I am 100% with you. I do believe that the Liberals have demonstrated that they were not convinced by the need for the Iraq War, and they seem the least enthusiastic about Afghanistan. However the overall situation remains as you define it.

Democracy, justice and reason all indicate that British government policies about our funding of banks and support of Middle East wars are both profoundly and fundamentally both way off-course and unpopular. Yet Brown will do nothing about any of them, nor will Cameron. The Liberals might, given half a chance, but that half a chance will be denied.

We need some elections to decide who sets policies like the Afghanistan War and giving casino bankers our cash. Neither Brown, Cameron nor Clegg make these decisions nor ever will. They simply put such externally imposed policies into practice and their next job is to make sure we keep quiet, and in return they get rich and feel important.

“who do not want to waste many scores of billions of dollars on a nuclear submarine system”

I signed a petition against Trident a few months ago. Last week I received a reply from my local MP (Ben Wallace, C).

He says we mustn’t get rid of it because it “guarantees our boarders”. Freudian slip, or what ?

The military industrial complex and in particular the absurdity of the trident system is of particular concern to me.

I have never seen anything more than a terribly simplistic, infantile argument put forwarded for the merits of the trident system. I just wish more people were outraged at the waste of money spent on such a so-called ‘deterrent’ but I guess money talks.

Nice to see even some in the establishment can admit an obvious truth : that it is an absurdity.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/defence/4268661/Trident-nuclear-deterrent-completely-useless-say-retired-military-officers.html

off the point a little….but Craig tell me as you are in the know, noone ever ask how the guns and bombs end up in the hands of talibans and insurgents in iraq…how do they go from manufacturing and then into the wrong peoples hands…

Sounds like sour grapes to me. “The public have spoken – the bastards”.

I totally agree. In fact if you vote you support a system that upholds Establishment/unaccountable government rule.

I agree.

Under normal circumstances facing the crunch-all-over situation of today’s global ecological and economical games one would have a hard time to find any voluntary candidate who would be willing to take over from here and bear the responsibility for any kind of turn-around-plans.

Not so in our modern democracy that successfully lowered the standards to where the lowest common denominator is just having a political job.

The leaders’ debate on how to not lead is one symptom; another one is the amoeba like change whichever way the wind blows or the pound comes from.

There may be some point in voting in this election on the grounds of domestic policy. There are probably discernible differences between the parties on where the inevitable tax rises and spending cuts will fall.

Much as I despise New Labour I have a horrible feeling they may handle this marginally more eqitably than the Tories.

Alan Campbell

The public may not trust politicians about expenses, but they do trust them about policy and they do trust the electoral system. The system is built on that trust.

If the politicians continue to exasperate the people about policy and spend our money supporting corruption in elections abroad viz. Carzai, then the trust will be blown. The same sense of outrage as the expenses issue, will follow. It’s not unthinkable, except to politicians, that the public’s mood could change, allowing candidates like Craig to stand on a level playing field, one day.

On Thursday the Greek government issued a 10-year bond to raise €5 billion. It has banned banks and hedge funds from subscribing to the sale and has also dumped Goldman Sachs and other US investment banks as transaction managers.

This is very good news. It shows that the Greeks know exactly what’s going on and have the political will and power to do something about it. There may be some hope yet in European political democratic systems, rickety as they may be.

One other similarity…

xFI are Cerebus’ biggest lobby group. Yip, Israyhell has a powerful say in UK foreign policy (and the passport agency too so it transpires). Mirroring quite well with the United Snakes.

Craig, I agree completely and have noticed the political descent into service to international corporations, since the time of Ogress Thatcher. Political consensus too has given way to a leadership autocracy–much the basis for the easy slip into current business wars of Iraq and Afghanistan.

People just have no say in matters, which affect their livelihoods–both in welfare and taxes.

Surely, a man such as yourself, could start a political TV programme to represent the real views of these people–something to compete with the vetted and mediocre Dimbleby knitting circle?

We need a programme which, demands accountability from those who elect to serve the people–and they should be compelled to appear before the Public.

I am convinced that, the ratings would be astronomical–and I’m sure that willing investors could be found to sponsor such a needed programme.

How about it?

At least tell us whether the British Establishment permits or not.

I am thoroughly looking forward to the day when A. Campbell makes a position contribution to the discussion, rather than just sniping at the sidelines. Not a spin-doctor, is he?

@Ruth: I would tend to shy away from never voting on principle, as much as I see your point. I trust you will go and spoil a paper though? – as you will otherwise be regarded by the powers that be as “couldn’t be bothered to vote”.

I don’t agree with it, but recently I was amused to see a sticker on a lamppost that READ:

DON’T VOTE: IT ONLY ENCOURAGES THEM.

Craig says – “Our democracy does not work.” Prominent main stream Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne (Editor of Maclean’s) says much the same thing, reporting that “Canadian Democracy is broken” … “if we were writing about a third world country with a system like ours, we would be careful to refer to the “largely ceremonial parliament” and “sham” elections”

Indeed nothing is more ludicrous than to find that a quarter of a century after the end of the cold war the MI5 / 6 intelligence services in the UK, and CSIS in Canada are bigger and more intrusive than ever. What ever happened to the end of cold war dividend that citizens expected? Could it be that the parliamentary system of government, common to both Britain and Canada, that was designed in a 19th and 18th century era of very small government, simply doesn’t work in the 21st century? Do we need constitutional change? It is certain that at present “Our democracy does not work”.

I understand Jon’s viewpoint completely, but I still think it is still best to vote, but vote the person and not the party.

The game is rigged. The table is tilted.

The mainstream media are perpetrators of a great fraud.

As J.C. said:

“Woe to ye, hypocrites. Ye who strain at gnats and swallow camels.”

Well if you don’t intend running again in Norwich I guess I’ll just not bother, as usual.

“On Thursday the Greek government issued a 10-year bond to raise €5 billion. It has banned banks and hedge funds from subscribing to the sale and has also dumped Goldman Sachs and other US investment banks as transaction managers.

This is very good news. It shows that the Greeks know exactly what’s going on and have the political will and power to do something about it.”

You do understand that Greek politicians are really to blame for that mess, don’t you?

Craig, it does you no credit to lump the Lib Dems in with the Con-Lab duopoly. I agree that Clegg is too risk-averse and smarmy, but in terms of policy they do offer a genuine different choice to the British people – a proper crackdown on unscrupulous financiers, a fairer, less regressive tax system, the non-renewal of Trident, and most importantly an electoral system that will encourage, not suppress, the kind of real choice that we all want.

As Will Self dryly noted on Question time the other night,in respect of the differences between the main parties>

“There’s not an anorexic cigarette paper between them…”

Very true.

Chomsky/Herman’s The Manufacturing Of Consent couldn’t be more relevant to these narrow thin times.

Re-edit the infamous pre-Thatcher poster. “Parliament Isn’t Working”.

Should cowards be allowed to vote?

The main trouble with our democracy is that it is by secret ballot; this instantly removes accountability by the voter, and they become ‘free’ to vote for obscenities like New Labour. Without fear of culpability, the morality of a democracy will degrade.

A secret ballot aids and abets those who would otherwise fear their own choice. Whilst the honest are left to share the anonymity of cowards.

It is cowards who vote for draconian laws, to have the full violence of law committed against others on their behalf, in secret, and unabashed. It is cowards who are appealed to, when the tyrants warn of the atrocities of the ‘other’ tyrants, to justify their wars of aggression.

Therefore, save democracy from the legion of cowards, who would prostrate freedom, from the safety of the shadows. Shame the cowards by making the vote public, and accountable; no more secret voting would allow those who believe in themselves to prove their moral stance via their registered vote. And those that voted for an atrocious policy, should then be distinct from those who did not, and redress, if it is required, should come from them. Let those who vote for war, pay for war; let those who vote for lesbian and gay outreach quangos, pay for such; and those who vote for public funding of the BBC, be named and shamed.

Let us end the secret ballot, and completely free ourselves from the guilt of our failed democracy; for only would a cowardly democracy as ours, vote for its own subjugation!

Since 1929 we’ve had one hung parliament. In 1974 Labour won 301 seats the Conservatives 297 seats. The Liberals under Jeremy Thorpe gained a considerable share of the popular vote.

The votes for both the Conservatives and Labour slumped while the Liberals, Scottish National party, Plaid Cymru and even Independents did well (winning Lincoln and Blyth). The combined Tory and Labour share of the vote fell from 89.4% in 1970 to 75% in 1974; in votes at least, the two-party system suffered a blow from which it has not recovered.

Despite this, the smaller parties received few seats, with only 14 Liberals elected on 19.3% of the vote. Proportional representation was much discussed after the elections of 1974.

The mechanisms of partisan dealignment have matured with better education and more importantly an increased cynicism that has become an attitude amongst electors that ‘they are all as bad as each other. This complete loss of confidence can now be used to our advantage. A ‘hung’ parliament cannot last for long and would certainly force politicians to rethink strategy else risk a collapse in civic culture.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded

Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed

Everybody knows that the war is over

Everybody knows the good guys lost

Everybody knows the fight was fixed

The poor stay poor, the rich get rich

That’s how it goes

Everybody knows

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking

Everybody knows that the captain lied

Everybody got this broken feeling

Like their father or their dog just died.

Etc.

Leonard Cohen & Sharon Robinson 1988

On this issue I have to say this; we must – MUST – vote. Every vote that goes uncast permits a narrower section of the electorate to define the political mode post GElection. Yes, I will be voting LibDem, although not out of complete confidence in the program they’ve announced thus far. But at least with the LDs there is a chance that they will do the right thing in government, and a chance that they will listen to the country on issues of grave import. With Nu Labour and the Tories there is ZERO chance on either of those possibilities.

Add to that my own conviction that every time someone on voxpop says ‘they’re all the same’ or ‘dont vote you’ll only encourage them’ or some other deadening, disconnecting, isolating culture-myth pap, the rich and the powerful sit back, laugh quietly and pour another brandy which with to toast the decay of democracy.

Democracy and the open society is something which we amongst the people force upon the governing structures, not something which is handed down from high.

“On this issue I have to say this; we must – MUST – vote. Every vote that goes uncast permits a narrower section of the electorate to define the political mode post GElection”.

Unconvincing. Not exactly reinforced by your conviction that, voxpop represents the nihilism of “democracy”. You need to look up what constitutes democracy, before you condemn those, who see voting under the English system, as a futile Pavlovian ritual.

“Democracy and the open society is something which we amongst the people force upon the governing structures, not something which is handed down from high”.

This heroic outburst is not borne out by any near-recent event, that I can remember. Please inform.

Many have been calling for reform of the flawed voting system of FPTP for over thirty years, in order to have better use of the voting. enfranchisement.

As it stands, those “rich and powerful”, to whom you allude, sit back with their brandies and toast the continuance of the present “democracy” and the resilience (phlegm) of the modern peasantry.

anno wrote:

The public may not trust politicians about expenses, but they do trust them about policy and they do trust the electoral system. The system is built on that trust.

Anno, the system is and always has been rotten, how else was it possible to keep some 30% of all safe seats in the same hands for 50 years?

As for policy, if they really trusted noLabour policies, how come less than 22% of the electorate voted for them the second time round?

Presot talks about integrating transport modesa, 12 years on they managed to do nothing,except waste millions on tube companies that go bust.

I do not agree that we trust their policy decisions, because they always change as soon as the lection is over.

I cannot agree that the Lib Dems, although up there on the rostrum with the two main perpetrators, are as fixed on war than those who sold their souls.

I suppoirt Johns comment;

Surely, a man such as yourself, could start a political TV programme to represent the real views of these people–something to compete with the vetted and mediocre Dimbleby knitting circle?

That time has come, ideally we need a programme that lets the audience decide, lets call it ‘you decide’

It will need a ring master and a set of audience questions. Those politicians invited, who do not answer the questions, divert or are oputright liars can be dismissed at the push of a button. next please, with a new question.

The format could be changed if so needed.

politicians are invited to speak the truth, if the public decides they have done so, after the probving questioning by the ringmaster (Craig) they keep the chair, those who make it through the programme without being dismissed, will earn applause and get the programmes badge for having answered truthfully and honest.

Another format could be to have a panel asking the same questions, with liars and those trying to divert being dismissed, the one/two who survive the questioning win the debate.

The audience needs to have some basic knowledge of events and issues I feel, but it is up to the researchers/ frontmen and the ringmaster to clarify fact from fiction. The last word is had by the audience, they are in charge of dismissal.

Those dismissed will be replaced with the next politician. There is no need to have just british politicians, people like Geert Wilders can also apply to be judged by the people, if Ms. merkel has time to come, so be it, one would not need a nationalistic frame to such a programme, it could be European.

There I spilled the beans, now lets do it.

I had this idea yonks ago, for the same reasoning that John mentioned, the clasping tight hold over public concern for politics by the Dimblepugs political roadshow.

Tom King

I don’t think the Liberals have come out against renewing Trident. And if you want to point me twoars a radical LibDem policy on the banks, I’ll look at it.

On the other hand, JimmyG, why would the cowards you speak of not vote for whoever threatens them most, if those people knew how they’d voted ? That’s not a competition I’d like to see.

Surely there was also a hung parliament… from November 1964 until early 1966.

Unlike Saddam’s imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction, which were a real threat, ours are real and hence the threat is imaginary.

Or something.

@Richard Robinson

They can choose not to vote; but if they choose to vote due to coercion, it would be their shame.

Those that vote to coerce others, such as feminists and other evil fascists, do so under the protection of anonymity, which shames the very democracy itself.

