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

Flight MH17 decisions: wait till vested interests stop shouting

The outrage [shooting down of MH17 over Ukraine] immediately raised questions over why commercial flights were using a region where attacks on aircraft have been rife.

These words from the Telegraph form the most succinct explanation, I think, as to why Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 came to grief in such a terrible tragedy. The article says, earlier, that "aviation safety authorities in the United States and Europe warned pilots in April about potential risks flying in or near Ukraine airspace". The paper now reports other Asian airlines "had already abandoned [flying over Ukraine] months ago because of security concerns".

Regarding concerns, an International Civil Aviation Organisation website document ostensibly praises Ukrainian Air Traffic Controllers for picking up English language skills, but then expresses concern that:

Learning language is a long and costing business…[and] Lack of resources does not allow to invite native speaking teachers and instructors to train aviation personnel, to purchase necessary equipment for…training, to organize recurrent training of teachers, instructors, raters and examiners abroad.

Considering airline fuel is expensive, and the Malaysian government was found in investigations into the Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 to be a major shareholder in the debt-stricken airline, and one can understand their pilots being pressured to fly over Ukraine.

Ultimately, did Putin order the plane shot down? I don’t know, but the picture gets more complex the more you examine it. And I wonder how long conspiracy-theory sites will take to notice that the US, the UK and the EU could all do with attention taken off their internal affairs, or even that it might not be beyond the abilities of Jihadis to down the flight and blame it on an Israeli attention-diversion exercise?

I have my own theory – that it’s always better to wait for vested interests to stop shouting before making decisions with long-lasting consequences.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Air operators belatedly avoid Ukraine war zone - Tom Whitehead, Nick Collins and Martin Whitehead, Daily Telegraph, 17 July 2014

Asian airlines stopped flying over Ukraine months ago - AFP, Daily Telegraph, 18 July 2014

Challenges in implementing Language Proficiency Requirements in Ukraine - International Civil Aviation Authority; statement made on p12 of pdf. 2003 mentioned in document, but date of its publication not apparent

Pi, paranoia and Plato

Director Darren Aronofsky doesn’t underplay the paranoid aspect of his 1998 debut Pi: the tagline is "paranioa is faith in a hidden order beyond the visible" – a hook Vigilant Citizen eventually bit on. However, I think the film is a meditation on that classical allegory of painful awakening, The Cave in Plato’s Republic.

The protagonist, Max Cohen, says near both the start and finish of the film that despite his mother’s warning not to look into the sun he did so at the age of six and, after being initially blinded, "something…inside me had changed."

Plato prefaces the Cave with a passage about the sun (Max’s mentor is called Sol), to compare the visible world with the intellectual. The point about the Cave is the contrast between the visible world and reality. The film mirrors the allegory’s four parts:

1. Prisoners observe "reality": artworks’ shadows cast by a fire behind them.
   Max uses his obsession with numbers to play the stockmarket.
2. One of the prisoners is turned round and sees the fire.
   Sol alerts max to the vital importance of the 216-digit number displayed by his computer before it crashes.
3. A prisoner is dragged to the surface to see the sun.
   Max will learn from Jewish Kabbalists that the number represents God (before the Cave, Plato uses the sun to represent the Good).
4. Should the prisoner return, Plato surmises, his former associates will try to kill him.
   Max was almost killed for his realisation that his number relates to a reality beyond that of the stockmarket.

The lesson I took from Pi is the one thinkers of all traditions tend to conclude: the world that brings us joy is the one we walk upon and share with others, but awakening to that world, forever in front of our noses, involves a long and painful journey.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Pi homepage

""something…inside me had changed" quote from Pi IMDb

The Republic - Plato, Electronic Classics. The allegories of the sun, the divided line and the cave are from p187 (starting with the section marked Glaucon-Socrates) to p196.

Sun, Divided Line and Cave - J.E. Raven, Cambridge University Press (Jstor/The Classical Quarterly, 1952): an academic article that might be of help in understanding the allegories.

Read reviews of Pi at Amazon

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.

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

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

Blackout

Pace Cloverfield and Paranormal Activity, Channel 4’s Blackout is the best found-footage film I’ve seen, and all the more scary because of its feasibility.

