Spectator Article Claims Immigration Has Increased Since Brexit

Looking through Google earlier I found an article on the Speccie’s website claiming with that more or less as its title, authored by none other than its editor, Fraser Nelson. Unfortunately, I couldn’t read the article because you have to be a subscriber, and I’m not. But hold on! Weren’t all the right-wing, Tory anti-immigration types pushing Brexit as the solution too mass immigration and all those pesky people heading across the Channel to us on rubber dinghies?

And was this a pack of lies? Yes, yes, they did and it was. The anti-immigration Brexiteers – there were others on the Labour left who support Brexit, and who were definitely not racist or anti-immigration – told anybody who would listen that the migrants heading over here after passing through Europe had been able to do so because of the European constitution. That isn’t the case. The European constitution does call for freedom of movement across the Union for EU citizens, but from what I understand asylum seekers are required to settle in the first country they travel to. The Schengen Agreement allows immigrants from outside the EU to travel freely from one country to another, but that’s a separate treaty which only binds the specific countries that signed it. Quite simply, the Brexiteer right lied to people about this issue, just as they lied to people about oven-ready deals with the EU, using the money spent on our contribution to the EU on the NHS, the rest of the world flocking to us desperate for trade deals after we left, no traffic queues at Dover or extra bureaucracy and so on, and on, ad nauseam. And now it has dawned on them that, rather than stopping mass immigration, the number of immigrants entering the country has actually increased.

I’m not actually surprised. I was talking to a friend of mine about immigration a while ago, who’d been doing some reading on the issue. He told me that immigration also increased massively after Britain first passed legislation cutting down on it. Before then, it had been largely chain-immigration. Immigrants would arrive from south Asia or wherever and take up residence in a certain area, but would generally only live there for a short period of time before returning to India or Pakistan. They would then be replaced by another set of immigrants, who would also live there for a relatively short space of time before returning and being replaced by a newer set of migrants in their turn. But in the run-up to the date when the new anti-immigration legislation came into law there was a surge in the number of people immigrating to the country, presumably hoping to get in before the door shut. I wonder if something like that is happening now with the people coming here from Africa and the Middle East. Some of the rise in immigration that’s occurred over the past year has been caused Ukrainians seeking refuge in this country as a result of Putin’s invasion of their homeland. I’d say that this was something of an anomaly, as it’s the result of warfare in Europe itself while the pattern of migration that bothers the anti-immigration lobby is that of non-Whites from outside Europe. The exceptional circumstances of the war in Ukraine may mean that in subsequent years the level of immigration may well be lower.

The anti-immigration crew have been aware for some time that Brexit hasn’t been the solution to the issue they believed, or they told people. I’ve seen disturbing articles on various right-wing blogs and YouTube channels talking about this, and suggesting that what we need to do is get out of the 1950s United Nations treaty on refugees. The Nat Cons are taking their inspiration and ideology from the American ultra-Conservative right, and there has been a strain in extreme right-wing American thought that’s been critical of the UN for a very long time. There are very conspiracy theories about the United Nations, which see it very much as the beginning of the Satanic One World Communist dictatorship. Other, less bonkers views attack it for supposedly being anti-American and anti-Israel. My guess is that it may not be too long before we see similar attacks on the United Nations appearing on the right in Britain with the purpose of discrediting the Refugee Treaty. Not that this will be such a radical change for some of the papers. When the UN criticises us for the poverty and suffering Tory policies have inflicted on our citizens, papers like the Heil respond with shrill attacks on it for being anti-British. I think we can expect this hostility to increase and become louder and more vitriolic as the Tories and other right-wing parties like Reform try to stir up anti-immigrant feeling.

New Culture Forum Interview with GB News Director on the Truth about the Pakistani Grooming Gangs

This is going to be controversial, but I think this video is important as it exposes the biases and distortions in the official reportage of the Pakistani grooming gangs and the fear of being accused of racism that allowed them to get away with their crimes for decades. I’m very much aware that the New Culture Forum is part of the free market fanatics, the IEA and that GB News is a Conservative media outlet pushing the culture war issues because the Tories don’t really have anything else to use to boost their image. But this is a very, very real issue, and the ingrained refusal to investigate and prosecute these men because of their religion and ethnicity has led to the horrific abuse of 1,500 + extremely vulnerable girls in Rotherham alone. And it also demonstrates how this scandal has its deeper roots in the refusal to tolerate anything that contradicted the multicultural dogma that states that ethnic minorities and immigrants somehow automatically adopt British culture and values when they immigrate to this country. These men didn’t, and the interviewees state that this was partly due to the nature of chain migration itself and the backward culture of the region from which most of the groomers came – the Mirpur region of Pakistan.

The video is part of a new series, ‘Deprogrammed’, being launched by the NCF, Presumably the title means that its against the supposed falsehoods with which we’ve been programmed like robots by the lamestream media. The video features Harrison Pitt, a writer for the European Conservative, interviewing Evan Rigg, a Canadian freelance journalist, and Charlie Peter, a presenter on GB News who produced a documentary on the Pakistani grooming gangs. It begins with Sajid Javid’s 2018 investigation of the gangs. Despite expectations, this turned into a whitewash as the Tories were sensitive about race in the wake of the Windrush scandal. It therefore concluded that the majority of abusers and gang members were White men. The report was originally withheld from publication and it took an internet petition with 180,000 signatures to get it released. In fact, the report on which Javid’s report was based contradicted its findings. It stated that the collection of statistics for ethnicity had been so poor, it was impossible to say which race the majority of offenders was composed of. What evidence there is stated that White men constituted 30 per cent of offenders, and Asians 28 per cent. This was despite Whites constituting 85 per cent of the British population and Asians 8 per cent. By these statistics, Asians are massively overrepresented as groomers and abusers.

Peter’s stated that one effect of his documentary was that it had helped changed the law. The news about the gangs in Rotherham had first been broken a decade ago by Andrew Norfolk, after which more reports from other towns flowed in. However, these reports were mealy-mouthed and heavily censored. More documentation on the ethnic composition of the gangs is needed, along with the imprisonment of their members. Many of those convicted served only light sentences and returned to the same areas in which their victims were living afterwards because of a reluctance to send offenders to Britain’s overstretched and crowded prisons. He supported the launch of Cruella’s National Crime Agency taskforce because local authorities and police forces and had been too mired in political corruption. The problem was that these organisations prioritised community cohesion and multiculturalism over the safety of women and girls. The girls were further regarded by politicians and the media as belonging to the underclass, wild girls whose unsafe lifestyle brought their abuse on themselves. There was the further problem in that it had gone on for decades, but the people who initially talked about it were far right. In fact, they were often ordinary, decent people who were branded far right because they talked about this taboo topic. When patriotic, decent, socially conservative members of the left spoke about it, they were bullied and harassed. Anne Crier was ignored when she spoke out in 2003. Jack Straw was pilloried for complaining about it, and Sarah Champion was similarly removed from Labour’s front bench for the same reason. Peters therefore considered Braverman very brave for taking on the rape gangs. He was struck by her comments that the truth wasn’t racist as something that needed to be said to defend a government policy.

