Dogwash

Did you know that slavery was only formally abolished no more than 5 years ago in the West African country of Niger? A woman in Niger is suing the government for not preventing her being sold into slavery.

So how is the victimhood industry going to pin the blame for this on the White Man and Western colonialism? Could be a tricky one. I await developments with interest.

Half-heard on the BBC World Service in the wee small hours this morning, the tale of Somalian "refugees" who thought they were headed for Naples in order to break into the European Promised Land but were taken instead by their traffickers to Nepal.

Apparently there are hundreds of misplaced "refugees" stranded in Kathmandu. Can't find any corroboration on the Web but I heard it on the BBC so it must be true!

I shouldn't laugh really.

Are these two recent judgements: [1] [2] symptomatic of a sea-change in judicial opinion?

On the steam wireless a rambling programme in which Alan Coren and Christopher Matthew use their freedom passes to wander round North London. Taking a break in a pub, one tells an anecdote from a visit to the cinema. In the darkness he heard a loud female voice in the demotic register, the voice of a woman clearly exasperated by the evident need to instruct her beau of the evening in the basic etiquette of back-row snoggery and gropery, as she called out,

"Oi, tits first! Ain't you got no bleedin' manners?"

Made oi larf, anway, as did the following.

Why South Africa Sucks (quite possibly not work-safe) is an egregious hard-line Afrikaner-led blog which sometimes makes even a hardened crusty old racist thug like me blanche, but is well worth repeated visits for the alternative view it gives of the Rainbow Nation's post-Apartheid paradise. It's the sort of site which would cause a Guardianista who accidentally connected to it to feel so contaminated that he would immediately burn his computer and then immerse the residue in quicklime. Those of us of sterner stuff are willing to listen to all sides of the argument.

In a recent typically ranty post, one of the regular contributors refers to a liberal commentator of whom he seemingly disapproves as "a dyke so butch that she probably rolls her own tampons". I know exactly what he means. A phrase I shall tuck away.



On the subject of web fastidiousness, I recall a case in which the phrase "I wouldn't contaminate my cache with [such-and-such a site]" was used in earnest. Several years ago the BNP published a "news item" about a fairground donkey which had supposedly been prosecuted for a racially-aggravated attack after unseating a young passenger who happened to be the first Asian child it had been called upon to carry. This came to the attention of the righteous and gullible folks at GUTalk, who duly started a thread telling each other how stupid the BNP knuckledraggers were to believe such nonsense. Of course they were reliant on third-party rumours of the article because, as the good folk of GUT were anxious to reassure each other and at length, they wouldn't dream of contiminating their browser caches by visiting so vile a website.

Being made of sterner stuff, I visited the BNP website (shock! horror!) to discover that the offending item was self-evidently a spoof, a deliberate satire on political correctness.

There are lessons to be learned there.

What a pity that all prospective illegal immigrants are not as incompetent as this one.



Update Su 18 Jan 2009

It seems the linked article has expired from the Gainsborough Standard website. I do wish newspapers would make their minds up whether they are going to run their sites as permanent archives or as transient newsfeeds. The link looked reassuringly permanent when I originally posted it. Anyway here, from memory, is the gist of the story.

A Nigerian man presents himself at the immigration desk at Heathrow. He proffers documentation, subsequently determined to be forged, to show that has a place on a university course in the UK. He also provides details of the UK address at which he plans to reside during his course.

Unfortunately, while the university he proposes to attend is in Northern Ireland, the residential address is in Essex. The immigration officers question the man about how he proposes to manage the daily commute, a round-trip estimated at about 10 hours. They further question how he proposes to follow his lectures, given that his English is so poor that an interpreter is needed.

The man finally admits that he is fact planning to work illegally in the UK and is put on a flight back to Lagos.

I am tempted to start streaming a certain Queen track in the background of this blog, apart from the likelihood that the PRS people would probably be round with their begging bowl.

The Race Equality Partnership Wolverhampton (REPW) has had the financial plug pulled by the local council after three years of funded inactivity.

An unkind thought comes to mind. Just how many of our BME population, apparently so vital to our economic well-being, indeed to the very survival of the country, are employed in this sort of make-work?