I think the result of the election has already been decided. Drip by drip the media are feeding us the scenario of a hung parliament. And drip by drip the Conservative party is being damaged just enough to put the parties on a par. Interestingly, there was very little coverage of the Conservative party conference. So we now expect a coalition government and when the election results are announced we’ll accept them. If the results don’t tally then no doubt they’ll be amended – postal votes are open to manipulation.. I anticipate that Mandelson will become PM

To all those who advocate the no vote option. If you do not vote it will be seen as a do not care – aka walkover.

If you do vote you will at least be seen as a doer, someone who cares. This means a larger electorate that should at least have a little more respect.

Vote for the person and not the party.

“They can choose not to vote; but if they choose to vote due to coercion, it would be their shame.”

Don’t be daft. If you don’t like the way that “cowards” vote already, how does exposing them to threats and intimidation improve things ?

“Don’t be daft. If you don’t like the way that “cowards” vote already, how does exposing them to threats and intimidation improve things ?”

It dissuades them. As I said, only cowards benefit from anonymity.

You’d like to prevent people from voting for fascists by threatening them ?

*shrug* I’m not voting for that. You want to put a brick through my window for it ?

“only cowards benefit from anonymity.”

So use your real name, you clown.

James McComb is my real name, you neurotic.

Sorry to bang on about this, but I agree with nevergiveup. Without a minimum percentage of the vote, below which an election is declared void, not voting simply encourages the politicians who make noises about ‘voter apathy’ when they know full well that it’s voter despair. A low turn out and low engagement suits them.

So I think people shouldn’t ‘not vote’ on principle. Because there is currently no way of making that protest felt. Even a ‘none of the above’ box would be a fine start.

Plus, whoever gets in makes the law. Whoever gets in makes decisions. Whoever gets in seemingly affects us all, until we learn to do without them.

That’s what I think, anyway.

So, you like the Nationalists in Scotland, you want to see the troops out of Afghanistan, you are skeptical about the EU, yet neither you nor anyone else here seems interested in the British National Party, which takes the right line on these issues and, furthermore, has the following sensible proposals:

An English assembly, allowing the English to rule themselves in most matters instead of having bad policies imposed on them by a Westminster Parliament run by devious Scots such as Blair and Brown;

Punishment for “bankster” — they’re a bit vague on this but they seem to be thinking on the right lines — probably the stocks or the pillory;

Back to basics in education — a bit of a cliche but again they seem to have the right idea, although one may doubt the value of beating kids (it didn’t seem to do me any good, or much harm, and it is hard to imagine that the beating Tony Blair received as a sixth form student at Fettes College helped, either);

Oh, and an end to mass immigration, which most people, according to opinion polls, apparently want.

So why does no one discuss this option? They’re fascists, Nazis, blah, blah. But is that so? For years they’ve been promoting the idea of referendums and devolution of power. They explicitly rejected totalitarianism in 2005, and they advocate a citizens militia, every male to own a rifle and know how to use it. Isn’t that the best defense against tyranny?

I should be glad to be enlightened.

Well there you have it. Someone at Craig Murray’s blog shows up and expresses support for the British equivalent of David Duke.

What the fuck is wrong with Britain?

Hey, Jimmy,

I don’t know why most Britons oppose mass immigration, but if that’s what they oppose, isn’t it democratic for the government to respect their decision?

As for fear of the ‘other’, I don’t know what that means.

I live here in Canada in a multi-racial society and I have not yet experienced this indefinable fear.

Moreover, I’m not against immigration to Canada. I’d be a hypocrite if I were, since I am an immigrant here myself. But in any case, Canada’s situation is very different from Britain’s. Canada is the largest country in the world after the disintegrating Russian federation. It is 32 times the size of Britain with only half the population. Canada is a treasure house of resources: hydro-electricity, coal, oil, gas, uranium, fresh water, gold, silver, nickel, lumber, wheat, living space and vast untapped tourism potential. We need people to secure these resources before someone else decides to take them off us. So we bring in people from all over the world and integrate them into our system. Oh, sure we give lip service to multi-culturalism, but that is bunk. Our immigrants are so diverse in origin, they find themselves very much on their own when the get here. All they want to do, especially their children, is integrate.

Britain, in contrast, is desperately resourced poor. Every few million extra people that arrive from abroad creates further stress on a severely stressed population. That’s why you have such an unaffordable housing market. The indigenous population is shrinking, but population is exploding and driving housing affordability down. Poor immigrants from third world countries can live happily on benefits or low-wage jobs in Britain, whereas, Britain’s indigenous are downward mobile and psyched out. That’s why Bangla-Deshi women have more children in Britain than their sisters back home, whereas Britain’s native, mostly Celtic, population is collapsing. The nationalist position is that the resources of the country belong to the people of the country, not to would be citizens abroad. This is not racist. It assumes that other national governments quite properly act in the interests of their own citizens. When you bring in a massive immigrant population, you are telling the pre-existent population to move over and make way: make over something like a fifth or a quarter of the resources of the country ?” now, and perhaps half or more of the resources of the country within 60 years.

As for WTF Larry, isn’t he the person Craig already identified as an agent provocateur?

“Britain’s native, mostly Celtic, population is collapsing”.

Yeah ! What have the Romans ever done for us ?

At least it makes a change from “indigenous caucasian”, I suppose.

If Larry sticks his nose in again, take a break and read this:

“Afghanistan’s My Lai Massacre”

http://tinyurl.com/y8pq67q

(truthout)

great post Craig. Reminds me of what Spengler wrote around 1912:

“The true class-State is an expression of the general historical experience that it is always a single social stratum which, constitutionally or otherwise, provides the political leading. It is always a definite minority that represents the world-historical tendency of a State; and, within that again, it is a more or less self-contained minority that in virtue of its aptitudes (and often enough against the spirit of the Constitution) actually holds the reins.”[1]

“The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has accomplished its task so well that the objects sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed. What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears… The public truth of the moment, which alone matters for effects and successes in the fact-world, is today a product of the Press. What the Press wills, is true. Its commanders evoke, transform, interchange truths. Three weeks of Press work, and the “truth” is acknowledged by everybody.”[6]

more at:

http://xpovx.blogspot.com/2010/03/media-entrenched-oligarchy.html

“Three weeks of Press work, and the “truth” is acknowledged by everybody.”[6]”

Equally, what the press ignores, never happened.

Re: Richard Rbinson and the Celts of the United Kingdom

I was quoting Bryan Sykes, Oxford Molecular Biologist who has surveyed the mitochondrial genome and Y-chromosome of more than ten thousand Brits from throughout the Isles and found, so he reports, that they are mostly Picts, i.e., celts and that reports of the invasion of the Saxons and Normans have been greatly overblown. Only the Vikings, apparently, made a big impression, accounting perhaps for 20% of the gene pool in parts of eastern England.

This, if correct, will be a shock to the Scotch Nats who, in their narrow nationalism, to quote one of them, will find it highly distasteful to be almost indistinguishable, genetically, from the damned English.

But, R.R., if you have different information, it would be interesting to know of it.

The anonymity of a ballot paper, although technically traceable, has the advantage that you cannot be victimised for your opinions by the state, because then we’d know they’d been cross referencing the codes and the names on the ballot papers.

Then you get a group of people from outside the democratic tradition who think this is a great joke. The number of bits of paper you can legally or illegally stuff into the ballot box, wins you a seat in parliament.

But in non-democratic systems of patronage, what is sent to the government is not your vote or your opinion, but your name as a non-conformer to whoever, like the CIA and MI5 who’s willing to buy this stuff.

You offend your landlord or the head of your mosque. You get stopped for a motoring accident with someone who’s better connected than you. Even in this country, it’s suddenly not in the public interest to prosecute the brand new mercedes that drove you into the hedge and cut off your legs.

At least here, the worst you’re going to get for expressing your opinions is a bed-wetting from Larry from St US. So I really appreciate our system, even though, apart from once for the Liberals, and once for the Greens, in my whole life I didn’t vote.

I didn’t bother renewing my membership with the Lib Dems due to their support for Trident – that finally did it for me. Only joined them because they were the sole party consistently against the war in Iraq.

Why didn’t the Lib Dems build on this populist platform of being solidly against the war? Not only would they have picked up seats, it would surely have shown them to be a genuine alternative, and a party of principle. But you don’t hear much about being anti-war from them anymore. That’s baffling, unless they’ve been pretty much told to sit down and shut up, if they even want to hang onto the coat-tails of power.

Having cancelled said membership, a Lib Dem operative duly called up and told me that Trident renewal was necessary to defend ourselves from other nuclear powers, such as Pakistan. Weren’t they supposed to be our ally? And anyway, why don’t Denmark, Holland and the Scandinavian countries feel the need to have a nuclear defence? Ah, but we have allies which aren’t liked in the world. So our association with America is our greatest security problem? (Answer – yes)

Clegg was apparently thinking about scrapping Trident, but nothing came of that. I doubt you’d find many informed people supporting the £100 Billion Trident is likely to cost over the next decade or so.

*

On not voting at all, because it might only encourage them or somesuch, consider what Tony Benn says on the subject. People died to give us the right to vote, they struggled with getting us the vote, were beaten, starved and imprisoned for it. It’s our duty to vote. If we don’t vote, we can’t complain. What have they been telling us for decades, activists, together with their counterparts like the League of Women Voters in the US – for God’s Sake VOTE!!

And most of us do nothing, leaving the likes of Margeret Becket to claim after the last election that the low turnout was on account of everyone being so happy with Blair/ New Labour, that we didn’t want to change anything. Nah, can’t be bothered. Not interested. Other things to do. Screw the lot of them. The result? We get screwed by default.

Vote Green if you can’t be bothered to petition candidates of the main parties to support your views. But at least do _something_ .

“But, R.R., if you have different information, it would be interesting to know of it.”

I don’t, directly, except for the way that I’ve seen a whole range of theories being ‘known’, at different times. Once upon a time a few decades back, I was under the impression, from the books going around, that ‘picts’ were definitely not ‘celts’, now it seems they are … are ‘picts’ still the oldest people known of ? No traces of any other flavours mixed in with them ? Andwhere are they all thoughtto have immigrated from, is it still somewhere vague in Central Asia ?

languages, too. Once it seemed “definite” that Scots/Irish Gaelic was way, way older than the Welsh/etc flavour, and more recently they seem to be saying the exact opposite …

I agree that mitochondrail DNA, & such techniques, could eventually help pin some of this down. I like the imperfections of science, the way it’s capable of discovering it was wrong. I might even start accepting some of it as probably so, if it stays put long enough (and if I do).

I definitely intend to continue mocking any political conclusions anyone might draw from any of it, though.

And, political ideas derived from peoples’ races *are* racist. By definition.

But, what about the other bit of seemingly-accepted-wisdom, that whatever ‘racial’ group you care to identify, you’ll see more variation within it than you will between any generalisation from that and from any other such group ? Know anything about that ?

Normans, I’m not suprised, it always looked like a mainly aristocratic exercise. Can they be distinguished from your ‘Vikings’, though ? They were only a small number of generations removed, after all. I do find that bit striking, in that I wonder if most English (Scots, I dunno. May be different ?) would expect even that much Viking (cf a brief exchange a few weeks ago, viz. their reputation for making like big-scale football hooligans and then buggering off again) – I’d been thinking about it, that actually they were all over large chunks of this island for a long time, and must have had some effect. The Orkneyinga Saga is a splendid exercise in geographical perspective.

Though, I rather gather ‘Viking’ is a bit of a tricky word – wasn’t what they called themselves, it was what they called the real psychopaths, v. small minority of the population.

Clegg will turn out to be, in my opinion, just like his name. You won’t know that something nasty has bitten you until you see the angry red swelling on your skin. Horse-flies are determined and crafty. They say to you: Oh I was just looking around for a nice spot in the sun to land on, or I was thinking it would be a nice idea to abolish tax under £10K, and the next thing you know they’ve signed up for trident, Iran invasion, and anything else the British public don’t want.

“The anonymity of a ballot paper… has the advantage that you cannot be victimised for your opinions” – anno

Exactly. Yes.

Richard,

According to Sykes, the Picts were what the Romans called the native Brits because they were painted (picti). They gave them tribal names as they got to know them. However, they found Scotland such a dead loss they walled it off, so everyone up there remained a Pict.

Sykes book is a good read:

http://www.amazon.ca/Saxons-Vikings-Celts-Bryan-Sykes/dp/0393062686

It deals with the points you raise, although I expect his data are open to various interpretations.

I am not sure what ideas you are mocking. Certainly, I advanced no political idea based on race, although I should think if one put one’s mind to it, one could formulate some valid political ideas based on race. For example, that genetic diversity reflects environmental adaptation and should be preserved.

It is true, I mentioned race a couple of times, but it was merely to stir up some reaction. I had a question about the BNP, but as yet, no one has been inclined to offer a response.

…And those who victimise others for their opinions will invariably expose themselves and risk democratic oblivion.

You simply have to be a little more brave. Evolution works by sexual selection; imagine if sex was determined by secret ballot!?

Democracy will only evolve through the bravery of declared voting rather than secret ballot. Surreptitious voting, only favours the coward, thus devolves democracy to fascism.

“I am not sure what ideas you are mocking.”

Neither am I. And I have no idea what this means, “Once it seemed “definite” that Scots/Irish Gaelic was way, way older than the Welsh/etc flavour”

Flavour of what? Welsh is closer to Breton, rather than Gaeilge or Scots Gaidhlig, as I understand it. What point are you making? or was it more a stream of consciousness?

