Dogwash

I've just deleted a post shortly after publication, having realized that I was, to use the demotic phrase, talking complete bollocks. Deleting stuff on the web is never straightforward. In the present case doing so will confuse the RSS thingy, or whatever it is, that people kindly use to publish their self-updating blogrolls — and which I haven't managed to work out how to use myself.

So this here is a filler post to prevent unhelpful error messages.



Here is a cryptic pun, or quite possibly a dirty joke — I'll let you decide — to be going on with:

The Bishop's a long time coming, remarked the Actress, stirring her tea with her free hand.

As the oozlum bird hovers over Anfield...

An image of a Liverpool fan appearing to make an offensive monkey gesture was circulated on Twitter, prompting Merseyside police to make an arrest.

Patrice Evra, who became embroiled in the row that led to Luis Suárez being found guilty of racially abusing the United defender in the 1–1 draw on 15 October, was booed loudly every time he touched the ball during the Cup tie, which Liverpool won 2–1.

Merseyside police said in a statement: "We can confirm that a 59-year-old man from North Wales has been arrested following an alleged incident. The man has been taken to a police station and will be questioned by officers...

Short of banging up every football fan in the country, I don't think the Righteous are going to win this war of attrition.

So the train comes to a halt between stations with a fine view of The Valley, home to Charlton Athletic football club and its now famously racist fans. The driver apologizes for the further delay to the already delayed train, explaining that this is all due to earlier signalling problems. Not that I'd really noticed, to be honest. Trains on the Greenwich line run every 10 minutes most of the time; at that frequency you don't give much thought to scheduled times.

After a minute or two, the driver came on again to announce further excitement. There was, he had been advised, a nutter running around with a knife on Greenwich station, which was therefore temporarily closed. The train would be diverted via Blackheath. All good fun. I've seen no reports of this incident on-line. If I pick up any local tittle-tattle I'll let you know.

And so the train set off again. A few minutes later I became aware of an irritating, loud and incomprehensible voice further down the carriage. A complaining voice. A male basso profundo voice. But very much an African voice, the words tantalizingly just beyond comprehension so that it was impossible to establish whether he was speaking in foreign or in one of those colonial patois that shamelessly claim to be English. Nothing unusual there: Africans complaining into their mobiles at the tops of their voices*, usually about money, is part of the aural wallpaper of travelling the South Eastern Railway.

And then I looked round as The Voice got louder. No mobile, just a scruffy middle-aged Black man standing in the vestibule as the train slid in to Lewisham, waving his arms about and, his tone of voice and presumably his words implied, complaining to nobody in particular about the injustice of the world.

Welcome to the World in One City. We keep on troddin'.

____________
* I once worked with a chap of Sri Lankan Burgher origin. Actually he worked on customer complaints while I worked in the adjacent group, part of whose function was to (plausibly) provide the lies with which to fob off the unhappy customer. My colleague did not seem to have grasped the fact that telephone circuits are amplified. Talking to customers in London and the UK, the volume of his voice was normal, if tending to the irascible. He was easily offended and would frequently get into arguments with the customer. But when talking to overseas suppliers — our services were of an international nature — he would vary the volume of his voice according to the distance involved. Loud for Europe, louder for the middle East, louder still for India. When talking to his relatives back home — what else are company telephones for, I ask? — he would stand up and shout.

— Do you like Kipling?

— I don't know, I've never kippled.

— Hmm. Do you like Dickens?

— I don't know, I've never been invited to one.

On BBC News 24 (as I persist in thinking of it for some reason),

There have been reared pigs throughout the UK.

or as the newsreader actually said

There have been outbreaks throughout the UK.

You may have missed this, it taking place in foreign parts and all. The Schloßparktheater in Berlin is staging a translation into German of the play "I'm not Rappaport". The play explores the relationship between two elderly men who regularly run into one another on their daily constitutionals in their local park in New York.

So what's all the fuss about, then? Well, one of the characters is an elderly Jew, and the other is an elderly Black man, or African-American as we are now required to call them. To play the latter part, the director has selected a White actor who blacks up for the performance.

Outbreak of mass hysteria ensues. Indeed, this kraut bloggeuse dons her finest dungarees of dudgeon and really gets stuck in. (Good stuff, but if you do decide to follow the link I'd recommend you to stand well back from the screen and have a fire extinguisher handy.)

To be honest I can't work myself into too much of an impassioned hate about all of this. In the director's position, I would probably have cast a middle-aged or elderly Black actor as first choice but, given that he has been bullied into defending his position, his explanation of his reason for selecting a White actor in blackface seems perfectly sensible to me. Actor-director* Dieter Hallervorden explained that good elderly Black actors with a native command of German were not that easy to find. Blacking up a White actor who was already a member of his company was a more feasible solution. Not that he needed to explain his choice, in my view, but there you go.

I know nothing of the thespian scene in the fatherland but this seems entirely plausible. The main source of diversity™ in Germany has until relatively recently been of Turkish origin. I wonder, could the racehustlers and screamers perhaps have been satisfied by having a Turkish actor black up. I mean, they are yer pukka ethnics, innit, if a touch on the pale side. Or a young genuine-black® actor be made up to look older? No hold on, that's ageist. Or a Chinese female in drag? Hmm.

