Polly Toynbee asks what being ‘European’ means…..

The reason so many hurl themselves recklessly at our rocky southern shores is because we are a haven of civilisation, where peace and law prevail, human rights are mostly observed, mercy is valued and murder punished.

Europe may lose that reputation if it becomes primarily a fortress, ignoring the age-old humanitarian lore of the sea that long predates human rights laws.

She seems to have no idea that those immigrants, coming in such vast numbers, and she of course doesn’t say when the tap should be turned off, will destroy what they value…..not just that ‘reputation’ but Europe’s very values and its ability to bring those values into being that created that reputation.

On Today (08:17) they are talking about one billion people in Africa now, and the likely prospect of rapid growth to 2 billion….and so many of them wanting to come here….things will get worse.

Such numbers will destroy Europe in its present democratic, liberal state that provides security, stability and welfare…none of which will be possible as vast numbers of people force their way into Europe and fail to integrate and achieve their dreams.

If Europe is that helicopter it can only rescue so many people, too many people loaded on board will bring the helicopter down.

The Today programme in BBC Radio 4 excels itself each morning, launching attack after attack on the Conservatives. In essence it is reduced to an echo chamber for Labour talking points. I listened earlier to the BBC talk up Miliband’s ludicrous assertion that David Cameron is “partly” to blame for the masses exiting from Libya to European shores. The sneering logic is that because Cameron played a role in removing Ghadaffi then he is responsible for people smuggling in North Africa. On that basis, given that Labour presided over the invasions that led to chaos in Afghanistan and Iraq, can we reasonable assert that they are “partly” responsible for the deaths of millions? Can’t wait for the BBC to bring up this point…

The other point is that not all illegal immigrants (or “migrants” as the BBC chooses to call them) departing Libyan shores HAIL from Libya.  In fact it is documented that the come from a range of African countries. So why does the BBC never ask what the African Union is doing about this unfolding drama?

On time and for your completion. Detail BBC bias here please!

77% of the British population think that immigration is too high and should be controlled and reduced.

A small liberal, metropolitan elite think otherwise and are intent on importing as many immigrants as possible regardless of the consequences….and they are ready to denounce you as racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic in order to try and silence you and any criticism of them that you may have.

The pro-immigration lobby, of which the BBC is a prominent and powerful member, is fanatical and reckless in its abandonment of all reason as it presses for completely open borders to allow in unlimited numbers of people who have no loyalty to this country, no idea of its laws, its culture, its norms, and often have no intention of adhering to those anyway.

It is a quite extraordinary example of people who allow their ideology to over-rule common sense and a total and deliberate failure to address the issues that such a policy might result in, ultimately the total breakdown of the society this mass influx of immigrants profess they want to join and, we are told, will ‘improve’.

It was known that the EU was intent on importing millions of Africans into Europe and now with wars in the Middle East the UN is trying to force millions more upon us…

The UN’s special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants has said wealthy countries should agree to accept one million Syrian refugees over the next five years to help end the series of boat disasters.

Not sure millions of Muslims entering Europe would be good for social cohesion and stability.

The Times on Monday told us that 25% of Britons will be from an ethnic minority by 2051, double what the level is now….driven of course by immigration…the population rising to over 77 million.

This will have dramatic effects upon services, infrastructure and of course society itself especially if different groups fail to integrate and continue to segregate based on race or religion.

David Coleman, professor of demography at the the University of Oxford, said:

“Many of the consequences of large scale migration are damaging.  We do not need up to 13 million more people by the mid century.   Almost all that increase will be immigrants and their children.  It will not make the UK a happier or richer place.  Crowding and congestion will have entirely negative effects, increasing pressure on schools, hospitals and particulary housing.”

Simon Ross, director of Population Concern, said it was time people looked at the consequences migration had on quality of life.

“There’s a lot of people with vested interests in immigration, the universities and employers for instance….People talk about the taxes that migrants pay but that is a short term view. Migrants have children and get old and we need to take account of the services they will eventually use.  We should not reduce migration simply to a taxation issue.  We should talk about its effect on British society including the need for more housing which effects the green belt and transport infrastructure.  These are quality of life issues.”

