Article 50 may be legal, but was Gordon Brown's premiership valid?

Tony Blair may not be telling the whole truth about the reasons for his unhappiness with the British EU referendum result.

When he says Brexiteers "dismissed" the Remain campaign as scaremongering, he seems - seems to be buying into the absolutely toxic stream of thinking that questions the intelligence of people who voted for Brexit. For more of this see today's Times, which beside the usual graphs of what the regional votes were, gives the average percentage of people in that area with 5 or more GCSEs at A-c. One woman interviewed this morning complained that she was "highly educated" and didn't understand the case for Leaving. Are the metropolitan intelligentsia preparing to take us down a slippery slope, similar to one that caused a lot of trouble in the 20th century?

I believe Blair is nervous because of a little-mentioned change to electoral law during his first term. The Representation of the People Act 2000 effectively legalised postal voting on demand by abolishing safeguards built into the Representation of the People Act 1985 (and earlier versions) which stipulated that anybody who wished to vote by post had to give a reason for doing so to the Registration Officer. A House of Commons Library investigation into electoral fraud dates the rise of such fraud to industrial levels to that change.

Jump to the 2005 General Election, and as you can see in the tables below, the number of postal votes cast were a massive 514% of Labour's majority over the Conservative Party, who were the runner up, ie they formed the main Opposition Party. This is in terms of raw numbers and does not take into account our first-past-the-post system, of course, but look at what the raw numbers are: there were 5,500,000 postal votes, and Labour's majority over the Tories was a mere 770,000. (click to enlarge)

Here's what Judge Richard Mawrey QC had to say about electoral fraud in his famous "banana republic" judgement, delivered two months before the 2005 General Election:

Anybody who has just sat through the case I have just tried and listened to the evidence of electoral fraud that would disgrace a banana republic would find this statement surprising. To assert that ‘the systems already in place to deal with the allegations of electoral fraud are clearly working’ indicates a state not simply of complacency but of denial.

The systems to deal with fraud are not working well. They are not working badly. The fact is that there are no systems to deal realistically with fraud and there never have been. Until there are, fraud will continue unabated.

This matters because, after Tony Blair retired, Gordon Brown signed us up to the Lisbon Treaty.

Article 50 of this treaty specifies the procedure to be followed if a country is to secede from the EU. There has been some debate over whether Article 50 is the sole legal way of achieving Brexit. But there may well be another factor to consider here: was Tony Blair's 2005 election win democratically valid? In other words when Gordon Brown signed us up to the Lisbon TReaty, including its Article 50, did he have a legal mandate to represent the people of Great Britain?

Mr Blair - and Mr Brown - have some very interesting times ahead.

Gerry Dorrian

Resources

Representation of the People Act 2000

House of Commons Library: Postal Voting and Electoral Fraud 2001-2009 (Isobel White, 2012)

House of Commons Library: Election Statistics 1918-2007

House of commons Library Election Statistics 1918-2012

Postal voting an invitation to fraud, says judge Nick Brittien, The Telegraph, April 2005)

Judge Mawrey's "banana republic" remarks on postal voting fraud in full

was Hilary Benn also referring to fascism at the British Establishment's heart?

There’s no denying the power with which Hilary Benn wrapped up his Syrian war speech, summarising why Britain should go to war and at the same time reminding his Labour colleagues that they are the inheritors of a proud tradition of facing down fascists.

But was the Shadow Foreign Secretary also referring to fascism elsewhere apart from Syria? I ask because the man whom the coda seemed to be directed against most, Jeremy Corbyn, took the position of Labour leader after an election in which there was no defined electorate, which would seem to be the sine qua non of any democratic process. Instead, you paid your three quid and you got your vote, leading to a satire-transcending farce in which even a journalist’s pet cat was sent a voting paper.

Significantly, a large number of Conservative party members voted for Corbyn, with the Daily Telegraph leading the charge in a strategy they claimed would "destroy the Labour Party", in a move that many Telegraph readers found a step too far, one writing:

Isn’t anyone feeling just a little queasy at a mainstream newspaper calling for a democratic election to be undermined and compromised?

I believe that the Telegraph, the Tories’ in-house paper, was lying about its motives. One key characteristic of the 2015 General Election was how similar the three main party leaders sounded (before the Lib Dems’ parliamentary collapse): in particular, on the subjects of open-door immigration and integration, David Cameron, Ed Milliband and Nick Clegg each became a Nigel Farage mini-me.

