The lid coming off

Something extraordinary is happening in Britain. It is not that there are any startling changes in what is happening on the public scene; government policies continue to be pursued as relentlessly as ever and with ever more disastrous results for the nation. The total absence of any meaningful opposition to those policies on the Tory side of the House remains. The ship of state continues to head for the rocks.

But what is changing is that more and more people are prepared to stand up in the open and talk about what is happening. The lid is coming off the dark subterranean world of public policy and the light of truth is shining in. Issues which a while ago could only be discussed in whispers are now being aired in the full glare of open national debate.

Take the case of Europe. While certain public figures and certain newspapers and journalists have for many years opposed the surrender of British sovereignty to the EU, virtually all have fought shy of acknowledging such a thing as a globalist conspiracy aiming at this surrender. Now some writers are taking the bull by the horns and acknowledging that conspiracy, describing it often in terms that would not look out of place in the columns of Spearhead.

Then there is immigration. After decades of pouring vitriol on those intrepid few of us who have been prepared to oppose the flooding of Britain with unassimilable ethnic minorities, certain papers are now coming out and accepting and echoing something like 80 per cent of our argument. In the forefront are the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and The Sun, all of which in recent weeks have printed front pages with huge headlines exposing the latest immigration scams and loudly condemning the Government for the feebleness of its immigration policy and the dishonesty with which it continues to try and hoodwink the British public over immigration matters.

And now public figures holding senior positions in our national life are beginning to speak out in a way that would have been inconceivable only a short time ago. The latest of these is Chris Fox, head of the Association of Chief Police Officers, a man with impeccable establishment credentials. Last month Mr. Fox caused untold anguish in the circles of the great and the good by saying, in an interview with The Observer, things that millions have known but nobody in positions of power, authority and influence dared talk about. Asylum-seekers, he said, have brought a new wave of organised crime to Britain. "Mass immigration," he asserted, "has brought with it a whole new range and a whole new type of crime, from the Nigerian fraudster to the Eastern European who deals in drugs and prostitution to the Jamaican concentrating on drug-dealing."

And he continued: "Gangs see a chance to earn money by getting people into countries without going through all the checks nations require. This mass movement brings the opportunity for criminals to move in."

The huge significance of this admission was acknowledged in the Daily Mail of May 19th, thus:-

‘The blunt statement that asylum-seeking has gone hand in hand with a growth of fraud, drug-dealing, prostitution and gangsterism is the first time that police chiefs have linked immigration with crime.

‘In the past, the association has been careful to avoid making any connection.

‘Its reticence has left the way clear for asylum and immigration pressure groups to claim there is no evidence of criminality among asylum-seekers.’

Mr. Fox in fact stopped a long way short of saying all that we would have preferred him to say about immigration and the hypersensitive issue of race with which it is linked, and he made a diversionary genuflection to political correctness by saying that it was ‘healthy’ to have lots of different communities, but...

Of course, into that ‘but’ people can read a myriad of meanings. The head of the ACPO has to keep a lot of folk happy - folk of very widely differing views. In the kind of country Britain has become, it is too much to hope for - at least at the moment - that a major public servant would cast himself out on a limb by coming out with the whole truth.

Nevertheless, the fact that Mr. Fox thought it appropriate to say as much as he did indicates that we have reached an enormously significant milestone in the achievement of an open public discussion of the nation's underlying problems. Bit by bit, the truth is being revealed, and the courage to face it is growing.

Tam mentions the unmentionable

Chris Fox is not the only eminence who has been speaking frankly. Another major taboo was given an airing last month when Tam Dalyell, Labour Member for Linlithgow and ‘Father’ of the House of Commons, accused Tony Blair of surrounding himself with a ‘cabal’ of Jewish advisers. The Prime Minister's aides, he said, "are skewing British foreign policy on the Middle East in favour of the Israeli Government."

Dalyell went on to say that Blair was "unduly influenced" by figures including Lord Levy, Labour's chief fund-raiser and Blair's unofficial envoy to the region, Peter Mandelson and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, an Anglican who had a Jewish grand-father.

Indeed, in ‘outing’ Mr. Straw, Tam did us all a favour by acknowledging something many of us had suspected. The Foreign Sec. has always been somewhat coy about his antecedents!

Dalyell went on also to talk about the Jews around President Bush, such as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Ari Fleischer, saying that they had very much captured the ear of the US leader.

These remarks were quoted in the American magazine Vanity Fair in a profile of Blair. Later, in a follow-up interview with Scotland on Sunday, he said of the question of Jewish influence: "It is an enormously sensitive issue and that's why very many of us have been extremely reticent about it, because we don't want to be seen as anti-Semitic."