Oh I give up.

I'll leave you with two questions.

Firstly, what would the anonymous Black actor who complained on CiF that he was excluded from historical (more precisely described, pre-Windrush) roles by his colour have to say about this? He seemed quite keen on flexibility in casting.

Secondly, I note that the other lead role is played by the play's director, Dieter Hallervorden. The character portrayed is an elderly Jew, and yet I understand that Hallervorden himself is in fact a gentile. OK, I can understand that the supply of native-speaking elderly Jewish actors in Berlin may well be a bit scant for historical reasons, but where oh where are the outraged pieces at Harry's Place and the JC, I wonder.


This kind of brouhaha is apparently intended to protect and promote the life chances of Black people. It is more likely in my arrogant opinion to have the opposite effect. In Hallervorden's position I would not be repenting my evil racist ways and seeking to employ genuine Black actors for future Black roles. Dealing with the concomitant hustlers, the quotaists, the racecarders and the pervasive atmosphere of resentful entitlement is just too much hassle. Instead I would be quietly excising pieces with Black characters from my company's repertoire.


________
* I'm slightly confused here. The Deutsche Welle article linked above refers to Hallervorden as "director", while the poster displayed at Yo, Is this Racist? reads "Regie: Thomas Schendel". Perhaps Hallervordern is director, ie head honcho, of the theatre rather than the play itself. Whatever, I don't think it affects the substance of the above.

...has stuck its beak up its own arse.

Man charged over Newcastle racist abuse

Police have arrested — and are holding in custody — a 29-year-old man who posted a racist tweet following Newcastle United's signing of a permatanned chappie with the good old Geordie moniker of Papiss Demba Cissé.

The offending tweet has been taken down and I have been unable to find a screenshot. The precise wording used has not, as far as I know, been publicized. But the gist, apparently, was that the writer felt there were now too many Black players in the Newcastle squad. Presumably this opinion was expressed in fairly direct terms, but I see nothing wrong with it being expressed.

There's certainly an argument to be had about the identity conflict between football teams being anchored to a particular geographical location and the increasing tendency in the premiership to treat the club as a globalized business and to hire from the entire world. It would be interesting to know whether the now trivially criminalized tweeter has issues with Sammy Ameobi playing for Newcastle as well, or just with Cissé as a "proper foreigner".

Personally I think there are too many Diane Abbotts in the Commons. Go on then, arrest me.


Good this, innit.

(No, no, I'm not suggesting that we eat babies — spit-roast pickaninny with a slice of watermelon in its mouth — but there are no doubt many among the Righteous who would regard the following as equivalent.)


In very crude terms, the "debate" about asylum seekers in this country divides into the Righteous and Unrighteous camps.

The Righteous assert that every asylum seeker throwing himself on our mercy and charity is genuinely fleeing mortal persecution, and if he isn't, he's fleeing destitution, or is at the very least being denied the sort of free self-expression and/or lifestyle that we undeserving bastards in the West are accustomed to, or some such waffle — I mean, like, if a flamboyant fairy can't exercise his divoon right to flounce along the main drag of Qom in a pink tutu without being hanged from a crane at the behest of the local ayatollahs, then he should be allowed to come and do so on Old Compton Street, innit. Such people, we are lectured sententiously, should be welcomed with open arms, whatever their numbers, and our society should if necessary be entirely rebuilt around their claimed needs. In recognition of our generic Western colonial guilt, our rapacious exploitation and unspeakable cruelty towards, well, anyone non-European really, it is our duty to provide reparation from our infinite coffers.

The Unrighteous camp, however, firmly believes that damned near all of these bastards are lying through their teeth and are in fact welfare seekers and economic migrants, voluntarily leaving adequate and safe environments in order to leech off our welfare state, hoping to supplement their undeserved state handouts with work in what we now call the informal economy and sending remittances home while employing, at our expense, crooked immigration lawyers in the hope of achieving the Holy Grail of ILR and the eventual chance to bootstrap their entire extended clan into the UK.


Actually, having followed this particular "passing show" with some attention for the last decade, I recognize a third and probably very large category: those who are "plausibly genuine" asylum seekers, certainly according to the generous lights of the Righteous, but also at the same time are opportunistic seekers after economic advantage. These are folk who have indeed fled a threatening situation, or perhaps simply left behind a deeply unsatisfactory one, but instead of accepting readily available refuge nearby within their own or a similar land, conclude that they might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb and make their way to Europe, where the streets are paved with stolen gold and the State will provide.

Let me give typical examples of two such Aspirants to the Ovine Upgrade, from memory.

There was the Cameroonian woman who, persistently importuned by the local chief, took herself off in order to preserve her honour. Not to Douala or Yaoundé, say, where she might reasonably be able to lose herself safely among the crowd, but all the way to London. She came to media notice in the UK when, while being forcibly deported, she kicked up an almighty fuss on the plane, Mubenga-stylee, bruised herself slightly in the process and was taken off at Paris (or possibly Brussels) by the authorities who pouted sanctimoniously at Anglo-Saxon barbarity and sent her back to London.