Suddenly, Miliband having fallen on his sword, Jeremy Corbyn comes out of the political outback to win the Labour Party leadership, his job to show the faithful that there really is a difference between the Labour Party and the Tories, in an “election” that both of these parties, Parliament’s biggest, participated. In order to keep the Labour party faithful on-board, it was imperative for them to believe that Corbyn represented a different sort of politics, and it was imperative to get the Conservative party faithful behind him to mitigate the effect of labour democrats upon the election. This, I believe, was the Telegraph’s true intention.

The Labour Party leadership election was an example, I believe, of the political cartel in action. This is a system whereby which party is in power takes second place to the “right people” the chosen few from the three main parties, being re-elected. Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s adviser during the PM's first term, took this even further in the Sunday Times and referred to our system as “a democracy in name only, operating on behalf of a tiny elite who are in power no matter the electoral outcome”.

So when Hilary Benn referred to the Labour Party’s tradition of facing down fascists, I have to wonder whether he is referring to the expropriation of the democratic process by figures on both his benches and those opposite. If he is, I hope he’s prepared to seek out friends among democrats of all political shades, as he’ll need them.

Gerry Dorrian

Resources Read Hilary Benn's closing remarks at Hansard (begins on column 486)

Ned the cat votes Corbyn for Labour leader – but llama family misses out - Aisha Gani, The Guardian, 21 August 2015

Why the Telegraph's call for Tory votes for Jeremy Corbyn will backfire - Roy Greenslade, The Guardian, 16 July 2015 (original Telegraph article: How you can helo Jeremy Corbyn win - and destroy the Labour Party, 15 July 2015, article attributed to "Telegraph Comment Desk")

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

open letter to the Archbishop of Westminster

To the Right Reverend Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster:

Dear Archbishop Nichols,

You have asked the Coalition government to review 2012 immigration legislation preventing spouses from outside the European Economic Area from joining their British husbands or wives if they (the non-EEA spouses) earn less than £18,600.

It’s dispiriting to see families with one British member split up. I’ve been in a long-distance relationship, and it hurt; I had cause to remember the French prayer to Our lady of Lourdes, which urges: priez pour ceux qui aiment et sont partis.

But if I may ask you to tune your political antennae to a wider wavelength, I hope you will see that years of poorly-controlled immigration has caused such a population rise in this country that in 2012 we were delivered a stark wake-up call: during the UK’s second-wettest year on record, our drinking-water nearly ran out.

We in Cambridgeshire have seen the benefits immigration can bring with Pinoy – Filipino men and women – coming to do healthcare jobs in the early 2000s and fitting in seamlessly with our Judaeo-Christian heritage. But a proportion of them have been forced out of their jobs due to EU rules saying that when contracts come up for renewal EU citizens must be prioritised.

This, I think is the crux of the matter: British citizens, whom you so rightly point out are suffering, are put in this position because the government has extremely limited powers to act on couples when neither of them are from Great Britain.

Like many others, including members of your flock, I look forward to the day when Britain’s politicians can truly govern within British borders and prevent British people from suffering. I hope you will speak out to say that the desire of British people to be governed solely by British politicians is by no means sinister or toxic, so that injustices like those you have identified can be consigned to history.

Yours faithfully
Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Catholic leader brands immigration policies 'inhumane' Miranda Prynne, The Telegraph, 16 December 2012

Changes to the family migration Immigration Rules come into effect on 9 July 2012 - UK Border Agency

Met Office: 2012 was UK's second wettest year on record - bbc.co.uk

Drought Declared Across 17 More Counties As Warning That Water Shortages Could Last Until Christmas - Huffington Post, 16 April 2012

immigration laws limit the days of being enriched - 300 words

Popper's theses on gov't (7) - liberalism is evolutionary, not revolutionary

Principles of Liberalism may be described (at least today) as principles of assessing, and if necessary of modifying or changing, existing institutions, rather than of replacing existing institutions. One can express this also by saying that Liberalism is an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary creed (unless it is confronted by a tyrannical regime).

In Karl Popper’s penultimate Liberal Thesis, he delineates tradition’s role: the means for an institution to evolve as situations change, or – perhaps more sinisterly – as the Establishment’s view of the institution’s purpose changes.