Such thoughts would be ‘ramping up the rhetoric’ and an unacceptable tone for Evan Davis and Co.

Left leaning David Goodhart also had his doubts…..

Too diverse?

Is Britain becoming too diverse to sustain the mutual obligations behind a good society and the welfare state?

The nation state remains irreplaceable as the site for democratic participation and it is hard to imagine how else one can organise welfare states and redistribution except through national tax and public spending. Moreover, since the arrival of immigrant groups from non-liberal or illiberal cultures it has become clear that to remain liberal the state may have to prescribe a clearer hierarchy of values.

Goodhart did conclude something similar in this BBC programme….

The gulf between conservative Islam and secular liberal Britain is larger than with any comparable large group….for those of us who value an open, liberal society it is time to explain why it is superior to the alternatives.

He told us that…

Some claim that if people understood Islam more everything would be fine, they would be more tolerant, I think quite the contrary….the more they understand about it the more alien they would find it…authoritarian, collectivist, patriarchal, misogynist…..all sorts of things that Britain might have been 100 years ago but isn’t now.

 

He also said this in another interview…..

I am pro-immigrant but against mass immigration.

I believe in human equality and the unity of the human race, but I am sceptical about the economic benefits of large-scale immigration for the bottom half of British society, and worry about too much rapid change leading to segregation of communities and a withering of the kind of fellow-feeling needed to sustain welfare states.

There is nothing remarkable about those views and there are now plenty of others on the centre-Left who share them — Jon Cruddas gave my book a favourable review in the New Statesman — though official Labour remains somewhat uncertain of its position on this territory.

Like many metropolitan liberals I had very little direct experience of immigration yet I came to see it as beyond the normal trade-offs and interest calculations of political life. It was simple: good people were in favour of it, and bad, bigoted people were against it.

Alongside this belief was a twitchy ambivalence about my own country, no doubt reflecting a twitchy ambivalence about myself. Left-wing and liberal intellectual scepticism about the national was particularly strong in England because of its dominant imperial past.

I now, of course, believe this disdain for the national was immature and premature as well as loftily dismissive of majority opinion.

How did I come to change my mind about that and about large-scale immigration?

No doubt becoming a more grounded person and mixing with a wider spread of people knocked some of the undergraduate ideological gaucheness out of me as I entered my thirties. But what I like to think really changed my mind was good ideas, or openness to better ideas than I had been carrying around.

It was David Willetts, the leading Tory, who had first drawn my attention to the “progressive dilemma”. Speaking at a Prospect debate on the welfare state in 1998, he noted that if values and lifestyles become too diverse it becomes more difficult to sustain common norms and hence the legitimacy of a risk-pooling welfare state.

“This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the US you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests.”

That is to say, people are readier to share and co-operate with people whom they trust or with whom they believe they have significant attributes, and interests, in common.

Willetts’s dilemma seemed to me a true and powerful idea. I remember thinking when I first heard it: why is this issue not discussed more, particularly on the Left?

Having experienced the tribal irrationality of part of leftist Britain on the issue of diversity I found myself extending my critique to other aspects of the argument: the nature of community, the role of national identities in liberal societies and more.

The other idea that broke through my inchoate left-liberal instincts was even simpler than the progressive dilemma. It is this: embracing the idea of human equality does not mean we owe the same allegiance to everyone.

For most people commitments and allegiances ripple out from friends and family to neighbourhoods, towns and nations. This does not mean we should not care about the global poor. But we have a hierarchy of obligations that means we spend 30 times more every year on the NHS than we do on development aid. Is that wrong?

Immigration, at least on a significant scale, is hard for both incomer and receiver, especially when multi-generational poverty is being imported. People are not blank sheets, societies are not random collections of individuals, and objection to the arrival of a large number of outsiders in a community is not necessarily racist.

