethnic minorities are growing at 15 times the rate of the white population. Data collected by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) between 1992-1994 and 1997-1999 showed that the number of people from minority ethnic groups grew by 15% compared to 1% for white people. If it was that much over that period then it much be far more now.
STAGE 3: Set up a few straw men for good measure:
Technicolor says: “Someone thoughtfully advocating mass forced deportation”… “suggestion that “non Europeans” are parasites”
Not in any of my posts here have I suggested either of those two things. Show me?
So Technicolor is the UK indigenous population’s birthrate under that of the ethnic minorities or not?
Which brings us to the next stage for these creatures:
STAGE 4: Move the Goal Posts
….
Enjoy your soup
BGD – you seriously need some help with the state of your mental health. You sound like someone on the point of cracking up. Do you have a lot of personal issues?
@ AM
Thank you for your professional opinion. I refer you to Stage 1 in the debating techniques of the left that I made in regard to Technicolor and say thanks for underlining my point:
STAGE 1: Use psychobabble to impute an underlying mental problem.
If it wasn’t all so tiresomely predictable I’d manage to crack a smile.
As if this wasn’t proof enough of your left-leaning twaddle your earlier comments that the BNP are on the rise and “when the shite hits the fan the state will look to the far-right to smash us and keep us in our place” is the usual low rent sixth form Marxist analysis that one can’t help but sigh upon reading.
You know in all good faith I thought it would be interesting to debate a few points regarding this post with the readers on the site but unfortunately the responses have been quite laughably bad.
Silly analogies, puerile sneers, what-ifs, straw men and playing the man instead of the ball is your benchmark..
I have looked in – mid packing – to see if Technicolor would have the cohones to say OK I made an argument, it was shown to have no substance but XYZ… Nope. Pitiful man.
In the absence of any substantive arguments I think it’s time to stop trying to make closed minded people engage with other perspectives and find more productive uses of my time.
C’est la vie.
Any one serious thinking about voting for the BNP should read this book, it is extremely details and further and describes the history of the BNP (and related organizations, its leaders and some of its candidates).
I defy any reasonably rational person, having read this, and maybe done some brief investigation of their own, to come to any conclusion but that the BNP
is a (renamed) British Nazi Party in suites and ties.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contemporary-British-Fascism-National-Legitimacy/dp/0230574378/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1244133031&sr=8-2
For further exposure of the reality of the BNP, try:
http://www.hopenothate.org.uk/the-real-bnp/