“Flavour of what? Welsh is closer to Breton, rather than Gaeilge or Scots Gaidhlig, as I understand it.”

Flavour of language. “Welsh/etc” standing in for “Welsh/Breton/Cornish/probably others (Galician ?)” as opposed, as you say, to the Irish/Scots branch. I used to hear them referred to as ‘p’ amd ‘q’ branches of some underlying linguistic whatnot, I’ve no idea if that still stands.

“What point are you making? or was it more a stream of consciousness?”

Sort of, I don’t like certainties. To be taken in conjunction with the bit about liking how ‘science’ has ways of noticing that it was wrong.

And also because I’d rather point out that I Know Nothing and don’t really regard any of it as a main point in what was being said, but it might be interesting anyway, rather than collapse into heated argument about Facts.

You like it when science is wrong; and dislike arguing facts… no wonder you prefer to vote in secret.

Great. I’m glad that’s all settled, then.

Good God, is the Open Ballot (as opposed to the secret ballot) seriously being suggested as a cure to our failing democracy? I take it the proposer is fully versed in why the 1872 Ballot Act (secret ballot) was brought about in the first place, and aims of the Chartists in bringing it about?

What was voted for last time… stated most lyrically by Tony Banks in the mid-1970s in “One for the Vine”. At that time, British troops being sent to do what they did in 2003 was unthinkable:

“Fifty thousand men were sent to do the will of one.

His claim was phrased quite simply, though he never voiced it loud,

I am he, the chosen one.

In his name they could slaughter, for his name they could die.

Though many there were believed in him, still more were sure he lied,

But they’ll fight the battle on.

Then one whose faith had died

Fled back up the mountainside,

But before the top was made,

A misplaced footfall made him stray

From the path prepared for him.

Off of the mountain,

On to a wilderness of ice.

This unexpected vision made him stand and shake with fear,

But nothing was his fright compared with those who saw him appear.

Terror filled their minds with awe.

Simple were the folk who lived

Upon this frozen wave.

So not surprising was their thought,

This is he, God’s chosen one,

Who’s come to save us from

All our oppressors.

We shall be kings on this world.

Follow me!

I’ll play the game you want me,

Until I find a way back home.

Follow me!

I give you strength inside you,

Courage to win your battles -

No, no, no, this can’t go on,

This will be all that I fled from.

Let me rest for a while.

He walked into a valley,

All alone.

There he talked with water, and then with the vine.

They leave me no choice.

I must lead them to glory or most likely to death.

They traveled cross the plateau of ice, up to its edge.

Then they crossed a mountain range and saw the final plain.

Still he urged the people on.

Then, on a distant slope,

He observed one without hope

Flee back up the mountainside.

He thought he recognised him by his walk,

And by the way he fell,

And by the way he

Stood up, and vanished into air.”

“You like it when science is wrong; and dislike arguing facts… no wonder you prefer to vote in secret.” – “JimmyGiro”.

Okay, so I’m a sucker. And annoyed.

I do, however, say what I think over the name I was born with, and will vote with, rather than flinging accusations of cowardice from behind a made-up name.

(And, You’re right, dreoilin, the language stuff was a complete digression. Taking all this seriously is beyond my reach just now, I can’t see that the whole sub-subject isn’t a complete digression too).

“I do, however, say what I think over the name I was born with, and will vote with, rather than flinging accusations of cowardice from behind a made-up name.”

So you will renounce secret voting then !?

If Justice should be seen to be done, then shouldn’t democracy? A secret ballot undermines the open integrity of democracy, in the same way that a secret court hearing, undermines the integrity of Justice from the family courts.

Following on from the last thread, and the fact that liberal democrats drop to only 16% in the latest opinion poll, I’m still haunted by the tragedy of Charles Kennedy, and what he is alleged to have said in November 2004.

I watched the debacle that masqueraded for a democratic debate in the House of Commons in March 2003, just before war was declared. Kennedy was continually shouted down by both sides of the house during his speech, and the speaker did little to assist him. How he could have left there thinking this was still a democratic system escaped me then, and escapes me now.

If this election does bring about a hung parliament and a change to our parliamentary system then that in itself is an achievement. But freedom of speech in parliament is surely a cornerstone of democracy, which must be addressed with equal tenacity.

Good post, Glenn. What has happened to the Libdems in recent years is a mystery. Like you, I didn’t renew my membership, and there must be many thousands like us.

We hear all about Tony Blair’s biography… why doesn’t Charles Kennedy tell all – I’m sure he’d have a great story to tell. Oh yes – and why haven’t both he and Ian Duncan-Smith been called to give evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry? They were both “allegedly” misled in parliament…

Cheer up Craig. There’s always something to look forward to, even it means dropping a few things you previously enjoyed. Crazy things will happen tomorrow, like time travellers dropping in from another planet, and you’ll find there’s all sorts of things which will make you laugh and want to go out into the world. We all get a bit droopy sometimes.

Thanks peacewisher…. what I’d suggest is that – if nothing else – one contacts each of the major party candidates soon and express interest in supporting them, if they support your views on an immediate end to our adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tell them you know nobody who wants more blood and treasure spent there, and they have our support if they go on the record to oppose it. If they do not – your vote will go to the candidate that does support your views.

This is the time to do it – they won’t care after the election.

Politicians might estimate that for every person who bothers to contact them, there are probably tens of thousands who agree with the point at hand, but do not bother to contact them. Make your views known, while we still can.

It seems to me that the BNP and its divisive policies is part of the problem for Britain today.

“It seems to me that the BNP and its divisive policies is part of the problem for Britain today.”

Do you mean, Barbara, their proposal for immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan?

Or an English national assembly to match the Welsh, Irish and Scottish legislatures?

Or the intention to devolve power to the lowest appropriate level of government?

Or the plan to end mass immigration as desired, according to polls, by a great majority of the population?

Or the plan to improve the quality of education by focusing on academic disciplines, not social conditioning?

Or is there something else that you find divisive?

“Or is there something else that you find divisive?”

Myself I find it funny that their brethren in the U.S. are disenfranchised white nationalist nutjobs like David Duke.

Seems about right that Griffin and friends are an insurgent force in British politics.

Britain is fucked.

Ha,

Larry the agent provocateur pops up again, with a characteristic non-sequitur.

But considering the point you raise, why do you say Britain is fucked, and who has been doing the fucking? It’s no good talking in vaporous generalizations. If you want an argument, you need to say what you are talking about.

“On not voting at all, because it might only encourage them or somesuch, consider what Tony Benn says on the subject. People died to give us the right to vote, they struggled with getting us the vote, were beaten, starved and imprisoned for it. It’s our duty to vote”.

Yes–and even while he was saying this, the last vestiges of our “community spirit” was ebbing away–usurped by the rush to personal greed.

“And most of us do nothing, leaving the likes of Margeret Becket to claim after the last election that the low turnout was on account of everyone being so happy with Blair/ New Labour, that we didn’t want to change anything”.

Yes–this is what they do–it’s called spin.

Why vote? Try demonstrating first in great numbers, to change the voting system. The democratic process, as it stands, just plays into their hands–and time wears all away.

Craig Murray

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jun/16/trident-liberal-democrats-nick-clegg

There are of course those in the party who are pushing for full disarmament, too.

As for the banks – the Lib Dems are in favour of a Glass Steagall type Act, a 10% levy on profits (not financial transactions, as that would be regressive), government representatives sitting on the boards of nationalised banks to ensure far better decisions are made about their future, bonuses banned and banks forced to lend to businesses.

We ask a huge amount of our brave servicemen and women. But they have never been properly rewarded with the pay and conditions they deserve. They are sent into conflict without proper equipment, have to put up with sub-standard housing and have been stretched to the limit by two wars. Too much MoD money is frittered away through poor decisions and waste.

Liberal Democrats would make the welfare of the men and women of our armed forces a priority. We would speed up forces’ family housing renovation and ensure that no serviceman or woman was sent into harm’s way on less basic pay than the starting salaries of emergency services personnel. We would spend taxpayers’ money more effectively on equipping our armed forces properly for the military tasks of today and tomorrow.

Labour has let down our Armed Forces. The quality of family housing is disgraceful. They have been stretched them to breaking point through two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and suffer from a lack of equipment. The Conservatives attack Labour, but many problems stem from their time in Government.

According to the Government’s own report, the Ministry of Defence is £36bn in the red. Yet Labour and the Conservatives are in denial about the long-term impact of this problem. The Strategic Defence Review now underway must take a long hard look at Britain’s defence and security priorities.

Britain needs to move away from a Cold War-style posture towards a more relevant armed forces structure. If we are to continue to have the capability to be a force for good in the world we need far greater cooperation with our NATO and EU partners.

Liberal Democrats do not believe that the UK can afford the billions of pounds the Government wants to spend on a like-for-like replacement of the Trident nuclear weapons system. Full-scale Trident is a cold war system that we no longer need nor can afford. We believe that less expensive alternatives should be considered.

Poor BNP. It must be desperate to so desperately want to sound appealing, and normal; but the skeletons are rattling round like castanets. I’ve always wondered, doesn’t the whole Nazi uniform, Sieg Heil thing bother you? They weren’t the good guys, you know. And they lost.

Keith, if that is so, why does Nick Clegg not come out with it and denounces the trident update as negative, unecessarry and invalid under Lib dem leadership. Why are the Lib dems cow towing to the establishment and the revamped cold war rethorics?

If he stands up and sounds like Bown and Cameron, he will equally rile the public, he is supposed to be in opposition.

If he wants to be pragmatic nd find a party with equal views to his own, why does he not eshew this debate, announce a ten point coalition with the Greens and watch the two main parties tear each other apart with niceties?

The Lib Dems in Scotland have demonstrated that they are simply a life-support system for New Labour. They refused to enter a coalition with the Nats, although there there was much more overlap between Nat & LD manifestoes than between Labour & LD. When it came to the crunch, toeing the establishment line was much more important than fussy little matters of principle. The general LD approach seems to be to strike a position a little different from the Labservatives, but not so terribly different as to incur the wrath of the fourth estate.

Having said that, the best option for anyone living in England is to vote LD. It may be true as RR says, that the Labour conservatives might be less awful than the Tory conservatives, but surely it is unthinkable to give Brown and his ghastly legion anything that they might interpret as an endorsement of their record. There is an outside chance – a very slender outside chance – that a LD balance of power could lead to the introduction of PR. I know that that’s not a lot, but it’s a start and it is possible – didn’t someone once say that politics was the science of the possible?

Concerning race, it is interesting to note that there is more genetic variation among members of the same race than exists between members of different races. Apart from that, I’m hoping that Larry is going to do us a favour and ask canspeccy for his two best pieces of evidence that fascism is good for us. From what I’ve seen of it from our present government, I’m somewhat underwhelmed.

Ingo: corporate sponsorship? Blackmail? Personal lack of knowledge/experience? But of course I don’t know. Has anyone ever asked Nick Clegg why he is failing to speak out? Good plan, by the way.

I think what we need is a panel of sanctimonious, haggard, masturbating bloggers to run the country.

thanks technicolour, he strikes me as being slippery, a sort of European thinking person, who had to adjust his possibilities due to the antiquarian system that has produced such shambolics.

Which paln do you mean, the TV programme that puts the audience in charge called ‘you decide’, or the idea of a Rainbow coalition, something I have been flogging to death during the last few weeks?

It will not work as Lib Dems and Greens have too many local animosities in the cupboards, dare I mention target to win.

Larry

Thanks for using the word insurgent in its proper sense viz. re-surgent.

I look forward to the US reverting to its

original plan to make the Taliban a re-surgent force in Islam, when it suited them to attack USSR.

Alan Campbell

Like you, you mean. Clegg wants personal fame by linking hands with one of the other two in a hung parliament. He can’t do that if he attacks the illegal invasions and trident. So he will lose any support he has accumulated anyway. I think the bloggers are streets ahead of the dumbos in charge.

“I think the bloggers are streets ahead of the dumbos in charge.”

Yeah, it’d be great if a load of Year Zero, social engineers like you were in charge. All these stupid members of the public. We should send them to special re-education camps, shouldn’t we?

Absolutely, march, nothing a benign dictator couldn’t muster. These free thinking men and women need re educating, I mean, who the hell was Thomas Paine anyway, some Norfolk flunky who just happened to have the gift of the gab… bring back Robert kett all is forgiven.

As with all things in life no political group will ever reflect ones personal point of view.You have to seek out the party that ticks most boxes.The most important issue as Craig has stated many times is a fair voting system that can give all parties a chance.The Liberal Democrats are the only main party to support this.

the only way to really make a point at these elections is to vote for independants.

ANything sort of this surely perpetuates the fraud that is UK democracy.

Oh pish to PR. Even Brown is muttering about it again. Holland has it and where has it got them, except into the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ and some crazily legitimised far-right nuttery? Ireland has the STV, and what has it got them, except corrupt politicians and even deeper into bankruptcy?

im sure this group could put together a checlist to pass to politicians to garnish support.

i.e

1) Will you activiley seek that only domiciled citizens may become politicians/lords, or that existing lords who become non domiciled lose the right to attend the house of lords and have no voting rights?

this list would be great, but would exist as some form of contract between voter and local politician.

Ingo: I meant the Green/Lib Dem plan. Sad about petty disputes. Think you’re right about Clegg; disconnected and disempowered as a result. Mind you, scrapping Trident, say, would mean directly challenging the UK’s allegiance to the US, and lose the UK its seat on the Security Council (I’m pretty sure), so it would be big talk from anyone. Maybe during a Lib Dem second term, though.