When middle-class social scientists like Michael Young in the 1950s and 1960s discovered what a high attachment people in working-class communities had to stability and continuity it was considered something to celebrate by left-wing sociologists. When people objected to that continuity being disrupted by the churn of mass immigration they were denounced.

You may want to read this forecast from 2007 of what the future may well bring….and indeed has…

Evan Davis interviewed Nigel Farage and it went pretty much as you might expect, Davis not focussing on policy but instead intent on painting Farage as some sort of racist rabble rouser who uses unnecessarily inflammatory language.

The BBC website’s follow up was equally determined to paint a similar picture and uses a snearing tone to undermine and discredit Farage as incompetent or ‘angry’.  The headline of their report itself is an indicator of what the BBC wants you to think…..they have decided what is important in the interview and highlighted it…but it was their question that set up the premise about Farage’s ‘tone’ and it was they who decided this was an issue, it is the BBC, Evan Davis, who insinuates that Farage’s ‘tone’ is somehow unacceptable….and that Farage used it cynically, not really meaning what he said about immigration, in order merely to ‘get noticed’….

Farage ‘used tone to get noticed’

The problem with that is what do they mean by ‘tone’?  Judging by the way the interview went ‘tone’ is not tone of voice, it is not the way you say something, not the language you use, but in this case it is the content of what Farage says….that immigration must be controlled and that multiculturalism has led to various segregated communities that are unhealthy for society…..apparently that is the ‘tone’ that is unacceptable.

Davis only really began the interview (and this is where Newsnight decided to start their edit of the interview from) when he started to ask about UKIP’s polling numbers and linked it to ‘image’ saying that UKIP was polling less than support for its policies might suggest because…..‘there might be a whiff of meanness and divisiveness about the Party’.

Farage tried to answer but was constantly interrupted by Davis who then declared that he think’s this has something to do with your tone, the way you talk about immigration.

So that’s the usual Evan Davis Stalinist-like show trial technique in operation….label someone a racist, demand they prove themselves innocent, interrupt so they can’t explain themselves and then tell them they are racist ….and then declare ‘let’s move on’ before the victim has a chance to object.

So Davis has already set up Farage as somewhat sinister and possibly racist and then tries to ‘prove’ his own labelling of Farage by using the ‘proof’ of his own interpretation of how Farage talks about immigration…naturally Davis, an ardent pro-immigration extremist himself, thinks anyone who talks about controlling immigration is wrong.

But never mind that Davis not only labels Farage with a strawman argument and then goes on to ‘prove’ it with his own thoughts, is he right that UKIP is polling low because it looks ‘mean and divisive’ due to Farage’s ‘tone’?

One reason is that UKIP has been under sustained attack from nearly every news outlet with their own vested interests intent on discrediting and underming UKIP…but even that isn’t the major cause for the low poll ratings.

The real reason UKIP polls low is that people recognise the bigger picture…vote UKIP and you may well end up with Miliband….vote Tory you will at least get a vote on Europe, under Labour you definitely won’t….so one major issue for UKIP supporters has been hijacked by Cameron…..and they also know that UKIP will not, certainly in this election, become a party that can win a majority and fulfill its promise to take us out of Europe and cut immigration….so they vote tactically, and certainly many Tory voters who might vote UKIP will remain Tory although many disgruntled Labour voters may well decide UKIP is less disagreeable than voting Tory.

Davis’ interpretation is wrong and coloured entirely by his own issues with immigration and Europe, not to mention HIV and its associations with Gays in relation to Farage’s comments on HIV positive immigrants and the NHS.

The BBC website tells us….

[Farage] does plenty of interviews and he’s got two televised debates under his belt, but this was probably the toughest exchange so far.

During a half hour of intense scrutiny Nigel Farage was at times tetchy, even angry. “I’m not having this,” he said, when he accused his interrogator of misquoting him. “I don’t hate anything” he said when he thought words were being put in his mouth. “I couldn’t care less,” he said – twice – when pushed on one sensitive issue. He was combative and he stood his ground.

