Sherlock and the BBC's war on plot

Since I refuse to fund the media wing of a paedophile ring – ie I don’t pay the BBC Licence fee – I had to wait until today to watch the Sherlock New Year Special. It was good. Better than that, it was great, done in the definitive style of Granada’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes starring Jeremy Brett, the definitive Holmes, with a gothic mystery it seemed only Holmes could solve, with witty references to Watson’s publication of Holmes’ adventures in The Strand.

Then suddenly and inexplicably we are in the present day on board a private jet and Holmes is delivering an impassioned defence of recreational use of illegal drugs. How depressingly BBC. The theme of the episode was women’s rights, particularly in the context of the invisibility of women in the late 19th century.

Really? Wasn’t this show broadcast by the same BBC that dropped former Countryfile presenter Miriam O’ Reilly like a hot potato when she started making noises about misogyny and ageism in the Corporation? That has form in hiring pretty young female current affairs presenters and weather-girls then throwing them on the trash heap when they no longer look like Barbie? That forced Martine McCutcheon, while in Eastenders, to do a lingerie photoshoot for lads’ mag FHM without a female chaperone?

Although the programme aired at 9pm on New Years’ Day, right on the watershed, there were several explicit scenes of suicide, which will be watched by teenage fans throughout the iplayer availability slot. Is this really appropriate?

The theme of suicide was part of a postmodern thread going through the program drawing attention to the fiction-within-a-fiction gothic tale within the “real-life” tale. As soon as I worked this out I saw the connection with the theme of Santa Claus recurring throughout the dreams-within-dreams thread of the inspirational Dr Who 2014 Christmas Special Last Christmas – and it turns out both episodes were produced by the same man, Stephen Moffatt. Is there such poverty of talent within the BBC that they have to recycle old plotlines?

Postmodernism, the view that there are no facts except those things we decide (ie the Establishment decides for us) are facts, and there is no right and wrong except those things we decide (is the Establishment decides for us) are right and wrong, but when used to underpin plot so heavily it allows a war against plot that amounts to an excuse for lazy writing and producing.

And in the last analysis, given the problems the world faces at the moment, it’s salutary to remind ourselves that people who believe in facts and that they are on the side of right will always win against people who have surrendered their powers of discernment to hypocritical Establishmentarian bureaucracies like the BBC.

Gerry Dorrian

Resources

Women in News and Public Affairs Broadcasting House of Lords Select Committee, Miriam O' Reilly's evidence begins from p171

Call the Midwife and the bleak road to Bethlehem

In Christmas Eve’s Daily Mail, Libby Purves writes a heartwarming piece about the Call the Midwife Christmas Special and how the series as a whole provides an island of emotional comfort in the cynical ocean that modern life has become.

It would be cynical of me, therefore, to point out that Purves, who predicts that BBC’s Call the Midwife’s Christmas Special will outperform ITV’s rival Downton Abbey offering, has been a BBC radio presenter since the 1970s and is using the article to curry favour with her managers.

But there’s a whole further level of cynicism to go to. Call the Midwife seems not just to be an evocation of a fondly-remembered past but also a reflection of how the Establishment works, in that it depicts middle-class professionals doling out largesse to a poverty-stricken and prejudice-ridden populace.

In fairness to the programme makers, that's not a million miles away from how the healthcare Establishment sees itself. A friend’s mother, as a staff-nurse in the 1960s, was reprimanded for “socialising with care assistants”, the latter being traditionally drawn from more working-class backgrounds as the professionals. In the 1980s as a student nurse myself, I had to endure a lecture from a ward-sister on how people from my part of Glasgow’s East End were uneducated, feckless and had too many children. Nowadays it becomes harder and harder for people of working-class backgrounds to become nurses as the entry level qualification is a degree – heaven knows why – and when was the last time you were treated by a senior doctor with an inner-city accent?

And sometimes the programme-makers’ own prejudices show through the slick production, now that the storyline has moved beyond Jennifer Worths original memoirs. For example, in the 2014 Christmas Special, we see a mother-and-baby home for unmarried mothers where the care standards are appalling. The doctor comments, “these places used to be run by charities, then they were taken over by the council”. In fact, the original National Health Service White Paper of 1944 envisaged control of services on the ground by local and borough councils, but with the 1946 National Health Service Act Aneurin Bevan expropriated the councils – and therefore the councillors and the electorates who voted for them – in order to nationalise the whole thing and place it under the control of predominantly unelected officials, ground-level services being entrusted to local health authorities, now trusts and clinical commissioning groups, which were and are almost completely outside of democratic control and oversight. The subtext of the doctor’s comment was, I think, that democracy was not the proper system from which to run services that reach out to “ordinary people”, as I believe we of the non-elite are now called.

