Amjem's March...

...is being discussed in a waffly way at Harry's Place. The usual High Left response that it's all an illusion cooked up by the Press and if only we could have censorship nobody would ever need to consider religious extremism in Britain again.
I replied:

Islam4uk is just the tip of a massive iceberg. By which I mean there are a huge amount of young Muslims in Britain that think that killing in the name of religion is justified*, that a caliphate is good news and that this, their home country, is at war with their religion. Their demonstration, if it had gone ahead, would have caused the first major battle of a second English civil war which now looks unavoidable in any case. How decisive Brown and Johnson are on this for once, how unequivocal! That’s because they too know it would become the first battle – and also be nicely illustrative the logical end of doctrinal multiculturalism, something both men have backed for years. A street battle between bearded fanatics and respectable middle-Englanders in a country town like WB would demonstrate vividly the mess that modern socialism and its siren suicide note of moral relativism and cultural Marxism has got silly old England into. No, you bet your arse they don’t want that.

*Last year, a poll by the Centre for Social Cohesion** found that almost one in every three Muslim students in the UK said that killing in the name of religion was justified, with one third also in favour of a worldwide Islamic caliphate, or empire, based on Islamic sharia law.

** Started with money from Civitas, which probably means that the High Left will airily ignore its survey results as 'right-wing propaganda'.

Cheer yourself up with Butch

From Keep Thinking Butch,

'Gordon Brown, our Prime Minister, and his six-year-old chum David Miliband have said rude words on China for executing a drug smuggler according to their legal code. That’s right. A man who aimed to bring misery to thousands in order to enrich himself has been whacked by the world’s next superpower, and our [non] elected representatives have a problem with that. I wish I could live another hundred years, if only to see Guardian readers’ faces when China takes over the role of Great Satan from their hated America. Human Rights Act? Toilet paper to the Chinese, my liberal friends. Also, I love the fact that every Brit in chokey abroad these days has got a ‘psychological condition’. Yeah, they have. It’s called being British. From a court case in the near future:

DEFENCE LAWYER: M’lud, although it is indisputably true that my client was found in the same room as seven dismembered corpses, with a bloody axe in his hand and repeating the phrase “I am death”, we would move for a plea of mitigation due to a psychological condition suffered by my client.

JUDGE: And what is the medical term for this condition?

DEFENCE LAWYER: Britishness, m’lud.

JUDGE: Case dismissed!

In other news, we can’t stop telling Iran how to run their internal affairs, either. It has absolutely nothing to do with us if a bunch of theocratic spastics want to club opposition supporters, be they women or children, half to death for the unislamic activity of having an opinion. So why are we getting so wobbly lipped about it? These people have yet to enter the eighth century; why do we think they will suddenly respond to adult suggestions, even those made by Childe Miliband? The only concern we have with Iran is keeping nuclear weapons off the menu and, if we lack the courage to do that, Israel will do it for us and I, for one, will have a street party on the day the first mushroom cloud is spotted over Tehran.'

And if you didn't laugh at that, well, as Rod Stewart says on the Faces' live version of Maybe I'm Amazed, 'I dunno where yer bin.'

"Mad" Mel

The we-know-best-and-you-don't left/liberals call her Mad Mel. They never have much to say after a terrorist hit or near-miss. She does. I knew a very noisy left/liberal years ago who said that all terrorism was caused by poverty - a cursory glance at the backgrounds of leading terrorists - especially the current crop of jihadist psychopaths - demonstrates that, like so much contemporary left/liberal dogma, that particular nostrum is fucking poppycock. But it shows you they'll believe anything.

Radicals flocked to the UK, attracted by Britain's toxic combination of criminally lax immigration controls, generous health, education and welfare benefits and the ability to perpetuate their views through the British veneration of the principle of free speech.
Despite 9/11, the 2005 London Tube and bus attacks and the dozens of other Islamist plots uncovered in Britain, the astounding fact is that Islamic extremist networks are still allowed to flourish in Britain, largely through the obsession of its governing class with multiculturalism and 'human rights'.

