Nigel Evans is fully entitled to the presumption of innocence; and the media seem more inclined to give it to him than they did to Malcolm Blackman, linked to Anonymous. In this particularly disgusting piece of journalism by Paul Cheston of the Evening Standard, the vicious liar who brought false accusations against Blackman is referred to as “the victim” – not even the alleged victim, but “the victim” – even after Blackman was found not guilty.
The victim, who cannot be named, had lived at home in south London during the week, and slept in the Occupy tent at weekends.
Having been at the Occupy site, where every tent touched at least three others, the idea that repeated rape could be carried out amongst a packed group of people who were particularly certain not to condone it, was always highly implausible. Compelling evidence was given in court that Blackman was not even at the site on one of the two named occasions.
It is particularly sickening that Blackman’s name and photograph has been published everywhere in relation to horrifying and untrue accusations of binding someone against their will with cable ties and raping them. This terrible publicity will follow him everywhere for the rest of his life. The deranged or malicious person who fabricated this story in court continues to have their identity protected.
Blackman’s role within both Anonymous and Occupy has been exaggerated by the media. He was nonetheless associated with the internet and street resistance to the increasingly authoritarian state. The parallels to the Assange case are inescapable.
Returning to Nigel Evans, on the Jeremy Thorpe precedent there is no reason for him to resign his seat before a trial, presuming that he maintains his innocence. Should he resign, this could be one of those small historical chances that has great effects. UKIP will have a great chance of winning Ribble Valley, and the resulting momentum could contribute to a genuine political convulsion in the UK.
Nigel Farage and I were due to have lunch a couple of years ago, but couldn’t get our diaries to match up at the time. Unfortunately, while admiring UKIP’s insurgent spirit, I find myself the polar opposite of their major policies. Distrust and dislike of the political establishment that has failed this country and allowed inconceivable amounts of wealth to be creamed off by the heads of the financial services industry, while ordinary people struggle to get any work at all, is perfectly understandable. The three main parties in England all retail the same neo-con policies, with different packaging. It is inevitable this system must break. That is should break in the direction of right wing populism, is perhaps predictable. But there are worse people than Mr Farage inside all the main parties.
I remain entirely confident that the UKIP surge in England will convince a great many more people in Scotland that they need to break free of the United Kingdom.
The problem with immigration is that it has become a liberal shibboleth: to suggest that it ought to be controlled or even discussed is to open oneself up to the charge of being racist. And thus unworthy of a voice or a platform.
Nothing could be further from the truth: most racism is discovered in societies which have been pitilessly raped and looted by immigrants. The victims of immigration were indigenous peoples whose protests were often silenced by arguments that the immigrants brought enormous benefits for which any people should be happy to sacrifice culture, language, religions and resources.
This is not to suggest that the movement of impoverished young Romanians, Poles or Bulgarians will overwhelm the remnants of British culture but that the same liberal imperialism that brought capitalism and wrecked communities in America, India, China and virtually everywhere else is now back where it started in the English countryside, the Scots highlands and Ireland. Once again ploughing up the settlements we had made, after the disruptions of the industrial revolution.
And among the shock troops of the new war against the poor are those forced to leave their own lands and seek a living elsewhere. They are themselves victims- as were the indentured servants in Virginia, the convicts in Australia, the poor bloody infantrymen in India, the Irish navvy in England, the African slave planting sugar on Carib land- and any discussion of immigration should recognise this, and the fact that if they are here it is because they have been forced out of their homelands, almost certainly by the same class of people who rule us, the financiers of the City, closing down their factories or buying up their peasant holdings, polluting their fisheries or building golf courses and resorts to turn milkmaids into whores and ploughmen into bouncers or drug dealers. Or suicide bombers.
We live in a system which frenetically churns up the world, constantly destroying and replacing. As it does so each new generation of developments is more illusionary, temporary and jerry built than its predecessor. Timber has been replaced by pulpboard, which has been replaced by petro-chemical compounds. Obsolescence is built in. Nothing will last. Nobody will die in the place of his birth. All employment is temporary. As in the dystopia in Doris Lessing’s Shikasta, the young are constantly being driven out, moved on.
To discuss these matters, not in terms of keeping less fortunate people at bay but in terms of initiating changes to make the world a better, more settled and more thoughtful place, is perfectly sensible. There are, undoubtedly, for the producers of sea food snacks, advantages to employing gangs of trafficked slaves from China to scour the shores of Morecambe Bay. Just as there were advantages for the South Pacific Railroad (including thousands of British investors) in importing gangs of coolies to lay their tracks.