I suppose this year’s Call the Midwife Christmas Special will provide an island of warm fuzziness in the bleak ocean of exclusion we all now founder in, and sometimes that’s what the doctor ordered. Programmes like Call the Midwife manipulate our brain chemistry to produce a sense of supported catharsis – a good cry, in other words. But sometimes it’s time to put down the tissues and see the world as it really is. As Mary and Joseph discovered on the bleak road to Bethlehem, the world is cold and unforgiving, and nobody comes to mitigate this. Sometimes the solution can only be that we have to create warmth and forgiveness by ourselves, because when nobody comes then each individual has to ponder whether it is he or she that has to act.

I hope you manage to draw what warmth and forgiveness you can from whatever source you can find this season. As the sun sets on freedom and democracy the road ahead is bleak, and I hope we find each other in the coming year. Resources A magical reminder of a time when those in need really felt cared for: As Call The Midwife is set to top Christmas Day ratings, we can learn something from a bygone era by Libby Purves, Daily Mail 24 December 2015 Call the Midwife Christmas Special 2015 BBC webpage A National Health Service White Paper of 1944 National Health Service Act, 1946

Fascism's ascent through the Labour Party

Eric Hobsbawm said in The New Century that in the early 1980s left-wing activists started entering public services in huge numbers.

The timing is significant: in 1979 Margaret Thatcher won a convincing general election victory after a campaign aimed predominately at working-class people. It became apparent that democracy wasn’t working in the way hard-left figures wanted it to, in not delivering victory to socialist politicians whose plan was to bring the country to its knees financially in order to foment revolution. Post-revolution, democracy would be allowed to wither on the vine so that the middle-class revolutionaries could not be replaced by what they saw as their underlings.

It didn’t quite work that way: the electorate continued to vote Conservative through the 1980s and well into the 1990s in numbers that would be impossible to explain without votes from working-class people, who Marx’s lazy assumptions indicated should be becoming class-conscious and seeking to make the state, and therefore democracy, irrelevant.

Hence the Gramscian infiltration of public services by hard-left activists in what Gramsci’s acolyte, Rudy Deutsch, called a "long march through the institutions". Preparations were made to turn the country into what they claimed would be a multicultural society, which would have been a laudable aim, but was actually a Derridean attempt to deconstruct Britain and ended up giving us a nation of ghettoes. Most unforgivably, Lucaksian views that the state would fall more quickly with the implosion of the nuclear family were used to justify sexualising children, a view that allowed the far-left BBC to ignore Jimmy Savile’s paedophilia, if not tacitly condone it.

Harriet Harman, the interim leader of the Labour Party after Ed Miliband’s resignation, was a follower of the last view, as shown by her lobbying of the Callaghan Government in 1978 to decriminalise child pornography. Her successor, Jeremy Corbyn, became leader after an election without a defined electorate which Labour’s own senior figures where desperately trying to wreck until the last moment. But democracy – largely through their own efforts – had become as irrelevant within the Labour Party as it has outwith, as witness the voting figures for the 2005 General Election which indicate an enquiry as to its democratic probity is required.

The French-Jewish philosopher Élie Halévy, in his landmark 1936 essay The Era of Tyrannies, established that Marxism and fascism are both descended from socialism, which was constructed in the early 19th century to carry on the work of the French Revolution. If he is correct, and I believe he is, we should call a spade a spade and correctly identify the process that has brought Jeremy Corbyn only a short chain of events away from the premiership as fascism at work.

Gerry Dorrian

Resources

Letter from paedophile group links Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt to it AFTER they said it had been marginalized Daily Mail - shows picture of 1978 letter from Harriet Harman, proposing that child pornography only be an offence if the child pictured institutes proceedings

The Federalist Derivation by Kriss day on academia.edu. Go to p15 for figures indicating voting fraud in the 2005 general election. Free - sign in with Facebook, Google+ or email account

letter to Nicola McKenna of TV Licensing

Edited version of a letter to Nicola McKenna, collections manager from TV Licensing, upon receiving a threatening letter from her.

Dear Ms McKenna,

We were dismayed yesterday to find a letter from TV Licensing lying outside our back door that said "you are hereby given official notice: your property is now under investigation" and threatened us with court action. Why was this? Is disconnecting oneself from the BBC really such a subversive act?

We do not have a TV, informed you of this, and confirmed it to Debbie Beckett of Customer Services in May, when we wrote that we would be happy to receive a visit as long as we have 48 hours’ notice. I do not think this is excessive – it is equivalent to the notice landlords have to give their tenants before they or their agents enter the property.

The visit will take place while I am there. No agent will be admitted to the premises when I am out unless they are in possession of a search warrant signed by a magistrate, which we will subsequently challenge. The visit will be filmed and may be put on the web. Should you take us to court on any pretext I will put regular updates of the proceedings online.

We do not watch any TV as it is being broadcast. We have drastically cut down on the BBC TV we watch afterwards on i-player and watch almost no commercial TV. We have been irritated by BBC bias, ageism and misogyny for some time, but for us the final straw was the lengths to which the BBC went to protect its reputation from the activities of Jimmy Saville, to the detriment of his victims.