The last blackouts to affect Great Britain were in 1972, during the Miners’ Strike. They were only in the evenings, but memories were still strong enough to see Edward Heath’s government voted out when he called an election over the strikes in 1974.

In Blackout the outage lasts for a week, literally 24/7, and by day 2 social order is breaking down. For me the central character is a DIY enthusiast who borders on what in the US would be called a "prepper", an individual who stocks food and supplies in case of an emergency entailing social breakdown. What our man seems to have overlooked is a stock of what across the Pond would be common sense: in such a breakdown you don’t just need supplies, you need the wherewithal to protect them.

In his non-fiction book Danse Macabre, horrormeister Stephen King concludes that horror films – and Blackout was very chilling – reflect the preoccupations of society at that time. Thus Them and the Godzilla movies reflected fears around nuclear warfare, while The Exorcist and The Omen came out at times of anxieties caused by youth uprisings.

I think King’s take on Blackout would be that it reflects, pretty obviously, fears about the fragility of our social fabric. However, King would also look at other meanings of the title: information blackout, say, as in the dearth of knowledge we have about how many people are actually in our country and how our money is really being spent at home and abroad; and blackout of consciousness, whereby our unelected establishment chooses not to be mindful of the abuses perpetrated by its favoured communities.

Watch Blackout – and be scared.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

REsources

Watch Blackout on 4oD

Go to the Channel 4 homepage for Blackout

CofE pension fund: Wonga's not the biggest problem

I’ve stopped telling people that my Dad worked for Monsanto’s in the early 1970s because they tend to ask me questions about genetics I can’t answer: in those days, Monsanto made carpets.

So I could empathise with the Church of Scotland which, in the 1980s, came under pressure over its pension-fund investments in defence manufacturer GEC. The Kirk replied that when the shares were bought GEC made electric appliances – I remember GEC fridges well.

Down south, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby is facing similar pressure over the Church of England’s pension fund investments in Accel Partners, which in turn bankrolls short-term loans provider Wonga, which makes no attempt to hide what its loans add up to in terms of 5000%-plus APR [click to see full size]:

It was perhaps the ABC’s misfortune to have made a comment that the CofE would back non-profit-making credit unions that would "out-perform Wonga" days before Muslim footballer Papiss Cisse (Newcastle United) refused to wear a shirt displaying Wonga’s logo as interest is non-sharia compliant, before being pictured in the equally haram activity of gambling in a casino. The press appear then to have embarked on a mission to find more Wonga-based stories.

One might ask whether the church gave Accel money before Accel invested in Wonga. However, whatever the answer to this question, Wonga is far from the CofE pension fund's biggest problem.

More troublingly, the CofE, according to Christian Today, mirrors the Establishment both in that it was facing a pensions crisis even before Gordon Brown’s borrowing-fuelled financial meltdown, and continues to invest less than carefully.

So His Grace must decide: does he invest in such a way as to let people with sensitive consciences sleep at night, or in such a way as to avoid retired vicars and other church employees joining the ranks of the homeless?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Archbishop Justin Welby is on the money over Wonga - Telegraph

What are the odds of that? £40,000-a-week Muslim Premier league star who refused to wear shirt sponsored by loan firm Wonga is spotted GAMBLING in casino - Daily Mail

Church of England faces pensions crisis - Christian Today, 2006

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1225008/Church-England-squandered-clergy-pensions-reckless-stock-market-gamble.html">Church of England squandered clergy pensions in "reckless" stock market gamble - Daily Mail, 2009

Church of England pension fund ploughs £60m of vicars' nest eggs into risky hedge funds - This is Money, Daily Mail 2012

Wonga.com's "about" page

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

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

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

Symphony: Dvořák and nationalism

You never forget your first. This applies to all sorts of things, not least music. My first classical record was the one on which so many people brought up in an environment where the genre was virtually unknown cut their teeth: Dvořák’s New World Symphony.

So it was fascinating to see Dvořák mentioned in Symphony, Simon Russell Beale’s exploration of the perennial form that lets composers rip up the programme to let the music bare their souls.