“a checlist to pass to politicians to garnish support.”

Ya want a bit of floppy lettuce on top of that ?

BNP – “Or is there something else that you find divisive?”

How about the way the courts had to explain to them that it isn’t legal for a political party to have a constution restricting membership to a selected racial grouping ?

I (now) think I was wrong, last night. My thought was, back off a while on the theories of the day before reaching firm drastic conclusions on their application to the rest of the world. But the ‘racial theory’ of the ’30s had several decades behind it, let alone the South African implementation.

“As with all things in life no political group will ever reflect ones personal point of view.You have to seek out the party that ticks most boxes.”

That’s the trouble I have. In isolation, I’ve heard almost all of the parties offering things I might want to vote for. But, to vote for any of those parties would also have to be taken as an endorsement of things I will not endorse. As witness, the BNP stuff above.

How about, vote for several out of a vast list of candidates, each only representing a policy on a single issue ?

Nobody’s mentioned the American trick of placing contentious issues on the ballot sheet as well as candidates’ names, so that every election is also a multi-issue plebiscite. You could vote for any of the main parties, but separately indicate opposition to the Iraq war, or gay marriages, or whatever.

The Lib Dem’s position on Trident is: “Liberal Democrats do not believe that the UK can afford the billions of pounds the Government wants to spend on a like-for-like replacement of the Trident nuclear weapons system. Full-scale Trident is a cold war system that we no longer need nor can afford. We believe that less expensive alternatives should be considered.”

So, not against nuclear weapons then. And not wholeheartedly for, either!

But this is better, from the same manifesto: “But Britain’s reputation has been damaged by dodgy arms deals with dictators, allegations of involvement in torture, and of course the disastrous and illegal invasion of Iraq.”

Not sure their opposition has been always as bold as that, but at least they are not sitting on the fence now.

(See link.)

Thanks, Jon. And actually, Clegg is not sounding too lily-livered either; on Chilcott for example:

“If Tony Blair gets through on the nod due to the withholding of key documents, the public will rightly dismiss this inquiry as a whitewash….The Government must understand that the truth about this illegal war must and will emerge eventually, and that the time to come clean is now.”

So I wonder, is this an absolute case of perception over reality? Is this about the subtle way the Lib Dems are being reported, rather than about what they are actually saying?

I know the Lib Dems can be absolute tossers on the ground (just like many party adherents, I suspect). But it would be ironic, you know.

Re party adherents, sorry. Not only was it unfair, I am of course, not such a perfect person myself.

Vronsky – yes, thanks, I’d see that as an improvement.

Craig,

You’re right of course. The substantive differences between the major parties are minimal, so why bother to vote, what’s the point?

The point is, I suppose, that New Labour, is marginally less conservative and reactionary than the Conservative Party is, but is that enough? I don’t know. I don’t vote in UK elections, as I’m in self-imposed exile, which makes me feel guilty. Though I’m not that far away.

In reality, apart from the Welsh and Scottish nationalists, the UK is dominated by three “conservative” parties. This is remarkably similar to the United States, where two business parties, or factions, have swapped places for over two hundred years, virtually a total monopoly of power, century after century.

Britain is increasingly coming to resemeble the United States, especially now when labour has been weeded-out of Labour, and the working-class marginalised politically, as in the United States.

I’ve often wondered if the greatest achievement of the Russian Revolution, was the growth of the Social Democractic movement in Europe, and the creation of the Welfare State; both functioning as reactions to the perceived threat from the left.

Anyway, I’m less concerned about this tired, old, “left” “right” split. In the coming new fuedalist system I believe the central question will relate to “up” and “down”.

I think we are in a period of transition politically and socially. We are on a historic tragectory which we have, as individuals, very little influence over.

I believe, though this sounds bizarre, that we’re in a “pre-revoltionary” phase; where the old order is breaking down, losing touch with reality, with our elite living in a comfortable and protected, virtual Versailles; whilst most others are increasingly forced to live in the harsh world outside.

In truth, the modern, global, aristocracy, no longer need the working, or even that great bulwark, the middle class, any longer; they can find new and far cheaper workers and managers in the third world, and the purchasing power and consumption will be moving that way too, like the lifestyle that goes with it.

And this great change, the creation of a disposable and redundant “peasantry” in the west, and all that this implies, is simply not understood by the poor sods who are being shafted before our very eyes.

Wealth us being transfered on an absolutely collosal, historic, scale, from the great majority, upwards to the ruling elite. It’s quite extraordinary how blatent this process is, and how grotesquely unjust.

What’s needed is some form of revolution, not yet another election.

The original question was: ‘The Election, What’s the Point?”.

For me the point is probably not to have a revolution. Nobody ever thinks about old people in Luton when they talk approvingly about revolution. Nobody ever thinks that the vulnerable old folk scratching a cold existence in their too large houses (or ‘stately homes’ ooh er) will be the ones to get the brunt of the mob, either. While the body-guarded gangsters on their gated estates will be peachy.

March on the House of Commons by all means – we all did – and stay there. But if that’s a revolution at all, it’s a peaceful one, and very few people append that adjective.

PS Interesting (?) point: in German, the word ‘revolution’ apparently has a different connotation, one of gradual evolution, in fact.

On the other hand, Venezuela…But the UK is not warm with an abundance of exotic food and a funky music culture. Where did all our greenhouses go?

I asked, in a spirit of honest inquiry, why it is that though the British National Party offers policies that most people support, hardly anyone will admit to supporting the BNP.

In response, technicolour offers a genuine hypothesis, saying:

“Poor BNP. It must be desperate to so desperately want to sound appealing, and normal; but the skeletons are rattling round like castanets. I’ve always wondered, doesn’t the whole Nazi uniform, Sieg Heil thing bother you? They weren’t the good guys, you know. And they lost.”

Ignoring the suggestion that I am a BNP member or apologist, which I am not, and the suggestion that the BNP march around in Nazi uniforms giving the Hitler salute, which they don’t, Technicolour offers an answer that may be close to the truth.

Some leading members of the BNP have past affiliations with avowedly fascist organizations. This undoubtedly taints the Party. However, it does not seem to be a complete answer. People change their minds, political parties change direction. Many of the Labour Party’s old guard are former Commies. Jack Straw claims to have been trained as a Stalinist, and as a student was identified by MI6 as a “Communist sympathizer”. And it was not so very long ago that the Labour Party abandoned its totalitarian commitment to nationalization of the means of production, distribution and exchange (Clause 4). But no one seriously considers today’s Labour Party to be Stalinist, and it is entirely possible for an MP to refrain from applauding the words of Comrade Gordon Brown without risk of immediate liquidation.

Thus, if the BNP’s “skeletons are rattling round like castanets,” that is surely because people like Technicolour keep rattling them in the hope of negating BNP policies, not because those skeletons provide a realistic indication about the present day BNP, which for years has avowed a commitment to democracy.

Vronsky mentions the “American trick of placing contentious issues on the ballot sheet as well as candidates’ names, so that every election is also a multi-issue plebiscite. You could vote for any of the main parties, but separately indicate opposition to the Iraq war, or gay marriages, or whatever.”

The point is of interest in the context of a discussion of the BNP, since the American “ballot initiatives” are, in effect little different from the BNP proposed citizen-initiated referendums.

In explanation of the widespread hostility to the BNP, despite its populist platform, Richard Robinson asks:

“How about the way the courts had to explain to them that it isn’t legal for a political party to have a constution [sic] restricting membership to a selected racial grouping?”

But, in fact, the court does not explain, it merely decides on the application of the law. The validity of a law, morally or politically, is an entirely different matter. For example, if courts deem that the abduction and rendering of terrorist suspects for interrogation through torture is legal, that does not make Craig’s campaign against torture morally redundant.

Further, Richard Robinson seems to imply that the BNP adheres to the “racial theory” of the 30′s or of South Africa’s defunct apartheid regime, but this seems implausible to me. First, how much “theory” of any kind does the average BNP supporter entertain! And, in any case, if you look at what the party actually says, then you would have to conclude that if they have a “racial theory” it is the theory of Winston Churchill, although evidently with some moderation, since Churchill allegedly considered the Australians an inferior race, whereas the BNP recently sought to recruit a well known Australian politician to the Party.

In fact, the idea that all racism is bad, is a silly and dangerous idea. It amounts to saying that loyalty to family is bad, patriotism is evil, and that only global government is good, to which I will say only that if you think Hitler’s gas chambers were bad, or Stalin’s and Mao’s genocidal policies were worse, try to imagine what a totally undemocratic world government will look like once it is firmly in control of all the means of coercion.

Very well. The courts didn’t ‘explain’ anything, they merely ruled that they couldn’t legally do it.

You can please yourself (or, could, if you had a vote in this country. I think you said you don’t even live here, so I don’t understand why you’d be arguing any of this, but never mind, I expect you have reasons), but I’m not voting for a party that needs external disuasion from such a policy. It just plain doesn’t reflect my values.

“the idea that all racism is bad, is a silly and dangerous idea”

And there was me thinking it was racism that was silly and dangerous. Could you please make the case for racism and explain why opposing it is silly and dangerous? I must have missed something.

“Could you please make the case for racism and explain why opposing it is silly and dangerous?”

Any policy that treats race as a significant fact can be considered racist. For example, human groups differ in susceptibility to various diseases and should therefore be treated differently (i.e., by programs for public health): good racism, surely.

The difficulty in discussing the relevance of race to political and social issues is that the Lib-Left have for so long relied on hate speech, that is to say authorized hate speech, against all their enemies that they are often unable to distinguish between reality and the labels they apply to reality. Thus they attack opponents of multi-culturalism as racists or xenophones and put them in jail if they can, notwithstanding that there are perfectly sensible reasons for not wishing to combine within a single political jurisdiction colonizing radical Muslims and a people with a more than one-thousand-year-old Christian tradition.

In India, at the time of independence, the Muslim and Hindu community voluntarily separated from one another, murdering a million or so people in the process. But in Liberal -Leftist England, bringing in literally millions of Muslims of questionable loyalty to the British way of life and doing so in opposition to the will of the majority of the population, is all supposed to end happily. Well, good luck.

I could go on, but it would be best if you just tried to use your imagination, rather that exercising sub-cerebral political reflexes.

I once did one of those online questionnaires which purports to identify the political party you should support. The software suggested I should be BNP. I think this was because I weighted so heavily my objection to EU membership, and apparently only the BNP agrees with me on that. Except that I’m of what I would call the secular left – the left which would actually like to *do* something, not the onanistically self-absorbed left of Life of Brian (link below).

Canspeccy, don’t be too disappointed if you can’t make your fascism foxy enough for us to want to shag it – attraction is a hard thing to understand. And if you’re really a committed and believing fascist, what’s wrong with voting Labour? And ‘questionable loyalty to the British way of life’? For fuck’s sake, my disloyalty is passionate, I wear it on my sleeve. Does that make me a foreigner?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb_qHP7VaZE

It’s a mirror world. Political incorrectness gone mad, I say.

I asked you to make the case for racism. You made a rather feeble point about susceptibility to disease. But no-one calls providing appropriate health-care racist.

The rest was a rather confused conflation of race with religious belief. I can’t speak for what happened in India but over here Muslims have on the whole assimilated in British society very successfully. There are one or two nutters but who cares? It’s the corrosive influence of the BNP and their ilk who try to create conflict and division where in reality there is none and most of us are too sensible to bother with that garbage.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfwdNAT8sWU

CanSpeccy is just using the new strategy (old at this point).

I imagine there are lots of Brits who would trust the BNP over Americans.

After pointing out how the Lib-Left resorts so freely to hate speech I am immediately called “mad” and “fascist.” Seems to confirm my point.

As to Vronsky’s comment “if you’re really a committed and believing fascist, what’s wrong with voting Labour?” good point, but I’m not a fascist.

As for Vronsky’s hatred of the British way of life, I can sympathize with that. Living under a warmongering lying government for 13 years and doing nothing about it must leave one disillusioned and self-hating.

@CanSpeccy:

> For example, human groups differ in susceptibility to various diseases

> and should therefore be treated differently (i.e., by programs for public

> health): good racism, surely.

No, that’s not racism. Racism is not simply telling races apart; it has to be negative and it has to be discriminatory. So, if we are to use medical illustrations, rejecting a donated organ on the basis that the donor is of another race and therefore a bad match is a good thing. However rejecting a perfectly good organ on the basis that the donor is black is discriminatory and negative, and therefore racist.

Racism is, as MJ confirms, silly and dangerous. Suggesting there is a good kind, and that opposition to such an assertion is simply reflexive liberalism, is plainly incorrect.

In case it needs further stating, the BNP are racist because their membership policies are racist, and because their whole world view is (somewhat privately) tainted with racism of an extremely aggressive kind. Mock “nigger burnings” at BNP rallies? Yep, they’ve got them. How about proven links to white supremacist movements and the KKK? Check. Instances of supporters convicted of possession of explosives? Oh yes…

I should be interested to hear how, if you think that the majority of the UK are opposed to immigration, how you would “deal with” immigrants who already have leave to remain. Are they incompatible with “our” way of life? Would you have them deported, or “encouraged to leave”?

Do a search for “Hope Not Hate” or other anti-fascist UK groupings – the real BNP is truly scary, even if supporters are not big on “theory”.

I am not advocating a violent revolution in Britain, with heads rolling and a scaffold in every marketplace.

But I was thinking more along the lines of the mass revolts that took place in eastern europe twenty years ago that brought down Stalinism.