Finally, I wish to put in a Freedom of Information request for all information in all formats you hold on our house, with details of how you got that information. I also wish to know what organisations or agents you are using to gather this information, which powers they are using and on what basis.

Yours
Gerry Dorrian

RIP Nelson Mandela: may his legacy endure

If prison should be a place of redemption, as Pope John Paul II said, Nelson Mandela showed that it can be. While there’s been some unsavoury comment on Facebook about his hinterland, there is surely no doubt that he was the decisive factor in enabling South Africa to transition from Apartheid to a fairer way to live.

A friend of mine from the South African diaspora in the UK told me, when Mandela walked free from Robben Island he could have initiated a bloodbath with a wave of his hand. He didn’t. He chose to try and lead his nation down the path of reconciliation.

Did he succeed? Only time can tell. There’s certainly a degree of underreporting of the extent to which white people in South Africa can feel embattled. As white left-wing presenters on the BBC’s News at Ten put on their official mourners’ faces, it was left to Johannesburg correspondent Nomsa Maseko (right) to give voice to this embattlement when explaining the strong police presence as the rainbow people, to use Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s phrase, took to the streets to celebrate his life and legacy:

People were worried about what was going to happen…each time Nelson Mandela was hospitalised a lot of South Africans were virtually in the waiting room, except now it was white South Africans saying “please don’t die, because we don’t know what the future is for white South Africans”. Because there is still a belief by some white South Africans that when Mandela goes, which we have now seen here, his long walk to freedom is now ended. What is to happen to them? That is the question that a lot of people are still asking.

Nelson Mandela has fought the good fight and finished the race. May his dream and his legacy be remembered and safeguarded.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

News at Ten, extended edition, 5 December 2013 - Go to 45.50 for a section of Nomsa Maseko's presentation quoted above

the acid test: will Lee Rigby's murderers be treated the same as Mohammed Saleem's murderer?

The murder of Mohammed Saleem while he was walking home from his mosque in Birmingham was a callous, cowardly act.

So was the murder of Lee Rigby in Woolwich.

Every crime is individual. But there is one equivalence between the murders of Lee Rigby and Mohammed Saleem. Mohammed Saleem’s murderer, Pavlo Lapshyn, hated non-whites. Lee rigby’s murderers, Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, hated non-Muslims.

It’s been said Lapshyn is a racist because of his hatred of non-whites, and I have some sympathy for this, especially when I read of the grief of his victim’s family, who say "He did not do anything to deserve this - other than be a Muslim". However, if you ascribe differences between groups of people to culture, not colour, it soon becomes clear that "white" is no more a race than "non-white". And "Muslim", indicating adherence to a religion as diverse as any other, is no more a race than "non-Muslim".

So why is it that news of Pavlo Lapshyn’s trial was – rightly – all over the mainstream media while Adebolajo’s and Adebowale’s is conspicuous by its absence?

The media blackout of the Somalis’ trial is so deep our increasingly prone press is not even commenting on the blackout’s existence. This must only fuel rumours asserting our masters and their media lapdogs have acceded to the view that "Muslim [jihadi] blood is superior to infidel blood".

That being said, the blackout is not the most important issue. Pavlo Lapshyn was sentenced to life imprisonment with a tariff of 40 years for his repulsive act. Will Adebolajo and Adebowale receive a similar term for their equally repulsive act, caught on multiple cameras? If they aren’t, surely it would be naïve of the government not to expect those effectively declared as being of lesser worth to react accordingly?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

HM Government e-petition: lift the Lee Rigby media blackout

Pavlo Lapshyn's 90 days of terror - bbc.co.uk

Mohammed Saleem stabbing: Man admits murder and mosque blasts

"Muslim blood is superior to infidel blood" - Raymond Ibrahim, The Commentator, 19 November 2013

Mosque bomber Pavlo Lapshyn given life for murder - bbc.co.uk

Cabaret

It’s been so long since I’ve seen Cabaret I was really glad BBC1 scheduled it tonight.

I hadn’t left school the last time I saw it. I liked my school, but the history curriculum at the time was abysmal and appears not to have recovered over the decades. So it’s only at this end of a long journey of self-education that I felt able to appreciate the compelling and devastating fable of Germany’s descent into madness.

Michael York plays an overeducated twit who thinks the power of his middle-class contempt will wither the forces of darkness gathered under the swastika, and in this he captures Europe’s mood during the Weimar Republic perfectly. He plays opposite Lisa Minelli, whose talents necessitated changes in the script – in the Broadway original Sally Bowles couldn’t sing.

Joel Grey’s Joker-like emcee (left) captures both the cosmopolitan freedom that made 1931 Berlin the citadel the Nazis had to capture, and, as the film moves on, the amoral accommodation with the Nazis that was effected by not just the West in general but also that portion of the German elite that realised that the Nazis wouldn’t be pacified after they’d finished with the communists. And, of course, as we see throughout, with the Jews.