A more successful freeloader was the Ugandan lady reported in the training supplement of the Evening Standard some years ago. Her husband was killed in some kind of very local political feud in some upcountry shithole and so, not unreasonably, she fled with her youngest child. Not to Kampala or some safe place elsewhere in Uganda or East Africa, but to London, where she was actually granted leave to remain and was now retraining as a medical technician. At the time of the article, her two older children had recently completed their secondary education at boarding school — in Uganda but away from her former hometown and evidently safely out of the reach of her late husband's political foes — and she was applying for them to join her in the UK. Which does rather beg questions.

Such tales are legion. And because, as with the party of blind men examining the elephant, each side of the "debate" can concentrate to those aspects which support his case while ignoring the rest of the picture, rather like Daniel Waweru below the line on CiF tenaciously maintaining his bite on the precise interpretation of a single word in someone else's post like an insane pitbull, that debate is heated but fruitless. People shouting over each other's shoulders until they get bored and go home.


So let me suggest a solution which might at least address the uncertainties.

The current refugee legislation and conventions adhered to by "the West" were, as I understand it in my historical ignorance, largely shaped by the horror and sense of guilt of the Allies when they were confronted with the full physical reality of the Endlösung der Judenfrage, their horror at their pre-war failure to provide adequate refuge to European Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. This outlook was subsequently compounded with the political desire to promise support to the trickle of successful escapees from behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

But then promises are easy to make when the uptake is negligible: the Jews we had failed were either already dead or already fled. And the Soviet dissidents were safely behind that nice big Iron Curtain.

What was not anticipated was a creeping commitment to supply European standards of governance and concomitantly European standards of living to every poor but hopeful Asian or African who is sitting there in the bush wondering whether the diesel in the generator will hold out until the end of the episode of Sex in the City or Dallas that he and his fellows are watching on the village telly.

"Do people in White countries really all live like that? I want some of that."

It doesn't work, however hard we try. The numbers are simply too great.

However many thieving bankers you expropriate or grasping rentiers you tax until the pips lose their squeak, you cannot afford to support 300 or 400 million poor Black and Brown people in the UK in the lotos-eating luxury to which they believe they are entitled. Nor can we support every last one of those fleeing simple poverty or intolerant, corrupt governance or even, ultimately, actual persecution.

The lifeboat metaphor has its place here. If you are in a crowded lifeboat and there are a couple of people floundering in the water nearby, you extend an oar to them and haul them aboard. If there are a thousand heads bobbing nearby, all desperate to get aboard and grasping for the gunwales, you use the oars to beat them off. That's the sad reality. Otherwise everybody drowns. While we're at it, let's run a bit further with the metaphor. As their bedraggled DJs and posh frocks make clear, the original passengers in the boat were first-class passengers at dinner when the ship sank; the new arrivals are all from steerage. And as more steerage passengers are helped aboard and begin to outnumber the toffs, the overloaded boat begins to founder. Who do you think is going to get chucked overboard to lighten the load?

I don't want some of that.


But we are decent folk, whatever the Righteous may think of us. If a man presents himself at our door and claims that he has run away from the threat of imminent death, mutilation or torture, and we find ourselves willing to believe him, then a decent person will still want to offer help. Despite rather than because of the pious wallowing righteous social masochism of the CiF post about the Congo that I linked to above, that decent instinct remains.

So how to separate the terrified sheep from the opportunistic goats? And how in due course do we persuade the sheep to return to their home pastures when the wolf has been killed?

Well, what are we actually undertaking to offer? We are offering protection from harm. Not the chance of "a better life". Not, for those fleeing — real or invented — persecution in the Third World, an upgrade to First World standards of living and opportunity as part of the bargain. Nor are we obliged to offer economic support to their countries of origin via remittances and the eventual opportunity for mass immigration of the refugee's extended family and clan. We are not even obliged to offer support and protection for the remainder of the refugee's life; just protection from harm for as long as the realistic threat persists.

That's the core of it. That is all that can fairly be expected of us and, in the face of the potentially huge numbers which are currently held back mainly by logistic barriers, all that we can afford to offer. Freedom from fear.

Which in practical terms means segregation. The accommodation of asylum seekers and accepted refugees in, yes, refugee camps. Camps offering decent basic international standards commensurate with those applicable in their home countries, and containment without imprisonment. Preferably located in suitable, safe non-Western locations but managed and possibly run by the sponsoring Western governments. And with the reasonably expectation of the contribution of productive work in exchange for their keep from those who are able to do it.

To square the circle, to at least separate the truthful sheep who seek protection from the lying goats who just seek to short-circuit the immigration process, we need to call the latter's bluff. You seek protection from mortal terror, you say? OK, we will give you that protection. We will offer you, in essence, the standard of living you enjoyed in the country you claim to have fled along with freedom from fear. And no more.

Of course we'd have to ditch the ECHR first and perhaps hang a few judges pour encourager les autres.


Now, Mr Asylum Seeker, are you still interested?

If you can overlook his incontinent sanitary practices — a big ask, I know, but hey it's part of his avian culture, innit — the London feral pigeon is a decent enough sort of chap. A very lower-middle class bird, like a humble Dickensian clerk who has, by dint of years spent assiduously watching for dead men's shoes, finally achieved his goal of becoming overseer. He quietly and uncomplainingly goes about his incomprehensible daily work of picking up invisible crumbs from London's pavements, a humdrum task enlivened only by the occasional discovery of a puddle of dried puke, whereupon he is wont to become uncharacteristically excited.

