Gun crime: the elephant in the drawing room

With the casual killing of 14-year-old Danielle Beccan as she walked home from a fair in Nottingham, the city has been labelled the gun-crime capital of the United Kingdom, leading to no end of soul-searching by the chattering classes over what could have happened to this once-peaceful and law-abiding place to earn it this unenviable reputation.

But if things are worse – proportionately – in Nottingham than anywhere else, other cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and London are not far behind. We are seeing enacted in our sceptred isle regular scenes that could have come straight out of the most violent Hollywood gangster movies. Just what is going on? Well, is there really any mystery?

It is like the proverbial elephant in the drawing room. Everyone is aware it's there but no one wants to talk about it. Gun crime, including murders, has reached unprecedented levels since Britain became a multi-racial society. Jamaican Yardie gangs are the biggest culprits; but Asian drug-dealers are known to have their turf-wars, particularly in some Yorkshire towns, which not infrequently are settled by shooting incidents, with rivals being 'taken out'.

Just occasionally, a journalist is seized by a rare fit of honesty over these matters. Jeremy Clarkson, writing in The Sun on the 16th October, commented:-

'Thanks to all our politicians and everybody on Channel Four news, it's now generally accepted that multi-racialism is a good thing for Britain. Really? Multi-racialism has brought us the current spate of drive-by shootings. It's multi-racialism that this week alone has seen a 14-year-old girl killed and a toddler hospitalised with gunshot wounds because her dad supposedly 'dissed' someone in a bar.

'Telling Jamaican Yardies that we welcome their culture, in all its forms, is as daft as telling the French they can come here and drive on the right.'

To which Mr. Clarkson is due our thanks for saying what very few of his colleagues would dare to say. We wait now to see whether he gets fired or is forced to atone by some future article in which he eulogises a black athlete or Indian businessman.

Such is life in UK 2004!

Big yawn for Britain

Will Bush win? Or will it be Kerry? Once again, the British public is being treated to one of the biggest yawns in the calendar. An American presidential election is taking place and, as usual, the affair is getting grossly excessive coverage on our TV screens at news time. One wonders what is the purpose. Is the matter of who becomes Israel's puppet in the White House really of such importance to this country? If it is, it shouldn't be. The United States is, at the end of the day, a foreign country with interests of its own that are not always synonymous with our interests. Britain's purpose should be to stand on her own feet and concentrate on her own affairs. We are not going to survive or go under in accordance with who comes first in a staged US mass-popularity contest.

Or maybe the idea is just to keep us entertained so that our attention will be diverted from problems much nearer home. This is always a regular practice of broadcasters and journalists. In fact, these elections have become like sport, in which we follow the contestants according to our fancy. Does one best like George's smile or John's? At the level politics have reached in today's 'democracies' these seem to be the biggest questions.

But in the end, it won't make tuppence worth of difference which man wins, even to Americans. The two occupy the same positions on all the really important issues: Iraq, Israel, immigration, global free trade. So what does it matter? The whole thing is no more than a charade, put on for the edification of zombies.

Should we need foreign doctors?

The familiar cry of the liberal establishment is that the huge flood of foreign doctors coming into this country is essential to the upkeep of our health services: we simply couldn't do without them.

Those who swallow this line should have read a report by Michael Day in The Sunday Telegraph on October 17th. This was headed 'Rejected in the UK, medical students head for the sun'. It went on to state that:-

'Hundreds of aspiring doctors who are denied places in British medical schools are travelling to the West Indies and Eastern Europe to study medicine.

'Despite Britain's shortage of doctors, thousands of students with excellent A-levels, or even relevant science degrees, are unable to gain admission to medical degree courses in Britain because of a lack of places. Some, determined to qualify as doctors, are responding by paying college fees of up to £18.000 a year to obtain a medical degree abroad.'

Is this just a matter of incompetence and muddle on the part of our rulers? Or is it one of high policy? Discuss.

Buying foreign again!