In a sense the Nazis stall rage on, through the Final Solution. Post-Nuremberg this was resurrected by Muhammad Amin al-Husayni, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who’d moved to Berlin 1941 to advise Hitler on the Holocaust and, incredibly, avoided capture as a war criminal. From his new base in Egypt he continued preaching hatred, and many of his followers walked antisemitism right back into Europe.

So it’s fitting that Cabaret ends ambivalently: in the minds of modern Nazis, the last act in their pursuit of Jews – and of every Western freedom – is yet to play out.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Quitting the English Defence League: when Tommy met Mo

Quitting the English Defence League: when Tommy met Mo is a documentary about Tommy Robinson’s move into Quilliam, the anti-extremism group.

Since it was a BBC documentary I had low hopes for imparitality, so was dumbfounded to see Tommy his views freely throughout.

The journey – the term speaks volumes about I’m a Celebrity’s impact on broadcasting – started in the company of Mo Ansar, who once agitated for the EDL to be banned. Ansar’s diversionary tactics on explosive Koran texts, such as cutting off the hands of thieves, being shot down by two eminent Koran scholars was amazing TV.

One of these scholars is Maajid Nawaz (right) of Quilliam who, like Tommy, receives multiple death threats. He and his companion supported Tommy against Ansar in that the phrase "all your right hands possess" from the Koran refers to concubinage, including sex slaves.

Through Nawaz, Robinson spoke to a group of Muslim women who proved as heterodox as any group from any religion. While Ansar was the first in the documentary to speak of “reformed Muslims”, but it was the Koran scholars who gave the notion legs by identifying the disconnect between scriptures over a thousand years old and a pluralist, liberal society where everybody has rights, including people like homosexuals who are executed in Iran.

As Tommy identified, we need to ensure that moderate Muslims, who are indicted as apostates by jihadis who can justify their judgement from the Koran and Sharia, are heard. So, I wonder, after future jihadi outrages, will the BBC and other channels continue to give extremists like Anjem Choudary a voice in the name of impartiality? Or will it eschew extremists and air the views of ordinary Muslims as oppressed by jihad as us? It seems Tommy’s not the only one at a crossroads.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Quitting the English Defence League: when Tommy met Mo - bbc I-player until 4 November 2013

Quilliam

"The Government should ban the EDL - HM Government e-petition, created by Mohammed Ansar (closed with 6,448 signatures)

BBC, ITV and Channel 4 face Ofcom probe over decision to interview hate preacher Anjem Choudary after Lee Rigby's murder - Daily Mail

Surat An-Nisā' Sura 4 of the Koran (Surat An-Nisā or The Wonen), mentions "all your right hands possess" severalk times.

Citizen Khan series 2

It’s not clear whether Adil Ray, creator of Citizen Khan, intended the multitalented Bhavna Limbachia to be the star of the show in her role as daughter Alia, but that series two kicks off with a story centred on Alia shows he knows it now. The result was a comedic tour de force as Mr Khan leaves aside his naked ambition to become Sparkhill Muslim community’s most renowned leader and finds himself unintentionally integrating to get his supposedly observant daughter into a Catholic school. In a scene that I think will make TV history we see Alia convert a hijab into something not unlike a nun's wimple, perhaps making the point that the first garment is not a million miles away from the second.

Alia is, of course, a modern girl enjoying a modern life while letting her father believe she is a devout Muslim. I would identify the relationship between Alia and her father as the conjunctio oppositorum holding the show’s many hilarious expeditions together as two worlds are only just kept from colliding. In the second episode, however, Ray recontextualises this by having his mother-in-law bond with a British man who turns out to be gay.

Hilarity ensues; but the many popular comedies have an edge to them as well, witness Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death do us Part. Citizen Khan’s edge is the peripheral, mute chorus of neighbours who are unhappy, for example, that Alia comes back at all hours.

Ray airs the fears of Westerners of all backgrounds in comic, therefore safer, form, eg "we Pakistanis don’t have bridesmaids; in our culture, your bride becomes your maid". Will he let the chorus step out of the wings and put the views that shock us all in their mouths? Time will tell.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Click to watch Citizen Khan S2E1: Alia's college - BBC i-player

Click to watch Citizen Khan S2E2: Naani's Day Out - BBC i-player

God bless the EDL

The news of Tommy Robinson’s leaving the English Defence League has provoked a deluge of reactions, occupying all points between praise and outrage. And maybe the sheer amount of coverage is something we should look at as well as the direction of Tommy’s journey.

However the EDL emerges from this episode, I’m sure it will carry on, because patriots have arisen, made themselves known to each other up and down the country and beyond, and emerged energised. It has built up a head of steam that cannot simply dissipate.

Things previously unbelievable before 2009 have happened, such as:

• Victims of child-grooming gangs are no longer being labelled as promiscuous or borderline racists on the grounds of their rapists’ and traffickers’ identities.
• Politicians are not being seen as racists (except by the usual culprits) for concentrating on immigration.
• Blue-collar concerns over national identity are being aired much more by the media, even by the BBC.

