Up in smoke

On the 17th January Home Secretary David Blunkett opened what was announced as Europe's biggest asylum centre. It was a lavishly appointed establishment in Yarl's Wood, Bedfordshire, which had cost £100 million. In a Daily Mail report the following day, it was observed that the facilities at Yarl's Wood would not be out of place in a luxury hotel.

The centre was designed to accommodate illegal immigrants whose applications for settlement in the UK had been turned down and were awaiting deportation. Not any old facilities for these people! Despite the fact that in entering this country they had broken our laws, the attitude of the Government was: nothing but the best for them! While waiting to go home (it they are ever sent there!) they were able to enjoy video games, satellite TV, two gyms, weight-training rooms, outdoor five-a-side football pitches, volleyball and basketball. NHS patients lying on trolleys in our Third World-standard hospitals would have envied them.

But were the immigrants grateful to the British Government and taxpayers for all these mod cons? Just a month afterwards they gave their answer. Following some dispute over a woman thought to be from Eastern Europe who had complained about lack of medical treatment, a large-scale riot broke out. Officers were attacked, and the rioting inmates started a series of fires throughout the buildings. In one incident four female nurses were locked in the medical centre by detainees, then burning paper was pushed under the locked door. Fortunately, the nurses escaped just in time.

There was then a break-out of some 23 inmates. Ten were subsequently captured quite quickly afterwards, but the remainder got away.

Fire damage has been estimated at £38 million.

To say there are red faces at the Home Office in consequence of this incident would be to understate the case. Our politicians have been telling us for years that we must be nice to the asylum-seekers, that they are poor, innocent people mostly fleeing from persecution, that the Government has the asylum system under control and that in due course all the applications will be sorted out to the satisfaction of everybody. In the meantime, there has been mounting public anger at the inability of the authorities to control the flood and, not least, at the vast public expense that has been incurred in providing the gate-crashers with living quarters, allowances and additional amenities such as those at Yarl's Wood. In fact, once it has been ruled that people have entered this country illegally they should be dispatched with the minimum of delay and in the meantime housed in the most basic of conditions.

But taking an overview of the matter, we should recognise that the reason these people have come to Britain in the first place is that word has got around the countries from which they come that we are the softest touch of all the developed, western nations; that we have a government that cares more for immigrants than for its own people and will bend over backwards to give the newcomers everything that they demand - while sometimes criminalising indigenous citizens who dare to object. The UK has become Tom Tiddler's Ground for all humanity. If you're prepared to take the risks getting here, mate, once you arrive you've got it made!

Of course, we should not take it out on all the asylum-seekers for the incendiary activities of a few. No doubt, for the troublemakers and arsonists at Yarl's Wood there were plenty others who were appreciative of their treatment (they damned well should be!) and just wanted to go home peacefully.

But the fiasco of Yarl's Wood adds up to a devastating indictment of Tony Blair's Government: for the soft and weak way in which it has dealt with the invaders, for the delay in kicking them out and for the ridiculous public expense it has incurred in giving them hand-outs and luxuries which only encourage more to come.

The Government's asylum policy has gone up in smoke - literally in the case of Yarl's Wood. But will lessons be learned? Knowing this gang, we doubt it.

Meanwhile, over the Channel...

On the 20th February, fresh trouble broke out at another refugee centre. This was the well-known Red Cross camp at Sangatte, near Calais, which has been the subject of a great deal of controversy and argument between the French and British governments.

At Sangatte, an estimated 500 immigrants started fighting each other - the main antagonists being Kurds and Afghans, and the brawl was reported as arising out of rivalry between Kurdish and Afghan gangs of 'refugee mafia', who can earn up to £15,000 a night smuggling immigrants. A Calais police spokesman said: "These wars often start when opposing gang chiefs are both vying for the same families to traffic across the Channel. It can escalate into a full-scale battle along ethnic lines, with Kurds on one side and Afghans on the other."

French authorities have defended the decision to keep the Sangatte centre open because, they maintain, the alternative would be to have the asylum-seekers running around Calais itself. As it is, the small village of Sangatte has endured no end of trouble. Local women are regularly subjected to abuse, and the beach is littered with alcohol bottles, used syringes and condoms. Some of the refugees have squatted in and vandalised holiday homes on the sea front and some have been arrested for pilfering from shops and cafes. Sangatte Mayor Andre Segard has said: "The situation is intolerable. Our community is under siege."

And guess where all these people are headed for!

Crime and the race factor

What everyone has known for a long time, but few have dared to acknowledge, came out last month in a series of articles and reports in the newspapers. Coloured immigrants play a role in crime out of all proportion to their numbers in the population, and in some particular crimes almost have a monopoly.