The abused girls were targeted because they were White. This was a result of mass migration, which had produced a very insular and clannish community. The immigrants involved came from the very backward Mirpur and Kashmir regions of Pakistan. It was chain migration operating through first cousin marriage. This prevented these communities from establishing links with the wider community and entrenched the traditional gender power structures that gave men immense power and control over women. It also meant that these abusers were extremely difficult to catch because family members did not want to inform on each other. This occurred at the same time the social solidarity of the wider community was declining due to the economic devastation of local industries and a process of social atomisation. Sexual behaviour became more licentious during the ’90s and Noughties, when it became acceptable to go out of an evening for casual sex. But this was also contrasted with the moral conservatism and judgmental attitudes of the tabloid papers.

The emergence of the Pakistani rape gangs flew in the face of the classical liberal doctrine that held that relentless waves of unwanted migrants would not lead to the destruction of social bonds, and especially the left-wing mantra that ‘diversity is strength’. Peters here contrasts the state of three of the countries with the highest rates of diversity – Liberia, Congo and Papua New Guinea, with very homogenous societies like Denmark, Japan and South Korea. Nevertheless, the assumption is that the more Britain becomes diverse, it can still function like Denmark and the other two nations. It’s assumed new immigrants will assimilate, but assimilation only goes so far. The Canadian journalist remarked that although he comes from a very similar nation, he will never be British. How will people from very different cultures like Liberia do so? Will it be their children or grandchildren who become British? Some migration is needed for countries to remain dynamic. The problem in Rotherham was that it was too much, too quickly and unwanted. And as the new immigrants could join the electorate after a few years, this resulted in the creation of a new electorate without the consent of the old one.

He then discusses the noxious activities and careers of some of those involved in the gangs and the suppression of action against them. One of these ratbags was Maruf Hussein, Rotherham’s Community Cohesion Officer, who refused to accept the reports that 1,500 + girls were being molested. The gangs were also assisted by White female converts to Islam, such as Shifra Ali. Ali set up a bogus taxi hotline which was supposed to supply taxis to take the girls to school. She died in 2009, unfortunately, before she could face justice. After Hussein resigned, he rebranded himself as an anti-racism activist. It has also been alleged that Hussein also launched a failed accusation of racism against a Labour colleague on the council for expressing concerns about the grooming gangs. He was then found working for NHS England as a diversity and inclusion officer. on £49,000 p.a. It is a disgrace that the doctrine of diversity hasn’t been harmed and even been strengthened by it, because it showed how such monstrous crimes could be ignored through censorship and lies. Once again the 2020 report is mentioned for its conclusion that the majority of abusers were White men. It showed that the ‘blob’, the right-wing name for the obstructive civil service and the diversity industry could spin the gangs as a White problem. This is despite the fact that there were 19 trials in which the gangs were composed only of Pakistani men. And while the police may not collect statistics on ethnicity, the names are included in the trial records. Further studies have also shown that Pakistani men dominate this issue. But the blob, Sayeeda Warsi, the Guardian and parts of the government will accuse you of racism if you talk about this.

The conversation then goes back to 2015 and comparison with the way the continental countries such as Germany were able to combat the Syrian rapists in Cologne and other cities. The interviewees make the point that Syria isn’t the same as Mirpur and Kashmir. England also has a particular nervousness when it comes to migration and accusations of racism. Peters then goes back to 1870 and Gladstone’s violent denunciation of the Turks’ atrocities in eastern Europe. His comments, if made now, would result in his being thrown out of every political party except, perhaps, Reform and the SDP. And there is the problem of the ethnic composition of constituencies affecting what their politicians are prepared to say about particular issues. Would Gladstone have made his comments, if his constituency had included a large Turkish population? He mentions the comments Tracey Brabin, the mayor of West Yorkshire, made three weeks ago on the Daily Politics. Brabin dismissed Cruella’s comments about the grooming gangs as ‘dog whistles. This is two years after a teacher in Batley was forced into hiding for showing cartoons of Mohammed in class as part of a lesson on free speech. It’s also just a few weeks after the controversy when an autistic boy scuffed a Quran, and his mother was dragged before the local mosque to beg its congregants’ forgiveness in what is described as a ‘Maoist struggle session’. Present at this kangaroo court was a police inspector urging restraint. Peters saw parallels here with the grooming gangs, especially as Maruf Hussain had also spoken to the police. If Brabin cannot tell the truth about these problems, what else will she cover up?

The video ends with a discussion of what ordinary people can do. They state that there are good resources out there about what people can do if they feel their children are being abused. The NSPCC is one, although they have reservations about them because of the charity’s statement that different communities should not be singled out. They are particularly impressed with Maggie Oliver and her campaign and organisation against the gangs.

Peters is questioned about the response by the working class to the documentary. Did they regard him as a hero? Peters replied by stating that he was only a documentary film-maker and not a hero. The real heroes were the survivors of the abuse, who put their lives at risk to talk to him. He was immensely grateful to them. It was easier talking to them and editing their accounts than talking to politicians as there was no waffle. As for Braverman’s proposed actions, the proof would be in the pudding. He would be very impressed if the offenders were imprisoned and deported. The survivors were cautiously optimistic, and Peters said he would be there to hold the government to account if it failed them.

More on the Pakistani Maniacs Demanding Execution of Blasphemers on Television

A few days ago I posted a piece about a Pakistani TV programme, which featured a panel of violently intolerant religious fanatics ranting about what they feared was a wave of unbelief and blasphemy threatening the country of the pure. Well, that’s one explanation I’ve seen for the country’s name: ‘paki’ – ‘pure’, ‘stan’ country. I’ve also seen another explanation that claimed the ‘Paki’ element is an acronym made up with the country’s various provinces. These men claimed to have seen a report by the Federal Intelligence Agency and the branch of the country’s judiciary or law enforcement tasked with protecting the Pakistani people from blasphemy, that there were 400,000 internet accounts put up by blasphemers. They then went on to complain that despite these numbers, only 119 people had been arrested and of these only 11 were executed. Later on in the programme they claimed that the blasphemous internet accounts had started with only four people, who had been arrested and executed, but the number had mushroomed. This was accompanied with histrionic demonstrations of grief and outrage. One of them wished he had died before he had seen this day. Another wondered if they shouldn’t react to this news by burning down the towns. I hope that’s just hyperbole, otherwise it’s going to kill an awful lot of people and increase any disaffection with Islam. An elderly mullah was seen crying in a corner of the studio. They also went to describe the dreadful acts the blasphemers were committing, claiming that it was all part of a conspiracy to bring down the country and that the blasphemous internet sites were using women to lure men onto them to commit these outrages. I’m not going to describe them, as they are very shocking, far more extreme than the Danish cartoons that provoked such outrage across the Islamic world when they were published.

The ex-Muslims atheists on the net believed that the stories of these blasphemous acts were genuine, and were an expression of real, bitter hatred by alienated young Pakistanis against the country’s dominant religion. But the acts they described are so grotesque, I wondered if they weren’t made up. Years ago I read an account of the furore over the Danish cartoons on one of the Islamophobic sites. After the cartoons had been published in a Danish provincial paper, the Jyllands Aftenposten or whatever it was, a group of five imams went on a tour of the Muslim world to show them to the masses. However, it seems that one of the cartoons they showed had not been published by the paper.

I’ve been told that in that part of the world there’s a culture of embroidering the truth in disputes. It was a problem for the British authorities during the Raj, as both sides would start inventing details to reinforce their side of the argument until it was impossible to tell who was actually in the right. I don’t doubt that there are internet sites in Pakistani posting blasphemous material, but I wonder if the supposed acts they contained weren’t, in actual fact, the products of the nasty, lurid imaginations of those complaining about them.