This has all happened because EDL members have taken all of these and more literally into the public square and have not let politicians forget the inconvenient truth that each one of us has a vote.

But the complex nature of public opinion and debate has also come to the fore, and the full veil is a case in point. Whereas opposition to this identity-smothering garment was initially sidelined as a fringe issue, because of patriots preventing it from dropping from debate the loudest voices now protesting against the full veil are Muslim women. And now the subject is out, bodies such as UKIP – which opposed the full veil under all circumstances – are engaging with its adherents and saying they’ll tolerate it in limited circumstances.

And all because the EDL have not surrendered to bullies, bottles and bricks any more than to far right infiltration – and undoubtedly will continue thus. God bless them.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

we rightly celebrate Stephen Lawrence's legacy: now what about Charlene Downes'?

It was good to see the Stephen Lawrence Unity Concert, on the 20th anniversary year of his brutal murder at the hands of racist thugs. Doreen Lawrence (Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon), who appeared near the end of the concert, has patiently waited for justice for her son through a process that has, thank God, renewed black-white relations.

Would that all campaigns for a murdered child so electrified the media.

This is the anniversary year of another foul ethnicity-based murder; On November 2003 Charlene Downes, aged 14, was declared missing.

The case is depressingly familiar to those who have followed it and shocking to others for whom it is news.

Following Charlene’s disappearance the police investigated a Blackpool kebab shop and two of its workers - Iyad Albattikhi and Mohammed Reveshi (from Jordan and Iran respectively) – linking them to the grooming of up to 60 girls from the town. Albattikhi and Reveshi were secretly recorded discussing murdering Charlene; but despite this two trials collapsed and the pair were awarded compensation for having been prosecuted.

Mick Gradwell, a former chief detective superintendent with Lancashire Constabulary, later claimed that police were well aware of Blackpool’s grooming gang problem but "investigations were being hampered by political correctness".

I’m not the first to compare Stephen’s and Charlene’s killings; Telegraph writer Sean Thomas, praising the "remorseless, dignified campaigning" of Baroness Lawrence, then asked why Wikipedia had taken down Charlene’s page – following this the so-called encyclopaedia published a page called "The disappearance of Charlene Downes".

I wish Stephen Lawrence hadn’t been killed. I wish Charlene Downes hadn’t been killed. Maybe one day her mother will be ennobled and given help to start a Charlene Downes Foundation; but while British girls continue to be targeted on ethnic and religious grounds – even as Charlene’s relatives are prevented from raising awareness of her death – don’t count on it.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Click to watch the Stephen Lawrence Unity Concert on BBC i-Player until 8 October 2013

Stars perform in Memory of Stephen Lawrence - bbc.co.uk

60 girls groomed for sex at takeaway shops in Blackpool - Nick Collins, Telegraph

Mother of murdered girl ‘put into kebabs’ runs from court after gruesome testimony - Mail

The murder of Stephen Lawrence and the strange case of the missing Wikipedia entries - Sean Thomas, Telegraph

Charlene's gran upset by T-shirt ban - Julia Bennett, Blackpool Gazette

towards a "Patriots' Pound" campaign?

For every EDL member I know, I know countless more who support its aims but do not feel they wish to go on marches. Could numbers (and therefore business) have been on Selfridge’s managers’ minds when they gave English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson a free steak dinner to apologise after a member of staff told him to "f**k off"?

Many of us have had similar experiences – I was verbally abused by a bus-driver on the way to a demo in Luton and learnt this was commonplace.

Well-heeled socialists might despise us for our working-class backgrounds, but we – and all those who support our multicultural agenda – represent a lot of spending power. Perhaps it’s time to realise the power of our our patriots’ pounds?

Many of us do already – for example, non-stunning slaughter leaves me cold, so I don’t buy Cadbury or other brands that use ingredients from meat that might be non-stunned if I can help it.

Sometimes we just have to buy where we have to buy. But occasionally, say, might it be possible to buy produce from traditional shops more likely to have been compassionately produced? Or to raise our voices at meetings when service providers with abusive staff are applying to renew their tenders?

Just as the Pink Pound campaign had broad-based popular support, focussed spending power could have wide appeal, perhaps even to integrated Muslims who are trying to put clear water between themselves and Jihadis who want to obscure their daughters’ identities with veils. It could even be an opportunity for vendors of Halal meat from pre-stunned animals (eg Waitrose) to set out their stall in a compassionate, multicultural marketplace.

It mustn’t be a campaign against people – as Tommy tweeted, he didn’t want the eejit to lose his job, just an apology. It has the potential, however, to be a campaign for dignity, for animal welfare and for meaningful community cohesion.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

No action after EDL leader's friend refused Selfridges service - bbc.co.uk

Selfridges Criticised For Giving EDL's Tommy Robinson Free Steak Dinner (POLL, PICTURES) - Huffington Post

Britain's Broken Families

After watching the BBC’s Britain’s Broken Families follow the progress of Newcastle’s Family Intervention Project, I wondered which was more broken: the families or the system?