One of several institutions I could mention in illustration is the police. While Sir Richard Mayne (right) defined police work in 1829 as "the prevention of crime [and] detection and punishment of offenders if crime is committed", as mass immigration changes our national makeup police become increasingly the enforcers of last resort when British culture opposes that of the Establishment’s favoured ethnicities. Thus, we see the English flag described as "racist" and a Christian preacher arrested for saying what has been in the Bible for millenia.

(I’m not criticising rank-and-file police, merely illustrating how Establishment opinion drift causes institution mission drift.)

In qualifying liberalism’s evolutionary nature with the caveat that it can become revolutionary when confronted with tyranny, Popper recognises the contributions liberal philosophy and politics made to the American, French and various humanitarian revolutions. It’s necessary to remember, though, Public Opinion and Liberal Principles appeared in 1956, before liberal leaders worldwide prostituted the movement’s vitality to the left, causing Ronald Reagan (left) to say "I never left the Democrats, the Democrats left me".

But Popper’s unquestioning acceptance that liberalism’s evolution will be in a socially positive direction contradicts a point made elsewhere in Conjectures and Refutations wherein he takes Hegelians and Marxists to task for assuming the same, through mistaking Kant’s triadic layout of his categories for a statement that syntheses will always be preferable to the conflicts they resolve. That, as institutional mission drift shows, depends on the Establishmentarian agenda regarding the conflicts.

I think Popper would reply that in the open society we can’t afford to make any thinker carry the cross of infallibility.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

This series:

Popper's theses on gov't (1): state a necessary evil

Popper's theses on gov't (2): democratic government can be got rid of without bloodshed

Popper's theses on gov't (3): democracy confers no benefit on citizens

Popper's theses on gov't (4): we're not democrats because the majority is always right

Popper's theses on gov't (5): institutions are insufficient without traditions

Popper's theses on gov't (6): Utopia is an impossibility

Popper's theses on gov't (7) - liberalism is evolutionary, not revolutionary

Resources

History of Policing - Metropolitan Police

Motorist told flag could be racist - Charley Morgan, This is Wiltshire, May 2008

Christian preacher arrested for saying homosexuality is a sin - Heidi Blake, Daily Telegraph, may 2010

"Why Reagan Was 'The Great Communicator' - Craig von Buseck, cbn.com

is the Kenya mutiny symptomatic of wider unrest?

The sit-down strike by soldiers of the 1st Battalion (Yorkshire Regiment) was a very British mutiny. I suppose in a sense Corporal Anthony Brown was lucky to be merely thrown out of the Army: after the 1917 Étaples Mutiny, Cpl Jesse Robart Short was executed for calling an officer a “bugger”.

The present action, taken during the Askari Thunder exercise in Kenya, also stemmed from the actions of people in charge: two commanders – who haven’t had their names plastered all over the press like the enlisted men – got drunk the night before a forced march and were found after the exercise sleeping off their hangover.

Incidents like this never spontaneously erupt; the discontent is usually slow-burning, with a possibly small incident turning into a flashpoint, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

It’s also impossible to ignore what’s going on around at the same time. We have the trial of one of Gunner Lee Rigby’s killers, who has been heaping praise on the nursing and medical care he has received, treatment he ensured Gunner Lee would not live to benefit from.

And of course there’s Marine A (Sgt Alexander Blackman), who was sent to Afghanistan to engage with terrorists in irregular warfare, and is facing 10 years in prison for doing precisely that.

There is an inequality inherent in any functional system, without which systems tend to collapse – but that itself can lead to system collapse when the inequality gap is unbridgeable.

This happened literally in the Étaples mutiny, when the officers appropriated billets in the posh resort across the bridge and left troops to fester on the wrong side of the river. If what happened in Kenya is symptomatic of a wider dislocation between officers and enlisted soldiers, perhaps the veteran Fusiliers’ march on London was but the politest of warning shots.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Afghanistan veterans jailed for parade ground sit-in protest over "muppet" officers - The Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Court-martial of Cpl Jesse Robart Short - National Archives

Lee Rigby murder trial: 'I’m a soldier just like Drummer Rigby... I killed him because this is war’ - Tom Whitehead, Daily Telegraph, 9 December 2013

Sgt Alexander Blackman: Marine backed by 60,000 people over killing of Taliban insurgent - Daily Mirror, 8 December 2013

Breaking: 100,000 people (the threshold that should trigger Parliamentary time for a topic) support Sgt Alexander Blackman - Daily Mail, 11 December 2013

Click to sign the HM Government e-petition to free Sgt Alexander Blackman (Marine A) - at time of writing 37,691 signatures

Veteran Fusiliers to march on London - ITV news, October 2012

social services snatch baby from womb

Put a frog in cold water and slowly raise the temperature: it will sit there until it dies. This week we heard of the case of a woman whose baby was snatched by social services, not from the cradle but from the womb. The water is starting to bubble.