But such economic benefits accrue entirely to the capitalists, are of no real benefit to the immigrants, who tend to be cheated and terrorised, and undermine all efforts on the part of the locals to organise and control their employment, their government and its services.
In a word the discussion of immigration in human, rather than neo-liberal terms (in which only labour power is considered) is long overdue. And if racists listen carefully, and join in the debate they will soon see that their real quarrel is not with “the other” but with those ruling the society in which we live; calling the shots, starting the wars, leading the lynch mobs and “reforming” the economy to their greater advantage.
Incidentally, there is nothing wrong with populism. Those who fear democracy sneer at popular politics because they don’t want to accommodate themselves to the changes that social justice requires to be made. The derogation of populism began with William Allen White in “What’s the matter with Kansas.” But that is another story though White’s spirit, in the pensioned pundit and corrupted clerisy, lives on rationalising the Pied Piper’s route as he leads humanity towards its doom and the emptying of the planet.
Lastbluebell,
A potentially interesting thesis, but a tired one at that. When all the standard tropes against opponents of mass-immigration have been trotted out (you know, “You’re just blaming the state of the economy on foreigners”, “You just hate brown people”, and so on), then go for the scientific method, backed by A Study.
Today we have our attention drawn to “Some Arguments Build On Evidence From Cognitive Psycology And Neuroscience”, and the shocking pack behaviour therein – the “them” and “us” mentality.
Seriously, thlastbluebell, there is nothing in the least bit wrong with desiring this country to be inhabited by people from this country, with some beneficial immigration.
Chris2, re your first paragraph, it was interesting to observe the regulars’ reaction to Komodo. After his First Disappearance, they were clamouring to have him back. “Where’s Komodo?” was the standard refrain for many weeks. But after the Big Fall-Out, during which Komodo questioned whether other regulars would support unlimited immigration (NOTE, merely questioned!), there came the Second Disappearance, but then there were no calls for his return.
@Giles,
Let me try and expand my thoughts a little,
“Racism” is (in all probability) an evolved human trait. It is for good or bad, like many other such traits, that we today find revolting or repulsive, an integrated part of human nature, whether we like it or not.
Denying it will not change it, and, I think ridiculing or applying blame on individuals is perhaps both nonchalant and ignorant. It is a bit like ridiculing people for being afraid of spiders, because spiders in Britain are not deadly poisonous to us. But they were for million of years, and that is what is encoded into our brains, in the same way as, “forigners”, or “them”, were deadly to us.
I also think that the denial of this in political and ideological circles is destructive, since it has prevented an continuing, open, rational and informed discussion about it. Both since we can expect that many people will feel severe discomfort about this, whether they will openly admit it or not, and not least because it can bring with it increased risks, for example when a society experience severe stress.
The difference between science and ideology, is that science is concerned with understanding of how the natural world works, without an a priori opinion, though careful investigations of objective evidence. An ideology informs you how the world is supposed to work, (according to its adherents), and applies values to opinions and sit in judgement.
To my mind, science can inform you, but it gives no advice on how you should use that information, or, how to make decisions.
In all humility,
Giles, I hope that you are wrong about Komodo whose contributions are almost invariably interesting and evidently sincere.
“The difference between science and ideology,” is like the difference between The Guardian and Izvestia. Everyone knows the latter is full of special pleas and lies, the former remains to be twigged.
Dearest Giles, who, as I remember, could hardly bear to drive through Tottenham, is a ‘committed seditionist’ the best you can do? Then I am in good company, at least. In fact I trump your epithet: I don’t recognise the ‘authority’ of the state: it is there to represent the people, not to rule them, which is why we pay our elected representatives. It is also there, of course, to enforce the rule of law, equably and fairly, as it unfortunately sometimes does not (see ‘jail sentences after the UK riots’) – unless that law is being demonstrably broken in order to prevent a greater crime (see the case of the B52 Two). I’m not sure why you’re obsessed with schoolchildren?
Otherwise your arguments, or propaganda, are of course based on seeing people from other races (though not, apparently, Australians and Americans) as those who deserve to be singled out. Do you support, in principle, the philosophy of the Mugabe government?
“are Mo Farah and a bunch of filthy rich Asian businessmen the best you can do in support of what has happened to our cities?”
No, Giles, but we have been through all this before, at tedious length, after which, I remember, you disappeared for some time. Those examples just show how ridiculous it is to refer to entire swathes of people as ‘them’; and to dismiss ‘them’ as economic drains. Propaganda, however, depends on this sort of sweeping, dehumanising generalisation.