You can imagine him at the end of the working day, with his copy of the avian edition of the Daily Mail tucked neatly under his wing, stepping into his favorite watering hole for a swift half of wallop and a spot of decorously risqué banter with the Polish barmaid, before catching his train home to the wife and squabs in the suburbs.

Compare and contrast the Thames seagull, a vulgar lager lout of a bird, who spends his days lounging about on the river walls, never separated from his can of Stella, making rude remarks about human passers by until he gets bored and pops back to the river to look for ducks and moorhens to harass.

Or the suburban corvid, evilly intelligent beasts who wouldn't think twice about swooping down and pecking out your eyes before offering you a "good deal" on a white stick. And yet despite their formidability, they seem to be nervous of us. Many's the occasion I have stood on the railway platform contemplating a crow or magpie which has fled my approach and sits looking at me from a safely high perch, only to look down to find a pigeon at my feet, looking up as if to say, "What the bleedin' 'ells up with him then, soft bugger?"

But your humble pigeon has, in recent years I notice, been getting above himself. Even in the days when I still joined the gloomy throng shuffling off the platforms at London Bridge of a morning, the local pigeons had taken to flying low over the crowd, passing scant inches above people's heads.

Groups of birds gathered around discarded food increasingly expect people to walk round them. Some have even begun, perhaps unwisely, to get confrontational about it. I recall one such encounter when I was eating one of those extremely flaky hard bread rolls in the street, unavoidably generating a tempting little pile of crumbs at my feet. A local pigeon, refusing to wait his turn, began to get quite aggressive. If he'd had the weight I'm sure he would have been up for barging me out of the way. I stood my ground, until as I was about to pop the last chunk of cheese roll into my mouth, he gave up and started to stomp off in disgust. So instead of eating it, I bounced the final morsel off the back of his retreating head. Quite a good shot, as it happens. Shameless little bugger, once he'd got over his shock, turned round and ate it, of course.

But the final straw came when a pigeon slapped me in the face. Not as health-threatening an experience as it might have been, for this was not only a suburban pigeon but a barely fledged squab who hadn't had time to accumulate the filth and disease that many of his elders aspire to. Probably accounts for the clumsy flying skills that caused him to collide with me, as well.

Enough I say. The feral rock dove is forgetting who built the artificial urban cliffs he perches on, who scatters the plentiful benison of food on the pavements, to which he has become so accustomed that he regards it as an entitlement. He needs to be taught a bit of respect.

I therefore invite readers to join me in participating in London kick-a-pigeon week. This is not a set period in the calendar, but any period of seven days, not necessarily contiguous and chosen entirely to suit your personal convenience, when you will take the opportunity to launch an unprovoked kick at selected ambulant pigeons who happen to cross your path.

Encourage your small children to chase the little sods. Don't worry, pigeons are not as bird-brained as they look. They recognize the difference between a human adult and a human child and they know that small children may give chase. There's no chance your child will catch an alert pigeon.


Keep the little buggers nervous and guessing. Teach them their place and reclaim the streets for humanity!

Just listening to the midnight news on the steam wireless. "13 Somali pirates", announces Kathy Clugston proudly, "have been captured by the Royal Navy" in the Indian Ocean.

Forgive me a certain eeyorish scepticism, but what happens next? Presumably they all claim asylum and end up living in Woolwich.

A report from The Bolton News (via)

‘Predator’ in sex case jailed

A couple of quotes:

A “predatory” man “saw no harm” in sexually assaulting a teenager from a different ethnic background, a court was told.

and

“She was not from your ethnic background.

I am quite sure you have a hypocritical view of sexual matters, and, while you would not be prepared to sexually assault someone from your own background, you saw no harm at all in sexually approaching this young girl because she was of a different background.”

Now there is word I would normally expect to see in such an news report. Begins with an R, I seem to recall.

Surely the following has nothing to do with that omission:

The judge also recommended that Mehri, of Tildsley Street, Daubhill, should be deported to Afghanistan, where he is originally from. He moved to this country in 2005.

Sky Sports News:

Police are investigating chants aimed in the direction of Leicester City supporters by their East Midlands rivals Nottingham Forest.

They are treating the chants as a potential hate crime.

Nottinghamshire Police said it was investigating the "racist" chanting after a video-clip filmed during the club's FA Cup tie against Leicester was posted online.

The footage, thought to be from the early stages of last Saturday's 0-0 draw at The City Ground, shows Forest fans singing: "You used to be English, you're not any more."

This is getting surreal.

Commenting on the police inquiry on Twitter, some fans claimed the chant was a reference to Leicester's high ethnic minority population, while others suggested that it alluded to the Thai-led consortium which owns Leicester City.

Not that I know anything about futebol, but not being a race-hustler the latter explanation sounds more plausible to me. Dunno, who owns Notts Forest?


Hmm. The EDL are in Leicester in three weeks' time in support of Rhea Page. Just saying.

The metaphor, that is.