But the interview did emphasise one thing – numbers are not his strong point.  On UKIP’s plan for big tax cuts and deficit reduction he was nonchalant in saying “dynamic growth” in the economy – more revenue from less tax – was the secret to it working.

Farage’s ‘toughest exchange yet’?  Hardly think so….LBC’s James O’Brien’s kangaroo court was by far the ‘toughest’ if only for the continual stream of made up accusations and half-truths O’Brien attempted to lynch Farage with…and yet Farage kept his cool and showed O’Brien to be less than credible as an interviewer and distinctly dishonest.  Evan Davis was less dramatic but had the same intent as O’Brien, to smear Farage with whatever trumped up charge came to hand.

At one point Davis played a clip from an interview Farage did on Fox News about the rise of radical Islam in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo and claimed this was an example of an unacceptable tone.  It was in fact Farage merely saying what many, many other people, from politicians, to journalists, to academics,  have said.

Davis seems to be saying that any criticism of Islam is unacceptable and shouldn’t be voiced lest we ‘upset’ Muslims, making them feel ‘under siege’.…leading to radicalisation.  The BBC seems to have no problem with a communtiy that says ‘If you criticise us we will turn nasty’….but does have a problem with anyone who suggest FGM, or polygamy, extreme intolerance, or indeed extremism based upon religion, is wrong.

Farage and Davis get sidetracked as to whether Farage in the clip is talking about Islam in the UK, he actually was in that BBC clip, but the interview as a whole was about radical Islam generally and was based upon events in Paris and so Farage, having done so many interviews, may be excused for not remembering the exact details of the clip…especially as it was edited to be very short and without context.

Cuious that Davis thinks this is ‘mean and divisive’……..

Davis dismisses the claim that the Archbishop of Canterbury said we should accept Sharia law in the UK by saying ‘He was misunderstood’.

No, no he wasn’t.  He quite clearly ssaid that we should accept a parallel system of law based upon Sharia…because….if we don’t it will upset Muslims and there will be a ‘breakdown in cohesion’...what could he possibly mean by that?

 “as a matter of fact certain provisions of sharia are already recognised in our society and under our law” ……. “the application of sharia in certain circumstances – if we want to achieve this cohesion and take seriously peoples’ religion – seems unavoidable?”

 

Here is the BBC’s very own report on the matter….

Sharia law in UK is ‘unavoidable’

Dr Rowan Williams told Radio 4’s World at One that the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system.

Dr Williams argues that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion.

Dr Williams said an approach to law which simply said “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts – I think that’s a bit of a danger”.

“There’s a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law, as we already do with some other aspects of religious law.”

 

So we must accept that Muslims do not want to be ruled by British law and must have their own legal system…and whatever else they want to keep them happy and quiet.

Farage was right, Davis wrong on that important point.

Things then got surreal with Davis suggesting the recent children’s film about Paddington Bear showed the wonders of immigration and multi-culturalism….‘a proclamation of the virtues of multiculturalism which I know you hate…’

Farage then objected to the word ‘hate’ as it was perjorative and seemingly designed to be a ‘ramping up of the rhetoric’ about him by Davis.

I wonder where Davis got the ‘Paddington’ angle from…..maybe the left-leaning Economist:

UKIP, pursued by a bear

MANY Britons were raised on tales of Paddington, the second-best-known bear in fiction after Winnie-the-Pooh. A kind of ursine Jacques Tati, the well-meaning Paddington caused chaos wherever he went through a mixture of clumsiness and cultural misunderstanding; the best moments usually involved his clashes with pompous British officialdom.

A new film version, directed and written by Paul King, focuses on a quality for which the British once prided themselves—a welcoming attitude towards refugees. An archetypal British explorer called Montgomery Clyde (who travels with grand piano and grandfather clock) meets Paddington’s aunt and uncle, introduces them to the joys of marmalade, and tells them of the warm welcome they can expect in London. When an earthquake destroys their home in “darkest Peru”, Paddington is duly sent to London to seek shelter.