Technicolour,
“Dearest Giles, who, as I remember, could hardly bear to drive through Tottenham,”
Please get it right:
Giles
31 Jul, 2012 – 1:00 pm
So, the usual stuff:
.
a) There’s always been immigration anyway
b) We’re all mixed-race anyhow
c) The bankers get away with murder while you worry about immigration
d) Ugly heads reared, the sight of black/brown people, Daily Mail… blah, blah, blah
.
Noticeably absent, as ever, is an argument in favour of the mass-immigration we have experienced in recent decades – merely attempts to excuse it, hide it, belittle those who oppose it. I think many of the commenters here, and to an extent the modern left in general, view any criticism of immigration policy as an attack on immigrants themselves. Living the kind of warped existence where everyone bar yourselves and your own politics is deemed fascist, where everyone else is a knuckle-dragging racist, a potential Hitler, it’s a sort of emotional gut reaction that must make you feel terribly good about yourselves.
.
What mustn’t be allowed to take hold is the idea that ordinary, tolerant people, who do not have any affiliation with nationalist or racialist politics and who are perfectly aware of the contributions made by immigrants in the past, have had enough of what they see as massive and unprecedented change, made not just without them having been asked, but against their will. “Nobody asked us” is what you most commonly hear. Nobody asked us if we wanted a war with Iraq. Nobody asked us if we should bail out the banking class. You’d agree, there’s a total disregard for the will of the people in that. But when it comes to immigration, you place yourselves on the side of the elites and mock and ridicule anyone who dares object. And those who can’t be labelled hypocrites because they have a bit of Norman, Jew or Irish in them, are to be disregarded anyway because they get their opinions from the Daily Mail. Nobody, it seems, can see with their own eyes, because they have all been brainwashed by the right-wing media. I must remember, next time I pass through Tooting, Totton, or Tottenham, to avert my gaze at what has become of my country, because it’s all an invention of the right-wing media.
.
Opposition to mass-immigration must always be portrayed as the preserve of racists, bigots and ignorant little Englanders. They must accept the fact of a greater Pakistan existing in England because Angles, Romans and Jews came here a long time ago. Whole areas of our cities must be made to resemble foreign countries because, hey, we’re all descended from Africans anyway. Dozens of entirely alien cultures can be introduced because there were Welsh, Scots and English here already, so we were already a multi-cultural land. If you oppose it then you’re only the latest in a long line of those who have sought to blame all our ills on foreigners and therefore you are discredited. And when all else fails, you are, of course, a racist. Are these really the arguments for? Smug, patronizing disingenuous evasion of the issues is what I would call them.
.
So let’s hear it. Why do you support the settling of millions of foreigners in this land? Craig likes it for all the hot women it brings in. Suhayl reckons on a mixing of cultures being a good thing, though I don’t see much evidence of the mixing. Who supports globalization and the global movement of labour along with wealth? Who is for cheap labour? Or is it that a country with an ever-decreasing sense of shared history, culture and identity makes fertile ground for a particular cause or belief to take hold? What do you hope to gain from it and why?
I see that you like the sound of your own typing, Giles 🙂 Again, as I remember, you could not specify why Tottenham, say, was representative of ‘what had become of your country’. Questioned about whether it was the, admittedly worrying, level of poverty in that area, which is hardly a new development in outlying parts of London, or whether it was the skin-colour of the inhabitants, many of whom have lived there for generations, to which you were referring, you failed to reply.
It would be so much easier to present yourself as an ‘ordinary, tolerant person’ if you were, you know.
Incidentally, conflating Tottenham’s specific skin-colour make-up with the rest of the country is another classic piece of propaganda.
You just so want it to be about skin colour, Technidross. Would fulfill all your dreams! Then you could present yourself as some sort of Martin Luther King. But it ain’t, and you aren’t.
Could you just address the points and the questions in the previous posts, if you do respond, thanks, Giles.
Is UQUIP the same ol’ cajoling political mockery of our intelligence. Certainly Farage has said he wants smaller government, no to Brussels, no to Trident, off with the Human Rights Act’s head. This sounds like a dyed-in-the-wool political erotic dream.
From a global or cosmic perspective UKQUIP’s international policy is fuzzy and segmented. For instance, Farage has called the US/UK extradition treaty as ‘crooked’ and in an interview shortly after his escape from death in a plane crash he said, Obama is a most dangerous president.” –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=LGjn-qv1y_4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDoJ2rY0WBM
yet sadly UQUIP opposes calls to suspend the EU’s trade agreements with Israel and is critical of European aid to the Palestinian Authority.
http://foi-ukip.org/
http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/ukip-leader-attacks-trendy%E2%80%99-israel-hate-eu-parliament
On Iran the waters become slightly muddy as Farage admits on one hand, “Tehran has gone to conceal and lie about its program, along with its famous vitriol against the West and Israel in particular, and most now grimly accept that what Iran actually seeks is an indigenous nuclear weapons capability.”