One of the two cases caught my attention in particular. Sharon, who has mental health problems, is mother to Sian, a 14-year-old girl who has not attended school for a year. She is in a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old boy, one of several teenagers who come regularly to the flat and cause chaos for Sharon’s neighbours.

Where to start? When education heroine Malala Yousefzai rightly spoke to the UN about the value of education accompanied by Gordon Brown, did Brown inform her about educational non-uptake in the UK? Would she not agree that denial of education is child abuse?

Who are these teenagers infesting Sian’s room? Is Sian being pressured to provide more than floor-space?

Towards the end of the program, we find that the plans starting to bear fruit for Sian are thrown up in the air because she is pregnant, presumably by the 16-year-old. She is now awaiting to see if a social-worker will allow her to keep the baby.

Take a bow Lord Fraser, of the eponymous guidelines; these laid down that children can make their own decisions about medical treatment. His guidelines were specifically introduced after Victoria Gillick (right) stood up for parents’ rights and duties regarding child protection, specifically in sexual matters, and was rounded upon by the entire liberal-socialist Establishment.

Another worker voiced the wish that children not go into care. I understand that: the care system has for some time been infiltrated both by child-abusers and by managers who seem not to believe that child-abuse is always wrong.

And caught in the infernal web of liberal intentions are Sian, her mother, and now her baby.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Click here to watch Britain's Broken Families on i-player until 23 September 2013

Britain's Broken Families webpage

Gordon Brown: Malala's UN speech is just the beginning - cnn.com

Fraser Guidelines - GP notebook

1983: mother loses contraception test case - BBC on this day

anti-fracking and the resurgence of Picturesque

Enclosure has a lot to answer for. True, it’s the basis of all that modern people consider private property, but it also established a precedent for a class of people declaring that what was beforehand held in common belongs to them.

Thus, for example, we have the BBC’s cultural enclosure of immigration, the NHS and the causes of climate change, whereby anybody who expresses views beyond the pale is considered toxic.

The anti-fracking camp is closer to enclosure in its original meaning. The means of harvesting oil from shale has brought energy prices down in the US and could do the same here, but protesters won’t have it. They insist the land cannot be used for this purpose.

And there’s the nub. Like the haves of feudal times, the anti-frackers arrogate to themselves the right to determine how our land is used to support the people lucky enough to live upon it. They seem to have an idea that fracking will turn fields of green to fields of concrete, but are blind to barely mitigated immigration doing just that (see cultural enclosure).

The anti-frackers seem to have a romanticised view of rural land that owes much to William Gilpin's (right) views on the Picturesque – seeing blasted heaths as more attractive than planted ones and ruins easier on the eye than habitations – without realising that Gilpin’s aesthetics concerned art, not life. Add to this the sinister left-wing fetishisation of land as the elite's birthright as pioneered by National Socialism and you have an explosive scenario.

The anti-frackers proceed from the super-privileged who come to lord it over the rest of us. Not only have they no contact with blue-collar life, but enjoy benefits most middle-class people will never see. They seem to think they have ringside seats for a revolution. Perhaps they do.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Andrew Marr and communism's mutant sister

Andrew Marr is my kind of Liberal, in that he has insight into the fact that his outlook is merely one of several: it was he who first identified, in 2006, that the BBC had “an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities and gay people” and suffered from a "cultural liberal bias".

You might object that there’s nothing wrong with being young and/or gay and I’d agree wholeheartedly. What Marr meant, I think, is that the BBC fails the diversity tick-box test by having so many more young and/or gay people than the communities it serves that it doesn’t reflect those communities accurately.

He showed this insight again in his 2007 book A History of Modern Britain, where he praises the benefits of immigration. Then he makes the one point commentators may not raise: no politician ever asked the British populace for permission to open the floodgates.

So it’s disappointing that, in his 2012 tome, perhaps somewhat hubristically titled A History of the World, his ability to think outside of the culturally liberal box deserts him when it comes to comparing communism and fascism.

He’s not afraid to tackle the abuses of communism: he identifies Stalin as the world’s worst mass murderer, and again says something liberals shouldn’t: Stalin merely finished what Lenin started.

My beef is that he flees from identifying fascism as the other side of the same coin as communism, but instead identifies it as "communism’s mutant sister". He seems to be in thrall to the idea that fascism can only be right-wing – but how many right-wing dictators soiled the 20th century? Hitler nationalised most of Germany’s businesses and proclaimed himself an anti-capitalist, with Mussolini close behind. Franco was the only right-wing dictator. Isn't any totalitarian "supreme leader" a fascist?

Fascism isn’t the mutant sister of communism: it’s the identical twin.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

We are biased, admit stars of BBC news - Daily Mail

REad reviews for A history of Modern Britain on Amazon

Read reviews for A history of the World on Amazon

What is fascism? A surprising BBC debate - 300 words

Hitler was a socialist (and not a right-winger) - Democratic Peace Blog

Wagner, Tolkien and the ring

Having recently conquered Lord of the Rings, I was interested to see during BBC Radio 3’s Ring Cycle marathon a short discussion entitled When Tolkien stole Wagner’s Ring.