To be honest I don’t see mass movements like this taking place any time soon. Unfortunately, given our culture, I believe a conservative, totalitarian, regime is far more likely an outcome, as the corporate state seeks to defend itself during a period characterised by a permanent crisis, rising unemployment and falling living standards.

One can see the seeds of Facism already in the United States where the rightwing are becoming energised and the liberals demoralised, as their hopes of a peaceful transformation of society are dashed by Obama’s betrayal of those who voted for him.

Why don’t people such as myself like the BNP, even though _some_ of their political views accord with my own, CanSpeccy wants to know.

ok, I’ll bite. It’s mainly because I don’t want to associate with a bunch of racist half-wits who think the main problem – indeed, the only real problem – in society is that there are Jews, sorry, immigrants over here. Immigrants, of course, of a very select type – you can usually tell which immigrants are the undesirables by the colour of their skin.

I’m also not terribly predisposed to jack-booted skinheads who like to get pissed up, throw abuse around, and snap the right arm salute which goose-stepping around, as demonstrated at a local BNP/EDL rally.

The problem we have in the UK is a huge swing to the right in “new” labour. It does not strike me that a further lurch to the right with the BNP would help. The BNP offers some policies that a lot – perhaps most – people would support. But it also has core values which will repel anyone with a scrap of decency.

@CanSpeccy – your suggestion that Britons “doing nothing about” their warmongering government should leave them “self-hating” is a cheap jibe and should be beneath you. If you come to a site known for its liberal/left readership, and make the case for racism (or fascism), then expect a robust defence. Responding with petty insults is not going to help with your case, and it was thin to start with.

Incidentally, does the BNP have much of a presence in the other parts of Britain, or is it (as I have the impression) mainly an English thing ?

“and it was thin to start with”

It’s fun to see someone who lives in Canada trying to instruct UK voters in how to defend ourselves against “world government”, though.

“If you come to a site known for its liberal/left readership”

About as mindbogglingly inappropriate a blog as it’s possible to imagine for such an ‘argument’, in fact.

“for such an ‘argument’”

Carelessly put. I meant “to make such points”.

writerman said

To be honest I don’t see mass movements like this taking place any time soon.

From what I’ve seen there are a lot of people seething at the loss of civil liberties and the impotence of Parliament. I believe there’ll be massive cuts in public spending next year and once people become dispossessed and with little hope for the future, this will become translated into civil unrest, something that the government has been preparing for for a while.

Jon,

Thank you for addressing the issues that I sought to raise.

I don’t dispute anything you say about the attitudes of BNP members because I am not a BBP member and may never have met one. However, in the context of my question (which was why do people who oppose the war in Afghanistan, who want Britain out of Europe, who want a more devolved and democratic system of government, etc. not support the party that offers those policies), it has to be noted that the BNP no longer discriminates among members on the basis of race, and is not therefore, as you define the term, a racist party. (Incidentally, do you consider the UK Black Police Association a racist organization that should be disbanded.)

I agree, as in my exchange with Technicolour, that appearances matter greatly. But, I maintain, also, that people and parties do change and that one needs to consider parties and people as they exist today, not as they may have been in the past.

The difficulty with debating whether racism can ever be acceptable is finding an acceptable definition of racism. Someone may say, England is a white country for white people ?” actually someone did say that (can anyone remember his name) and Ted Heath kicked him out of the Conservative party caucus ?” and they will be branded a racist. However, if someone says, Britain is a democratic country and must accede to the wish of the majority, which is for an end to further immigration, is that racist? And if it is, is it bad?

If you say it is racist, I say that racism can be a just and a good thing. Governments of all democratic nation states are supposedly run by, for and of the people (i.e., the people of that country not of some other country or countries), therefore, why should the people of the nations of Europe share their resources with the third world? Remember, countries such as India and China are, in aggregate, vastly wealthier than Britain (they both have a manned space program, an extravagance that Britain could hardly contemplate).

Further, what of a multi-racial country like Canada. Is opposition to immigration in Canada (most Canadians think the rate of immigration is too high, although our immigration rate is only about one third of Britain’s) racist? If so, which race is discriminating against which. In fact I would say that opposition to immigration, whether the Viking colonization of Britain a thousand years ago, or the third-world influx into Europe today, is largely motivated by economics.

However, there is another factor. If you live in the city of Leicester, my father’s home town, you will, if you are of British ancestry, soon be in a minority among an immigrant population that may not, when it finds itself in a majority, much care about assimilation. Then you could have cultural reasons for opposing mass immigration, quite apart from racial or economic reasons. So the issue is complex and calling people racist and then saying racism is an unforgivable sin makes an intelligent debate impossible.

You ask my view of legal immigrants, which is that whoever is a citizen has the full rights of citizenship. What I consider outrageous is the failure of governments, for example Canada’s government, to stand up effectively for the rights of Canadian citizens (mainly Muslims of ME origin) kidnapped and tortured by the US and its allies. In this respect, the British government seems to have done slight better than the Government of Canada.

Writerman talks of the possibility of revolution incited by the revolt of the elites.

http://www.amazon.com/Revolt-Elites-Betrayal-Democracy/dp/0393313719

I think this is a real danger. As long as the Lib-Left go on deriding those who call for redress of the genuine grievances of the working poor ?” the outsourcing of jobs, the competition for jobs created by mass immigration, the high cost of housing due to mass immigration, lousy hospitals run by overpaid bureaucrats, poor schools, etc. ?” the possibility of revolutionary change will continue to exist.

On the plus side, I don’t see Nick Griffin as a charismatic demagogue able to create a totalitarian system. He talks very much as one would expect a Cambridge-trained lawyer to talk: with careful logic aiming for a reasonable conclusion. In fact, I would say that in public, Griffin is the most intellectual of all the party leaders. You may say that Griffin is something else in private, but which major politician is not something else in private (consider the Nixon tapes, Churchill’s private conversation, etc.).

Naturally, I think it would be best if the Conservative party or the Labor party were to offer decent policies instead of acting like marketing agents for the plutocratic interest and various foreign entities. But that will not happen. Those people are bought, and being good politicians (as Menchken defined the term) they will stay bought.

It would be interesting to know why Glenn considers the BNP platform right wing. Referendums, devolution of power, an end to immigration to protect the economic interests of the working poor, an end to the war in Afghanistan, support of Israel’s right to defend itself. This sounds leftish to me, so I suspect that Glen is under the influence of essentially meaningless labels.

Oh, I see Jon has another comment: that I am making a case for Fascism. In what way? Can you even define Fascism. I can, but I am not sure if that is true of too may people who use the term.

Cheers.

Craig put down some Tory bait,’ .. very sceptical about the direction the European Union has gone…’ but all this pit bull, racist, Muslim savaging has scared the posh racists of the Tory party away from commenting. The English countryside is full of daft people living peacefully in their vastly oversized residences, mostly on their own, who want to reverse William the Conqueror’s cheek in taking over nearly a thousand years ago.

If the many strands of racism in this country all united , which is unlikely, machine guns would be set up at the entrance to the channel tunnel to prevent foreign wildlife, foxes and the like from straying through.

People from this country have wandered through distant unexplored continents and received nothing but hospitality. Why is it that the British are so determinedly inhospitable to anything or body they don’t know?

Europe is financial drain on this country, and the hourly rate for my job has been halved by the influx of their labour. So what, it’s for the greater safety of the Euro-zone. This is a burden the previous archbishop of Canterbury is prepared to bear. It’s Muslims, he said recently, whom we should be turning away.

No prob, age hardens the brain. The UK’s violent past placed a burden on us, recognised in legislation by Her Majesty the Queen, to receive a contingent of people from our former bloody Empire. Who is canspeccy or BNP to disagree with her? Do they dare to disagree with constitutional law established by the Queen?

They say corgis don’t have street cred.

But the pit bull owners and Labrador brigade seem to think they own the place. If they win the election, I’m off with my little red passport to claim asylum in Iraq. At least you don’t have to pay taxes. The fantasy of anti- foreign, anti-EUROPE!!!!!!!! little Englandism is almost scarily insane.

Sorry, somehow the posting process cancelled my name. Larry from St US might be one of those US patriots who patrol the Mexican border for free. It must be so annoying for these folk that thoughts keeping whizzing through their borders online.

“Why is it that the British are so determinedly inhospitable to anything or body they don’t know?”

This is so terribly trivial I’m faintly embarrassed to suggest it, but … I think a lot of it might be simple laziness. It raises the possibility of having to deal with something new – think about something, maybe even act in new ways – and somehow the culture has thrown up ways where people can reassure each other that it’s allright to not have to do that, just be rude about it instead, make it go away. At least away from the range of things they have to engage with. “Go to strange exotic countries, meet strange exotic people, and dislike the whole experience because you can’t get a proper plate of fish and chips”.

Either that or it’s the outcome of 500 years spent dealing with foreigners over the pointy end of a gunboat.

(This is massively unfair to the many exceptions, of course, but that’s generalisation for you).

I’m 29 (nearly 30) and have never voted in any type of election in the UK. It’s a complete waste of time.

“Larry from St US might be one of those US patriots who patrol the Mexican border for free.”

You mean those people in San Diego, whose group numbers about 50 and the catchment area of which includes Phoenix? There’s, I don’t know, 10 or 15 million people in that area, and 50 – okay, maybe 100, show up to patrol the border.

Another anti-American fail.

Vronsky,

This would be a good time to suggest sortition again. A group of us sortition-supporters has formed a blog devoted to discussing and promoting this idea. It’s at http://equalitybylot.wordpress.com.

Craig,

I haven’t seen your response to the suggestion of building a political forum with a broadcast Question and Answer programme (TV)? Something like Dimbleby’s Question Time–only with matters of daily domestic and international politics to be considered.

Have I missed your reply?

“Ignoring the suggestion that.. the BNP march around in Nazi uniforms giving the Hitler salute, which they don’t”

So sorry – as Jon says:

http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/465772/Angel-faced-racist-aged-12-Girl-burns-golly-at-BNP-fun-day.html

Will this change your view, person-not-a member-of-the-BNP in Canada? It is the News of the World, so you might like to google for the many other examples.

Interesting exchange, thanks Glenn and everyone. What did slip through was the canard that “the British National Party offers policies that most people support”.

And again:

“However, if someone says, Britain is a democratic country and must accede to the wish of the majority, which is for an end to further immigration, is that racist? And if it is, is it bad?”

It would be bad for the country, but in fact it is simply wrong. In the last Migration Watch poll 22 percent wanted an ‘end to immigration’; that leaves 78 percent who don’t. And no-one’s even asking about forced deportation.

I’m with many here who despise the rightwing messages of simpletons. What nobody seems to realise is that it is our colonial attitudes and rapacious practises that are exploiting the developing nations that lies at the heart of 2/3 of all immigration.

We ain’t seen nothing yet,imho, wait until EU factory ships have stripped the protein rich waters of the west African coast and thousands of small fishing communities, already eeking out less and less from the once abundantly teeming seas, can’t catch enough fish to feed their families anymore, then we will see hundreds of thousands wanting to leave their desolation.

many fish species are collapsing and the reverberations will be multiple.

You can extrapolate this on to agricultural economic sectors in almost any African state, the impunity of some of its Governments, or depseration, has led them to lease out some of their most valuable soils to foreign countries, at the detriment to the respective local population that sees large amounts of food grown on their soil and exported within 48 hours to some overstocked supermarket here, there and everywhere.

It is time that the public understands how migration is created, to cut through the loony and sometimes hatefull tirades by the like’s of the BNP and UKIP.

How can they possibly want to govern? if they are not able to make people understand that migration is mainly due to our own establishments practises and sheer exploitation?

ingo

If we exploited people, we’d be the establishment as well. Room enough in hell for all of them, including their wives and families and special indestructible editions of Harpers and Queen to remind them how they got there through their shameless greed.

@glenn – yes, I would reach for Mussolini’s definition of fascism too. I think the admiration of authoritarianism is an essential component too.

@CanSpeccy. There are two ways in which I think you are being disingenuous here. First, you insulted Vronsky with the notion that he should be “self-hating”, and then when I took you to task on it, you did not respond. An apology to him is in order, I would suggest.

Second, you are making the case for racism in a place where you know racism is likely to be resoundly rejected. Accordingly I think it is best to tread carefully on this topic. Your earlier post has a number of interesting features, but since we don’t know whether your motivation is based on societal well being or plain old hatred, we are likely to be suspicious, and it is not plausible that you would not be aware of that.

This is mirrored precisely, for example, in the nature of questioning the official numbers killed in the holocaust. One or two thoughtful posters here have in the past entered into that discussion on this board, but it was tolerated because there was no view that their motivations were racist. However, most people who raise this question *are* motivated by anti-Jewish racism.

But, if it is the case that you don’t hate non-white people, and you have good intentions for making a case for racial discrimination, then perhaps people will enter into the debate with you. Perhaps you could address your views on race/colour from that perspective?

Would it be racist if Britain shut its borders according to the wishes of the majority? It depends to whom and, in the main I think, for what reasons. Most people who are anti-immigration are, to a degree, racist – in soft subconscious terms, rather than in conscious and politically organised terms. But it is possible to be anti-immigration without being racist, I think, but it occurs less frequently.

Why should the people of the nations of Europe share their resources with the Third World? An excellent question, and I am glad you asked it. There are a number of issues here:

The motivations for financial immigration are directly connected to limited opportunities back in immigrant’s home countries. Contrary to popular view, people are not at all keen to leave their home and to go to a foreign land where they may not be welcome. True, there may be some “land of milk and honey” world-views, but financially-motivated migration would not occur in large numbers if work and food were available locally.