The woman, an Italian spending two weeks in Stanstead to complete a Ryanair training course, is bipolar and wasn’t taking her medications.

Bipolar disorder is the most common mood disorder. An Australian study found 2.5% of the population were bipolar; in Italy, 10% of patients accessing non-psychiatric medical facilities are bipolar.

An Italian judge found that the lady agreed British social services had authority over the situation – but when she called the police because she couldn’t find her daughters’ passports, they told they were taking her to a hospital to check her baby was OK. It was a psychiatric hospital, where she was later restrained while being forcibly sedated in preparation for a C-section. Her baby was snatched from her womb, which should be its safest refuge.

The message is unmistakeable: take your medications or lose your children. Didn’t anybody stop to think that many psychiatric meds are contraindicated in pregnancy? Did the NHS operating team know they were working in, to be charitable, a legal grey area?

This isn’t just about mental illness – social services have form in targeting people they consider to be on the verge of public opinion then moving inwards: think how the snatching of foster-children from UKIP foster-parents was prefaced by a similar attempt on an English Defence League member.

In order not to jump out of the water as it heats, the frog has to have its brain removed. If we don’t get angry about this one, I think that description can be fairly applied to us.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

"Operate on this mother so that we can take her baby" - Christopher Booker, Telegraph, 1 December 2013

MP John Hemming to raise Essex forced Caesarean claim - bbc.co.uk

Bipolar disorder and its diagnosis - Royal College of Psychiatrists; quotes study on lifetime incidence of bipolar disorder in Australia on p9 of the pdf

Disturbi dell' Umore - Epidemologia - Manuale Merck (in Italian)

Incidence of bipolar disorder in 3 UK cities - British Journal of Psychiatry

Wisdom on frogs - Michael Jones, The Atlantic

Council which removed foster children after parents' UKIP membership was discovered finally apologises seven months on - Simon Tomlinson, Daily Mail

Why try to take baby from EDL mother but not from "terrorists"? - Ted Jeory, Daily Express

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

human trafficking: 3 cases showing why patriots oppose open-door immigration

Not long before the 2010 general election, I attended a meeting for domestic violence liaison workers in East Anglia at which a straw poll was taken on whether the Oakington Immigration Detention Centre should be shut, as was being advocated by Cambridge’s MP, Julian Huppert.

Every single liaison worker there, the general mood being vaguely left-of-centre, said they wanted the camp to remain open, because otherwise vulnerable people – mostly women and children – would be exploited and possibly abused; ie trafficked.

As recent child grooming trials show, victims of this vile trade are often trafficked internally; but many are also brought in and their abusers are enabled by Britain’s immigration laws.

Three cases in particular serve to illustrate this: I chose them because they are the most recent three I became aware of.

• An unnamed deaf girl has told a court how she was trafficked from Pakistan, age 10, to be a slave and was not only financially exploited for a decade but also raped by her "employers", Ilyas and Tallat Ashar.
• 
  Another unnamed Somali girl was trafficked into the UK by a gang intending to harvest her organs. Bhirti Patel (right) of children’s rights group Ecpat UK commented that "It's unlikely that a trafficker is going to take this risk and bring just one child into the UK. It is likely there was a group."
• A Chilean woman was trafficked to the UK by a Turkish gang to work as a prostitute. The woman is being deported back to Chile while members of the gang who trafficked her are not being deported.

People who stand for unchecked immigration label their opponents as swivel-eyed racists and far-right activists, but the most cursory look over just these three examples given above shows that a major part of the reason we oppose open-door immigration is that the door is open also to traffickers. Stop the traffic: guard the door.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Deaf girl tells court of "decade of rape and beatings" - The Telegraph

Somalia: girl trafficked into UK for organs harvesting - Somaliland Sun

Sex worker who helped jail gang behind brothels to be deported - Human Trafficking Foundation

"I am Malala"

The book’s full title says it all – I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood up for Education and was Shot by the Taliban.