Tolkien constructed his legendarium from pre-existing building-blocks, but it hadn’t occurred to me that he’d stolen it from anyone. And neither of the participants (professor Nick Groom and author Renée Vink) accused him of stealing. As Vink said, both Wagner and Tolkien mined the rich seam of Norse mythos.

Then, of course, there's Hitler, to whom Wagner – who died six years before Hitler’s birth – was attractive because of his atrocious anti-Semitism, unfortunately all too prevalent throughout the West.

But the ring theme predates Norse legend. Perhaps indicative of Europe's ancient Eastern roots, since antiquity the Hindu god Shiva has been depicted dancing within a ring of fire (left), and both our artists associate their respective rings with fire – Wagner’s with his fire encircling Brünnhilde in Die Walküre as she sleeps on the mountaintop, Tolkien’s with the fires of Mount Doom in which Sauron’s Ring of Power must be destroyed.

Tolkien’s work, however, is more rooted in the time of writing than Wagner’s. Written during World War II, the crisis in Middle Earth has come about through its peoples ignoring the rising powers of evil taking hold: a comment on appeasement? Groom recounts a contemporaneous letter referring to "that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler" misappropriating the traditions that had informed the character of his beloved England.

But although Tolkien, as a Professor of Anglo-Saxon, used his knowledge of northern folklore in writing LOTR, I think it’s significant that the name of the reforged sword (another shared theme) is Andúril, meaning Flame of the West. I hope Western patriots adopt his legendarium, telling of diverse peoples cooperating to fight against evil, as a founding myth.

So when will we see the first LOTR opera?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Twenty Minutes: When Tolkien stole Wagner's Ring BBC Radio 3 Proms - available until 2 August 2013

REad a review of Renée Vink's Wagner and tolkien: Mythmakers at Tolkien Library

The Letters of JRR Tolkien - use table of contents at the front for the hyperlink to Letter 45, which speaks of "that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler

Shiva in the form of Nataraja (dancing in a ring of fire) - Exotic India

Tolkien and the black riders - 300 words

chivalry, betrayal and the Peasants' Revolt's relevance

BBC Four’s series on the Hundred Year’s War, Chivalry and Betrayal, is a quality documentary. Simultaneously, it displays the BBC’s inability to portray anything remotely connected with class-based tension without imposing its own agenda.

Presenter Jenina Ramirez' points were lucid and well-argued. I agree with her that the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt was one of the landmark battles of the 14th century, pitting the might (and perceived divine right) of the rulers against the rage of the ruled. And the ruled, particularly serfs, were in uproar at the imposition of new taxes for foreign wars at a time when the taxpayer base had shrunk considerably.

I sighed warily when Ramirez defined the Revolt as class war: while possibly a valid assumption, this phrase indicates that the BBC is entering fetishistic Marxist recontextualisation mode. Sure enough, Professor Caroline Brown of Royal Holloway University of London appeared to inform us that the rulers’ surprise that ordinary people could communicate and organise, including by letter, was redolent of the West’s consternation upon learning on 9/11 that people it had disregarded were actually quite sophisticated.

The Peasants’ Revolt was a civil war triggererd by excessive inequality. It was not a pan-national terror campaign, and to compare it to one is an astounding expropriation of working people’s history.

More than this: to compare the Revolt to 9/11 is a tactic to distract us from the mounting inequalities under which we’ve been labouring since 1997. True, we all reap the benefits of an affluent society, which cannot be created without some inequality; but paying for ill-thought-out wars and EU membership plus public sector waste on top of an open-doors immigration system is unsustainable, and the house of cards is shaking even now.

The Peasants’ Revolt is far more relevant to contemporary British life than the BBC, for all its cod-proletarian rhetoric, would have its licence-payers believe.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Chivalry and Betrayal: Breaking the Bonds - BBC i-player - section on Peasants' Revolt starts 23:08

Chivalry and Betrayal webpage

Janina Ramirez' blog on Chivalry and Betrayal at bbc.co.uk

Money Week: The End of Britain

The People's Songs: tubthumping

"They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot". This was Joni Mitchell’s farewell in Big Yellow Taxi to a middle-class apartment block in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles. So it was fitting that the song closed BBC Radio 2’s latest documentary in The People’s Songs strand, entitled Tubthumping – Environmentalism and Anti-Globalism. In case we missed the Beeb’s cultural enclosure of environmental matters, presenter Stuart Maconie prefaced the song with the remark "being kettled has become as much of a modern middle-class youth experience as a gap-year in Asia" (I know middle-class people who have experienced neither).

I’m not trying to do down environmentalist issues and concerns. As Margaret Thatcher once remarked, “we are not only the friends of the earth, we are its stewards and guardians”. But any BBC presenter who unearthed that quote without audibly dripping with sarcasm would soon be sidelined.

