British morons

The scandal of the hooligan behaviour of British holidaymakers on the Greek island of Faliraki has brought back to centre-stage the issue of the kind of young population created in this country by decades of permissiveness, inadequate education and dumbing down by the mass media. The issue never really went away; the Faliraki story merely served as a particularly repulsive reminder of it. Drunkenness; brawling; sex on the beach in full public view; even murder; they were all present and were witnessed by other tourists as well as the locals. The name of Britain, once again, has been dragged through the mud.

It will be claimed by some that the people responsible constitute only a small minority. But this British minority always seems to be bigger and behave worse than similar minorities of other countries in Europe. Frank Furedi, writing in the Daily Express on the 20th August, raised some pertinent, yet arguable, points:-

'The favoured academic explanation is the "culture of masculinity" which is said, somehow, to drive young men to prove themselves through anti-social behaviour.

'Yet this argument does not explain how young men in other parts of Europe manage to find less destructive ways of demonstrating their masculinity. Nor does it account for the rise of the badly behaved British female. In recent years a growing number of 'ladettes' have adopted the habits of binge drinking, using foul language and misbehaving in public. Acting anti-socially is no longer the monopoly of the British male.

'Others claim that British hooliganism abroad is a symptom of patriotism gone mad, that somehow the spirit of the Victorian Empire has returned in the monstrous form of the yob. However, at a time when national pride appears relatively muted, it is unlikely to be a force that incites young British men to hurt or kill one another in European tourist spots. There is little point in blaming the past for the misdeeds of the present.'

Where masculinity is concerned, the assault on it by the contemporary culture is a general western phenomenon, but it could be said that that assault has been that much more extreme in its impact on the young men of Britain than almost anywhere else. The cultural forces represented by 'New Labour' have done unimaginable damage to the values of manhood and womanhood. Where young men are concerned, the decline in the priority given to school sports is just one example of this. Such sports, particularly boxing and rugby, provide controlled and disciplined outlets for young male aggression. With the provision for them so greatly reduced, that aggression is likely to seek other outlets. The answer is, of course, to restore those and other tough physical pastimes to the high status they previous enjoyed.

As for Mr. Furedi's reference to patriotism of the Victorian Empire, this is not entirely without relevance, as he seems to suggest. Can there be any other nation in the western world today whose proud and distinguished past contrasts so depressingly with its degraded present? And can there be any such nation where patriotic feeling is so stifled by the alliance of politics, education and mass media? As with the attempt to submerge manhood, this can provoke an uncontrolled and destructive reaction. The answer is, of course, to raise patriotism again to the status of a highly esteemed social virtue, while inculcating the young with the idea that it is best expressed in discipline and dignified forms, and that yobbish behaviour in front of, and towards, foreigners is not one of them.

But with 'New Labour' in charge and wimpish Toryism is the only 'respectable' alternative, neither of these things is going to happen in the near future.

As for the ghastly conduct of all too many young British females, the same culture influences may be said to be to blame. The attack on femininity has been as devastating as the attack on masculinity, what with the current obsession with proving that men and women are no different. Political correctness has its tentacles into almost every nook and cranny of the nation's life, and what happened in Faliraki last month was merely an inevitable symptom.

The murder of industry continues

The last train factory in Britain - the country that gave birth to the railway - is facing closure.

The Litchurch Lane works in Derby was beaten last month by the German company Siemens in a competition for a £25O million order for new trains. The factory now has no orders for the three years beyond the end of 2004.

All future trains for Britain's rail network, including 1,700 carriages for the London Underground, are likely to be built outside Britain.

The Government has refused to intervene to save Litchurch Lane, saying that it is an issue for industry to solve. A spokeswoman for the Department of Transport has said that the order was won by Siemens under a competitive tendering process as required by European competition law.

But Howard Johnson, a railway consultant, has said that other European countries insisted on a domestic manufacturer for big-train orders. "It's not a level playing field," he said, "because Britain plays by the European competition rules."

In the meantime, Dyson's, the maker of household products, notably its revolutionary vacuum cleaners, has moved its last production line overseas. Henceforth Dyson washing machines will be manufactured in Malaysia.

Accused of betrayal, the company's founder and head James Dyson has said that the globalisation of manufacturing has made it impossible for his company to survive except by availing itself of the vastly lower production costs of the Far East, where wages are on average less than half those in Britain.

Like many other manufacturers, Dyson cannot be blamed for playing within the rules set by our political chiefs, who have committed Britain to the global economy, with its free trade and free movement of investment capital. Firms cannot remain in business otherwise.

In a report in the Daily Mail of August 14th it was stated that 9,000 manufacturing jobs are now being lost every month in the UK.

But of what interest is this to the Blair Government? Preoccupied with the occupation of Iraq and saving the hungry in Africa, it seems completely indifferent to the fate of industry at home.