The ex-Muslims themselves wondered about how many of the 400,000 blasphemers were really non-Muslims. Islam in Pakistan is composed of different sects – Sunni, Shia, Barelvi, Deobandi and so on, some of whose doctrines are seen as blasphemy by the others. So some of what was being denounced as blasphemous by the various fanatics could simply be honestly held beliefs by pious Muslims, who themselves see them as true and respectful expressions and formulations of their religion. Some of the ex-Muslims therefore suggested that the number of real blasphemous internet accounts was therefore half the official number, 200,000. But even if 400,000 is the real figure of atheists attacking Islam on the Pakistani net, it’s a trivial number compared to the country’s population. I think Pakistan has a population of c. 250 million. Which means that the proportion of people posting this material is less than 1/500 millionth of the population. In other words, a vanishingly small number. To outsiders like myself, when put like this the issue seems hardly worth bothering with. But not to these guys, who lined up in the studio to sing a song about how they would cut the heads off the blasphemers and burn them by day and night.

The same week Pakistani television broadcast this fiasco, Muslims in Britain had been celebrating Eid with the Big Iftar, in which they shared their religious meal with their non-Muslim neighbours. The One Show also covered on Muslim, who had dedicated himself to doing good deeds during Ramadan, and had assembled a team of Muslims and non-Muslims to help him. All of which was obviously far more constructive than the Pakistani programme’s demands for mass death. As for its wretched song, I can remember when one of the great Pakistani Sufi musicians came to Britain with his band back around 1991. He performed in Bradford, I think, and the Beeb televised the concert late one evening. I watched some of it, as I was then trying to do a postgraduate degree in British Islam. What came across from the little I saw was the sheer joy of the musicians and the audience. Joy in their religion, joy in the music. No hate at all. Round about the same time there was a documentary about Islam, Living Islam, which attempted to give a positive view of the religion. When it came to Pakistani politics, the presenter admitted that yes, politically the Pakistani electorate did demand more Islam. When the politicians attempted to give it to them, however, they were much less enthusiastic. Looking back, this is a mistakenly optimistic view. But then, despite the continuing controversy over the Satanic Verses, in some ways the ’90s were far more optimistic when it came to race and religion than today. To many people, both Black and White, racism was declining as conditions for Blacks and minorities improved. Another piece of optimism that has vanished in recent years.

Some of the posts I’ve seen about it made the point that the country has bigger issues to worry about than blasphemy. The country is supposedly deteriorating economically, socially and politically. But I wonder if that wasn’t the point. It looks like a diversion, to get ordinary Pakistanis to look away from the country’s real, material problems. Just like the Conservative MP Lee Anderson wants his party to fight on the culture war issues, because Rishi Sunak’s material policies about the economy are terrible and indefensible.

Even so, the programme is still chilling for the hatred it was trying to stir up. Accusations of blasphemy have resulted in rioting, murder and assassination in Pakistan. In one particular insane case, a schoolgirl allegedly murdered her teacher. The teacher herself hadn’t actually blasphemed. The child merely dreamed that she had, and so attacked and killed her. In my previous post about this I worried that this could set off a wave of mass persecution. So were the ex-Muslims, one of whom urged people to post about this and add hashtags copying in the American embassy and British High Commission as it looked like this could lead to serious human rights violations. And there’s the additional problem that this fanaticism could easily spread over here. The rioting between Hindus and Muslims that erupted a few months ago was supposed to have been caused by radical preachers from India and Pakistan.

We really need preachers now to emphasise peace against all the bigots anywhere in the world trying to divide us with hatred.

Mad Official Demands More Arrests for Blasphemy on Pakistan TV

A few days ago the ex-Muslim atheist YouTuber Harris Sultan put up a link to a piece in one of the English language Pakistani magazines. Harris is an Australian of Pakistani heritage and a very bitter critic of Islam. The magazine had approached him for comment about a programme on Pakistani television in which various members of the clergy and officialdom had demanded more arrests to curb a wave of ‘islamophobia’ and blasphemy that was supposedly threatening the country. The official had stated that 400,000 blasphemous comments had been posted online, and the magazine claimed that Pakistan was the 7th most islamophobic country in the world, despite its draconian laws against blasphemy. Insulting the Prophet Mohammed himself carries the death penalty, and insulting the Prophet’s companions is punishable by 10 years to life in prison. The magazine claimed that this meant that Shia Muslims are particularly vulnerable to this charge, as they reject many of the first caliphs.

A friend of mine with a stronger stomach than me told me once that there’s a piece in William S. Burrough’s The Naked Lunch where the cops get arrestomania and go around arresting anyone they can. It looks like the official demanding more arrests for blasphemy has a bad case of it. The very idea that Pakistan is massively islamophobic seems to me to be entirely false. It was set up by Jinna explicitly as an Islamic state, where Muslims could live in accordance with their faith although it remained relatively secular until the country’s dictator, General Zia in the 1970s formed an alliance with the conservative Muslim clergy. It was then that the blasphemy laws, which had been introduced by the Raj to protect all religions, became solely about Islam and increasingly severe. I also think that the Pakistani upper house is composed of Muslim clergy who check whether the legislation passed is sufficiently Islamic. It’s also one of the nations where there is the strongest support for the return of a Muslim caliphate.

Accusations of blasphemy have led to murder, mob attacks and assassination. The laws are frequently abused by people wanting to get rid of their opponents in disputes that have nothing to do with religion. They’ve also led to attacks on Christians and other religious minorities, as shown in the cases of Asia Bibi, who was accused of desecrating a Quran, and a Christian student who was murdered by his classmates because he took a sip from a glass of water he was bringing to a group of girls. There was also the case of a seven year old boy, who was being charged with blasphemy because he urinated in a madrassa, a Muslim religious school.

Historically, Islam was admired by many intellectuals in the west because it didn’t have the history of mass persecution, such as inquisitions and witch hunts, that has marred Christianity. But this official’s complaints about 400,000 blasphemous posts looks like he wanted all that to change.

Sultan’s comments was that if they wanted to deal with anti-Islamic sentiment, they should stop forcing the religion down their children’s throats and abolish the blasphemy laws. I’m not an atheist, and believe that parents have the right to bring children up in their religion. But in my experience, many atheist activists come from oppressively religious backgrounds that have turned them against religion. And when religion comes into politics, then it does seem to lose popularity through its association with controversial or oppressive legislation. I think Christianity in America has lost some of its ground because of the emergence of the religious right and their influence in the Republican Party. A Pew Poll the other year found that Iran, which the magazine article stated also has harsh laws against blasphemy comparable to Pakistan, was no longer a majority Muslim country. People were either turning to other faiths, or abandoning religion altogether. There have also been other reports about the massive, underground spread of Islam in the Arab countries. I’ve no doubt that this is a reaction to the atrocities and horrors committed by ISIS. I therefore think Sultan is absolutely right about the blasphemy laws.

Religion should be a matter of one’s own private conscience, especially as these laws seem to be used as instruments of religious persecution.