Furthermore, the developed West has directly and deliberately plundered from the Third World for hundreds of years, leaving it where it is today. True, African countries have further problems on top – specifically corruption – but the effects of the interference of empire are still visible today. Substantial developed world assistance for struggling countries that is not tied to IMF/neo-conservative conditionalities would directly reduce the demand for immigration into Britain. But the racist press would likely have a problem with this too: they would say “shut our borders AND reduce foreign aid”.

I would say that I am in favour of relaxed immigration controls for this very reason; it provides an incentive for the government to reduce immigration through foreign aid.

I would bring in here the notion that closed borders is inimical to the spirit of the free-market that we’re meant to be worshipping, and having closed borders is an impediment to the natural order of things that would have everything working in perfect Friedmanite order. But is the US government, primary driver of this neoconservative worldview, about to relax its borders with Mexico, Cuba, and the rest of the world? Of course not. Think about it this way: we have mainly free movement of money, free movement of goods, but not free movement of people. Surely if the hidden hand is meant to iteratively improve things, this substantial impediment should be removed completely?

I should say however that I don’t at all endorse the free market – but this contradiction between racism and capitalism rarely enters the debate.

That all said, I think there are some good points in your text, though voting for the Hitler-loving BNP is really not the solution (do all members like Hitler? Probably not. But if the leadership is so intellectually poisoned, it is a good idea not to encourage them). I am deeply suspicious of integration programmes, but perhaps – in terms of encouraging immigrants to be fluent in English and to actively learn useful skills – they have their advantages. But I regarded their recent introduction into the UK as a device to simmer justifiable tensions amongst migrant communities, especially as regards to “our way of life” that includes the killing people en masse in foreign countries. (Ditto our new religious hatred laws – a mechanism to assuage domestic Muslim unrest over British foreign policy.)

Regarding what politicians are truly like in private: it is relevant. If Griffin is meeting white supremacist groups in the US, as I believe he has done, then I want to know about it. It is not a “private matter” when one enters public service!

Is BNP right-wing? Yes, they are, on the social scale. Economically, they are generally left-wing, as Hitler’s party was. Read more about these distinctions at http://www.politicalcompass.org.

Incidentally I see your lists of working-class grievances as caused by rampant capitalism, not immigration. Part of the work of the Left is correctly regarded as educating (if that is the right word) an apolitical public that economic conservatism – aka greed – is a primary cause of their societal ills.

Craig, come back to Bonnie Scotland and fight for that difference. Please

This election is a time for the independent to shine. At no point in time has the electorate been more disillusioned with main stream part politics. Slanging matches and a failure to address the real issues are to blame.

Let’s hope the TV debates cover more contentious policies that the public want action on. EU and immigration are two. They’re divisive for the nation and for the parties and courage is needed to address them. The country would be better for it! @wiljt

We have choice in Scotland. Perhaps we are very fortunate.

I suspect I know where your journey for political consequence should be taking you.

It is the nature of disputative Scotland to suspect the motivation of all politicians and to do things very properly and very honestly when the time comes.

What a nation we can build when we get there

Aren’t elections about getting middle classes richer?

With Britain’s record in racist military adventures, it is difficult to smear Hitler even if he rose from his grave today.

Was just revisiting this thread & noticed that Canspeccy aka Alfred Burdett aka whatever is using the word ‘underclass’. Untermenschen, anyone? Sick stuff.

Although sorry, Mr Burdett, I don’t expect you meant it.

“Was just revisiting this thread & noticed that Canspeccy aka Alfred Burdett aka whatever is using the word ‘underclass’. Untermenschen, anyone? Sick stuff.”

Technicolour, why do you conflate the meaning of “underclass” and “untermenschen”?

Are you too lazy to look the terms up, or don’t you know how to? And do you not know that to assert or imply in writing, without a shred of evidence, that someone is a racist, Nazi-lover, etc., is potentially libelous. (Probably you do, since you don’t reveal your real name.) And even if it is not a libel that anyone will sue you for, do you not understand that there is a difference between rational civil debate and merely hooting and hollering abuse?

What this site shows is that the lib-left in Britain is heavily colonized by lovers of hate speech. It is enjoyable, I suppose, to exercise one’s lungs. Rather like the enjoyment that small boys derive from exercising their calf muscles and larynx. But it is childish, and it is socially destructive and contemptible.

And for your information here are a couple of definitions.

From Dictionary.com:

Underclass: a social stratum consisting of impoverished persons with very low social status.

From a U. of Texas web page

Underclass: William Julius Wilson, a sociologist, refers to the urban poor as the “underclass”.

The primary issue facing members of the underclass is “joblessness reinforced by an increasing social isolation in an impoverished neighborhood”. (1) They not only suffer from lower socioeconomic status, minimal education, and lack of opportunities, but they are further victimized by a lack of community safeguards and resources. The underclass’s defining characteristic is the absence of job opportunities coupled with the absence of societal supports.

From the Free Dictionary

Untermenschen: subhumans; Nazi conception of Jews and Slays.

An pology will be accepted.

Er, CanSpeccy/Mr Burdett, whatever – the word ‘sorry’ is above? But you carry on.

And, by the way, I am very cheered by the fact that despite all the evidence (see above) you see the BNP as a decent party – practically a Be Nice People party, in fact. Peace & love is what it’s all about, isn’t it? You carry on with that too!

CanSpeccy – If all immigration was stopped then the multinational companies would sack more people in the UK and move more of their factories and banks and headquarters to countries like China and Burma and Nicaragua and Thailand where democracy doesn’t exist and workers are exploited.

The only way to protect the interests of the poorest in Britain is to start by promoting democracy, the right to form trade unions independent of government (and governing parties) and decent minimum wages in countries like China and Nicaragua.

Unless that’s done the big firms can always move manufacturing or service sector employment to countries where labour is cheaper.

Banning immigration would just punish lots of poor people from other countries – including lots of torture victims.

The BNP promotes the myth that Britain is ‘soft’ on immigration. In fact many thousands of genuine asylum seekers who face torture or death are jailed in ‘detention centres’ and then sent back to torture or death in Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Iraq etc every year.

See e.g

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/mar/14/asylum-torture-evidence-ignored

What serves the ‘elite”s interests is dividing people using nationalism, so that the majority of people in every country don’t ally against the big firms and the billionaires. By seeing immigrants as the problem and by promoting nationalism you are helping the big firms and the billionaires divide the majority of people around the world and conquer them.

You ask “Why is it that the BNP platform — and I refer specifically to policies stated by leaders of the party and posted on the Party’s Website… is condemned as fascim..?”

The answer is that the party’s constitution on it’s website refers to representing the “Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Nordic folkish peoples” and says others (i.e non-whites, even those born here) should be “persuaded” to leave the country. It’s both racist and very similar to Hitler’s rhetoric about the “volk” – the folk or people of Germany.

On the original topic i see your point Craig. First-past-the-post is a long way from a properly democratic electoral system, but it’s still better than many countries have. The biggest barrier to independents and small parties’ candidates getting elected under it is that it creates the belief that these candidates have no chance – and that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. Persuading people that if enough of them vote for that candidate they really can win is the only solution this side of electoral reform.

There’s always the option of standing as an independent (which i hope you’ll do again) or voting for one of the smaller parties or an independent candidate. It may take a long time to make a difference – only former big-party MPs or doctors who have lots of patients who trust them as a core vote seem to get elected on the first attempt as independent candidates. For other independents it may take many attempts – but in a General Election the big parties won’t be able to bus in party workers and volunteers from all over the country the way they could in the by-election – they’ll all be busy in other constituencies.

Even if independents and small parties don’t win they can influence bigger parties’ policies if they fear losing votes to smaller parties might lose them the seat to another big party.

I completely disagree with the people who say not voting is the way forward – that just allows an even smaller minority of voters to decide the government with the majority’s opinions ignored.

Duncan,

You say,

“If all immigration was stopped then the multinational companies would sack more people in the UK and move more of their factories and banks and headquarters to countries like China and Burma and Nicaragua and Thailand where democracy doesn’t exist and workers are exploited.”

Why would an end to immigration cause companies to sack anyone? There are already 8 million workers on the dole, working part-time when they need fulltime work or who have simply given up hope of finding a job and have quit looking. The idea that companies would have to fire people if there were no more mass immigration seems to make no sense unless you mean that companies will fire people unless they are able to continue driving down wages, for which purpose they need a vast army of the unemployed to scare the hell out of those who still have jobs.

“The only way to protect the interests of the poorest in Britain is to start by promoting democracy, the right to form trade unions independent of government (and governing parties) and decent minimum wages in countries like China and Nicaragua.”

I’m all in favor of democracy, but as I pointed out, so allegedly, is the BNP. They claim to be more democratic than anyone else, as they offer referendums, devolution of power and the creation of an English national assembly.

But as to promoting workers rights in China, forget it. The Chinese will have to sort out their own affairs. Britain’s power to influence events in China is negligible. China is thirty times the size of Britain, it has 20 times Britain’s population and it has the second largest economy in the world. They are already the greatest emitters of CO2, the have the world’s largest auto industry, their economy is growing many times faster than economies in the west. They have a manned space programme ?” something the US can no longer afford, they are building 15,000 km of high speed rail, versus a few hundred in the US, they are building 20 nuclear power plants versus one in the US.

China is not going to put a damper on its breakneck rate of growth by allowing stupid trades unions to price China out of world markets, as happened to the British car, coal and shipbuilding industries. Why would they? It would only condemn the mass of Chinese to continued poverty.

The Chinese are a great nation, but they are not soft. They have always considered China the greatest nation on earth and they intend now to prove it. Our best bet, in the western nations, is to attend to the needs of our own people.

“Unless that’s done the big firms can always move manufacturing or service sector employment to countries where labour is cheaper.”

In theory outsourcing of jobs can be prevented now, if that’s what people want. Britain had capital controls in the 1960s that severely restricted movement of productive resources offshore. The BNP say they will end massive outsourcing of jobs. So there you have a democratic solution to the adverse effect of globalization on British workers.

“Banning immigration would just punish lots of poor people from other countries – including lots of torture victims.”

Come on, the average immigrant to Britain is not a torture victim, and even the BNP has not said that it would deny entry to those genuinely in need of asylum.

“The BNP promotes the myth that Britain is ‘soft’ on immigration. In fact many thousands of genuine asylum seekers who face torture or death are jailed in ‘detention centres’ and then sent back to torture or death in Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Iraq etc every year.”

You need to be quantitative. Britain is currently receiving something like 600,000 legal immigrants a year plus asylum seekers plus probably hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. In London, immigrant mothers now account for the majority of births. Do you think it fair to displace most of the indigenous people in London, in Leicester, and many other great cities by immigrants? Why is it that charity must be denied at home?

“By seeing immigrants as the problem and by promoting nationalism you are helping the big firms and the billionaires divide the majority of people around the world and conquer them.”

That seems to me to be a total inversion of reality. The global financial elite want absolute freedom to move resources ?” capital, raw materials, people ?” in accordance with the drive for profit maximization. Global governance is the antithesis of democracy. If people feel no loyalty to their own country or sympathy for their poor neighbours, how likely is it that a global government would give a damn about the underclass in Britain’s former industrial cities?

“You ask “Why is it that the BNP platform — and I refer specifically to policies stated by leaders of the party and posted on the Party’s Website… is condemned as fascim.. ………”"

Look, the BNP are probably the most clutzlike party on the face of the planet, so much so that I have elsewhere speculated on the probability that the party is a security services front designed to slime all truly democratic options.

A striking piece of evidence for this view is provided in Nigel Copsey’s book “contemporary British Facism”, which cites an opinion survey, in which most people said mass immigration should be ended. However, when told that this was a BNP policy, most people changed their minds and said immigration was OK.

How come? Obviously because people think that to support anything the BNP advocates makes one a racist, fascist, Holocaust denying, nose-pulling beast. The fact is, however, loyalty to one’s own people, to the nation that gave one life and raised one to an understanding the world is not racism.

“The answer is that the party’s constitution on it’s website refers to representing the “Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Nordic folkish peoples” and says others (i.e non-whites, even those born here) should be “persuaded” to leave the country. It’s both racist and very similar to Hitler’s rhetoric about the “volk” – the folk or people of Germany.”

That’s all crap ?” what the BNP Constitution says, I mean, if they still say that in the revised constitution, because there is no need for it. All you have to say is that the party represents the British people, period, most of whom probably are folkish Nordic peoples or whatever gobblydegook they use.

Concerning your later post, I think there is little point in voting for parties with a track record of lying, since it only encourages the bastards. Voting for independents makes sense, but an independent has to build a reputation in a constituency, which takes a long time, e.g., twelve years in the case of Edwin Scrymgeour, of the Scottish Prohibition Party who, in 1922, defeated Winston Churchill in Dundee. I applaud anyone who will do the work, but I doubt if I would live long enough to have a chance of doing it.

Mind you, I have an idea for an affiliation that sounds sexier that the Scottish Prohibition Party: I am thinking of starting the DNTF Party, i.e., the Definitely Not the Fascists, party. The platform would borrow a good deal from the BNP but with out the rubbish about folkish Nordic peoples. Probably the party would ban former Nazis, provided that did not constitute a form of indirect discrimination with which the Equalities Commision would take exception.

Cheers. AB

CanSpeccy wrote “Why would an end to immigration cause companies to sack anyone?”

