So we're all racists!

If Sir David Calvert-Smith, head of the Crown Prosecution Service, did not actually exist, he would have had to be invented as a fictional character in the Daily Telegraph's satirical ‘Peter Simple’ column. Sir David made national headlines last month when as an excuse for the Government's lamentable record on law and order he claimed that the problem was that British society was ‘institutionally racist’. As if that explained everything!

Sir David had been put on the defensive by revelations that the justice system in this country was failing disastrously in its job of catching and punishing criminals. The chance of a law-breaker being convicted and sentenced has plunged over the past 20 years to an all-time low. As just one example, in 1980 the number of serious assaults nationwide was under 5,000 and the conviction rate was 29 per cent (low enough) but in 2000 this had risen to over 15,000, with a conviction rate of a mere 12 per cent. Burglaries had risen from 618,000 to 836,000 with conviction rates sinking from 13 per cent to four per cent.

One important factor in the slump in conviction rates has been the fact that law-enforcement authorities have been under tremendous pressure from the Government and various lobbies to drop cases where the suspects are black. The embarrassing preponderance of young black men arrested for street crimes, particularly mugging, has been seen as causing tremendous damage to ‘race relations’. The answer of the Government and the lobbies has been to practise reverse discrimination by declining to prosecute Blacks for offences that would automatically result in charges had they been white.

Sir David, instead of condemning this practice, has attempted to justify it by reference to the supposed ‘disadvantages’ suffered by black people living in a white dominated society. He neglected to explain why Chinese, who are a far smaller minority in Britain, have a crime rate lower even than the white average.

Predictably, Sir David's statement was greeted with horror by Tory politicians and journalists, who hastened to protest how ‘non-racist’ the British people were. For ourselves, we would treat the matter in a different way. If by ‘racist’ is meant a preference for our own kind and a belief that our country should be preserved for its indigenous inhabitants, we should be extremely worried if the British people were not ‘racist’ - it would mean that they had simply lost the will to defend their national frontiers and way of life. If they actually are ‘racist’ by Sir David's definition, that should be a cause for reassurance rather than shame.

None of this means, however, that ‘racism’ - whether in the positive or pejorative sense - should be the basis for deciding whether to prosecute and convict law-breakers. All should be treated absolutely equally under the law. We so-called ‘racists’ have always maintained this; the ‘anti-racists’ in authority apparently believe otherwise.

Hypocrites!

Labour MP for Keighley Ann Cryer got herself into big trouble last month - including accusations of ‘racism’ - by saying that Asian drug gangs in West Yorkshire were out of control and were making people's lives a misery with their turf wars.

There are two main points to make about Mrs. Cryer's comments - which are of course true. In the first place, under the race laws the truth of a particular opinion is no defence, and proof of ‘intent to provoke racial hatred’ is no longer required. The DPP could proceed against her but most probably will not, due to the politicisation of this service. Nevertheless, British nationalists have been imprisoned or otherwise penalised under these laws, sometimes for making rather milder statements than Mrs. Cryer. Secondly, Mrs. Cryer must have known about this situation for some considerable time, but kept quiet until Asians particularly Muslims - had lost something of their protected status following the September 1Ith attacks in America.

The Race Relations Act and its various amendments have never had anything to do with good race relations; they have been introduced essentially to silence protest by native British people against the flooding of their land by immigrants. But of course, if you're a Labour or Tory MP you can get away with saying things - even under this infamously totalitarian legislation - which others cannot.

The thin end of the wedge?

One of the decisions reached at the EU summit conference in Seville in late June was that an all-European border police force would be set up to patrol the frontiers of the European countries against illegal immigrants. The argument seems to have been that because illegal immigration is a problem common to the whole of Europe it needs a European police force to deal with it.

We fail to see why. One could say that crime of almost every kind has an international dimension and that European countries, along with others, have a mutual interest in fighting it. This does not mean that the fighting of crime has ceased to be essentially a function of national police forces - albeit sometimes in co-operation across borders with other national police forces.

Illegal immigrants trying to get into Britain are a problem for Britain's police, and there is no reason whatever why our police - providing they have governments solidly behind them - cannot deal with this problem themselves. The same is true for the other countries of Europe in respect of their illegal immigrants.

The suspicion is that the problem of illegal immigration - which the governments of Europe have so far done very little to stem - is being used as a Trojan horse by which to sneak in new police powers on an all-European level which will gradually supersede the police powers of the individual European states.

We have failed to stop illegal immigration, not because we have lacked a European police force to deal with it, but because we have not had a national government with the necessary desire and will to prevent this country being invaded.

Saga of the useless rifle

A scandal has broken out over the poor performance of the SA80 assault rifle issued to the British armed forces, which evidently has let its users down on an embarrassing number of occasions. In operations in Afghanistan, a unit of Marine Commandos found the rifle not infrequently failed to fire when needed. The British manufacturers, when consulted, claimed that the men had neglected to clean the rifles properly, but this excuse was rejected by the first-line troops, who insisted otherwise.

Apparently, after previous instances of malfunction, a £70 million refit programme was carried out on the rifle but this does not seem to have had much effect; complaints about its unreliability still persist. One Marine has said he would rather leave the corps than face going into battle with the SA80.

Now service chiefs are demanding that the army adopt an alternative rifle of foreign manufacture rather than persevere with this apparently unworkable British product.

This affair prompts two thoughts and comments. Firstly, a nation whose army relies upon foreign supplies for such a vital weapon of war as a rifle is no longer a country which has any proper independent means of self-defence. Whatever money has to be spent to ensure that Britain's forces have the best possible small arms, and that these are supplied from British factories, must be spent.

Secondly, just how did the failure of the SA80 ever occur in the first place? Surely, the supply of weapons of war upon which men's lives depend should be a process of infinite care in which new weapons are objected to rigorous tests at every stage of their production, including the final stage before they are made in quantity to be applied to fighting units. How on earth did it happen that it fell to men in battle in Afghanistan to discover functional flaws in this rifle that were not discovered earlier?

Is there any branch of our public services these days that operates efficiently and competently?

Who owns Britain?

The surrender of vital British assets and resources to foreign capital has been amply documented in these pages, but here is more. An article in the Financial Times of the 17th June focused on the public utilities of electricity and water, region by region. To the credit of the Scots and Welsh, both utilities in those parts of the Kingdom remain under home ownership. In England, however, it is a different story.

Taking electricity first, the ownership picture is as follows: Norweb (NW England): TXU (American); Northern (N. Yorks & E England: Eon (German); Yorkshire (excl. N. Yorks.): Eon (German); East Midlands: RWE (German); West Midlands: Eon (German); Eastern: TXU (American); London: EdF (French); South East: AEP American); South West: EdF (French). In fact, in England only in the Southern Region is the electricity supply British-owned.

Where water is concerned, the situation is a little better but it is bad enough. The supply over the whole of the South of England except the South West comes from foreign-owned companies - Spanish, Dutch ad Malaysian as well as American, German and French. In addition, the supply in the North East is owned by the Suez company of France.