But accepts, “A nuclear Iran may actually be easier to deal with. Secure from foreign invasion, it would lack the justification for its continued repression against ‘enemy agents’ at home. Security would also allow it to move out of Russia’s orbit and stop behaving like a nation under siege.”
I would suggest Mr Farage needs to sharpen his pandemic outlook and frame his mind in the light of his near-death experience. A good start involves listening and I present an eavesdropping session with Robert Fisk…
http://freedocumentaries.org/teatro.php?filmID=200&lan=en&size=big
FYI
The British Dream by David Goodhart; The Diversity Illusion by Ed West – review
Two polemics about recent immigration contain more contradictions than sense
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/14/british-dream-david-goodhart-review
Mark D’Arcy in discussion with David Goodhart about his new book ‘The British Dream’.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01sdnmp/BOOKtalk_David_Goodhart/
15 mins
PS Are we not all ‘immigrants’ at one stage or another?
A litany of names here. Where are they now? I had forgotten about Kilroy-Silk!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Independence_Party
Be aware:
It is, in thought if not yet in personnel, the extreme right-wing of the Conservative Party in exile; a party run in the main by self-made businessmen with an agenda to match. And it has a record of defections, internecine squabbles and acrimony, plus scandals that have led two of its former MEPs to jail.
Founded in 1991 as the Anti-Federalist League by Dr Alan Sked of the London School of Economics (it became Ukip two years later), it has had, in the past 20 years, no fewer than eight leaders. And the upper reaches of its 22,000 members are fed – and depleted – at regular intervals by defectors coming in and going out, among them its founder. Two of the people elected as Ukip MEPs have since defected to the Conservative Party, and Nikki Sinclaire, elected a Ukip MEP in 2009, was expelled from Ukip for refusing to be part of the right-wing Europe of Freedom and Democracy grouping in the European Parliament.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/special-report-what-voters-should-know-about-ukip-8517997.html
And (which people everywhere seem to be ignoring):
The leader of far-right group, the English Defence League (EDL), has urged supporters to vote for the UK Independence Party in the next election, arguing: “they are saying exactly what we say, just in a different way”.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/04/04/edls-tommy-robinson-endorses-ukip-_n_3014019.html
And from the same piece, UKIP’s former founder:
The founder and former leader of Ukip, Professor Alan Sked told Huffington Post UK in November the party he launched in 1993 had become “extraordinarily right-wing” and is now devoted to “creating a fuss, via Islam and immigrants. They’ve got nothing to say on mainstream issues.”
He said: “They’re not an intellectually serious party. Their views on immigrants and on [banning] the burqa are morally dodgy.”
The UK Independence Party tells “lies” to stir up fear of immigrants and Nigel Farage is personally to blame for failing to vet candidates with far right links, one of its former leading MEPs has claimed.
Marta Andreasen’s comments came as the Ukip leader spoke of his pride that the party was managing to reduce the BNP’s vote share by winning the support of people who had previously voted for Nick Griffin’s party.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/exmep-marta-andreasen-claims-ukip-peddles-lies-as–highprofile-tory-mp-priti-patels-father-announces-he-is-standing-for-election-8598205.html?origin=internalSearch
These 620 poor souls will not be coming to these shores. Instead their lives ended in a hideous sweatshop making cheap clothes for some of us, the rich Westerners, to put on our backs.
http://news.sky.com/story/1087105/bangladesh-disaster-more-than-600-dead
Well I doubt anybody wants to see a ‘Genuine political convulsion in the UK’ more than I do, but I have grave misgivings about UKIP; less for what is obvious (ie its right wing populism) and rather more for what is hidden – what is ALWAYS hidden in fact.
Have a look at its policy statements concerning Israel. In company with the EDL mentioned above, they might have been drafted in Tel Aviv. In fact, as a keen student of the modus operandi and relentless rise of Jewish power in post WWII US/Europe, my guess is they probably were. Whatever UKIP’s effects on UK/Europe and the trivia of domestic politics may be, they will certainly bind us even tighter to US/NATO and irrational support for the Zionist entity. I for one find that a thoroughly depressing prospect.
@ Suhayl “The key question, it seems to me, is this. How precisely will an independent Scotland be able to plough a furrow different from the neoliberal one?”