Wahan Ke Log: The Indian Bond-Style Spy Film with Invading Martians

Okay, here’s something a bit different for this Easter Day. I was looking through the genre film site, Teleport City, yesterday when I came across a review of the 1968 Indian movie Wahan Ke Log. As well as covering western films, Teleport City also has excellent reviews of Asian genre cinema. Much of this is about the various Hong Kong martial arts epics, but it also deals with other countries like India. I’ve no idea what the title means, but the review was fascinating in what it said about the influence of James Bond on Asian cinema at the time and also how the UFO phenomena had reached Asia and influence popular culture over there, at least in the form of this movie. Apparently the success of the Bond films led to the release of a number of similar flicks in Asia, as countries like India sent their suave, elegantly dressed superspies after nefarious villains intent on world conquest. In this case, it was a UFO invasion from Mars. Among the suspects was an Indian scientist, who has invented a laser gun, which his criminal son has gotten hold of and is using for his evil purposes. And yes, there are song and dance numbers as the hero goes into nightclubs to see the female lead sing while knocking back cocktails. In the end it is revealed that the Martian invasion is a hoax, perpetrated by one of India’s Asian rivals, though the review wouldn’t tell you whether this was Pakistan or China. The only hint they gave as to who was responsible was that it wasn’t Burma.

It’s a long review, and I admit, I did no more than skim it. What interested me is what the film says about the global nature of the UFO phenomenon. It first arose in America in the 1950s and so can appear very much as a western phenomenon even though there have been sightings all over the world. The sceptical UFO magazine, Magonia, used to complain that UFO researchers had a simplistic view of non-western cultures when it came to interpreting UFO encounters. They assumed that witnesses from regions like Africa could not be faking their experiences or mixing it up with material from the global UFO culture because, living in such distant parts of the world they were somehow untouched by western popular culture. That this was not so was shown in one UFO documentary where an African UFO witness wore a Michael Jackson T-shirt.

I’d also assumed that there was little in the way of Science Fiction in India. One of the anthologies of SF stories I read in the ’90s included one Indian short story, but stated that there wasn’t much of it. I read elsewhere that when it came to fantastic cinema, the main genre was the ‘Theologicals’ about the Hindu gods. These satisfy the need for the fantastic and cosmic that in the west is catered to by Science Fiction and Fantasy movies. It certainly seems that the majority of science fiction cinema and television from Asia comes from Japan, although China might be starting to catch up with its television adaptation of the Three Body Problem.. I also found it interesting for what it also showed about the nationalistic tensions in Asian cinema as well. Some of the 1950s SF movies have been seen as metaphors for the Communist threat, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or otherwise informed by Cold War paranoia. One of the clearest examples of this is the B-movie The Angry Red Planet, in which the voice of God appears on people’s radios from Mars denouncing Communism. I think. Wahan Ke Log shows that the theme of invasion from outer space could also express the same national and political fears in Indian cinema of covert foreign plots to take over the country.

Not all Indian SF cinema may be so grim, however. A couple of decades ago our local multiplex had posters up for the Bollywood epics it was also showing as well as the latest Hollywood releases. One of them appeared to be about an alien family with large, high craniums landing and living in India. One of the pictures was of the family on a bike trip, their cycle helmets suitably shaped to cover their peculiar noggins. It was only when thinking about it a little later that it occurred to me that this could be India’s answer to the Coneheads. There’s a whole world of SF and space related cinema out there, which takes themes and tropes from the west and adds its own unique experience and views, as countries around the world industrialise and start to explore the High Frontier for themselves.

To read the Teleport City’s review of the film, go to: https://teleport-city.com/2019/08/28/wahan-ke-log/

GB News’ Mark Steyn Coming Very Close to Pushing Fascist Conspiracy Theories about Covid Vaccine

GB News, the self-proclaimed alternative to the ‘wet, woke BBC’, is in this fortnight’s Private Eye. The broadcaster apparently has overtaken Sky News in ratings, and has taken to pushing stupid, and potentially dangerous conspiracy theories. These include myths that the vaccine doesn’t work, or is responsible for deaths, and that there’s no need for the lockdown. Pretty much staples of the wider right-wing anti-vaxxer fringe. But one of these conspiracy theories comes very close to fascism. Mark Steyn has apparently told his viewers that the coronavirus vaccine is the cause of the falling birthrate in the west of the ‘Aryans’, who built civilisation. Firstly, as the 19th century linguist, who used the term ‘Aryan’ for what are now termed the Indo-European languages, George Muller, it’s a linguist not racial term. A dark-skinned Indian, who speaks Hini or one of the other languages descended from Sanskrit, or an Urdu-speaking Pakistani can both be fairly described as Aryans, because their languages are derived from that introduced by the Aryans, who invaded Indian c. 3000 BC. But both would be targeted by the Nazis over here because of their race. Muller stated quite clearly that conflating Aryan with race was dangerous, and it’s a pity more people didn’t listen to him otherwise the carnage of the Third Reich might have been avoided.

He’s right that the birthrates in the developed west are falling along with the sperm count of western men. This is alarming, as there have been predictions by respectable magazines and newspapers that if it continues, by 2050 half of western men will be considered clinically infertile. No-one really knows the cause of this, but it’s been suggested since the 1990s that a type of plastic, phthallates, may be responsible. Other causes are probably the industrial pollution responsible for the reproductive deformities in amphibians, which Alex Jones notoriously declared were ‘turning the frickin’ frogs gay’. These chemicals are believed to mimic female hormones, hence their damage to those animals. I’ve also seen claims that it’s all due to female hormones from the reproductive pill getting into the biosphere, but I haven’t seen any scientist make this claim. In my opinion, it comes from that part of the right which is anti-feminist and so pro-life as to condemn contraception as well as abortion. I also got the impression that all western men were affected, including Blacks and Asians, and not just Whites.

Steyn’s claims resemble the conspiracy theories that were going around the Black communities in America and possibly apartheid South Africa back in the 90s. These claimed that the government was putting chemicals in Coca-Cola to sterilise young Black men. That was totally wrong, though it was understandable given the persecution of Blacks in both those countries. Steyn’s is a first-world, White version of this. It comes very close to all the stupid and murderous conspiracy theories about the machinations of the Jews to enslave and destroy the White race, although as far as I know Steyn isn’t an anti-Semite.

He is, however, an Islamophobe. About a decade ago he was a partner with late Reaganite bloviator Rush Limbaugh and his radio station out in New Hampshire. Much of the content Steyn put out on his blogs and columns on the internet were attacks on Islam, including some of the weirder rulings made by Iran’s late Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini. He was one of those pushing the ‘Eurabia’ fear. This holds that Muslim birthrates are outstripping those of indigenous European Whites to such an extent that they will become the dominant race and religion and impose sharia law. A friend of mine told me he did some calculations, and that’s simply not going to happen. I don’t doubt that the Muslim population will expand immensely in the next decades, and this will present serious problems if the radicals and Islamists extend their influence over these communities, but it won’t lead to their population overtaking everyone else’s.

Steyn also tried to warn or scare people with the example of Feyenoord in the Netherlands. This is a majority Muslim town where some decades ago the Muslim dominated city council publicly invited the non-Muslim population to convert. I don’t know, but I think their attitude would be unremarkable, perhaps even ordinary in very pious, hardline Muslim countries like Pakistan, where non-Muslims can come under very intense pressure to convert. But obviously in the context of the non-Muslim, secular west, where religion is considered a matter for the individual’s private conscience, it’s totally unacceptable. The problem is, I don’t know how common such political moves by Muslim-controlled local authorities are. As far as I know, it only happened in Feyenoord, although I’m sure that non-Muslims living in solidly Muslim areas are under pressure to conform to their standards of behaviour.