A BBC News presenter is interviewing a vaguely relevant industry talking head about the Government's approval of the HS2 project.

"Do you think it could be derailed by protesters?"

Hmm.

Sunny has decided to pull the plug on the Pickled Politics blog. Probably just as well. The blog was held together by Rumbold, who was the only remotely sensible above-the-line poster. Rumbold now has other things to occupy his time. Sunny himself seems to have been absorbed by his heretofore mysterious software project to the extent that his presence above the line at PP and to a lesser extent at LC has consisted of quickie ill-considered and bad-tempered sideswipes and his interventions below-the-line have been little more than generic abuse. Which basically leaves Jai. Well, one doesn't wish to be unkind (omnes: "Oh go on, let yourself go!"), but Jai comes across as a saloon-bar bore with a thin skin. His ponderous dissertations on Indian history and culture have been interesting if a little one-sided, but his sallies into British "far-right" politics (BNP, EDL, Alan Lake, Breivik, ...) have been painful, his tiresome literalism like nothing so much as the desperate comma-wrangling of a defence brief whose client is 100% bang to rights. If Jai migrates to LC above the line without the admin rights to censor his critics below the line, he's going to be in a different and less-forgiving environment which may come as something of a reality-check to him.

All that said, PP has been an entertaining read. Given its largely Desi commentariat, it is a bit like watching a counterfactual "reverse Raj" at play. I find myself visualizing the Picklers as a motley crew of people in the Imperial Service of the Indian Empire in Europe, assembling socially at the Club in some kind of Cotswolds resort mirroring the real-world Ooty. Sipping their pink lassis as Col. Jai (retd) holds forth on the benefits of Indian rule in Europe, while they talk airily of the bloody natives — "Decent enough chaps in their way, doncha know, but essentially childlike. Apparently some of these English blightahs think themselves capable of ruling themselves. Ha! I say, another round here, Smithson, you lazy bugger. Jaldi jaldi!"

The undercurrent of ethnic arrogance is subtle but totally self-assured.

Pip! Pip!

I was walking along one of the main shopping streets of central London; I forget which one. In the other direction there approached a Chinaman. He was dressed in what appeared to be waiter's garb, with one of those little black weskits they seem to favour.

Johnny Chinaman, however, was not walking but running, running as fast as his little legs would carry him. He ran as if his life — or somebody's life — depended on it.

So why the great hurry?

I don't know, but I did notice what he was carrying. In one hand he held a large clear polythene sack containing a dozen or so of those giant industrial-size bog rolls you sometimes encounter in the toilets of institutional or commercial premises.

I find myself thinking of the running Chinaman whenever I pass a Chinese restaurant. And for some reason I cannot quite fathom, I am never tempted to go in.

And so it goes on.

From Friday's Daily Record, och aye the noo, geezer, innit.

A FAN who racially abused an SPL star on Twitter was yesterday being hunted by police.

The sick tweet about Inverness Caledonian Thistle striker Gregory Tade was allegedly posted in Fife by a student who claimed he was drunk at the time.

(My emphasis)

This is really becoming quite entertaining. Soon the resources of the police forces of the UK will be entirely consumed in hunting down and prosecuting naughty White people voicing counterrevolutionary thoughts. Normal life will grind to a halt as the entire White population is progressively imprisoned.

To maintain basic services, the Government will resort to emergency immigration: Congolese doctors, Nigerian financiers and Somali labourers will flood into the country to save us.

Ah. Never thought of that.

Hmm. It's a plot, isn't it? Has anybody seen Andrew Neather lately? I think he's co-ordinating all this from a secret bunker under Pudding Mill Lane. The Crossrail project was all a front to hide the building work. I see it all now.

Silly buggers.



Hold on, I hear a knocking at the door.

And in yet another CIF thread milking the Stephen Lawrence show trial,

Stephen Lawrence verdict does not end the debate on police racism

at 02:30 this morning we find


but by 09:20 we read


Oh dear. I wonder which "community standard" Laban broke, then. Answers on a postcard, please.


They're rattled, aren't they?



Update (21:00)

The Civitas report linked to in the deleted post is available for download at http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/cs05.pdf.

You might also find Institutional Racism and the Police: Fact or Fiction? of interest, from the same source.

Apparently a footballer called Tom Adeyemi, who plays for Oldham Athletic, was racially abused and reduced to tears at a cup tie between Suárez United and t'Latics, when ... well let the Guardian explain.

A witness who gave evidence to Liverpool officials and the police said: "I was to the right of the Kop and the No11 turned to walk away after a tackle. I heard a single voice shout, 'You fucking black bastard.' He spun round with shock on his face and started pointing at the crowd, from where the shout had come."

Got that? Football supporter shouts something rude at a player for the opposing side.

A statement said: "Merseyside police can confirm that no one has been arrested this evening on suspicion of racially aggravated behaviour during tonight's FA Cup fixture at Anfield. However, the force and Liverpool Football Club are investigating following an incident that occurred during the second half of the game. The aim of the investigation is to establish the full circumstances surrounding the incident to ascertain if any action needs to be taken."

Liverpool launched an investigation into an incident that could not have come at a worse time for a club that has been widely condemned for its vehement support of Suárez, before and after his eight-match ban for racially abusing Evra in a match last October.