.
It seems to me that the key question should be – how well off would Scotland’s citizens be after independence? When I was a boy in Glasgow back in the 50’s, we still had a fully functioning industrial base and a fairly sophisticated society. But it wasn’t well off – times were tough. The one thing I can say is that we all knew back in the 50’s that we were better off than countries like Norway. Today Norway has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. The answer of course is that Norway has their own OIL all to themselves. And that it seems to me is the answer to the key question – a much higher standard of living for all of Scotland’s citizens, no matter what the political system is.
Craig, though I’m no fan of UKIP I wonder why you support staying in the EU. For example, the upcoming EU/US trade treaty seems to have been a propelling force behind the controversial recent changes to the NHS, as Lucy Reynolds mentions.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYakMiKwoak
Mary, will you ever criticise the Bangladeshi owners, several of whom did a runner to the Indian border? My experience of the place was that of a wonderful country and people, but I also saw a total disregard for human life. The rich treat the poor like dogs. In fact, everyone treats anyone even slightly beneath them like dogs. This isn’t the fault of the West. I would say that to work for a factory supplying Western companies would be something of a blessing in such a country.
Wikispooks, it is true that UKIP has a “Friends of Israel” office. I believe it is a very small, single person affair based in South Molton, Devon. Have you been to South Molton, Devon, to witness the power this mighty Zionist HQ has? I also recall that a senior woman within UKIP said that it is absolutely untrue that UKIP is pro-Zionist, rather, she said, you have the full range of opinon within UKIP, from avowedly pro-Palestinian to pro-Israeli, with everything inbetween, but can’t find a link. None of it really matters to Britain, and so I would argue for a complete severance of support for Israel, support of which is clearly detrimental to our interests.
That should read “a complete severance of our ties to Israel, support for which is clearly detrimental to our interests.”
Sophie, Craig supports the EU because it hates Britain.
Wikispooks,
I have a real dislike of people saying things like “relentless rise of Jewish power in post WWII US/Europe”. Nobody can be more critical of Israel than I, but that should not be confused with Jewish people generally, whose contribution to the world of science, medicine and literature has been immense and beneficial.
All this talk of austerity, for most people austerity is all there ever has been, all they have ever known, beginning with Labour’s needless mid-70s capitulation to the IMF’s iron financial rule, in response to balance of payments deficit figures, often 6 months or more out of date and out of touch with the real economy, deficits of a few hundred thousand pounds that made scare headlines, not billions as now, the sort of money they’re spending now to recover and house in a museum some pile of scrap wrecked old plane, was a CRISIS!. For most there is no false hope of a return of the ‘good times’, there never were such times for the many. A crisis is brewing as that minority who took – like pigs to shit – to looting and plunder of the country’s accumulated post-war assets, physical and human achievements, have run out of easily available rich booty and for the first time it dawns on them that by the predatory nature of the society they have salivated for and built, they must in due course be devoured themselves, they who worshipped the demagogues of neo-liberalism, raised these false idols of boundless greed. Having sniffed the foul winds of their very own whipping, they sense the taint of a pungent bad medicine, one they so heavily prescribed for and dosed upon all. The very remote thought of reality biting, a grim reality they’ve never shared in, is not to their liking. They turn to UKIP, these replete arch-Thatcherites, they cry for protection of their ill-got spoils and their unmerited privilege.
Good times? For most such would be a first. Return? Come off it.
Giles: any answers? No?
‘Right wing populism’is a misnomer. Right-wing people in this country, unless they hide their agenda, or distort reality, are not popular. Thatcher was, before the spin of the Falklands, the most unpopular prime minister on record. As any fule who has studied history knows, you can con some of the people some of the time – by whipping up fear, envy, hatred and invoking an enemy – but not all of the time.
I can imagine what it must feel like to be one of these self-made businessmen who see this as their way to power – hard inside, and exulting with a cold, drunken delight in my own apparent cleverness. But “down, down, down into the darkness of the grave” they go, regardless.
Roderick: “And that it seems to me is the answer to the key question – a much higher standard of living for all of Scotland’s citizens, no matter what the political system is.” How interesting. That’s your criteria?
wikispooks
5 May, 2013 – 6:57 pm
I think you have been misinformed about the provenance of FOI in UKIP. It does not look like ‘a very small, single person affair’.
http://en-gb.facebook.com/pages/Friends-of-Israel-in-UKIP/111727452249341
http://en-gb.facebook.com/pages/Friends-of-Israel-in-UKIP/111727452249341?id=111727452249341&sk=info