Dogwash

So you go into a pub and buy a pint of Guinness. Now, as any fule kno, Guinness takes quite a while to pour; pouring Guninness requires a certain skill and patience. If you can pour a pint in the same time as it takes to pour a pint of, if you'll pardon me mentioning the evil fluid, Foster's, without ending up with a glass full of foam, then there is something wrong, probably with the nitrogen pressure.

In other circumstances the bar-person would have recognised the problem and dealt with it. If the "bar associate" were perhaps a part-trained newbie, I might have explained the problem and arranged a satisfactory solution. But unfortunately the young lady was clearly newly arrived from the European mainland, with an unidentifiable accent and and an extremely weak command of English outside her scripted repertoire.

I cut my losses, accepted the drink, a shortly after left having sipped a couple of cc's to confirm my evaluation. Chalk up £3.13 to the multiculture.

Laban points out the significant discrepancies between alleged eye-witness reports of the "Croydon Litter Riot", as expressed in the reader comments section of the Croydon Guardian and wonders where the truth lies.

A majority of commenters are absolutely clear that the police incited the trouble, whereas others are equally adamant the litter-dropper and her friend kicked it off by attacking the policemen, who were compelled to defend themselves.

Perhaps the discrepancy is not so puzzling after all.

In the first place, how many of these "witnesses" were close enough to the action to see and hear it in detail? How many saw the entire incident, from the policeman's instruction to the schoolgirl to pick up the dropped litter and her reaction? Or was their attention first attracted by the ruckus when the violence kicked off?

I suspect it was generally the latter, at which point people's prejudices begin to colour their judgement and their memory. At this stage you are watching a loose fight involving an escalating number of people. If you dislike the police, you will see policemen striking a schoolgirl with his baton and see typical police brutality. If you are a Left-Liberal, you will see policemen attacking a Black schoolgirl and see out-of-control police brutality and police racism. If you are a Black, immersed in the Victim culture that the White Liberal Elite has worked so assiduously to foster, you will see the racist Babylon brutalizing innocent sistren as part of the ongoing White Racist campaign to keep the Black Man in subjugation. If you are an ordinary White English person, fed up of what you perceive as a disintegrating social infrastructure and fed up of "the benefits of our vibrant diversity", you will see shocking but typical and arrogant Black yoof committing "mindless" violence against policemen just doing their job. And, pace commenter Poonam, who is "Indian and therefore not racist", if you are South Asian you will see typical Black barbarism and monkey behaviour. And if you are Chinese, you will just shake your head at such typically incomprehensible gwei-lo barbarism and go quietly about your business of accumulating wealth.

So what's the truth? Perhaps CCTV evidence will help to resolve the issue, but I am not particularly sanguine. The Croydon Guardian's comment thread certainly raises questions in my mind and I would like to know more, but frankly my prejudices in the matter are merely stirred a little, not shaken.

Er no, actually, it's not All Fools' Day, but for a moment I wasn't sure.

Today's Times brings us yet another instance of fatuous appeasement of our Muslim "community". ACPO, it seems, will recommend that "explo dogs" wear bootees when searching Muslim premises.

What is ironic about this sort of thing, as Imam Ibrahim Mogra, quoted in the Times piece, clearly understands, is that rather than improving "community relations" and encouraging "social cohesion", it merely serves to further infuriate the indigenous population, leading to ever increasing antipathy towards our Muslim guests.

What the dénouement will be I don't know. As a man of peace, I very much regret to say that I am increasingly inclined towards the "Bring it on!" tendency.

When a young woman in her teens or early twenties offers you her seat on the bus.

When in conversation with a polite young man, UK-born of Afro-Caribbean origin, he repeatedly refers to you as "Uncle". ("Uncle" is a respectful term for any elderly man in some English-speaking cultures, including the West Indies and South Africa, as indeed the locally equivalent term probably is in many societies.)

When you've just got your Freedom Pass from the Post Office and for the first time you start noticing all the other Old Fogies and Ancients touching their passes to the Oyster card reader on the bus. The London Freedom Pass is easily distinguished by its heavy-duty DayGlo orange ticket holder, presumably designed so that us old buggers can get our arthritic fingers round it and can more easily locate it with our dimming rheumy eyes. (Actually there may be a hint of truth in both of those "design" features -- it does make some sense.)

