You never shut up - why should we?

A letter in our local paper stated that "those calling for referendum mark two are talking nonsense" [mark three, surely?]. The writer asserted that, after we leave the EU, we will still be able to trade with the EU and with the Commonwealth. I appreciate the his upbeat wishful thinking, and the interesting suggestion that Commonwealth members have spent 41 years waiting for us to leave the EU so they can trade with us again. In reality, they have in the intervening decades forged other trading links and I cannot see how we'd be able to stroll in and pick up where we left off.

The EU vote was an enormous gamble that certain politicians chose to take with our future: David Cameron held the referendum, which he fully expected to win, not to give us a say, but to try to silence his Euro-sceptic backbenchers once and for all, a foolish tactic that disastrously backfired. Boris Johnson supported the leave side to further his own ambition to be prime minister, but you don't have to take my word for that: senior Tories such as Anna Soubry and Alan Duncan will tell you exactly the same thing.

Because Cameron anticipated a victory, no plans were made about what to do if the 'leave' side won; so confident was he that government departments were specifically instructed not to make any contingency plans, which to me seems the height of irresponsibility. Having engineered this vote, Messrs Cameron, Farage and Johnson all stepped away from leadership roles. To put it another way, having started the fire, they all simply ran away leaving others to deal with the consequences.

Those who are happy with the result keep on telling those who voted to stay in to get over it. Just like they did? We have had 41 years of constant whingeing and complaining by them about the EEC/EC/EU since the first referendum in 1975. They did not 'get over it' then, so why should anyone else now?

The first referendum did not close down the debate; I strongly doubt that the second one will either.

Nice, Jo Cox - Explanations and Excuses

Last Friday, July 15, saw two seemingly unconnected events: we woke to the news of the previous night's slaughter of 84 innocent people in Nice, France and, during the day, the burial of Jo Cox, M.P. in her Yorkshire constituency of Batley and Spen. These two events happened hundreds of miles apart, but there are a number of similarities between the perpetrators of what I believe to have been two terrorist acts - the shooting and stabbing of Jo Cox by Thomas Mair, and the massacre by truck carried out by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel in France.
To me, there are several obvious similarities between Mair and Bouhlel. They both carried out their attacks alone, even though evidence of support for Mair may yet emerge, and Bouhlel's last text message before he set out to commit mass murder does seem to point to the involvement of others.
Bouhlel's final text message read: "Bring more weapons. Bringing in 5," while an earlier text said:"It's good. I have the equipment."
Both appear to have been loners. Mair was regarded by his neighbours as a quiet man, if somewhat eccentric. Bouhlel was regarded as being anti- social by his neighbours, even though he was married with three children. Whereas Mair helped his elderly neighbours with their gardens, Bouhlel showed the nasty side of his nature by beating his wife, who left him. As one of his long-suffering neighbours said: “He was rude and bit weird. We would hold the door open for him and he would just blank him...He kept himself to himself but would always rant about his wife. He had marital problems and would tell people in the local cafe. He scared my children though.”
Significantly, both had a history of mental health problems, which, in the context of terrorism, I have discussed before, on June 17th. The question of mental instability and terrorism is a thorny one, but it has now become more topical and, in my opinion, deserves urgent attention. After all, terrorism is not a rational activity, so should not all terrorists be judged insane? Counterpoint to that, as has been pointed out previously, MIND has said that one in every four Britons will suffer mental health problems in their lifetime, so can these problems really be regarded as legitimate excuses, or even explanations, for terrorist actions? We are told that Bouhlel suffered from depression, but so do tens of thousands of people who do not go out to commit mass murder.
Now, Mair and Bouhlel have one outstanding difference, and that is in their ideological beliefs, which inspired them on to carry out their atrocities. Mair, as I have said before, is a racist and a fascist, who appears to have had links to the far-right outfit, Britain First, while Bouhlel is thought to have been a radical Islamist. With Bouhlel, however, some people, including his lawyer, doubt that he was a Jihadi. As his wife's cousin, Walid Hamou, said of him:
“Bouhlel was not religious. He did not go to the mosque, he did not pray, he did not observe Ramadan. He drank alcohol, ate pork and took drugs. This is all forbidden under Islam.

‘He was not a Muslim, he was a shit. He beat his wife, my cousin, he was a nasty piece of work.”