Away from Steyn, the article describes how GB News, like Fox over in the US, threw in their lot with Donald Trump, talking him as US president until it became the ‘MAGA channel’. Their predictions of Trump’s eminent suitability for the Oval Office was definitely born out by the Orange Buffoons massive greed, incompetence and disastrous policies towards blue collar workers – more attacks on their rights, further decimation of their welfare provisions to enrich Trump’s friends and donors, and more outsourcing. As well as attempts to muzzle federal climate and environmental scientists for the benefit of the oil industry. And I could go on.

As for GB News’ attitudes over here, it’s solidly behind Farage and Brexit and resolutely against the welfare state and the NHS. If you’re a member of the working class, GB News is not your friend. But the stupid conspiracy theories about the coronavirus vaccine threaten to do real harm. We’ve already seen instances where people have refused the vaccine, then caught the virus and died. And Steyn’s story about birthrates and ‘Aryans’ threatens to encourage real Nazis and Fascists, who’ll target not just Muslims but Jews.

Leaked Report Reveals Prevent Funding Used for Islamist Groups, and More Focussed on Tackling White Fascism

This obviously isn’t something you want to hear, but it needs to be recognised and the problem tackled properly. A few days ago the Shawcross Report into the operation of the Prevent programme was leaked to the press. The Prevent programme was the scheme launched by Blair as part of the ‘War on Terror’. It was set up to identify and deradicalize people, like schoolchildren, who were being drawn into Islamist terrorism. The report has been repeatedly delayed from fears that some of the individuals discussed in it would sue. It found that instead of the money being used to deradicalize people, it was instead being used by Islamist groups to fund their activities and propaganda. This included one group, who called on Muslim soldiers in the British army to disobey orders. Which is mutiny. Furthermore, the programme was more focussed on identifying and punishing White nationalists in contrast to the other anti-terrorism organisations. Of course, the report was immediately denounced as ‘harmful to community cohesion’ and racist and islamophobic.

Unfortunately, I am not remotely surprised. Private Eye a long time ago quoted a passage from Ed Hussein’s book, The Islamist, in which he described watching a long line of Muslim clergy and community leaders entering No. 10 to reassure Blair that they were all moderates and were doing their bit to tackle extremism in their communities. And he knew that every one of them was lying, and that they were all Islamist radicals. A friend of mine used to help teach Islam at university. One year his university arranged to host an interfaith conference between Christians and Muslims. He told me that the Muslim delegates were all jihadis. As for the misplaced focus on White fascism, I think this is a result of repeated criticisms from the Muslim community. Before the BNP finally collapsed, whenever the subject of tackling Muslim radical organisations was raised someone from one of the main Muslim organisations would indignantly retort that this was racist and islamophobic, and that they should ban the BNP instead. The Prevent programme has come under repeated attack from Muslims for supposedly being racist and Islamophobic. And whenever Muslim bigotry is exposed, as in the 2007 Channel 4 programme, Undercover Mosque, there are inevitably the same defensive claims about harming community cohesion. This is despite the fact that community cohesion was harmed the moment someone took the decision to invite the preachers of hate in. Simon Webb, who has very far right opinions himself, stated in one of his videos that the focus on tackling White extremists rather than Muslim was an attempt to mislead the public into believing that there were more of them and they were a bigger problem than the Islamists. Even allowing for Webb’s own views, I think he has a point. White fascists have used violence and terrorism. In the 1960s they bombed a couple of synagogues in London. Many of us still remember the mass violence between far right football hooligans and Black and Asian youths in the 70s and 80s, and the racist murder of Black kids has inspired pop songs attacking the hate and violence like ‘Down in the Subway’. In the 90s there was a bombing campaign by a member of the National Socialist party against Blacks, gays and Asians, in which nail bombs were planted in three pubs. People are very aware of the threat from White racial terrorists. Targeting these groups is also easier because it will have greater support from the left from the kind of people, who would suspect that a programme targeting Black or Asian terrorists is persecuting them unfairly. The police and local authorities, who refused to tackle the Pakistani grooming gangs in Rotherham and elsewhere did so because they didn’t want to start riots. I think the same attitude is behind the skewed focus in the Prevent programme. I think there is a reluctance amongst the political class to tackle ethnic minority criminality and extremism because of memories of the race riots of the 60s, 1981/2, and Oldham more recently, and a determination to prove Enoch Powell wrong in his lurid predictions of racial violence in the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.

Islamism is a real danger, but the proportion of people who hold Islamist views are trivially small. Only about five per cent of the Muslim population, according to the polls, want to be governed by shariah law. There are far greater numbers who support British democracy and values, albeit often moderated. This is why the Lotus Eaters, in order to show that the Muslim community rejects British traditional values, concentrated on single issues like Muslim disapproval of homosexuality and singing the national anthem. There is genuine opposition to Islamism and the preachers of hate from other parts of the Muslim community here in Britain. Back in the ’80s and ’90s Muslims organised their own demonstrations against the protests and hateful preaching of the extremists demanding the death of Salman Rushdie. Ed Hussein in his recent book states that his fathers’ generation came to Britain because they believed in our country and its values. I’ve heard other Muslims say that their parents came here to enjoy the freedom and opportunities they were denied in their own country. Mahyar Tousi, a true-blue Tory Brexiteer, said something similar in a recent video of his on the channel migrants. He stated that second and third generation British Blacks and Asians were against further immigration, not because they were traitors to their own kind, but because their parents and grandparents had come to this country to share and support its values and were concerned that later migrants did not share these. Tousi’s a libertarian Tory, who’d sell off the health service if he could, but he does have a point. Some of the Muslims in Hussein’s recent book stated that much of the violence and criminality their communities now suffered from came from recent migrants, like asylum seekers from war-torn parts of the world, who could not adapt to peace nor fully accept that they were not under threat from the state. One of the issues connected with immigration identified by one genuinely moderate imam, writing in the Financial Times in the ’90s, was that the shortage of home-grown Muslim clergy meant that bigoted preachers from Pakistan were being allowed in to rectify this shortage.

We really need to tackle the problem of Muslim radicalisation properly and squarely, without listening to reassuring blandishments and assurances of peace and cooperation from those who don’t believe remotely in it. And we can do so by strengthening and listening to genuinely moderate, liberal Muslims voices and supporting their protests and initiatives against such hate.

Simon Webb’s Speech to the Traditional Britain Group: A Critique

One of the great commenters on this blog asked me the other day if I’d watched Simon Webb’s speech to the Traditional Britain Group, which has been posted up on YouTube. Webb is the man behind History Debunked, in which he criticises, refutes and comments on various historical myths and distortions. Most of these are against Black history, as well as racial politics. Occasionally he also presents his opinions on gay and gender issues. Like other YouTubers and internet commenters, you need to use your own discretion when watching his material. Sometimes, when he cites his sources, he’s right. At other times he’s more probably wrong. As much of his material is against mass immigration, particularly Black and Asian, and he believes that there is a racial hierarchy when it comes to intelligence, there’s some discussion of the man’s political orientation. He’s definitely right-wing, reading the Torygraph and attacking Labour as ‘high spending’. But it’s a question of how right-wing. Some people have suggested he’s English Democrat or supports a similar extreme right fringe party.