Malala describes a childhood in Mingora in the Swat valley – once known as Pakistan’s Switzerland for its ski resorts – that was idyllic despite its poverty. The human story of her upbringing is a universal one – she comments that although her family were poor, her mother’s door was always open; I remember my mother saying the same thing about her own upbringing. The story of mothers selling their traditional gold wedding bangles reminded me of my grandfather and his peers selling their WWI medals to feed their families.

Then the Taliban came, dispensing jihad through its main delivery system, sharia law, itself dispensed through the barrel of a gun. She describes the suffocating nature of the burka, a garment which is alien to Pashtun culture.

Her shooting and subsequent hospitalisations in Islamabad and Birmingham are well-known and, at 16, her determination to see that girls have the right to education worldwide shows she has more fire in the belly than generations of coddled British feminists. Their silence in the face of Muslim girls being subjected to FGM and being removed from education, in Britain, condemns them. Malala, nowever, is a living sign that jihad and sharia by no means constitute the natural habitat of Muslims, and I wish her well.

As soon as I finished the book my wife snatched it and my daughters have dibs: it’s a book that demands to be read, and I predict that demand will be satisfied. How about putting it on the National Curriculum?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Click to go to Malala Fund, for education for girls worldwide

click for reviews of I am Malala

The mystery of the missing Muslim girls - Fran Abrams, The Independent

British girls undergo horror of genital mutilation despite tough laws - Tracy McVeigh and Tara Sutton, The Guardian Malala Yousafzai's desire to learn shames our schools - Allison Pearson, The Telegraph

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

Popper's theses on gov't (1): state a necessary evil

(1)The state is a necessary evil; its powers are not to be multiplied beyond what is necessary.

It sounds libertarian, but is actually the first of Karl Popper’s "liberal principles" concerning the state in his 1956 essay Public Opinion and Liberal Principles, which is in his 1963 collection Conjectures and Refutations. Since modern democracy owes its existence to the (small-l) liberal melting-pot of Enlightenment thought, I’ve called them his Principles of Government.

Popper’s first principle is a sociological reworking of Occam’s Razor, often rendered as "do not multiply entities unnecessarily". The state has steadily accrued functions since the eve of the First World War when, AJP Taylor noted, "a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman…The state intervened to prevent the citizens from eating adulterated foods or contracting certain infectious diseases."

Arguments perennially rage over state roles such as landlord, healthcare provider and surrogate parent. What I think Popper was thinking of with this principle, however, is the criminalisation of dissent by the state, the prime examples of which in our time were provided by fascist governments such as those of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany.

Until, that is, 2005, when an incident in Britain highlighted the state’s sinister take on dissent when Walter Wolfgang – tellingly, an escapee from the Nazis – was manhandled from the Labour Party Conference and charged under terrorism legislation by police for shouting "rubbish!" when then Home Secretary Jack Straw was speaking.

Now you are apparently a "fascist" if you voice misgivings on certain matters that are dear to the massive unelected establishment surrounding government, to the extent that you can have children taken from you if you support UKIP or the English Defence League, with "anti-fascist" rhetoric spreading to the badger cull and climate issues.

Time, it seems, to robustly prune the state before our prisons hold not criminals but dissidents and our town squares echo to jackboots stamping.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

This series:

Popper's theses on gov't (1): state a necessary evil

Popper's theses on gov't (2): democratic government can be got rid of without bloodshed

Popper's theses on gov't (3): democracy confers no benefit on citizens

Popper's theses on gov't (4): we're not democrats because the majority is always right

Popper's theses on gov't (5): institutions are insufficient without traditions

Popper's theses on gov't (6): Utopia is an impossibility

Popper's theses on gov't (7) - liberalism is evolutionary, not revolutionary

Resources

Conjectures and Refutations - 300 words

Occam’s Razor - math.ucr.edu

Ken Minogue: resisted the relentless march of state control - Peter Oborne, telegraph.co.uk - contains AJP Taylor quote

[Walter] Wolfgang highlights deeper disquiet - bbc.co.uk

Taking Liberties - channel4.com

UKIP couple have foster children removed from care - bbc.co.uk

Why try to take baby from EDL mother but not from ‘terrorists’? - express.co.uk

sex: My British Job - the misery of immigration and prostitution

"It is estimated that there are 4,000 brothels in London, 80% of which employ immigrants, most of whom are illegals."