Well, I am sure he was, but that does not mean he could not have been radicalized in some way. He was a known violent criminal, last convicted in the spring of this year. As the Huffington Post says:
"His latest conviction was in March, when he received a six-month suspended sentence for violence with a weapon, having used a wooden pallet against another driver during a traffic incident."
Far from Bouhlel not fitting a Jihadi terrorist profile, I believe he fits it only too well. Most of the attackers in the Paris massacres had criminal backgrounds and became radicalized very quickly. The same thing could well have happened with Bouhlel. The fact that he sent the  text messages (see above), and seems to have researched the murderous route he took, points to his having some tactical and logistical support. It also shows him to have been capable of forward planning, which, again, calls into question the view that he was mentally deranged.
The link between Jihadi radicalism and crime is borne out by a local youth worker, who told the BBC:
Kamel, a youth worker in the Nice area, says one of the reasons for the recent success of the Salafist ideology that has inspired jihad, is that it provides a ready and easy way of justifying the actions of petty criminals.
"The kids are told that they are in a land of unbelievers, so when they steal and attack people it is justifiable; the petty criminal is turned into a holy warrior, and is promised status, sexual gratification and eternal life."
Bouhlel's sudden radicalization, which many doubt, is not so unlikely after all. Both Bouhlel and Mair knew what they were doing, and acted according to their beliefs and (lack of) consciences. The killing of innocent people they perceive as enemies is rational behaviour to both neo-Nazis and Jihadis. Mair goes on trial in November, and, hopefully, will be judged accordingly.
To conclude, I know that we all have felt helpless in the face of what happened in Nice last Thursday. Lives have been ruined, 84 people have died, 202 injured and many others traumatized. We tend to feel helpless - I know that I did - when such things happen, but I would like to close with a positive suggestion that I offer to all who read this post. You may wish, as I did, to send a message of support and sympathy to the French people, and here is a link to the email address of the French Embassy in London - CLICK HERE. It is better to light a candle than complain about the darkness.

Trident Nuclear Weapons

Letter to my Member of Parliament

I am writing to ask you to vote against renewal or replacement of our nuclear weapons. These are my reasons:

1. The possession of nuclear weapons did not save us from being involved in conflicts in Cyprus, Suez, Malaya, Kenya, the Falklands, the Gulf War, Serbia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. It did not save us from years of terrorism by the IRA or by Islamic extremists on 7.7.05, Al Qaeda or ISIL.
2. In Europe, only the UK, France and Russia have nuclear weapons. This leaves more than 40 European countries that do not consider they need such weapons to ensure their security. If they don't need them, we can do without them as well.
3. The cost is unaffordable: at least £205,000,000,000 at a time when all our public services are being attacked, including health, social care, social services, benefits, education and public transport. Local authorities are cutting services, not to the bone, but into the bone. Our border forces are lamentably inadequate: 3 boats as against Italy's 600, even though their coast line is shorter.
4. Once a nuclear war begins, both sides lose, no matter who was the aggressor. A system of deterrence that would ensure our own nation's destruction if it were ever employed is in reality a form of national suicide.
5. Submarine-based technology is already obsolescent. Its strategic value derives from the fact that, even today, submarines are not as easy to track as land-based installations and vehicles. Unmanned underwater drones will remove that advantage forever, and such drones are currently under development. There would be no way of compensating for the loss of that tactical advantage. In the event of a conflict that ends up going nuclear, our subs, previously almost untraceable, would be easily located and destroyed before we deploy them.
6. The only reason why the UK retains Trident is because our leaders want our country to be seen as a major player on the international scene, thus justifying our permanent seat on the UN Security Council. This is a spectacularly bad reason, and it is definitely not a priority for most ordinary citizens in this country. It is simply using weapons of mass destruction as a global status symbol.
7. Mass murder by nuclear weapons would not be war: it would be genocide. Leaders who used them, or agreed to their use, would be war criminals.

Even if one has previously accepted the argument that we need nuclear weapons in the past, the rationale behind retaining or replacing them is ceasing to exist. I am reminded of how during the First World War, the generals maintained cavalry units and looked for opportunities to deploy them, ignoring the fact that military technology had rendered them obsolete. The repeated full frontal assaults by infantry units against entrenched machine guns was a refusal to adapt methods to changed circumstances; the generals eventually learnt to modify their tactics only after horrendous and pointless losses of lives caused by this bloody-minded obstinacy. The consequence was carnage on an industrial scale.

To renew our Trident weapons system is to employ the same blinkered thinking. There is no moral or financial logic to nuclear weapons. There is increasingly no tactical value in them either.