The other day he gave a speech at the Traditional Britain Group, which is a particularly nasty set of rightists within the Conservative party. There was a scandal a few years ago, you’ll recall, when Jacob Rees-Mogg turned up at one of their dinners. Mogg claimed he didn’t know how far right they were, but was shown to be somewhat economical with the actualite when someone showed that he’d actually been warned against associating with them. They are fervently against non-White immigration and some of them have a dubious interest in the Nazis and the Third Reich. I’ve also been told that their members include real Nazis and eugenicists, which is all too credible. They also want to privatise the NHS. I found this out after finding myself looking at their message board a few years ago. They were talking about how they needed to privatise the health service, but it would have to be done gradually and covertly because at the moment the masses were too much in favour of it. Which has been Tory policy for decades.

Webb’s speech is about half and hour long, and takes in slavery, White English identity and how Blacks have taken ownership of the subject so that it’s now part of theirs, White guilt over it and the industrial revolution and how White Brits are being made to feel ashamed of imperialism. He also blamed Tony Blair for mass immigration and claimed that it was due to this that the health service was collapsing.

The British Empire

He started off by saying that when he was young, everyone believed that the British Empire was a good thing and that we had brought civilisation to Africa and other parts of the world. I don’t doubt this. He’s older than me, and so I can believe that the received view of the Empire in his time was largely positive. Even the Labour party broadly supported imperialism. Its official stance was that Britain held these countries in trust until they were mature enough for self-government. This has changed, and there is a general feeling, certainly on the left, that it’s something we should be ashamed of. But this has come from historians and activists discussing and revealing the negative aspects of colonialism, such as the genocide and displacement of indigenous peoples, enslavement, forced labour and massacres. The end of empires tend to be particularly bloody, as shown in the various nationalist wars that ended the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and the French possession of Algeria. Britain fought similar bloody wars and committed atrocities to defend its empire, as shown in the massive overreaction in Kenya to the Mao Mao rebellion. Jeremy Black, in his history of the British Empire, also argues that support for the empire fell away from the 1970s onwards as British youth became far more interested in America. I think the automatic condemnation of British imperialism is wrong and one-sided. It’s also somewhat hypocritical, as the same people condemning the British Empire don’t condemn other brutal imperial regimes like the Ottomans. It’s also being used by various post-colonial regimes to shift attention and blame for their own failings. But all this doesn’t change the fact that some horrific things were done during the Empire, which politicians and historians have to deal with. Hence the shame, although in my view there should be a space for a middle position which condemns the atrocities and celebrates the positive.

Britain and Slavery

He then talks about how slavery is now identified solely with Black transatlantic servitude. But he argues that the White English can also claim slavery as part of their identity. He talks of the first mention of the English in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, when pope Gregory the Great saw some English children for sale in the slave market in Rome. Asking who such beautiful children were, he was told they were Angles. At which Gregory punned, ‘Non Anglii, sed angeli’ – ‘Not Angles but angels’. At the time of the Domesday Book 10 per cent of the English population were slaves. And the mob that tore down Colston’s statue in Bristol were unaware that the city had been exported English slaves over a millennium before. These were shipped to the Viking colonies in Ireland – Dublin, Wexford and other towns – from whence they were then trafficked internationally. Slavery existed long before Black transatlantic slavery. The first record we have of it is from 4000 years ago in the form of document from the Middle East recording the sale of slaves and pieces of land. While they weren’t aware of transatlantic slavery at school, they knew slavery existed through studying the Bible. The story of Joseph and his brothers, and the Israelites in Egypt. But slavery has now become identified exclusively with Black slavery and is part of the Black identity. It’s because we’re supposed to feel guilty about slavery and feel sorry for Blacks that Black people over overrepresented in adverts, on television dramas and even historical epics, such as the show about the Tudors where half the actors were Black.

Webb is right about slavery existing from ancient times. There are indeed documents from the ancient near eastern city of Mari in Mesopotamia recording the sale of slaves along with land and other property, as I’ve blogged about here. One of the problems the abolitionists faced was that slavery existed right across the world, and so their opponents argued that it was natural institution. They therefore also claimed that it was consequently unfair and disastrous for the government to abolish it in the British empire. He’s right about Pope Gregory and the English slaves, although the word ‘Angli’ refers to the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that settled and colonised England with the Saxons and Jutes after the fall of the Roman Empire. Angles in Anglo-Saxon were Englas, hence Engla-land – England, land of the Angles, and Englisc, English. Bristol did indeed export English slave to Ireland. Archbishop Wulfstan preached against it in the 11th century. We were still doing so in 1140, when visiting clergy from France were warned against going for dinner aboard the Irish ships in the harbour. These would lure people aboard with such promises, then slip anchor and take them to Ireland. The Irish Vikings also imported Black slaves. One chronicle reports the appearance of a consignment of blamenn, blue or black men in Old Norse, in Dublin. David Olasuga has also claimed that they imported 200 Blacks into Cumbria. Bristol’s export of White English slaves is mentioned in a display about it in the city’s M Shed Museum, which also contains the statue of Edward Colston. I do agree with Webb that there is a problem with popular attitudes towards slavery. Its presentation is one-sided, so that I don’t think many people are aware of it and its horrors outside the British Empire, nor how White Europeans were also enslaved by the Muslim Barbary pirates. I very strongly believe that this needs to be corrected.

Black Overrepresentation on TV

I don’t think it’s guilt over slavery alone that’s responsible for the large number of Black actors being cast on television, particularly the adverts. I think this is probably also due to commercial marketing, the need to appeal to international audiences and attempts to integrate Blacks by providing images of multiracial Britain. Many adverts are made for an international audience, and I think the use of Blacks has become a sort of visual shorthand for showing that the company commissioning the advert is a nice, anti-racist organisation, keen to sell to people of different colours across the world without prejudice. At home, it’s part of the promotion of diversity. Blacks are, or are perceived, as acutely alienated and persecuted, and so in order to combat racism the media has been keen to include them and present positive images of Black life and achievement. There are organisations dedicated to this task, such as the Creative Diversity Network, as well as systems that grade companies according to how they invest in multicultural enterprises, such as television and programmes with suitably racially diverse casts. Webb has himself talked about this. He’s also stated that Blacks are disproportionately represented on television, constituting only 6 per cent of the population but a very large proportion of actors in TV programmes and adverts. This might simply be because other, larger ethnic groups, such as Asians, aren’t so concerned with entering the entertainment industry and so aren’t represent to the same extent. Hence, Blacks sort of stand in for people of colour as a whole. As for adverts, I’ve also wondered if some of this might be purely commercial – a concern to sale to an emergent, affluent, Black market, perhaps. It also struck me that it might also be a make work programme. As I understand it, there are too many drama graduates for too few roles. This is particularly going to hit Blacks and other ethnic minorities because Britain at the moment is still a White majority country. There have consequently been demands for colour blind casting, as in Armando Iannucci’s recent film version of Oliver Twist. A year or so ago one Black actor announced that there should be more roles for Blacks or else they would go to America. As for the casting of a Black woman as Anne Boleyn, this seems to follow the theatre, where colour blind casting has existed for years. I think it also follows the tacit demand to create an image of the British past that conforms to modern multicultural society rather than how it really was. And some of it, I think, just comes from the feeling that as modern Blacks are as British as their White compatriots, so they should not be excluded from appearing as historical characters who were White. I think these considerations are just as likely, or more likely, to be the causes of the disproportionate number of Blacks appearing on camera than simply pity for them as the victims of slavery.