[Laughed at this bit..]

If this interpretation had been served up by the BBC, the publicly subsidised national broadcaster, the howls of protest from the Daily Mail and Nigel Farage, leader of the anti-immigrant UK Independence Party, would have been deafening.

It was a reminder that UKIP polls relatively poorly in multicultural London and that its national ratings are still in the mid-teens, well below the Front National in France.

Not everyone in Britain is a “little Englander”; a lot of people, if they met Mr Farage, would be tempted to follow Paddington’s example and give him “a particularly hard stare”.

Well not this particular commenter…..

From the Telegraph:

BBC accused of left-wing ambush on David Cameron over hostile Radio 1 interview

H/T Guido…

The BBC has given a lifetime ahievement award to a man who expressed the desire to execute Salman Rushdie.….. endorsed by Sharia law…but only in an Islamic State Yusuf Islam assured us….though I’m sure the BBC thinks it has nothing to do with Islam.

This year’s Lifetime Achievement awards will be given to legendary musician Yusuf / Cat Stevens and Grammy Award-winning artist Loudon Wainwright III.

 

From Nick Cohen:

But here is what Islam said to Geoffrey Robertson QC in 1989. (Video here.)

Robertson: You don’t think that this man deserves to die?
Y. Islam: Who, Salman Rushdie?
Robertson: Yes.
Y. Islam: Yes, yes.
Robertson: And do you have a duty to be his executioner?
Y. Islam: Uh, no, not necessarily, unless we were in an Islamic state and I was ordered by a judge or by the authority to carry out such an act – perhaps, yes.
[Some minutes later, Robertson on the subject of a protest where an effigy of the author is to be burned]
Robertson: Would you be part of that protest, Yusuf Islam, would you go to a demonstration where you knew that an effigy was going to be burned?
Y. Islam: I would have hoped that it’d be the real thing.

Just had this from my marvellous Observer colleague Andrew Anthony: “He told me in 1997, eight years after saying on TV that Rushdie should be lynched, that he was in favour of stoning women to death for adultery. He also reconfirmed his position on Rushdie. He set up the Islamia school in Brent, which is currently undergoing council-backed expansion. Its mission statement three years ago explicitly stated that its aim was to bring about the submission of the individual, the community and the world at large to Islam. For this aim it now receives state funding. Its an incubator of the most bonkers religious extremism and segregation, and is particularly strong on the public erasure of women. Why do people go to such lengths to ignore these aspects of Yusuf Islam’s character and philosophy?

If the BBC’s continuing endorsement of a Muslim fundamentalist with views that are evidently quite extreme, in  British society, is quite scary this (H/T Sue at Is the BBC biased?) should create a great deal more concern as it looks as if the BBC’s much vaunted independence has been compromised by Muslim activists seeking to change how the BBC reports Muslim issues:

Aaqil Ahmed, the BBC head of religion and ethics, said: “Religious literacy is far too important just to be left in the hands of people who are not subject specialists. I think you need both.”

Replying to criticism that BBC cuts and the pressures of the 24-hour news cycle had stripped out specialists, he said: “There are a lot of conversations with BBC News. There is a different leadership in BBC News, understanding exactly the world is different.”

He said editors, including director of news and current affairs James Harding, had attended a recent meeting with Muslim academics covering “the rise of religiosity in young Muslim children, the Trojan horse schools, which are not one-offs, they are a glimpse of the future.

“We have to find out the right way of telling that particular story. That notion has landed.”

‘A glimpse of the future’?  What did Ahmed mean by that exactly?  Is he saying that Muslims are becoming more devout, fanatical, in their religious observation and will be demanding British Society adapts to them…or else?

I think he is saying precisely that….but he is also looking to have the BBC report such issues, such as the Trojan Horse scandal, in a Muslim friendly manner rather than present them as the threat to a democratic, secular, tolerant and peaceful society under one law that is the British way.