Because in an unregulated market with complete free trade between countries (like the one the big firms have secured now through lobbying governments)if they can’t get cheap labour in the UK they’ll simply move to other countries where they can still get cheap labour – China, Nicaragua, Thailand, etc – and then export the product (whether a manufactured one or a service like call centre calls) back to the UK.

The only ways you can stop this are

1) Protectionism – Which might work but would likely also reduce the overall wealth of the country, so everyone in it would be worse off

OR 2)Make any trade deals with undemocratic sweatshop countries like China, Nicaragua etc depend on greater democracy and higher minimum wages, the right to set up independent trade unions etc.

The second option would reduce the pool of cheap labour worldwide and ensure everyone benefitted from economic growth.

CanSpeccy wrote “But as to promoting workers rights in China, forget it. The Chinese will have to sort out their own affairs. Britain’s power to influence events in China is negligible. China is thirty times the size of Britain, it has 20 times Britain’s population and it has the second largest economy in the world. They are already the greatest emitters of CO2, the have the world’s largest auto industry, their economy is growing many times faster than economies in the west.” All true – i’m not suggesting the UK on it’s own could negotiate any kind of deal China.

The EU however, could – it’s more than big enough as a market that access to it matters to the Chinese as much as access to Chinese markets matters to the EU

CanSpeccy wrote “China is not going to put a damper on its breakneck rate of growth by allowing stupid trades unions to price China out of world markets, as happened to the British car, coal and shipbuilding industries. Why would they? It would only condemn the mass of Chinese to continued poverty.”

That’s the reverse of the truth. No amount of economic growth will benefit the majority of Chinese people unless they are allowed to form independent trade unions to negotiate a fair wage for their work. Overall in the decades since World War Two the world economy has increased its GDP per capita massively, yet there’s still poverty – because growth doesnt end poverty unless the existing wealth and that created by growth is distributed fairly.

“If people feel no loyalty to their own country or sympathy for their poor neighbours, how likely is it that a global government would give a damn about the underclass in Britain’s former industrial cities?”

I’m not arguing for global government – though you’ll certainly need some OECD wide deals to, for instance, crack down on tax avoidance and prevent multinational firms playing one country against another, as they have for decades – i’m arguing for everyone recognising that reducing poverty in other countries benefits them too, because it makes it harder for multinational firms to just move elsewhere to get cheaper labour.

“In theory outsourcing of jobs can be prevented now, if that’s what people want. Britain had capital controls in the 1960s that severely restricted movement of productive resources offshore.”

I’ve no argument with you there.

“The BNP say they will end massive outsourcing of jobs. So there you have a democratic solution to the adverse effect of globalization on British workers.”

There’s nothing democratic about a party that classes people born here as not British and says they should be “persuaded to leave” based on the colour of their skin.

CanSpeccy wrote “You need to be quantitative. Britain is currently receiving something like 600,000 legal immigrants a year plus asylum seekers plus probably hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. In London, immigrant mothers now account for the majority of births. Do you think it fair to displace most of the indigenous people in London, in Leicester, and many other great cities by immigrants? Why is it that charity must be denied at home?”

Do you really believe that there was any period in British history when there wasn’t massive immigration into the country? There always has been, from the ice ages on.

On top of that you’re defining “illegal immigrants” as people denied refugee status or work visas by the British government – but that government is so busy trying to please voters and tabloid newspapers who have an irrational hatred of all immigrants that it has quotas on the number of people to be deported each year.

As the article i posted a link to before shows immigration officials ignore medical evidence showing asylum seekers have been tortured.

On top of that the government has been treating Iraq, Afghanistan and Zimbabwe as ‘safe countries’ so that asylum seekers from them are deported back to torture or death.

The other group of immigrants are the so-called “economic immigrants” many of whom are leaving countries where they would watch most of their children die

before they ever reached adulthood – of hunger, of disease or due to war.

Duncan, I can’t deal with all these issues again. However, I will respond to a couple of points that you make.

“There’s nothing democratic about a party that classes people born here as not British and says they should be “persuaded to leave” based on the colour of their skin.”

The BNP do not say that people born here are not British. They say that those with British roots going back several generations are ethnically British, which is correct if the term ethnic means anything. They say those who are immigrants or the descendants of recent immigrants who are in Britain legally have the same rights as other citizens even though their ethnicity is not British. This is not very interesting to me, but it makes sense.

As to persuading people to leave, that could mean anything. The present government uses existing legislation to give certain immigrants an incentive to leave. I think that without coercion such departures would be minimal, and I don’t advocate coercion. However, what the BNP would do, I haven’t any idea. In fact, I doubt whether the BNP think that they will be doing anything. As I’ve indicated, I think they are spoilers intended to dupe the public into accepting the existing corporatist, globalist system.

“Do you really believe that there was any period in British history when there wasn’t massive immigration into the country?”

If you scan the discussion that proceeds this, you would find the answer to your question, which is yes I do believe that and, moreover, there is conclusive genetic evidence for the belief. Read Bryan Sykes, Oxford molecular biologist and human geneticist who has analyzed the mitochondrial genome and Y chromosome from over ten thousand British citizens.

http://www.amazon.ca/Saxons-Vikings-Celts-Bryan-Sykes/dp/0393062686

I have several degrees in biology, including a PhD in molecular biology, and see no reason to doubt the validity of Sykes’ assessment that the great majority of the British population date back to those who followed the retreat of the glaciers 9000 years ago plus Neolithic farmers who arrived about 5000 years ago. The only other major immigrant wave, before the that of the last 60 years, was that of the Vikings who contributed as much as 20% to the present gene pool in certain areas of eastern England.

CanSpeccy – Your versions of BNP policy are very rose tinted. Here’s what their current constitution on their website says -Section 1 “a)…The British National Party… believes that the indigenous peoples of the entire British Isles, and their descendants overseas, form a single brotherhood of peoples, and is pledged therefore to adapt or create political, cultural, economic and military institutions with the aim of fostering the closest possible partnership between these peoples.

(b) The British National Party stands for the preservation of the national and ethnic character of the British people and is wholly opposed to any form of racial integration between British and non-European peoples. It is therefore committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration and to restoring, by legal changes, negotiation and consent, the overwhelmingly white make up of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948.”

http://bnp.org.uk/resources/constitution-1th-edition/

So apartheid style segregation of black and coloured people from whites and ‘negotiating’ all non-white people in the UK being made to leave the country, even if they were born here, or their parents were born here too, or their grandparents or their grandparents.

——————————

The genetic studies are interesting but mostly show that genetics probably can’t distinguish between groups that are genetically similar or shared common ancestors – like e.g Normans (descended from vikings) or Angles, Jutes and Saxons.

There have been many waves of immigrants and invaders to the British isles – the Celts, Irish , Attecotti, the Romans (who also brought North African troops, some of whom settled here), the Saxons, the Angles, the Jutes and the Normans to name the main ones that preceded the vikings. If you’re telling me not many Angles or Saxons settled here where did the Anglo-Saxons come from? If not many Normans did how did they govern the place?

So all the genetic study shows is that the only groups that genetic science can distinguish between are vikings and non-vikings. That’s not proof that the vikings were the only large scale immigrants to the UK in any way.

Nor does it explain why you think immigration is such a terrible thing, still less how you think it’s going to be possible to prevent it peacefully and humanely if the current methods of ‘detention centres’ (jails) and deportation by force aren’t preventing the hundreds of thousands of “illegals” you complain of (people who have committed no crime whatsoever and many of whom have suffered torture but have been denied asylum by quotas for deportations per year set to keep the anti-immigrant brigade happy).

So what’s your solution? ‘Send them all back’ – including even more of the victims of torture and people who’ll be killed when they’re sent back. Shoot them to deter others? How exactly will you come up with a method tougher than the current government’s brutality and quotas for numbers of people to be deported that won’t involve killing people directly along with killing even more of them than now by deporting them back to torture and death?

You’re also obsessed with the symptoms but completely ignore the causes – which include our governments’ backing for dictatorships in other countries and willingness to trade with them (including arms sales), invasions and occupations of other countries – and impoverishing them by demanding they open their markets to our government subsidised exports while we protect our own markets from their exports. On top of that there’s global warming which will lead to more and more flooding, the spread of deserts and droughts, creating more destitute people. Do you want to just let them all starve to death quietly as long as it happens somewhere else so you don’t have to see it?

You ignore the word “consent” in the section of the constitution concerning repatriation.

What you say about the genetics of the population of the UK is mostly nonsense according to Bryan Sykes, an Oxford don who I am more inclined to believe than you.

His point is that the indigenous people of Britain are all of the same ancient stock, with a significant addition of genes from the Vikings, who may include the Normans, although who the Normans brought with them from France is probably unknown. According to Sykes there is only the slightest trace of the Roman presence in Southern England, mainly that of slaves from the Middle East.

Anyway, why is it impossible to talk about the BNP platform without being attacked as an advocate of some bloody stupid BNP policy. I’ve already stated that I think the BNP are either the stupidest political party on the face of the earth or an outfit intended solely for the purpose of sliming anyone who opposes the policies of the existing corporatists/globalist financial elite that own the government.

Why not think about that for a bit. Sixty percent of the British population oppose mass immigration (which is quite a separate issue from that of repatriation by “negotiation and consent”) until you tell them that is BNP policy, then the back off.

Sixty-three percent of the British population want the troops home from the criminal war of aggression in Afghanistan. But if you tell them that is BNP policy they’ll probably back off that too.

CanSpeccy wrote “You ignore the word “consent” in the section of the constitution concerning repatriation.”

Right so you now admit, presented with the text of their constitution, that they are racists; that they do not want “non-white” people as British citizens – even if they and their parents and grandparents were born here; that they want apartheid until they can get the “consent” of all non-whites to leave.

How would you feel about a party that said you should be “persuaded” to leave the country you were born in because your skin was the wrong colour? How would you or the BNP get the consent of all these British people to be forced out of their own country? They won’t leave voluntarily – why should they?

Unless you’re a racist it shouldn’t bother you what genetic stock or race people came from if they were born in this country, or granted citizenship and don’t break the law.

“What you say about the genetics of the population of the UK is mostly nonsense according to Bryan Sykes, an Oxford don who I am more inclined to believe than you.”

Really? So genetics can tell the difference between an Angle or Saxon who came from Denmark or northern Germany in the 4th c AD and a Danish viking who came a few centuries later? Or between a Danish viking who arrived in the UK in the 7th century AD and a Norman who invaded in the 11th(the Normans having been descended from the viking chief Rollo and his settlers)?

I greatly doubt it – I also doubt Professor Sykes makes any such claim himself.

Much of the population of Britain today does indeed have it’s head filled with Daily Mail and Sun crap about immigrants ‘swamping the country’ and Britain being supposedly a ‘soft touch’ when in fact no asylum seeker can live in anything but poverty on the pitiful benefits they can claim (considerably less than unemployment benefit) and genuine torture victims and people fleeing for their lives are being jailed and deported by the thousand every year.

That doesn’t mean that, when i know the truth, i should pretend the majority are right rather than point them to the actual facts.

The BNP are opportunists – they’ll adopt any policy that they see the majority support if they think it will help them piggyback their racist, immigrant-hating agenda on them.

I don’t admit to anything that I didn’t say.

As for the genetics, you’re trying to argue a case against a professor of genetics without even reading the evidence. This is totally futile.

And on the question of immigarion, you cannot deal competently with numbers. It’s not crap to say that immigration has added around 1% to the population every year for a number of years. And its not crap to point out that the immigrant community is much more fertile than the indigenous community. It is not crap, therefore, to point out that the immigrant community very rapidly, in a historical context, will come to dominate and largely replace the indigenous community.

If that’s what you want, its fine with me that you advocate it. Just don’t be surprised if people think members of the indigenous community who support your view are self-hating losers. And don’t try to justify you position with bogus arguments and false statistics.

I am sorry to be irritable about it, but you need to come to grips with the facts and, if you want to comment on what I have said, you should do me the courtesy of paying attention to what I’ve actually said.

“It’s not crap to say that immigration has added around 1% to the population every year for a number of years. And its not crap to point out that the immigrant community is much more fertile than the indigenous community.”

No, it’s not – both those claims are valid – largely because first generation immigrants are on average younger and poorer

“It is not crap, therefore, to point out that the immigrant community very rapidly, in a historical context, will come to dominate and largely replace the indigenous community.”

This however, does not follow from your first two points for several reasons.

First, second generation immigrants or people who’ve lived here for decades are no longer immigrants but British.

Second the longer they’re here the better off they get – and it’s a proven fact that wealthier people have a lower birth rate than poorer people – the poor in the third world having more children in place of pensions they don’t get – and because more of their children tend to die of hunger and disease.

Third the immigrants are influenced culturally by the ‘indigenous’ population just as much as the ‘indigenous’ population are influenced by the immigrants. For a start pretty much every immigrant family’s children speak English with an English or Scottish or Welsh accent.

You also seem to view non-white people as some kind of alien race who will wipe us all out – in fact cultural and genetic diversity strengthens both cultures and gene pools – as a geneticist i’d have thought you’d know that, but maybe you’ve fallen victim to prejudice that blinds you to it?

Inbreeding does not make a population healthier or more resistant to disease.

“If that’s what you want, its fine with me that you advocate it. Just don’t be surprised if people think members of the indigenous community who support your view are self-hating losers. And don’t try to justify you position with bogus arguments and false statistics.”

This is neither an argument nor is it pointing to any argument i’ve made.