The words are those of Hsiao-Hung Pai (right), an incredibly brave woman and (legal) immigrant herself, who investigated a brothel using illegal immigrants from China for Channel 4’s Sex: My British Job. Women under pressure to pay their debt to people-traffickers are again pressured by the madame, Mary, to perform sexual services – as is Pai, who poses as an illegal hired as a housekeeper. She is continually bullied by Mary, who was trafficked herself and now owns three villas, to become a sex-worker. The bullying leaves Pai describing herself as "suicidal" and illustrates the complex issues surrounding consent in cases of people-trafficking

Advocates of open-door immigration, if they have any humanity, will be holding their heads in their hands tonight and saying "it wasn’t supposed to be this way". In fairness, they were sold the best of all possible worlds: a society in which different cultures would mingle and share freely what was best about each one. The sentiment now seems something that wouldn’t have sounded out of place had Voltaire put it in the mouth of Doctor Pangloss.

But at ground-level we need to help the women trafficked here into sex-work and stuck there because politicians living in the real world have stiffened immigration laws.

The first thing we need to do is put real measures in place to stop people-trafficking, and not just give those trafficked advice to attend their local police station. Then we need to make an example of owners (I volunteer Mary and her partner-in-crime Mustapha (left)), followed by a time-limited amnesty on brothel-owners employing illegals who shut up shop. The case for putting rehabilitation schemes in place for trafficked sex-workers is unassailable, but will only provide false hope while next to nothing is done by statutory agencies to stop the trafficking.

Forget the politics: anything less fails vulnerable people who are being abused right now.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Watch Sex;My British Job on 4oD

Channel 4 homepage for Sex: My British Job

Channel 4 support pages:

Rape, abuse, domestic violence

Sexual health

Immigration and language

Juvenal and the internet: Fear and Loathing Online

If Old Holborn’s been trolling to the extent stated by Jonathan Maitland in ITV’s Tonight program, his Twitter feed shows he’s been behaving himself recently; but he knew the program was coming out.

The Libertarian Alliance compared OH to Juvenal (left, who admittedly railed bitterly against those who he saw as his lessers), but ignored the dearth of literacy and materials in ancient Rome relative to today. And also satire’s traditional targets, as Maitland pointed out: not “the weak and vulnerable” but public figures, especially those in power.

Old Holborn didn’t help himself, coming across as something of a psychopath:

It isn’t my responsibility what other people find offensive. If you don’t like it, turn off.

But it’s not always possible to turn off. Even the act of looking at a computer screen increases cerebral arousal and can create a compulsion to look further.

That’s maybe why some people can’t look away, most notably 14-year-old Hannah Smith, who killed herself after trolls – anonymous hyper-offensive posters – ground her down so much on ask.fm living didn’t appear an option.

Maitland traced a troll, "Jamie Card", who posted offensive comments about a woman’s 2-year-old child with Down’s Syndrome. However, under present laws, he has to be caught “with his hands on the keyboard”.

Old Holborn (Robert Ambridge - masked, right) defended himself as a championing free speech. But, as one victim pointed out, trolls curtail the free speech of their victims. The internet becomes a lawless expanse where only the brave or the abusive dare tread, and where both statutory authorities and social-media operators fail in their duty to enact Tim Berners-Lee’s principle that they must "prevent the Web from being abused by destructive forces to an extent that the overall pain is greater than the gain".

Given that the Internet enables communication and organisation like nothing before, is Establishment inaction in the face of these abusers totally coincidental?

Charles Bond
300 words

Resources

How to deal with an Internet Troll - wikihow.com

Fear and Loathing Online - ITV player, until 11 october 2013

Fear and Loathing Online Homepage - itv.com: scroll to bottom of page for sites to help you if you are a victim of trolling

Old Holborn's Twitter feed

Old Holborn: a Juvenal for our times - Libertarian Alliance blog

Facebook troll ["Jamie Card"] hijacked woman's account and pretended to give her child away

Tim Berners-Lee's internet archeology principles: filtering

Martin Luther King's dream

Fifty years ago, one of the greatest figures in world history gave an impassioned speech that rings out through the decades as a hymn to justice and multiculturalism.

Martin Luther King’s "I have a Dream" speech marked the hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation which became law on 1 January 1963. The president wrote:

I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves [within the US] are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

King’s assessment of progress thereafter was stark: "One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination…It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of colour are concerned".