These admissions were sparked off by a series of horrific murders occurring in our cities, particularly London, over the past weeks. Some of the murders were the result of shoot-outs between rival gangs of Jamaican Yardies, in one known case with an innocent passer-by cut down and killed in the crossfire.

In another horrific incident, an estate agent in London, Tim Robinson, was stabbed to death by a gang taking his car. The gang members were identified as black.

At long last, even some members of the chattering classes have got around to admitting frankly, if with pained reluctance, the race factor in all this murder and mayhem. This could be because many of them, ever eager to be trendy and ‘PC’, choose to live in multi-racial areas then have cause to regret it as they become aware of the constant danger lurking around their own street comers. It's OK for journalists residing comfortably in Buckinghamshire or the Surrey stockbroker belt to pontificate against the ‘racism’ of Whites in the inner-city ghettos; but when the same people find themselves right in the middle of the nightmare world which their own writings have done so much to encourage and defend they are ready to sing a different tune.

One journalist, James Jackson, penned an article in the Daily Mail on the 2nd February titled 'Give us back our streets.' Mr. Jackson lives close to where the Robinson murder took place, and he was angry. He said:-

‘I never met Timothy Robinson. What I have seen of him is a small, sodden pile of flowers left beside a lamppost.

‘This is London, not Johannesburg. And so my anger grows with the moral cowardice of an overspun government that avoids questions and ignores answers; with an emasculated, dispirited police force which substitutes lazy, fearful incident-response for visible presence; with those who use the smokescreen of race to excuse the violence of the street.’

And Jackson is not just incensed at the Blair Government. He goes on:-

‘Meanwhile the Conservative opposition calls for ‘neighbourliness’ but the trouble is that round here there's very little soft, cosy neighbourliness. I'm talking about knives held to throats, of faces scarred for life, of pervasive threat, of mindless, predatory aggression, of wanton evil, of the ongoing celebration of ghetto delinquency.’

Strong stuff, but there's more:-

‘There is fear of speaking out, fear in the playground, in the housing estates, in quiet residential streets. And there is fear of wandering into the minefield of political correctness that prevents open debate.

‘Gun crime is endemic among some elements of black society and most street crime is perpetrated by young black men.’

Jackson continued:-

‘This is the difficult part of the debate, yet it ought to be aired, if only because many of the victims are Blacks and the criminal minority gives the vast majority of decent, honest Blacks in this country a bad name.’

We should be glad that Mr. Jackson has gone a good deal further than most mainstream journalists have ever done in facing the uncomfortable reality of crime and race, but there is one matter, which even he failed to address. He speaks of the vast majority of black people as being decent and honest just as some other journalists, when acknowledging the ethnic minority crime problem, have referred to the vast majority of ethnics being law-abiding. This is something we would not dispute; the majority in virtually any community, of whatever race or hue, are decent, honest and law-abiding. Criminality is invariably an occupation of minorities.

The point, which no mainstream writer or broadcaster yet seems willing to admit, is that the minority among immigrant communities prone to commit crimes - particularly street crimes - is considerably larger, proportionally speaking, than the minority among the indigenous white community of the same disposition. This phenomenon can be observed consistently, not just in Britain, but in every country in the White World where non-white minorities have settled. That is the crux of the issue of crime and race. When we are free to talk about this without fear or inhibition, we will really start to address the problem.

Another Tony crony?

Everyone now knows about it - the affair has had ample airing in the media over the past few weeks. We are talking about the case of Mr. Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian millionaire who obtained agreement for the takeover of the Sidex steelworks in Romania as a result of an encouraging letter to the Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase - by our own Tony Blair, no less!

One of Mr. Blair's sweeties when writing to the Romanian premier was that if he consented to the takeover the British Government would look favourably on the Romanians' application to join the EU. Big deal for them!

One of Blair's lies in dealing with the case was that Mittal's company, Ispat International, was a British company. In fact, it is nothing of the kind. Mittal himself is an Indian citizen. His company is registered in the Dutch Antilles, a Caribbean off-shore tax haven, and of its workforce of 125,000 less than a tenth of one per cent is employed in the UK.

More seriously, the Mittal company, the more so with its new Romanian acquisition, is a direct competitor of the Corus steel company in Wales, which is currently laying off workers mainly because of import penetration from Eastern Europe and Central America.

Less than a month before Blair's letter to the Romanian Prime Minister last July recommending the deal, Mittal had made a donation of £l25,000 to the Labour Party. When a Daily Telegraph investigative reporter rang Blair's office enquiring whether the Premier knew of this when he wrote to Nastase, a spokesman replied: "I do not know if he (Blair) was aware of Mr. Mittal's donation, but it is irrelevant."

Irrelevant? If people in the Prime Minister's office really think this way, can it be any surprise that the Government is fast gaining the loathing and contempt of many among the British public.