Last month it emerged that one of the British Army's biggest defence contracts for decades, a £1.8 billion order to replace all of its trucks, was to go to the German MAN company - whose vehicles are already familiar on our roads.

The other bidder for the contract was an Anglo-American consortium, led by US truck-builders Stewart & Stevenson, which includes three British-based firms, LDV, Multidrive and Lex. As stated in a report on this development in The Sunday Telegraph on October 17th, "A first consequence of the Ministry of Defence's decision, therefore, is that thousands of jobs which would have been created in Britain will go instead to Germany."

Apparently, the issue was decided by the American parent company owning the said British subsidiaries being prevented by a vote of Congress, from supplying certain hi-tech items to the latter.

This all goes to show that allowing British manufacturers of vital defence equipment to be in any way foreign-owned, whether or not their factories are located here, places us at the mercy of others in matters essential to our national security. All British military equipment should be obtained from British suppliers, under British ownership. Otherwise we have no national defence in any meaningful sense of the term.

As for the news that our future large-scale military road transport will be provided by German makers, it prompts the question of who really won World War II!

BNP and the Civil Service: Mr. Cohen passes judgement

Nick Cohen, writing in The Observeron the 26th September, seems to think that the Government would be correct in banning British National Party members from civil service jobs. Here is what he has to say on the subject:-

'With so many dark currents swirling, it's possible to sympathise with the Home Office's suggestion that far-right supporters should be banned from being civil servants. You can hardly expect a fascist to treat black and brown Britons fairly, and when he is given the coercive powers of a police, prison or immigration officer the results will be violent assaults or miscarriages of justice. The far right likes nothing better than to dress up in uniforms and exploit the benefit of the doubt given to law-enforcement officers. A blanket ban seems a sensible precaution.'

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether there are such people as black or brown 'Britons', Mr. Cohen's comments are utter balderdash. BNP members, aside from a tiny few, have always held to the principle that members of ethnic minorities, as long as they are here, should be treated the same under the law as anyone else. And if anyone among the mentioned few acted contrary to this principle and discriminated against an ethnic minority member, whether as police or prison officer or otherwise - least of all acted violently against such a person, there are ample rules governing these occupations, apart from the law itself, to ensure they were brought to book.

Would it be a silly question to ask just why Mr. Cohen is so biased on such matters that he resorts to misleading drivel to make his point?

Protecting 'democracy'!

Bruno Gollnisch, deputy to Jean-Marie Le Pen in France's Front National, is in hot water. Answering claims concerning the 'Holocaust' at a press conference recently, he ventured to say:-

'There is not a serious historian alive today who adheres completely to the conclusions of the Nuremberg trials. I do not call into question the existence of the concentration camps, but as to the number of dead, historians can still have something to argue about. As to the existence of the gas chambers, that is up to the historians to determine.'

Now doesn't this strike you, as it strikes us, as a perfectly reasonable and moderate response to such questions? Mr. Gollnisch didn't say things happened or that they didn't happen. Least of all did he justify atrocities if they occurred. Just how anyone could take offence to such statements is beyond belief.

But offence was indeed taken – and how! As reported in The Scotsman, "a leading anti-racist organisation, LICRA, said it had asked the president of the European Parliament to sanction the National Front deputy." And also: "demands were made for Mr. Gollnisch to be suspended from his professorship at a university in Lyons."

The Scotsman report went on to say that Mr. Gollnisch, a professor of languages and Japanese civilisation, made his comments as he was reacting to the published findings of an investigation into alleged 'extreme right-wing activities' at the University of Lyons III, where he teaches and that...

'A report by the investigating commission, headed by the Jewish historian Henri Rousso, found it was incontestable that the founders of Lyons III have more than just tolerated the expression of extreme-right ideas.

'Yesterday [October 13th], the president of Lyons III, Guy Lavorel, said he had asked the education minister François Fillon, to suspend Mr. Gollnisch from his post following his comments.'