His answer was not to take one’s rights by force, which some (eg Malcolm X - right) would have justified with the not unfair argument that freedom is taken, not gifted. King emphasized that freedom exists only when everyone is free: not just little black children and little white children but Catholics and Protestants and Jews and Gentiles.

I think King was saying is that there must be an end to exceptionalism, the concept that one part of society stands elevated over others and is justified in using all means necessary to preserve that elevation. The context of "I have a Dream" was white exceptionalism (or supremacy). Now the West faces waves of Jihad based on fundamentalist Islamic exceptionalism and, as the exclusion of Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer from the UK shows, the Establishment will not even tolerate reference to the issue.

What will such denial of freedom produce for our generation: a Martin Luther King, or a Malcolm X?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

"I have a Dream" speech on Youtube:

Full text of "I have a Dream" speech - BBC

Obama on Martin Luther King anniversary: the full speech

Text of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 - US Government Archives

Letter banning Pamela Geller from UK - Atlas Shrugs

Banning Geller and Spencer from UK will only increase grievance - Index on Censorship

Mid Staffs masscre and baby deaths: a sinister agenda?

In the mid-1990s my friend worked in a nursing-home in Grantham and was asked to write a report about failings on a shift where a patient was scalded by hot tea. He declined as he hadn’t been on that shift, but receiving an offer he couldn’t refuse wrote about systemic failings that had led to somebody unsuitable being in charge of the shift. His boss replied the report was unacceptable, and to rewrite it. He refused. It later transpired the report had been rewritten with his name appended.

So I can sympathise with the officials of the Care Quality Commission who found their reports about failings in the discredited (but still functioning) clinical standards inspector suppressed.

It’s been rotten from the start: its first chair, Cynthia Bower (right), was formerly CEO of the West Midlands Strategic Health Authority and had studiously looked away from the ongoing corporate massacre of 1200 people at Mid Staffs Hospital, as well as being in charge when babies were dying unnecessarily in Cumbria. That’s the sort of negligence that can only be cultivated over the course of years of disorder and misrule.

I say so advisedly: many people comment on the caring nature of almost every ground-level doctor and nurse in the NHS, without reflecting that there are nasty pieces of stuff in all walks of life – where are the NHS’s?

The answer is they’ve been promoted. The NHS always had a habit of kicking troublemakers with loud voices upstairs, but the adoption of a target-and-tickbox culture has sucked the buggers into management in previously unimaginable numbers. It’s since been shown that targets cultures attract psychopaths, who excel at both producing ticks in boxes and erasing the chaos created.

There seems to be another dimension to this crisis, though. Look through your history books – older people and babies are the traditional prey of eugenicists. It’s where they always start. This perhaps explains the untouchability of the guilty parties.

Charles Bond
300 words

Resources

Inundated with complaints from all over the UK - Cure the NHS, Feburary 17, 2013; scroll down to third comment, which refers to "Disc 1", alleging the complicity of "public officials in the NHS, Home Office [and] chief constables" in the NHS cover-up

Cynthia Bower omitted from report into Cumbrian hospital baby deaths - Guardian, 19 June 2013

NHS Watchdog accused of hospital 'cover-up' still not fit for purpose, chairman admits - Telegraph, 18 June 2013

Name the NHS staff responsible for hospital cover-up, minister says - Telegraph, 19 June 2013

And still the NHS cover-up goes on - Telegraph, 19 June 2013

Baby Joshua: the death that led to police enquiry

Targets and psychopaths - 300 words, 8 January 2013

Where are they now? - Tales from a Draughty Old Fen, March 18 2009

Patients subjected to abysmal workhouse conditions - Telegraph, 18 March 2009

Nick Ross' Crime

If you’re reading this review of Nick Ross’ Crime: How to solve it – and why so much of what we’re told is wrong, chances are it’s because of the Daily Mail's manufactured furore misquoting that passage about rape.

I don’t agree with 100% of what Ross writes, but would hope that holds true of any thinking person reading any text. Ross deplores rape utterly, and he goes nowhere near the Mail’s recurring theme, based on "evidence" that would never have met his rigorous standards, that women are to blame for being raped; they only have themselves to blame; it’s the victims’ fault.

As an ex-drugs worker I was interested in his positing non-punitive detention for drugs users. I remember the US once imposed this on a man thought (wrongly) to have XDR (extremely drug-resistant) TB. Human rights concerns were raised, and rightly so, but in the face of the prospect of a treatment-resistant illness that evokes fears of horrible suffering these were somewhat restrained.