Blair Not Responsible for Mass Immigration

Now we come to his assertion that Blair was responsible for mass immigration. When he made this declaration, there were shouts, including one of ‘traitor’. I don’t believe that Blair was responsible for it, at least, not in the sense he means. The belief that he was, which is now widespread on the anti-immigrant right, comes from a single civil servant. This official claimed that Blair did so in order to change the ethnic composition of Britain and undermine the Tories. But did he really? This comes from a single individual, and without further corroboration, you can’t be sure. In fact Blair seems to have tried to cut down on immigration, particularly that of non-Whites. In order to dissuade people from coming here, he stopped immigrants from being able to apply for welfare benefits. The food banks now catering to native Brits were originally set up to feed those immigrants, who were no longer eligible for state aid. I also recall David Blunkett stating that they were going to cut down on immigration. The Guardian also accused Blair of racism over immigration. He had cut down on non-White immigration from outside Europe, while allowing White immigration from the EU and its new members in eastern Europe. The right had also been concerned about rising Black and Asian immigration for decades, and in the 1980s Tory papers like the Depress were publishing articles about unassimilable ethnic minorities. This started before Blair, and I don’t think he was deliberately responsible for it.

But I believe he was responsible for it in the sense that many of the migrants come from the countries Blair, Bush, Obama and Sarco destroyed or helped to destroy in the Middle East, such as Libya, Iraq and Syria. Blair had made some kind of deal with Colonel Gaddafy to keep migrants from further south in Libya, rather than crossing the Mediterranean to Europe. This was destroyed when Gaddafy’s regime was overthrown by Islamists. The result has been the enslavement of Black African migrants, and renewed waves of refugees from North Africa fleeing the country’s collapse.

He also stated that the industrial revolution, which was something else that was traditionally a source of pride, is now considered a cause for shame instead. Britain had been its birthplace and given its innovations to the rest of the world. However, we are now expected to be ashamed of it through its connection to slavery. The cotton woven in the Lancashire mills came from the American slave south, while sugar came from the slave colonies of the Caribbean. We’re also supposed to be ashamed of it because it’s the cause of climate change, for which we should pay reparations.

The Industrial Revolution and Climate Change

Okay, I’ve come across the claim that the industrial revolution was financed by profits from the slave trade and that it was based on the processing of slave produced goods. However, this is slightly different from condemning the industrial revolution as a whole. You can lament the fact that slavery was a part of this industrialisation, while celebrating the immense social, technological and industrial progress itself. After all, Marx states in the Communist Manifesto that it has rescued western society from rural idiocy. The demand that Britain should feel ashamed about the industrial revolution because of climate change comes from Greta Thunberg. It is, in my view, monumentally stupid and actually shows an ignorance of history. It’s based on an idealisation of pre-technological societies and an idealisation of rural communities. It’s a product of European romanticism, mixed with contemporary fears for the future of the planet. But the agrarian past was no rural idyll. People in the agricultural societies before the urbanisation of the 19th century had very utilitarian attitudes to the environment. It was a source of resources that could be used and exploited. The nostalgia for an idealised rural past came with the new generation of urban dwellers, who missed what they and their parents had enjoyed in the countryside. And rural life could be extremely hard. If you read economic histories of the Middle Ages and early modern period, famine is an ever present threat. It still was in the 19th century. The Irish potato famine is the probably the best known example in Ireland and Britain, but there were other instances of poverty, destitution and starvation across the UK and Europe. Industrialisation has allowed a far greater concentration of people to live than would have been possible under subsistence agriculture. Yes, I’m aware that overpopulation is a problem, that industrial pollution is harming the environment and contributing to the alarming declining in animal and plant species. But technological and science hopefully offer solutions to these problems as well. And I really don’t want to go back to a subsistence economy in which communities can be devastated by crop failure.

The call for climate reparations, I think, comes from Ed Miliband, and in my view it shows how out of touch and naive he is. I have no problem the Developed World giving aid to some of those countries threatened by climate change, such as the Pacific islands which are threatened with flooding due to the rise in sea levels. But some countries, I believe, are perfectly capable of doing so without western help. One of these is China, which also contributes massively to carbon emissions and which I believe has also called for the payment of climate reparations. China is an emerging economic superpower, and I see no reason why the west should pay for something that it’s doing and has the ability to tackle. I am also very sceptical whether such monies would be used for the purposes they’re donated. Corruption is a massive problem in the Developing World, and various nations have run scams to part First World donors and aid agencies from their money. When I was at the Empire and Commonwealth Museum one of these was a scheme for a hydroelectric dam in Pakistan. The Pakistani government was calling for western aid to finance the project. Britain refused, sensing a scam, for which we were criticised. Other countries happily gave millions, but the dam was never built. All a fraud. I suspect if climate reparations were paid, something similar would also happen with the aid money disappearing into kleptocrats’ pockets. There’s also the problem of where the tax burden for the payment of these reparations would fall. It probably wouldn’t be the rich, who have enjoyed generous tax cuts, but the British working class through indirect taxes. In short, it seems to me to be a colossally naive idea.

But these ideas don’t seem to be widespread. When he announced them, there were shouts from the audience to which Webb responded that it was coming, and they should wait a few years. Perhaps it will, but I’ve seen no enthusiasm or even much mention of them so far. They were mentioned during the COP 27 meeting, and that’s it. Thunberg’s still around, but after all these years I think she’s somewhat passe. At the moment I don’t think these ideas are issues.

Mass Immigration Not the Cause of NHS Crisis

Now let’s examine his statement that it’s due to immigration that the NHS is in the state it’s in. This is, quite simply, wrong. He correctly states that while Britain’s population has grown – London’s has nearly doubled and Leicester’s grown by 30 per cent – there has been no similar provision of medical services. No new hospitals have been built. As a result, where once you could simply walk into your doctor’s and expect to be seen, now you have to book an appointment. And when it comes to hospitals, it’s all the fault of immigrants. He talks about a specific hospital in London, and how the last time he was in that area, he was the only White Brit in the queue. This was because immigrants don’t have GPs, and so go to the hospital for every problem. We also have the problem of sick and disabled people from the developing world coming to the country for the better services we offer. A woman from the Sudan with a special needs child will therefore come here so that her child can have the treatment it wouldn’t get in the Sudan.

I dare say some of this analysis is correct. Britain’s population has grown largely due to immigration. One statistic released by a right-wing group said that immigration was responsible for 80 per cent of population growth. It’s probably correct, as Chambers Cyclopedia stated in its 1987 edition that British birthrates were falling and that it was immigration that was behind the rise in the UK population. I don’t know London at all, and I dare say that many of the immigrants there may well not have had doctors. I can also quite believe that some immigrants do come here for our medical care. There was a case a few weeks ago of a Nigerian woman, who got on a flight to London specifically so that she could have her children in a British hospital. I think this was a case of simple health tourism, which has gone on for years, rather than immigration.