Well, whether Mr. Dalyell wanted to be seen as ‘anti-Semitic’ or not, that is what he was rapidly transformed into in the following month. As might have been predicted, the Jewish lobby in Britain went ballistic, with the screams of ‘anti-Semitism’ with which we are all too familiar. Some Jewish leaders even demanded that Dalyell be prosecuted for his heresy. His indignant denials of the charge that he was an ‘anti-Semite’ and his pleas that he had many Jewish friends and had been on holiday in Israel did not save him one iota - as anyone of us could have told him!

Like Chris Fox, Tam Dalyell was only saying what huge numbers of people in public life know only too well but have been afraid to admit: that Jewish power in both British and American politics is immense and wholly disproportionate to the numbers of Jews in the populations. One journalist of whom we are aware (there may have been others) did, however, exhibit sufficient boldness to put his head just slightly above the parapet. This was Andrew Alexander in the Daily Mail (May 9th). Aside from the mandatory reference to the Jews' talents and the naturalness of their rise to top positions, he went on to say:-

‘Naturally, Jews will incline towards Israel, not its neighbours. Nothing wrong with that. People should have a prejudice in favour of their own kith and kin. That is what nationhood is all about.

‘But one would naturally like to think that Blair would treat a Jewish Minister's views with appropriate caution on the Middle East issue...’

In the same article he made so bold as to speak of the "shrieks of outrage"and the "paranoia" that had greeted Dalyell's remarks, and said that the veteran MP had "breached the Great Taboo by pointing to the cabal of Jewish hardliners around the President."

As with the comments of Chris Fox, some of the truth rather than the whole and undiluted truth. But for just that amount we should be glad and relieved. Things which almost everyone was frightened to say a while ago are now being said - out in the open. Our censors must be squirming in panic, and that is a mightily encouraging thought.

Still softly-softly with Mugabe

The hypocrisy of the Government continues to astound and nauseate. After throwing away 31 British lives and killing untold numbers of Iraqis to bring ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ to the latter's country, Blair & Co. remain resolute in their irresolution when it comes to doing something about the appalling tyranny and terror now taking place in ‘Zimbabwe’. Unlike in the case of Iraq, they have never seriously contemplated sending an invasion force there to restore order and liberate people, despite the fact - or perhaps indeed because of it - that the people in this case are Europeans of mostly British stock. But that is not all.

In a report on The Mail on Sunday (May 18th) it was disclosed that Blair had done a secret deal with Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe whereby he (Blair) would desist from making any attacks on Mugabe if the latter would reciprocate by not attacking Britain.

Just why it should worry a British Prime Minister that a creature like Mugabe is attacking this country is a mystery. Coming from the quarter they do, such attacks should be shrugged off as if they were no more than irritating flies.

The Mail on Sunday disclosure was part of a story concerning a number of acts of appeasement of Mugabe that have been made unofficial policy in government circles over the past few weeks. On the 29th May, after this issue has gone to press but before it reaches our readers, Deputy Prime Minister and the Government's chief clown John Prescott is expected to be in Nigeria as its representative at the formal inauguration of the new President Olesegun Obasanjo. On that occasion, with Mugabe also present, Prescott might well be placed in a position of having to shake hands with the Zimbabwe tyrant, or otherwise snub him. At the moment, and bearing in mind trends in British Government attitudes, odds on the handshake seem pretty heavy.

In the meantime, according to the same MoS report, Foreign Secretary Straw has said recently that he believed that "quiet diplomacy" was the best way to deal with Zimbabwe.

But not, apparently, with Iraq.

Another nail in industry's coffin

For generations, the name of the city of Sheffield has been synonymous with steel - but not for much longer, the way things are going.

The news came at the end of April that 700 steelworkers at the Corus plant at Stocksbridge, a suburb, were to be laid off. A local councillor, Martin Davis, said: "It's a disaster and will decimate the town."

And a further 350 jobs will be axed in nearby Rotherham, with the closure of the firm's works there. Also closing will be the plant at Tipton, in the West Midlands, with 90 job losses.

Even worse is the likely loss of 2,900 jobs at Corus's Tees-side works, as the Anglo-Dutch steel giant is losing more than £400 million a year and plans to ‘restructure’ its UK operations - whatever that may mean.

Union leaders have vowed to fight the job losses. Well, they always say that, don't they?

The trouble is that these union leaders seldom, if ever, fight the causes of the job losses, which are rooted in the international system to which Britain is tied. One of the acknowledged factors in the crisis faced by Corus is the drop in domestic demand for steel, and the reason for that doesn't take a genius to work out. As we witness the gutting, due to imports, of one after another British industry that uses steel in its products, steel itself is bound to be gutted sooner or later.