Ross consistently attacks criminology and its disciples for their determination to blame society for individuals’ criminality at the expense of victims’ needs and anxieties, which I think is seen as his real crime; but he doesn’t let right-wingers, pointing to personal responsibility, off lightly. Chicago’s stock exchange has as many cocaine-users as its poor black areas…guess which ones are easier to catch? By way of his thesis that opportunity to commit crime facilitates its occurrence he cites something close to my heart: the explosion of postal voting.

If you’re angry at what you think Ross has said about rape but haven’t read Crime, I would suggest you’re not quite angry enough to engage your own critical faculties. Buy or borrow Crime, read this ground-breaking text on the causes of and solutions to crime, and make your own decision.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Click for reviews of Crime on amazon.co.uk

the crimebook.com - an internet supplement to the book

Blog attached to the above - catalogues what one post calls "the rape row"

Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science, University College London - co-founded by Ross, dedicated to the memory of his Crimewatch co-presenter; a multi-disciplinary approach to evidence-based solutions to crime

My James

The most harmful delusion liberal intellectuals have foisted on society is undoubtedly that everybody has an inner liberal intellectual which will emerge when treated in a civilised manner. It sounds anodyne, but the preponderance of liberal intellectuals in the top reaches of the police, prison, probation and judiciary renders this attitude lethal.

Literally: in Ralph Bulger’s book about his murdered son My James, written with journalist Rosie Dunn, we hear of a man who killed himself in Scotland because people thought he was Jon Venables and were understandably keen to administer the justice that the state sabotaged.

James Bulger’s 1993 murder shocked the world through both its brutality and the age of his killers: ten. John Major was moved to say we needed as a society to "condemn a little more and understand a little less".

Said liberals didn’t listen and arranged for Venables and accomplice Robert Thompson to be given new identities before being released in case adult prison should undo their rehabilitation work. Ralph’s thesis is that they didn’t want to believe such young children could sexually abuse and torture an infant – and they weren't the only ones; when he was eventually allocated counselling (something the killers got without having to beg) the psychiatrist fled, unable to bear what Ralph told him about James’s death.

My James is no academic discussion about crime and punishment; Venables may have fathered a child during his taxpayer-funded new life, and was returned to jail after being found to have accessed sickening child pornography, which is by its nature produced by abusing children.

My James cries out to be read because of Ralph’s heartbreaking insights into the topsy-turvy values produced by ivory-tower liberals who view victims of crime as distractions from their pet projects. Just have tissues and a punchbag to hand.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Click for reviews of My James: the heart-rending story of James Bulger by his father on amazon.co.uk

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

the blasphemy law is dead: it must rest in peace

In the late 1800s, the National Secular Society published a pamphlet featuring a cartoon Moses meeting God on Mount Sinai. God, whose lower half we see, is pictured wearing a nightshirt billowing out behind him: he’s farting in Moses’ face.

To observant Jews and Christians this is shocking. But it’s part of the long, often unhappy conversation between church, state and citizens about what is acceptable comment and what strays into criminality.

Thus, in latter times, we’ve had The Love that Dares to Speak its Name, a poem about a centurion sexually abusing Christ’s dead body that was published by Gay News in 1977 in defiance of Britain’s blasphemy law. In a reading of the poem in 2002, Peter Tatchell said "The blasphemy law is now a dead letter. If the authorities are not prepared to enforce the law, they should abolish it". (It was, by the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008.)

What worries me is that we are accruing a blasphemy law by stealth, an undead version if you will, that is used to justify persecution and even murder of those who insult Islam. In the recent trial of the six would-be Dewsbury bombers, the defence attempted to justify the terrorists’ intention to bomb an English Defence League demonstration by playing a CD of EDL members chanting “who the **** is Allah?”

It might not be the most elegant sentiment, but it’s nothing compared to the content of Jerry Springer: The Opera, which the BBC refused to apologise for in the face of over 60,000 complaints, saying "nobody has the right not to be offended".

Now watch the contortions of so-called "antifascists" who will argue that some people do have the right to be offended and to act on this, and also attempt to deny that we inhabit a two-tier Britain.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Blasphemy Law Is Dead - petertatchell.net - scroll down for The Love that Dares to Speak its Name

Six would-be terrorists were responding to EDL provocation, court hears - The Guardian

Governors' Programme Complaints Committee finding on complaints against Jerry Springer - The Opera - bbc.co.uk