As a result, Britain remains - to its eternal shame - the biggest hub of Islamic radicalisation outside the Arab and Muslim world.
Extremists are still slipping into the country. The courts are still refusing to deport terrorists in order to protect their 'human rights' abroad.
London boasts the shameful reputation of the world's premier money-laundry for terrorism, which shelters behind a label of 'charity' that the authorities choose not to challenge.
Not only is no action taken against extremist mosques and madrassas, but many British universities have been turned into terrorism recruitment centres.

Rest here.

As Madness once sang, if this is madness then I'm filled with gladness.

Because totalitarian governments always label their opponents insane in the end. See soviet Russia.

Is it "Mad" Mel, or is it "Mad" Gordon, Ed, Harriet and Tony? The answer depends on whether you prefer your head in the sand or not.

Local effing government

After last night weather, I felt moved to ask a friend of mine to stick this the local paper round here:

Dear XXXX,

I will buy you a beer or two if you put this letter in your paper.

Dear Sir,

When I emerged from ****** station at around 12.30am on Dec 17, I found a blizzard blowing. In the space of two minutes I saw three people take heavy falls in the slush - there was, of course, no grit down. Walking through the snow I saw several other people take heavy falls. I called out to one man, who had fallen very heavily and appeared to have done serious damage to his arm, and said: "wonderful, isn't it, that we pay a fortune in tax and AND council tax to keep the council offices full of local government staff who are supposed to be 'managing' everything but they can't even grit the roads and pavements, even when there's 12 hours notice.."
Of course, the above sentence was shorter, sweeter and punctuated with bloodcurdling swearwords.
When I finally reached my road, after half a mile uphill of ungritted pavements and roads, I checked the box at the end of the road to see if there was any salt that residents could use for the road come the morning. Naturally, it was empty - we used it all in the February blizzards and, though the council can have a diversity and green policies of byzantine intricacy and bully everyone into having four different recycling boxes, it cannot refill the salt supply tub for the road.
I would write to my councillor about this but last time I wrote to him he never wrote back.
The moral of the story is what the point of local government? Five intelligent people - who actually live in the borough and understand its needs - could meet once a month in a room above a pub and make all the financial and planning decisions necessary to 'run' this borough. Local government is an expensive, useless racket and it should be abolished now.

William Gazy

Balls

Privately educated 'toff' Edward Balls has responded to Andrew Gilligan's Spectator piece about the Labour government giving money to a school where a former Hizb ut-Tahrir campaigner with extremist views is working(see past posts)with a letter to said organ saying that no hardline Islamic attitudes exist within the school because the school's Ofsted inspection didn't find any.
I'll say that again. In a slow, mockingly sarcastic voice. Because Ofsted didn't find any.

This is how socialism does its business. This is how it sleeps at night. The same thinking that results in Baby P and the doctor who couldn't see he had a broken spine and the social workers who filed reports while his father kicked him round the house. Why pensioners lie in their own excrement in hospitals. Why people end up in court for having opinions that the Oxbridge intelligentsia don't approve of. Why Victoria Climbie was tortured to death under the noses of Haringey Council. Why Fiona Pilkington was driven to suicide as the police did nothing. Why a hundred or more teenagers have been shot, stabbed or beaten to death in London in the last couple of years. Why the national debt is heading for £1.5 trillion.

Because Ofsted didn't find any.

Victoria, Midnight

Study for Victoria, Midnight; charcoal on brown packing paper
14x19in

It was Van Gogh who said that night was just as interesting to paint as day, if not more so. I think he was right.
If you ever come round the corner into Terminus Place, as the area outside Victoria Station is called, on a bus, you will notice how the recorded female voice announces it. She says it quite unlike the way she announces any of the other streets.
She says 'Victoria Station' in the voice of a woman who has just had a very good time in bed.
I like the front of Victoria Station at night. It has grime and grandeur; a monstrous wedding cake left out in sooty rain. I've been coming in and out of that station for thirty years and the front always has something new to show me, if only the way the light catches it.
The impression I want to give here is something vertigious, tottering almost, with immensities looming. Some lights still burning but many switched off.
I hope to work it up into something majestic and damned, like England is.

Post budget record, sing in a Scotch accent, if you please.
Here we are again. The money's all gone. Osborne is right when he says that at least in the past when they'd pissed it all away on their bureacratic utopias they had the balls to take the tough decisions. Not this bunch of devious cowards.