I therefore urge you to vote against renewal or replacement of our nuclear weapons systems.

Thank you.

Enoch Powell, Nigel Farage and Genies Out of the Bottle

Surprisingly, although there has been some media comment, no-one seems to have looked at the similarities between the late Enoch Powell and (still with us) Nigel Farage. This is all the more remarkable when we learn, according to the Daily Mail, Farage was, at one stage, desperately trying to get Powell to join UKIP, even acting as Powell's chauffeur on one occasion. Farage was certainly persistent, as the Mail says:

"Mr Powell, who died in 1998, turned down Mr Farage’s request after giving the matter ‘very serious consideration’.

The following year, Mr Powell was invited to stand as a Ukip candidate in the 1995 European Parliament election, and then in the 1997 general election. 

He rejected both requests. But he did go on to give his backing to three Ukip candidates in the mid-1990s.

Mr Farage has described Mr Powell as a ‘political hero’".

(It should be mentioned here that Russell Brand described Farage as a "Poundshop Enoch Powell").

It is not clear why Powell would not join UKIP, but there is one issue which united Farage and himself: Immigration - with one important difference. Powell, in his public statements, especially his infamous so-called "Rivers of Blood" (Powell never actually used the term) speech of April 20, 1968, focused upon immigrants from the former British colonies, who happened to have different coloured skin. Farage, on the other hand, has targeted EC migrants, who are predominantly white. Another difference between the two is that Powell's speech, and later ones, led to him being banished to the political wilderness. As Wikipedia points out:

" The Conservative leader, Edward Heath, sacked Powell from his post as Shadow Defence Secretary, telling him on the telephone that Sunday evening (it was the last conversation they would have). Heath said of the speech in public that it was "racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions". Powell's later political career was spent in a sort of noisy obscurity.

 Farage is still glowing with the success of the "Leave" campaign in the referendum, for which he takes a good deal of credit. If Powell were alive today, he would probably be wringing Farage's hand in congratulation. Unlike Powell, though, Farage does not seem to be heading for obscurity, even if he has resigned as the leader of UKIP. He is headed for a presenter's job with LBC and has been offered a huge amount of money to appear on "I'm a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here". He will thus avoid having to answer criticism for the imminent adverse effects of Brexit. 

The major similarity between the two, in my opinion, is the way they both appealed to what can only be described as the racist section of the British electorate. This is not to say that Powell was, or Farage is, a racist. Powell explicitly denied it on a number of occasions, most famously to David Frost. As for Farage, even Ken Livingstone  has defended him on this charge.

However, the racists among us, who lack subtle intelligence, have listened to the cunningly measured statements of both men, and heard something different. After Powell's speech of 20/4/68, dockers and Smithfield porters marched in support of him. Significantly, one march was led by Big Dan Harmston, a Smithfield market porter and lifelong member of Oswald Moseley's fascist Union Movement. Opinion polls showed a 74% approval of Powell's speech by white Britons, and for a time, Powell had a bodyguard squad of skinheads. For immigrant communities, it led to a heightened sense of insecurity and fear. Admiration of Powell persists on the far right to this day. He even has his own Facebook page (I refuse to provide a link), run by the "Traditional Britain Group."

Any casual observer can see that Farage has learned a lot from Powell. As the Guardian said in 2014:

"Farage has long openly admired Powell, once calling him his political hero. While acknowledging that Powell got it wrong about people of different nationalities and races being unable to mix, the Ukip leader has said the central thrust of Powell’s arguments about immigration hold true".

And Farage has not been slow to demonise EC migrants in much the same insidious way that Powell attacked coloured immigrant communities. As he himself said:

" It's about mass immigration at a time when 21% of young people can't find work. It's about giving £50 million a day to the EU when the public finances are under great strain."

That neatly implies that EC migrants are causing youth unemployment and cuts in public spending. It also lets the government and bankers off the hook. Worse, it sums up the way in which Farage and all the "Leave" big noises depicted EC migrants as invading parasites and enemies within. It comes as no surprise then, that post Brexit, racist hate crime has increased (a 50% increase in London alone) - and Farage has not said one word in condemnation. Powell never denounced the racist violence that followed his speeches, either. Farage has learned well from his hero. Ok, so you can't put released genies back in their bottles, but you could at least pretend to care about their misdeeds.

Nigel smiles; his hero hangs.