All of which is a bit laughable as the BBC already does its utmost to pretend there are no such issues with the Religion of Peace and happily sweeps them under the carpet more often than not…or if forced to report them looks to downplay any issues and deny a connection to Islam…the Trojan Horse scandal being a case in point, the BBC claiming it was all a hoax, that there were no issues, that it was a result of islamophobia and racism…the BBC that refused to publish information that indicated that the lead Muslim advocacy group, the MCB, was at the heart of the scandal.  Why would the BBC do that?

Even John Birt noticed the BBC’s failure to address the issues….

BBC’s current affairs programmes ‘failing to address radical Islam and other tough topics’

The BBC is failing to address the “awesomely difficult questions” facing Britain, including the economy and the threat of radical Islam, according to the corporation’s former chief.

John Birt, director-general of the BBC from 1992-2000, said its current affairs analysis was falling short.

“What it’s not sufficiently doing is addressing the very big, awesomely difficult questions our country and our world are facing at the moment,” he said.

There is a war going on, a war of words and ideologies.  Activist Muslims have launched a media assault on our society with the intent to intimidate the Media into censoring themselves on Islamic issues, forcing them to whitewash any crimes or behaviour that can be associated with Islamic teachings in order to silence criticism of Islam and deceive non-Muslims about the serious concerns that the rise of a fundamentalist religiosity, one that is highly intolerant of other religions and which incites high levels of violence in many adherents, in the West raise.

It looks like the BBC has been groomed and recruited.

I think we should know who were these ‘Muslim academics’ that lobbied the BBC and what exactly was said and agreed.  How can it be that private interest groups can shape how the BBC reports the news in their favour?

How soon Rochdale is forgotten.

This morning the BBC filled the airwaves with tall tales about Tory Grant Shapps and Wikipedia edits.

The BBC told us that the administrator who had made the claims about Shapps had said that he ‘couldn’t be sure who had edited the account’….so the question is did the BBC know the identity of that administrator and if so why did they not report it?  Was the story about Shapps just too good to put a stop to?

The Telegraph reports that the administrator at Wikipedia was in fact a LibDem activist…

Wikipedia administrator who accused Grant Shapps of editing pages of Tory rivals is Liberal Democrat activist

Richard Symonds admitted today that he had been “chastised” by other administrators at Wikipedia for not checking with more people before banning a user who he claims is Mr Shapps, or someone working for him.

Mr Symonds also admitted that he had briefed The Guardian newspaper, which broke the alleged story yesterday.

 

No mention of the identity of this administrator in the Guardian story, nor of his inability to actually provide any evidence that linked Shapps to the edits….so where did the BBC get their quote from about his lack of evidence? Did they contact him personally?

After spending the day slinging mud at Shapps, and he was also interrogated on Newsnight last night so important is this story,  the BBC hasn’t bothered to update the story with the rather significant fact that it looks like a bit of LibDem skulduggery at work.

Funny how much time the BBC spends on a story when it seems to suit their bias, as with the ‘Jihadi Bride’s father, and then can suddenly lose all interest when the truth comes out and contradicts their quality journalism…and never a sign of an apology or a rowback from them….they’ve already managed to imprint people’s minds with the BBC version and they know that may well stick however much ‘truth’ comes out later. All very Goebbels-like.

I’m sure Nick Clegg will be rewritng his jokes now…

Asked about the claims, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg said he was “prepared to believe” that Mr Shapps had not altered his Wikipedia entry but joked: “It just could have been someone else – Michael Green, for instance.”

 

 

I happened to watch Newsnight on BBC2 last night. It’s been a while and with good reason. The entire programme was one long extenuated assault on the Conservative Party. We had geo-political analysts such as “White Dee” (from Benefits Street) there to explain why Welfare reform is an evil. It is clear that the BBC has decided it must be EVERYTHING possible to help get Ed into Downing Street and with around two weeks to go, it is throwing ALL it can to ensure Cameron is “locked out” of Downing Street for the next five years as the Left run amok with their glove puppet Miliband installed as glorious leader.