It’s merely a ridiculous insult like those used pro-Israel extremists who call any Jew or Israeli who criticises Israel a “self-hating Jew”. It’s even more similar to the racists of the BNP who call any white person who isn’t a racist like them “self-hating”. I am not “self-hating” – you are racist – you hate non-white people and want South African style apartheid and to “persuade” all non-white people to leave Britain “by consent”.

Also please point out my bogus arguments and exactly why they’re bogus – and what ‘false statistics’ i’ve cited.

I’m sorry to be irritable and to point out your obvious prejudice and hypocrisy, not to mention your desperate resort to insults when you’re shown to be wrong both on the facts (e.g the BNP’s racist constitution) and the logic of your arguments.

p.s i’m sorry to have to say all that CanSpeccy but the “self-hating” jibe used to justify racism and bigotry is well below the belt

Also i intensely dislike racists. In fact i don’t believe racists are fit to live in Britain or Scotland. I also believe that racists tend to breed like rabbits, so i want them all out of the country before they swamp the non-racists and ruin over a century of democracy and largely harmonious mixture between different cultures.

So can all the racist “self-hating losers” get out of our decent countries now please. We’re not forcing you to go, we just want to “persuade” you to leave with your consent so your backwards, bigoted culture doesn’t continue to pollute our non-racist democracy.

And one other thing – the beaker people were here first before anyone. So, as one of my brothers pointed out, if you don’t have a lot of beakers then by your own logic you should sod off back to the continent.

and your claims about “bogus arguments” and “false statistics” have a hell of a cheek coming from someone who hasn’t quoted the full statistics on immigrant births exceeding non-immigrant ones in London.

Google it and you’ll find that nationally immigrant births account for 20% of births in the UK – so despite the rise in immigration 80% of births in the UK are from non-immigrant mothers.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-547871/More-babies-UK-born-migrant-mother.html

So much for your claim that non-immigrants will be swamped by immigrants.

sorry correction 21 to 23% are the children of immigrants – which means 77 to 79% – the vast majority – are not the children of immigrants.

Of course many of the immigrant minority will be white, so won’t worry someone of your persuasion.

oh and i see from your website you’re Canadian canspeccy – so what does British immigration policy have to do with you?

Or are you some “damn immigrant” from the UK who’s moved to Canada in order to swamp the indigenous people?

Hey Duncan,

Try an aspirin. I don’t know if it will help with the anti-Canadian xenophobia, but it may cool your fevered brow a little.

I’ve nothing against Canadians whatsoever. My grandmother lived there for many years as a teenager and i liked the Canadians i met on my last degree course too.

I’m just confused about what someone who is against the “indigenous population” of countries being mixed with or added to by immigrants is doing in a country whose indigenous population on the timescale you refer to for Britain would be native Indians.

What are you doing over there swamping the indigenous people if you think non-whites coming to Britain is wrong?

Duncan,

You ask “What are you doing over there swamping the indigenous people if you think non-whites coming to Britain is wrong?”

I explained above why immigration made sense in Canada (see comment above, addressed to Jimmy). And when I say made sense, I mean serves the interests of the majority. It may even serve the interests of the native people, the fastest growing ethnic group in Canada, who are far from being swamped out, if you mean crowded out, in a country 32 times the size of the United Kingdom but with only half the population. Many native people maintain their identities tenaciously, and here in British Columbia have negotiated the creation of independent native states. Whether these are viable or merely Bantustans is a not clear to me.

Whether you are mistaken, or I have misrepresented my own view, I am not sure, but I had not intended to advocate any policy on immigration to Britain. What I had intended to do was draw attention to the fact that on opposition to immigration, the criminal wars of aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan, withdrawal from the EU, and on more democratic forms of government, many or most British people apparently support the positions of the BNP, yet will not vote for the BNP and, in fact, back off their declared position when it is identified with the BNP. This is a paradox that seems worthy of consideration.

I then raised the possibility that the BNP exists to discredit populist policies by associating them with the ridiculous statements and actions and odious past political affiliations of BNP party members. For example, the issue of immigration is, I suspect, for many people primarily an economic, not a racial, issue for reasons that I have stated above and will not repeat. Therefore, by making immigration a racial issue, the BNP creates huge tension about a question that members of a democratic society should be free to decide as they see fit. Likewise, the nose-pulling, the boasts about not having gone soft, and the fascist associations of many party members tend to discredit BNP positions, and thus delegitimize opposition to Britain’s corporatist and part foreign-owned government.

I have said some other things as well, because many advocates of mass immigration seem to be unaware of the biological reality of what is happening and they seem also to be remarkably callous about the negative economic impact of immigration on Britain’ huge and growing underclass, people no doubt regarded as white trash by the likes of Tony Blair and David Cameron. Indeed, as a result of mass immigration and outsourcing of production, white trash is what they have become: their labour made of little or no value, just as was the case with the poor whites in the southern United States during the era of slavery.

Cheers,

AB

CanSpeccy wrote “Whether you are mistaken, or I have misrepresented my own view, I am not sure”

So why do you defend the BNP in saying it would “persuade” non-whites (which is not the same as immigrants – and you know it) to leave Britain by “consent”?

Why did you say that if i didn’t oppose all immigration to the uk then, including that by genuine torture victims and people fleeing for their lives, then “Just don’t be surprised if people think members of the indigenous community who support your view are self-hating losers.” (17th March 4.05pm in this thread)

You are using the same language as the BNP – where “indigenous” means “white” as it does in their constitution on it’s website. You use the same rhetoric that the BNP use about anyone who doesn’t want to stop all non-white immigrants entering the country being “self hating” white people.

This also explains why you think white immigration to Canada is and always has been fine, but non-white immigration to the UK is not.

CanSpeccy wrote “but I had not intended to advocate any policy on immigration to Britain. What I had intended to do was draw attention to the fact that on opposition to immigration, the criminal wars of aggression against Iraq and Afghanistan, withdrawal from the EU, and on more democratic forms of government, many or most British people apparently support the positions of the BNP, yet will not vote for the BNP and, in fact, back off their declared position when it is identified with the BNP. This is a paradox that seems worthy of consideration.”

No, it’s not. Most people are well aware that the BNP are racists and fascists whose constitution calls for expelling all non-white people from Britain and for segregation between white and black people. They also know the BNP leaders in the late 90s were still distributing anti-semitic literature and denying the Holocaust, before u-turning after September 11th when they realised it was more popular to whip up bigotry against all Muslims than all Jews.

They started opposing the Iraq war and ending PFIs when they realised those were popular policies that they could gain some votes on in order to promote their racist agenda.

Do you think the poor in the countries the immigrants are coming from are better off? In Haiti they eat mud cakes mixed with salt to fill their bellies and those of their children as they starve.

If you want to reduce mass immigration start campaigning for democracy and decent wages and working conditions in sweatshops like Haiti and China.

P.S I agree that the big parties have abandoned the poorest, but if you think the cause is a ‘soft’ immigration policy you know nothing about the UK’s immigration policy, which is one of the most ruthless and inhumane in the world.

I said nothing about a “soft” immigration policy. But if you are saying that Britain’s immigration policy is essentially eugenic, i.e., favoring the fittest, best educated, etc., that must only make it worse for the least competitive members of the indigenous British work force.

To finish (perhaps) this conversation, here are some thoughts about the biological consequences of human migration, the determination of immigration policy in Britain and the impact of the immigration issue on British democracy (thoughts I express without apology, since despite my alias, I am both British by birth and citizenship).

The migration of people to already populated lands has frequently been accomplished by conquest, often with the slaughter of the males and the elderly and the impregnation of the nubile females by the conquerors. This makes good evolutionary sense, in that it increases the representation of the conquerors genes in the future human population, i.e., it an adaptive strategy. It was the strategy of the Mongols, for example, and explains why, according to genetic evidence, Genghis Khan has about 16 million living descendants.

However, conquerors may bring their own women, as genetic evidence indicates was sometimes the case with the Vikings who settled in Britain. This was also an adaptive strategy, inasmuch as it gave the immigrant population a share of the resources of the country to which they had migrated and thus the potential for greater representation of their genes in the future human population.

Migration may also occur as the result of invitation, or coercion, by the inhabitants of the land to which population moves. The process is exemplified by the transport of slaves from Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas. The result in the Caribbean was the extinction of the native population, which was replaced by a largely African population: an accidental plus, it seems, for Africans. For the Europeans who undertook the transport of slaves, the benefits are hard to gauge. In Haiti, the French colonists were wiped out in a slave insurrection. In the British colonies, some British genes no doubt persist in a mixed race population. Further, the British plantations generated great wealth that helped finance the industrial revolution, which in turn provided a basis for the expansion of the empire and British colonization overseas, particularly in North America. For the British people, the empire allowed an increase in their worldwide population to several times the present population of the United Kingdom.

What impact the use of slave labour had on the eventual success of British colonization in the United States is hard to gauge, although it can be considered to have conferred an evolutionary advantage on the African population which now includes something like thirty million Americans.

In South Africa, reliance on immigrant African labour proved unprofitable to the white settlers, leading eventually to their loss of political control, and their current flight.

Mass immigration to Britain today, serves the same purpose as the slave trade or African immigration to white South Africa, namely to provide cheap labor. From an evolutionary perspective, this does not seem to be an advantageous strategy, since it will likely result in a sharp reduction in the indigenous British population as it is subject to increasing economic stress imposed by the competition for resources in a severely resource-limited country. For the elite, this may not appear to be of any importance.

There is no reason why humans should chose to maintain an adaptive policy on immigration or anything else. However, if they do not, it is likely that the society or population to which they belong will not long endure. In considering this outcome, it must be recognized, however, that the evolutionary consequences for the elite and for the mass of the people may be quite different.

It is possible, for example, to envisage a ruling class that views its interests as more closely allied with those of a global, multi-racial elite, than with the common people of the nation from which they have emerged. That appears to be the situation in the West today, where the indigenous populations are in more or less rapid decline as their place is taken by more highly philoprogenitive immigrants. In Britain, for example, the fertility rate is 1.6 versus a replacement rate of 2.1. In Germany and Italy the fertility rates of the indigenous people are only 1.4 and 1.1, respectively, which means almost certain extinction of the indigenous German and Italian peoples.

Such situations create the potential for conflict between the elite and the mass of the people. If the people believe, for whatever reason, that mass immigration is to their detriment, which in evolutionary terms it most probably is, the elite will be highly motivated to deny the common people the right to express their view democratically. This seems to explain the concerted effort of governments in western nations to demonize those who oppose immigration as racists, xenophobes, etc., and to inculcate pro-immigration propaganda through the state-controlled K-12+ education system.

My conclusion, therefore, is that mass immigration which, according to opinion surveys is opposed by 60% of the British population, i.e., more than 70% of the indigenous population, is not consistent with the maintenance of a democratic society. The result is the failure of the democratic system to provide the people with legitimate choice.

This conclusion has, obviously, nothing to do with my personal feelings about immigrants. Living in a multi-racial society has many attractions. Moreover, it could be argued that the hybrid vigour resulting from miscegenation of Europeans with third world immigrants will yield an adaptive advantage to the host populations in Europe. I am unaware, however, of any real evidence for such a contention, and it is difficult to see an advantage that would outweigh to quantitative loss in genetic representation in the population as a whole that will be experienced by the native populations.

The second and final sentences of the last paragraph of the above post should have read:

Moreover, it could be argued that the hybrid vigour resulting from miscegenation of Europeans with third world immigrants will yield a long-term adaptive advantage to the host populations in Europe. I am unaware, however, of any real evidence for such a contention, and it is difficult to see an advantage that would outweigh to immediate quantitative loss in genetic representation in the population as a whole that will be experienced by the native populations.

CanSpeccy wrote “It is possible, for example, to envisage a ruling class that views its interests as more closely allied with those of a global, multi-racial elite, than with the common people of the nation from which they have emerged.”

So asylum seekers are part of the “global elite”? If that’s the case can you explain why they get lower benefits than unemployed British people and are banned from working while their cases are heard?

Asylum seekers without children get £35 a week – those with children get £42 a week – and their benefits are falling every year relative to inflation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/04/asylum-seeker-benefits-cut-refugees

The jobseekers’ allowance for British unemployed people is £50 a week – plus child benefit.

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/MoneyTaxAndBenefits/BenefitsTaxCreditsAndOtherSupport/Employedorlookingforwork/DG_10018757

Can you explain why Conservative and Labour governments have competed with one another to be tougher on immigration and why the billionaire owners of tabloid newspapers compete with one another to be most opposed to ‘bogus asylum seekers’ and to spread hatred against them, far more even than they focus on native ‘benefit fraudsters’ who take $1billion a year compared to tens of billions taken by billionaires and big firms avoiding taxes?

The majority of immigrants are even worse off than the poorest people born in Britain and even more victimised by “the elite” here and in other countries.

So stop pretending that by opposing immigration you’re siding with the oppressed against the elite or defending democracy – you’re siding with the elite against the oppressed and dividing the majority – which only helps the elite conquer them by focusing attention away from Murdoch’s media ownership, tax evasion and deals with Blair and Cameron.

Your genetic arguments are also political propaganda dressed up as science – stop pretending they’re scientific. You might as well be talking about how the Aryan race is being weakened by Slavs and Jews.

It also speaks volumes that you think non-indigenous immigration to Canada is great for native Indians ?” genetically and in every other way ?” but non-white immigration to the UK is terrible for the ‘indigenous’ (read white) people. Unless you’re a racist who considers white people superior to non-whites, including native Canadian Indians, this makes no sense.

It is a moot point whether we really have a democracy. However, I agree entirely with your post. Well said!