But this overlooks the fact that the problems of the NHS has been down to successive Thatcherite regimes cutting state medical care in Britain all under the pretext of making savings and not raising taxes. Thatcher closed hospital wards. So did Tony Blair, when he wasn’t launching his PFI initiative. This was supposed to build more hospitals, but led to older hospitals being closed and any new hospitals built were smaller, fewer and more expensive. Cameron started off campaigning against hospital closures, and then, once he got his backside in No. 10, carried on with exactly the same policy. Boris Johnson claimed that he was going to build forty hospitals, which was, like nearly everything else the obese buffoon uttered, a flat lie. And Tweezer, Truss and Sunak are doing the same. Doctors surgeries have also suffered. Many of them have been sold off to private chains, which have maximised profits by closing down those surgeries that aren’t profitable. The result is that people have been and are being left without doctors. If you want an explanation why the NHS is in the state it is, blame Thatcher and her heirs, not immigrants.

Conclusion

While Webb has a point about the social and political manipulation of historical issues like the slave trade and the British Empire, these aren’t the reasons for the greater appearance of Black actors and presenters on television. Blair wasn’t responsible for mass immigration, and it’s underfunding and privatisation, not immigration, that’s responsible for the deplorable state of the health service. But he’s speaking to the wrong people there anyway, as the TBG would like to privatise it.

I am not saying it is wrong to discuss these issues, but it is wrong to support a bunch of Nazis like the TBG, who will exploit them to recreate all the social inequality, poverty and deprivation of pre-modern Britain.

Does Sargon Really Think That Only Whites Can Be ‘Far Right’?

I haven’t criticised Sargon of Gasbag, otherwise known as Carl Benjamin, the man who broke UKIP, for a little while, so I’m doing so, now that the opportunity has presented itself. And it definitely has! Like Simon Webb of History Debunked, Sargon and the Lotus Eaters decided to put up a video about the Hindu-Muslim riots in Leicester. The title claimed that the ‘right’ had started it. Which the right definitely has, but not in the sense Sargon thought. East Leicester’s MP, Claudia Webbe, had tried to calm things down with a message to the people of Leicester that it was a great multicultural city where traditionally different peoples had lived peacefully together. Sargon obviously couldn’t resist sneering at that, now that the peace and harmony had been broken. But I understand from the great commenters on this blog that, whether relations between Hindus and Muslims are like now, this was certainly true in the past. But Sargon really showed his ignorance when he sneered at something else Webbe said. Webbe said that the hate and violence was caused by far-right influences from outside. To Sargon and his viewers, this meant that Webbe believed that the tension was being stirred up by White supremacists.

Except Webbe didn’t say that. She said, ‘far-right’. Various television news reports on the riots by the Indian news agencies and British broadcasters like GB News have suggested that the violence was provoked by Hindu far right extremists supporting Modi and his militant Hindu nationalism on the one hand and militant Muslim Pakistanis on the other. Modi’s BJP and its concept of Hindutva, Hindu Nationalism, is considered far right and a form of fascism. I’ve seen it mentioned in a recent textbook on fascism as an example of the mystical trend in fascism. The same textbook also included Marcus Garvey and his Negro Improvement Association because when Garvey was in New York, he and his organisation used to give each other military ranks and hold paramilitary style rallies, very much like Hitler and Mussolini. In fact, Garvey said in an interview that he taught it to those two dictators. He didn’t, but it shows a certain similarity in attitude to them.

Sargon stated in his video that Webbe is now an independent after she was thrown out of Labour party after being convicted of threatening to throw acid in the face of a love rival. It’s a disgusting crime, and a pity Webbe did this. She was a member of the Corbynite left, and the Labour party needs MPs like her who stand up for the working class against neoliberalism. Despite her crime, she’s not stupid. My guess is that Webbe knows very well that other nations and races have their own far right. And so, when she talks about the far right causing the tension and violence in Leicester, she’s talking about Hindutva nationalists and Islamists. She isn’t talking about the NF, BNP, National Action or whoever.

Sargon’s sneer about her assessment of the situation, which is entirely accurate, shows he’s not as clever as he thinks he is.

Or it could be that he knows perfectly well that Webbe did not mean White fascists, but has carried on with the smear because he knows it’ll stick with his viewers, who won’t know any better.

Which is really nasty and cynical. And worthy of a true Tory like Truss or Rees-Mogg.

Asian News Agencies Now Covering Pakistani vs. Hindu Rioting in Leicester

And the Indian government is getting involved as well. A few days ago, Simon Webb of HIstory Debunked put up a piece about the ongoing riots in Leicester between Pakistanis and Hindus. When he blogged about it the rioting had been going on for 13 days and, although covered in the local press, had received scant coverage on the Beeb or the national news. Webb considered that this was because the rioting didn’t fit the narrative that only Whites can be racist. He also claimed that the police officers sent to quell the riots weren’t British because they had Asian names.

Now the Indian news channels are covering the riots. There have been reports by The Quint, the Hindu Times and WION, frequently using the same footage. According to them the riots started on the 28th of last month (August) when a fight broke out after a Pakistan versus India cricket game. Three men were arrested. The fighting broke out again this weekend as Muslims attacked Hindus due to a rumour that a mosque had been desecrated. The rumour was completely untrue, but it didn’t stop the Muslims from seeking revenge. An orange flag was videoed being torn down near a temple. According to the Muslims, this rioting was started by Hindus marching through Muslim areas chanting ‘Jai shri ram’. The Indian High Commissioner has sent the government a strongly worded message condemning the attacks on Hindus and demanding that the British government do everything possible to protect them.

Claudia Webbe, the local Labour MP, has written a message to the city’s people stating that the city is a wonderful example of diversity, and the way different peoples can live together peacefully. She urges people to be calm and not go out and so protect their community. This praiseworthy message has naturally drawn sneers from Paul Joseph Watson. As for the ethnicity of the police at the rioting, the videos show a number of White cops. So, the policing of the riots has definitely not been given over to foreigners. And the foreigners Webb mentioned were likely to be British Asians, whose families could well have been here for three generations or more.

I do believe that Webb has a point when he talks about the riots not being covered because of ethnic minority racial sensitivities. My own experience has been that Black and Asian anti-racist activists do not like crimes by ethnic minorities being reported because they see it as promoting prejudice against them. Hence when the Beeb did start covering the riots, they merely mentioned that it was by gangs of ‘youths’. I suspect another reason may have been to prevent the violence spreading if there was a danger that other Asian communities would also begin to divide and follow suit.

But it also seems to me that the rioting also corroborates a danger to social cohesion caused by the demographic decline of Whites, suggested by Thomas Sowell. Sowell, a Black Conservative, believes that America is in danger of balkanisation. White culture is currently the glue that holds America together. As Whites decline as a percentage of the American population and White culture is challenged by other groups, so there is a danger that America will become nothing more than a collection of different races and ethnicities competing against each other. The decline of White America will therefore result in more ethnic violence as these peoples directly confront and come into conflict with each other. There is some low-level violence between ethnic minorities already. For example, the attacks on Jews that occurred at Christmas weren’t done by White anti-Semites, but by members of Black Israelite groups. These believe that only Black Americans descended from slaves are the authentic Jews and despise White Jews as ‘Khazars’. See the section on the Black Hebrew Israelites in Donna Kossey’s 1995 Kooks: A Guide to the Outer Limits of Human Belief, published by Feral House for more information. In Britain I remember there being rioting between Blacks and Asians in Birmingham in the 1980s.

I think Sowell’s got a point about balkanisation, which is why I strongly believe that ethnic racism needs to be tackled as well as White, regardless of opposition from Black politicos like Diane Abbott.