To my shame, for the first week after I got my Freedom Pass, I was tempted to transfer it to a more anonymous season ticket holder. I was feeling self-conscious about being so blatantly 60. But fortunately I got over it and now carry the "orange thing" with pride and a soupçon of smugness.

Yesterday the Today programme carried a piece about child trafficking. Two cases were featured, one of a young Nigerian girl and one of a Ugandan girl, both of whom were brought under false pretences to live with African families in the UK where they were exploited and used as mistreated unpaid servants, and there was some suggestion of sexual menace or abuse. In each case the girl escaped and eventually came to the attention of the authorities. Having reached their majority, both are now under threat of repatriation.

After the package, a child-protection busybody was wheeled on to say how nasty and unfair this was and how the young women should be allowed to remain in the UK. Neither girl, it was pointed out, had anyone to go back to; indeed the Ugandan girl's near family had perished in political violence.

Clearly a community, or nation, has a duty of kindness and care towards vulnerable people who find themselves in its territory, but something seems wrong with this argument.

So I tried turning the circumstances round the other way. Consider an English girl in her early teens, and yes by "English" I do mean a girl of the indigenous North European ethnicity which still forms the majority of the population of the UK. Under false pretences, she is sent to live with a family of English "ex-pats" in Kampala, where she is effectively imprisoned in the family compound, treated as a skivvy, abused and receives sexual advances from the man of the house. In due course she escapes and eventually comes to the notice of the Ugandan authorities. What happens next?

Well, I rather suspect that what happens next is that the Ugandan authorities contact the British authorities, who arrange to repatriate the young woman. If she no longer has family in the UK able and suitable to receive and care for her, she will be taken into the care of the authorities. If the Ugandan authorities prove uninterested or incapable, then if she makes her way to the British High Commission, I am sure they will help her get home.

And that is what should happen to the two African girls quoted. The Nigerian and Ugandan authorities are not competent or trustworthy, you say? Shame on you for that racist insinuation. In any case, that is not our problem. The care of the young women is the responsibility of their own Governments.

This might seem harsh, but It is not for us to offer sanctuary and social support to the entire world, nor can we achieve or afford it.

The Indy tells us the story of a failed asylum seeker being deported to Cameroon. During the leg of the journey from London to Brussels she was, allegedly, badly beaten by her escorts.

Now I can't comment on the allegation of violence. Certainly, Group 4 -- and privatized prison guards in general -- have a possibly deservedly indifferent reputation. It may well be the case that, as the tenor of the article subtly suggests, that her G4S escort took the opportunity to beat the living shit out of her because they "don't like darkies" and fancied a spot of nigger bashing to pass the time. At the other end of the scale, it may well be that she was struggling so violently and putting up such a fight that she brought her injuries on herself. Restraining a violent and unco-operative prisoner without hurting either the prisoner or the guards is a difficult and not always successfully deployed skill even for a properly trained officer. The deportee, Ms Toumi, will doubtless have learnt during her sojourn at Yarl's Wood that a deportee who causes extreme disruption at the airport and, in particular, on the aeroplane, might succeed in having the deportation attempt abandoned.

The truth of this aspect of the matter may, or possibly may not, emerge in due course. That is not what I am interested in pursuing here. Rather, I would draw the reader's attention to the basis of Ms Toumi's asylum claim, mentioned by the Indy as incidental information not requiring further comment.

Her injuries were so serious that Belgian immigration officials refused to allow the escort team to fly her on to Cameroon, claims Ms Toumi, who fled her home in March after being tortured and abused by a village chief.

(My emphasis.)

So she was badly mistreated by a village chief in Cameroon and, perhaps not unreasonably, fled. Not to another village out of the chief's reach. Not to Yaoundé, where she might have been safely invisible, but all the way to good old soft-touch Britain.

Stephanie Toumi seems to have no case for refuge in the UK, other than, I very much suspect, the conviction of victimist entitlement that seems to infest the vast majority of Third World migrants who choose the clandestine and asylum routes of entry. If her G4S escorts did use inappropriate violence then they should be punished for that, but otherwise I have absolute no sympathy for the woman. She is an opportunist cheat.