The Liddle Incident - Night Thoughts II

Anyone who takes notice of the news and spends significant amounts of time on streets and on public transport in London will know that Rod Liddle has a point - the culture of young black males has been pathological for a very long time now and liberals and the Left cannot face it and have gone to extraordinary lengths to hide/deny it.
If you've seen a fair bit of life from, as Kipling has it 'the underside where the lath and plaster is not smoothed off', you will know that Liddle is being provocative but broadly correct.
(Sorry to bring Kipling in - that won't help anyone's case in the eyes of an urban liberal)
The usual suspects have all howled with rage - you won't see Bonnie Greer or Diana Abbott getting so exercised about Hizb ut-Tahrir - and let them howl. Abbott is one of the biggest and most ridiculous hypocrites in the parliamentary Labour Party - and that is a very crowded field.
She refused to give her son the socialist education her party insists children should have, for the very reason that she did not want her son to become involved with the pathological culture of young black males - which socialist comprehensive culture can do absolutely zilch about, except invent ever more fantastical explanantions and excuses for it.
So she packed him off to a private school, paid for with the money she makes from 'representing' the people whose sons she does not want her son mixing with.
And she calls Cameron and Osborne toffs...
Bonnie Greer was reported in yesterday's papers to have responded to Liddle's piece by saying:

'My response would be that the overwhelming majority of paedophiles, murderers, warmongers and football hooligans are white males and all we got in return was beans on toast and Top Gear.'

Now, doubtless this is sarcasm and I should not bother to refute her outburst on the grounds that I have never seen Miss Greer say anything that even appeared intelligent or wise, even when she had a golden opportunity to do so when she found herself sitting next to that repulsive and stupid man Nick Griffin on Question Time.
But still. They are very intemperate comments for someone who is Deputy Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the British Museum, don't you think? As well as being a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Member of the Franco-British Council.
Guess who personally put Bonnie on the board of trustees for the British Museum? Gordon Brown, that's who.
The Left can't handle crime when it's done by anyone - but their especial supinity is with black crime. Which is why it has escalated over the Blair/Brown years.
In fact, the near-weekly fatal stabbing of young black men by other young black men which occurred during the late baroque wrongness of Ken Livingstone's mayoralty has only been reduced because that heartless communist and his tame copper Ian Blair were turfed out by someone on the Right who could face the truth and do something about it.

Three cheers for Andrew Gilligan - he's proved that the Labour government ARE funding what amounts to a Hizb ut-tahrir madrasah. Gilligan, no righty he, called Ed Balls a 'disgrace' to his face, which must be a wonderfully cathartic thing to be able to do.

The main evidence that Mr Balls has made a massive blunder is a chapter in a Hizb ut Tahrir pamphlet, ‘Education and Identity’, written by one Farah Ahmed. Mrs Ahmed is the head teacher of one of the two schools, and also a trustee of the Islamic Shakhsiyah Foundation (ISF), which runs them both. If I were a Muslim parent, I would not let my child within 20 miles of her.

Just when bien pensants were about to start playing their well-worn record entitled 'all an invention of the right wing press', old Gilly gets to the bottom of it. Well done son.

I approach Taki in the Spectator with caution. He can make you laugh or he can make you think he's an old Germanic word beginning with c. But he's very funny this week about Dubai threatening to go pop. I particularly enjoyed this bit:

Sam Goldwyn once said that if you want to send a message use Western Union. Hollywood didn’t listen and lots of crappy movies were made. Well, I liked old Sam, not that I ever met him, but we should follow his advice and send a message through Western Union to the Maktoum Brothers comedy act. It should read as follows: Palace intrigue old hat stop decision making lousy stop greed comma arrogance comma and all round hirsute facial ugliness too much stop no longer welcome to rainy comma full of towels already comma London stop. Not that it will ever happen. Because you can fool all the people all the time when you promise them riches. Because that’s all the Dubai debacle ever was. A desert mirage fueled by greed and sold to suckers by tawny types whose ancestors used to sell flying carpets to dumb Englishmen with sunburnt noses, knees, and elbows.

Of course, I'm more struck on the Maktoums than Taki is - I've backed a lot of their horses and won fat sums off them.