Riiight. Football supporter shouts something rude at a player for the opposing side and the police are called. The "incident" is reported in the media — including the BBC national radio news, no less.

...

And lo, it was reported on BBC 4 national radio news last evening that the police had arrested someone for this crime against humanity. Apparently someone has also been arrested for tweeting something racist at Stan Collymore.

This is getting silly. Soon most of the White population of the UK will be banged up. Either that or they will be keeping their traps well and truly sealed. I suspect I shall belong to the latter category. Or try to.

Not that, if I were to put my larynx into gear in the hearing of a black person, er, person of colour, er, non-IC1, I would be particularly likely to be going round racially abusing them. Such behaviour is apt to invite a smack on the nose, for one thing. But there's that awful feeling that you might just say something that might be misinterpreted, or indeed creatively re-interpreted, and you'd be up before the beak before you can call a spade a black bastard. Oops.

I mean, I used to work with this Black bloke many, many moons ago. He was a nice enough chap but he had a ginormous racial chip on his shoulder. Not only that but he seemed to think he personally owned the intellectual property rights on the word "black". I can't say I remember ever hearing him complain about the phrase "black coffee" itself, but he certainly treated most of the common collocations of "black" to detailed analysis. As I say, nice enough chap and I wish him well in his subsequent career, but I'm pleased he doesn't work for me any more. That, thankfully, was several yonks ago. Working with such a person these days would be positively dangerous.

My advice is, don't talk to Darkies. It only leads to trouble.

Actually, now I think of it, I did abuse a Black man yesterday. I say "Black", but it's difficult to pin down his ethnic make-up with any certainty. Let's settle for decidedly swarthy of complexion and definitely not "one of us", shall we? Joe the beggar will be familiar to anyone who knows beautiful downtown Greenwich at all well. As he stood there looking at me with an expression on his face like a vulture trying to decide which end of the carcass to start on first, I decided to open the conversation myself. "Fuck off, Joe!", I suggested politely. I might as well have saved my breath: he wished me a happy new year and launched into his pitch anyway.

The Old Bill will probably be round for me some time today, Sunday.

Trouble is, you do wonder where we go from here if the current round of arrests fails to encourager les autres. A new offence of looking at a Darkie quizzically, perhaps? Failing to smile nicely at a member of a privileged ethnic group, with intent to cause alarm and despondency? Failing to laugh sufficiently enthusiastically at Lenny Henry's jokes?

This will end in tears. Or worse.


In other news, Emma West (remember her?) has opted to go for jury trial. Good idea — I think.

You'd have thought that the ruling elite would be relieved at getting away with the show trial of Dobson and Norris, wouldn't you? Think of the consequences had the jury acquitted.

The White liberal elite and their grasping camp-followers in the racehustling industry have for the past 40-plus years been assiduously encouraging Black people in this country to view themselves as oppressed victims.

Last August we saw the most recent example of the consequences of this when Mark Duggan, a violent armed petty criminal was shot dead by police. The circumstances and justification for that shooting remain under investigation, but that didn't satisfy the local "community". One of their own had been killed by the Babylon System and so they marched to the police station to demand ... well, what exactly? Whatever it was, they didn't get it, and days of rioting, arson and extreme shopping followed across the country. Yes, most of that was criminal opportunism but the trigger lay in the death and the popular reaction to it.

Now look at the Stephen Lawrence murder. This unfortunate young man was killed in what in the scheme of things was an ordinary street attack, devastating for his parents but, to be brutally frank, of minor ongoing consequence or interest to the wider community. He had already been elevated to the status of martyr by opportunist busybodies when the New Labour regime, through the agency of the Macpherson inquiry, turned him almost incidentally into a secular saint. Whether or not Jack Straw actually set out to cynically use Macpherson as a tool to further the party's diversity agenda is neither here nor there. The impact on British society, its expectations and institutions has been startling, and in my view almost totally counterproductive.

And so the show trial of his killers had to be pursued at all costs, financial and judicial. So imagine what might have happened if that naughty jury had acquitted Dobson and Norris of sancticide and that expectant population of Black people, two generations of whom have been raised into a mentality of simmering entitled resentment, had been denied their prize.

But no, having got away with their stunt and having had their pound of flesh they want more. I must admit I was only vaguely aware of the populist nonsense that allows members of the public to demand the review of a sentence, but apparently this is now in hand

Stephen Lawrence murder sentences to be reviewed by attorney general

The crime for which Dobson and Norris were convicted took place in 1993, when both men were juveniles of 16 or 17. Whether you agree with it or not, this typically reduces the sentence. The crime of racially-aggravated or -motivated murder, which would serve to increase the sentence, did not exist in 1993. The judge, himself a member of the sentencing guidelines body and an expert on these matters, sentenced on that basis, according to the rules.

So if in principle any Tom, Rajiv or Winston can write in and demand the review of the sentence for a serious crime then this stuff must be going on all the time. Yet I don't recall reading of an example in the media. Publicizing this is another populist stunt, isn't it?