What is happening to British manufacturing is wilful murder - or at least the next thing to it. Watching a victim die without doing anything to save his or her life is as good as an act of murder itself. Is this Government party to a secret international agenda which has decreed that the great tradition of making things in Britain, begun with the first industrial revolution, must be ended? Those who would describe this as a cranky conspiracy theory have the onus on them to provide an alternative explanation for what is happening.

Kelly: Was it suicide?

The Hutton Inquiry into the circumstances leading to the death of Professor David Kelly is ongoing, and we should await its conclusion before making overall comment. Already, however, the evidence of a great deal of lying and deception from Downing Street is getting stronger by the day.

What did emerge from the enquiry last month is that Dr. Kelly had told diplomat David Broucher back in February that he would be "found dead in the woods" if Iraq were invaded. This, on the face of it, is an extraordinary revelation. The official line so far is that Dr. Kelly took his own life on impulse while under enormous public pressure, and many have blamed government ministers for this pressure. From the start, this has seemed to us an overly facile explanation for the death of a man whose personal life, from all accounts, was a happy one and on whom public pressures, though not negligible, were no greater than are imposed on a great many public servants in situations like those in which Kelly was involved. But now we have an even more unlikely scenario: that the Professor decided a full six months ago that he would kill himself if things turned out as they did!

Did Kelly speak to Mr. Broucher as the latter claims? And if he did, was he referring to his intention to commit suicide or something much more dramatic and sinister? Did he (Kelly) have some special knowledge of forces at work in a very dangerous international game being played for extremely high stakes, and did he have reason to anticipate that in certain circumstances he might become a target for assassins?

A US commentator, Gordon Thomas, writing for the American Free Press (website americanfreepress.net), stated on the 9th August that Kelly in fact had links to three other top microbiologists who all met their deaths in strange circumstances. Two of these were American scientists Bonito Que and Don Wiley, who had been engaged in DNA sequencing, which played an important role in the development of weapons that could hit selected groups of humans identified by race while by-passing others in the same vicinity. The third was another microbiologist Vladimir Pasechnik, a defector who fled to Britain from Russia in 1989, just before the Soviet collapse, bringing with him details of Soviet plans to use cruise missiles to spread smallpox and plague among populations. Kelly, himself an expert on DNA sequencing, had played a key role in debriefing Pasechnik when he arrived in Britain, and had helped him set up a laboratory in Porton Down, Dorset, for further research on these matters.

Weapons able to kill selected people identifiable by race first hit the news a few years ago when it was reported that research into them was proceeding at a top-secret installation at Dimona, in Israel.

Could there be links between the deaths of the two American and one former Soviet microbiologist and that of Dr. Kelly? If it emerges that there are, it could well be that those responsible deliberately chose a moment in Kelly's life when his demise might credibly be explained away as suicide under pressure.

This leaves unanswered the key question of all: Who could have been responsible? With Soviet Communism having been defunct for 14 years, that source can be eliminated with fair certainty. This leaves the British and US security services and, perhaps most interestingly of all, the Israeli secret service Mossad. Of the three, which has established the most fearsome worldwide reputation for bumping off inconvenient people? As The Daily Telegraph's 'Peter Simple' would say, study and discuss.

The lady who wouldn't 'repent'

Obituaries for Lady Diana Mosley, who died last month, were many and lengthy. They varied from the personally benign (A. N. Wilson in The Daily Telegraph) to the rabidly hostile, indeed hateful (David Aaronovitch in The Observer). Almost without exception, however, they included one recurring observation: Diana Mosley remained to the very end 'unrepentant' over all she had done and stood for during her life as the wife of British Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley.

To which the most obviously commonsense questions must be: Why should the lady have repented? Over what did she have to repent? The dictionary describes repentance as being contrition for an act done, for sin. We are not aware of anything Diana Mosley did during her life that was sinful. Many may have disliked her political opinions, but that is something else entirely. Harbouring an unpopular political opinion is not a sin. However, in the twisted climate of today, it seems, opinions can be 'sinful' if they do not satisfy the requirements of liberalism and political correctness.

Indeed, these pompous obituaries to the Grand Dame of British Fascism tell us more about the state of mind of the writers than about their deceased subject.

Thinking about offspring

Women, according to researchers at the University of Bristol, "are genetically programmed to find beauty more attractive than brains when seeking out a partner." Scientists said that an animal instinct drives women to search for good-looking husbands to ensure their own sons will also be handsome, and that the rationale behind this belief is that attractive male offspring are more likely to find a mate and have children of their own.

If only women - and men - did think in this way! In our 'liberal' climate, the thought of offspring is the very last thing in the minds of would-be partners contemplating relations with each other. Sexual pleasure is the dominating impulse - and to hell with the unimportant question of what kind of children, if any, will result.