Maconie was, in my view, totally right to play Robert Wyatt’s Pigs (…In There). Battery farming is a vile practice – but can only increase while our population is augmented from without virtually unchecked. So why not use the broadcast to suggest common land be used for keeping pigs and other animals who would otherwise be intensively farmed, while keeping a modicum of land free for those who have ethical or religious objections to humanely slaughtering animals for food?

The stars of the show were Chumbawamba and their 1997 hit Tubthumping, which they publicised by drenching John Prescott in water at the next year’s Brit Awards. I can understand that – Prescott occupied his position near the top of New Labour to market it to its traditional voters, while laying plans to abandon those voters in favour of a mass-imported electorate. Which is how predominantly left-leaning environmentalists seeking to protect green spaces were stabbed in the back by the party they worshipped, and which the BBC still does.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Tubthumping – Environmentalism and Anti-Globalism - BBC Radio 2

The People's Songs homepage on bbc.co.uk

Pigs (...in There) - Robert Wyatt

Tubthumping - Chumbawamba

fetish and phobia: time to be shocked a bit more

There appears to have been a cult of Islam, a fetishisation of the religion by non-members, for some time. The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first occurrence of the word "Islamophobia" in 1926 in the Journal of Thelological Studies, indicating the author regards it as preventing fair comment on Islam. The second quote, from the International Journal of Middle East Studies, is similar: "a non-Muslim…is compelled, under penalty of being accused of Islamophobia, to admire the Koran in its totality."

Little wonder, then, that even constructive criticism of practices undertaken by Muslims is handled with kid gloves. Witness BBC Radio 4’s long-term Born in Bradford project, in which health-workers investigate why Bradford’s Pakistani community, who comprise 20% of its population and have 50% of its babies, bear children with genetic disorders. It’s not rocket science – as any student of the Habsburgs' decline knows – but one doctor told of resistance at the highest levels to offending Pakistanis by campaigning on the dangers of marrying relatives as close as first cousins.

Therefore I admire Charles Moore, Telegraph commentator and former editor, for his candour in berating the British establishment and populace for being shocked "not quite enough" at Lee Rigby’s murder. His honesty is courageous and astounding:

If we attack the EDL for being racist, fascist and pro-violence, we can do so with impunity, although we are not being strictly accurate. If we make similar remarks about Islamist organisations, we will be accused of being racist ourselves.

He writes of us having an "air of menace", but that’s mild compared to the Mail and the Sun, whose comment sometimes might be cut-and-pasted from ours, but whose reportage labels us thugs.

So I’d like to throw him a friendly challenge: do his honesty and courage extend to publishing interviews with EDL members?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Woolwich outrage: we are too weak to face up to the extremism in our midst - Charles Moore, Telegraph

Born in Bradford page on bbc.co.uk

Born in Bradford NHS page

Born in Bradford page at Bradford University

The Habsburg Lip - msu.edu

the BBC's choice

English Defence League Tommy Robinson’s excellent performance on Radio 4’s Today has already been skilfully parsed on Kafir Crusaders.

The only thing I’d add is that interviewer Sarah Montague seemed to be somewhat unprepared. When she asked Tommy about representing the views of white working class people, I genuinely don’t think she was trying to trap him. She seems in thrall to Greg Dyke’s doctrine that the BBC is "hideously white", with the BBC predicating the epithet of society at large. Tommy, of course, replied that the EDL represents "non-Muslim communities in Britain". Anybody on a housing estate can tell you that doesn’t necessarily mean white.

Tommy is of course right to complain "no-one wants to sit around tables with working class people in this country". Our sharp-elbowed political classes, ascending through Society’s ethereal heights, position us on the receiving end of an apartheid with mainstream politics as the meadow we look on but whereupon we may not graze.

But I suspect the BBC is paying far more attention to the EDL now than it ever has because it’s not just blue-collar people who nod earnestly when we talk about two-tier Britain, or how ordinary Muslims are Sharia’s first victims. People from all social strata and ethnicities want to make up their own minds about what we say.

The day before Tommy’s interview, Oxford West MP Nicola Blackwood – a tireless campaigner for justice for child-grooming victims – indicated on Today there is another grooming scandal waiting to break. She spoke of Asian victims who weren’t coming forward "because of fear of retribution from their families and communities".

I can understand their alienation: the BBC wasn’t interested in victims of honour-killings until a white girl was murdered. If it comes to a choice between Jihadis and their co-religionist victims, who will the BBC stand beside?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Today, Radio 4, Monday 10 June 2013 - go to 0:53:40 to hear Nicola Blackwood's interview

Today, Radio 4, Tuesday 11 June - go to 1:35:30 to hear Tommy Robinson's interview

Click for Kafir Crusader's analysis of the above interview, contains the interview on YouTube

Nicola Blackwood MP homepage

MP Blackwood granted child exploitation debate in Parliament - Oxford Post