At least I hope it is: just a bit of desperate cock-waving to please the baying mob. For if they follow through and this does go to the court of appeal, and the tariffs for Dobson and Norris are increased to the current 2012 standard of 25 years, then our lords and masters will have achieved another judicial and democratic breakthrough: selective retrospective legislation by administration.


Come on guys, you want a lynching, don't you? Stop messing about, just bind Dobson and Norris hand and foot, tie them to the back bumper of a police carrier and drag them through the streets of Catford, Lewisham and Peckham for the delectation and retribution of da people.

I was going to write something here about the conviction of Gary Dobson and David Norris but Anna Raccoon has pretty well covered everything I would have said and with greater clarity and thoroughness than I would have managed.

There is also the Spectator commentary by Rod Liddle to which Treacy J took exception and forbade the jurors to read. The following text is from a third-party source so I cannot vouch for it.

Now, here's a good one. The judge in the Stephen Lawrence murder trial told potential jurors that they must approach the evidence 'with a clean slate'. That is, not be inclined to prejudge the issue as a consequence of having been assured, repeatedly, for the last twelve years, by the entire press, that the men accused are disgusting racist bastards and definitely guilty. Judge Treacy might as well have told the jurors that they must approach the case 'by eating fifteen Jacobs cream crackers, without any water or other emolument, inside one minute'. The case is a charade, and a vindictive charade at that.

A few years ago two of the men not now facing a retrial were sentenced to eighteen months in prison for having thrown an empty paper cup in the direction of a black policeman. Eighteen months! But of course they were not sentenced to eighteen months for having thrown an empty paper cup in the direction of a police officer, they were sentenced to eighteen months for the crime of having not been found guilty of the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

I don't think that they are very nice people. So I suppose it's ok that we invent a new system of justice to ensure they get banged up.

Stephen Lawrence the person was killed in a depressing but unremarkable attack by a bunch of overconfident young thugs. Was the attack racially-aggravated? Probably. Was the attack racially-motivated? Dunno, that's actually a different question.

More to the point, does it matter? If the group had attacked a pair of bespectacled posh young White toffs from Blackheath who had had the temerity to wander onto their territory, would that have been less heinous? Would the attackers have been charged with murder aggravated by class hatred and a commission of inquiry set up to investigate institutional dioptrophobia in the Met?

Anyway Dobson and Norris have not been convicted of killing Stephen Lawrence the person, they have been convicted of killing St Stephen the political symbol.

£50million spent, the legal system trashed, the police reduced to gibbering diversity-sensitive cowards scared to say boo to a golliwog. Good value, eh?

You tell me.

I was half-listening to Eddie Mair and Jennifer Tracey's iPM programme on the steam wireless the other day. iPM is very much a characteristic Mair vehicle, an irreverent light-touch spin-off from the mainstream afternoon news programme PM which pursues "human interest" anecdotes, largely suggested by listeners. The iPM programme has been collecting listener suggestions for its own "new year's honour award". One of the nominees was a chap who has started up an online social networking site for ex-servicemen.

As I say I was, as ever, only half-listening so I don't recall the chap's name or details. But my little pointed ears pricked up when he started going on about his experience with fending off the BNP and the EDL. He cited as an example a supposed "EDL" troll on his site who had been complaining about the lenient treatment of Muslims by the courts, comparing this with the case of two White men banged up for 12 months for spray-painting poppy images onto a mosque. This, asserted our candidate hero, was a totally made-up story. It had never happened. He had, he said, investigated it and could vouch for its fictitiositude.

Oh yes, I thought. I remember that story. It seemed real enough to me. So I did a bit of googling to reinvigorate the old neural pathways and came across, among others, the Hoax-Slayer site, which seems to be a sort of one-man Snopes run by an Australian busybody called Brett Christensen.

Mr Christensen attempts to deconstruct the odious comparison between the cases of Vasey and Smith (the poppy sprayers), who were sent down for 12 months with that of Tohseef Shah, who painted the slogan "Islam will dominate the world – Osama is on his way" on a war memorial and was made to pay approximately £600 in compensation and told not to be a naughty boy. Fair enough, Vasey and Smith had also committed vandalism against other "Asian" buildings, but the key distinction is that Vasey and Smith's crime was deemed to be racially aggravated, while that of Shah was not.

It is worth looking at the CPS's reasoning in the latter case,

“The CPS specialist unit was sent the pictures, as well as his mobile phone records, to see if there was a racially or religiously motivated connotation.

“It was decided there was not enough evidence to prove this, and they decided it was politically motivated."

Now there's subtle, look you. I shall have to remember that for next time I'm up before the beak for being rude to a wog. "I was not being racist, Your Exiguousness, I was merely employing Mr Khan as a proxy for the late Osama bin Laden, the latter gentleman being unavailable. My comments were therefore political in intent."

A spokesman for the CPS said: “While it was appreciated that what was sprayed on the memorial may have been perceived by some to be part of a racial or religious incident, no racial or religious group can be shown to have been targeted.”

Ah yes, the British, the people who don't exist, innit.

You do begin to wonder who's running the CPS and to what purpose. Well, not for me to cast nasturtiums, but here's an interesting post at Casuals United

We get an insight from an email we recieved from an ex employee of the CPS

“The new “Director of Diversity” decided she could earn brownie points by downgrading all the senior caseworker posts and making them junior posts. Ostensibly this was to cut the wage bill. It also had the effect of getting rid of all part-timers and anybody with a family friendly work pattern. The Family friendly policy was SO last year! She wasn’t the only one making cuts, nearly 1000 of us went in the department in the course of a year. But it had the secondary effect of ridding the department of experienced, mature staff, who were mostly white, because we had been there since the 80s and the junior replacements were recruited with ‘diversity’ criteria in mind. I had got used to not hearing English spoken around me on the tube – during this period I started to find the same thing in the office lift and canteen queue”

The above cases and this from an ex employee PROVE that the CPS has become a politically correct organisation who are clearly not interested in prosecuting anyone for racial offences other than white people. It should be scrapped. End of.

One law for all.

You may make what you will of that. I couldn't possibly comment.

Apologists for Rhea Page's assailants have argued in a comparable way to Mr Christensen, dredging up examples where groups of attackers have been spared jail due to perceived mitigating circumstances. (I had a link for this but in my cack-handed way I'm afraid I've mislaid it.)

I have no problem with the principle of mitigation as such, and I am wary of passing judgement on the basis of newspaper reports. Even the most conscientious report will necessarily be incomplete, never mind one in the Daily Mail. However, judging from their photographs and the CCTV footage, I am having some difficulty convincing myself that this particular coven of violent Somali painted jezebels were in reality the group of shy, chaste and naïve young muslimas temporarily led astray by bright lights, infidel temptations and unfamiliarity with the demon drink that we are asked to believe in.

But that's not really the point, is it? Despite their racially-charged language, including "Kill the white slag", no less, their offence was not deemed to be "racially aggravated". In my not particularly humble opinion, the concept of racially (or religiously, etc) aggravated offences would be fragile and socially divisive even it were applied with visibly scrupulous impartiality. In a situation where one "community", in this case the White British, has anecdotal but credible (or at the very least not convincingly discredited) reason to believe that it is being actively discriminated against, it is a recipe for disaster.



Oh, and one bonus point to finish with. Back briefly to Mr Christensen. In his efforts to demonstrate that White racists are not treated disproportionately badly, he cites the case of Ryan Austin,

For example, if the message had compared the Shah and Choudhury cases with another case in which Sunderland man Ryan Austin sprayed racist grafitti on a Mosque, its power would have been considerably curtailed. As with Shah and Choudhur, Austin was not sent to prison. He received only a fine for his crime.

Did you actually read your link, Brett? Mr Austin, full name Ryan Zahid Austin, is an Anglo-Pakistani half-caste, confused by his multicultural upbringing and largely rejected by his peer groups of both ethnicities, whose crime was motivated by revenge against his decamped Pakistani father. Hardly your average White chav, eh?

Must try harder.

When I leave comments below the line at Righteous blogs and comment fora, appalled readers sometimes follow the link back to this blog. Many of them, it seems, are looking solely or mainly for something to feed their outrage, to imbue a comforting Ready Brek glow of self-righteous indignation and self-certainty. They light on the first thing they encounter which matches their criteria.

Usually, because it is always there at the top of the page, it's the crack in the "About me" sidebar on the left about being "prepared to call a spade a black bastard".

It's actually a call for equality of treatment between Black and White and a statement of intent: I will treat non-Whites on equal terms, and that, folks, includes openly attacking their negative behaviour rather than scrabbling for mealy-mouthed patronizing excuses for it.

But the Righteous don't think about any of this. They see the mild slang "spade" and throw their hands up in horror. And then they see "black bastard" and the delicious pleasure of easy, pious outrage is complete. A warm pre-orgasmic glow of self-satisfaction suffuses their being: they are the decent ones; they are better than me.

I wrote that potted biography after the Dogwash blog was started pretty well by accident seven years ago — I was actually trying to create a Blogger identity to facilitate leaving comments on other people's blogs rather than start one of my own.

Edwin Greenwood is the nom de souris of a Mancunian early baby-boomer, now living in London, who like so many of his cohort has made the transition from cuddly inclusive soft-left liberal into a grumpy old git who is quite prepared to call a spade a black bastard.

The spades and black bastards reference was little more than a rather neat pun that had been running round in my head for a while and I was a bit nervous about putting it in at first. But it epitomizes what this blog stands for, and I stand by it.

And while outrageous Black-on-White racist attacks continue to be mitigated on the grounds that "they are Muslims and unused to alcohol", I shall continue to offend you by complaining about the imbalance, sometimes in rather stark language.



Right, enough of this sententious tosh. As a special new year's service to the Righteous, here's something different for them to get upset about. Let's start 2012 as we mean to go on: with an entirely gratuitous and offensive racist joke.

Mr Wong, a senior Chinese business executive, is visiting his company's interests in Yorkshire. As the train pulls out of King's Cross, Wong settles into his first-class seat and takes out his laptop. In due course a steward makes his way along the carriage dispensing refreshments. Reaching Mr Wong's bay, he calls out jauntily,

— "You for coffee?"

Mr Wong is not going to stand for that sort of thing. Not looking up from his computer, he replies evenly,

— "No, you fuck offee. Me got first crass tickee."



A prosperous new year to you all.