In Dvořák’s time his native Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the folkish elements in his music – for example the Furiant, a Slavonic dance with a complex time-signature he’d have seen performed in his father’s inn – was looked on with condescension. However, while Wagner’s works were admired by the aristocracy and Vienna’s Musikverein (left) was built for the edification of the middle classes, Dvořák’s nationalist populism fired the patriotic sentiments of his people to whom his music spoke.

I don’t know how well Czech nationalism translates into American nationalism, but patriots can often appreciate the sentiments of their peers from abroad. Thus when Dvořák – now head of New York’s National Conservatory of Music – adapted negro spirituals (such as Swing Low Sweet Chariot), incorporated sentiments of the admittedly Rousseauian fable of Hiawatha and inaugurated rolling passages that would inspire Copland, his New World Symphony (no 7) was a hit. Add to this the two-octave prototype for the walking bass snuck in at the very end of the symphony that would inspire first swing then rock’n’roll, and you have an epoch-making work.

The demotic output of Dvořák’s fecund mind made him, if I may mix art-forms, the Tom Clancy or Peter Robinson of his day. It’s so sad, therefore, that his music is largely dislocated from blue-collar culture. Are we ready for another outbreak of nationalism in musical form?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Symphony homepage on BBC4

Open Learn - Open University on the BBC: Symphony

Antonin Dvořák at Classical.net

EDL silent walk to war memorial, Cambridge 1 June 2013

"We don’t want you here!" spat one of the so-called "Unite against Fascism" protestors as the English Defence League silent procession approached the war memorial to lay flowers in memory of Gunner Lee Rigby.

The woman wasn’t shouting at us, though, but at a pensioner who had come independently to meditate on the short life and brutal death of the off-duty soldier.

On Thursday 30 and Friday 31 May the Cambridge News published stories attempting to raise concerns about the EDL to the level of hysteria. We’re used to its being biased, but on those two days it surpassed itself, presenting UAF opinions as fact in an exercise in disinformation that I’m sure will provide future cub reporters with plenty of material when learning how not to write articles.

Because of the News’ venom, our facilitators decided it would be prudent to process from a different place from the one advertised. There were about 30 of us, all of us uninterested in the 4 seated UAF protestors engaging in a silent protest (silent, that is, unless a pensioner happens to express an opinion they dislike).

After we’d laid our floral tributes we left, as the main body of the UAF counter-protest had seen us and was coming up the road: there were rather a lot of them. The News had quoted Richard Rose of Cambridge UAF as predicting that we were going to be "goose-stepping" – no wonder his flock were fired up.

I agree with what the woman who shouted at the pensioner wrote on her placard – "no place for racism here". That is why the English Defence League continues to oppose those who seek to trade genuine multiculturalism for a system that listens to the grievances of one religion’s abusive wing at the expense of all other groups within our shores.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Rsources

Police prepared for EDL war memorial rally - 31 May - contains remark about EDL "goose-stepping"

Confronting the rise of the far right - 31 May: "If there were just three old men putting a wreath on a war memorial we would probably not oppose it but the organised hard right has to be opposed"

Police describe EDL walk in Cambridge as "peaceful" - 1 June

EDL Newcastle demo: RIP Drummer Lee Rigby

The Mail, never slow to heap abuse on the EDL, merely carried a muted statement that the Newcastle demo on Saturday 25 May had "passed off without major incident".

The police were great. Many are ex-military, and looked as angry as us. It was also great to see veterans proudly displaying their medals among the 1,500-2000 protesters, and there were several serving Forces members present – for obvious reasons.

What grated was that during a minute's silence for Drummer Rigby, all the so-called Unite Against Fascism round the corner could do was chant "Nazi scum, off our streets". I don’t know why I expected more; people who defend the ideology that killed Drummer Rigby will sink to anything.

Tommy Robinson extemporised an impassioned speech in which he was careful to warn us that we must discern the difference between Muslims and Islam, reminding us that Muslims serve in our armed forces. In the run-up to the demo, which has been planned for months, Tommy has received many death-threats on Twitter; the ones I’ve seen threatened to decapitate his family.

Kev Carroll recited a poem about Lee’s death; by the end he was weeping and so were many of us. An activist from our LGBT division told how Jihadists in East London were now boasting, after a campaign of violence and intimidation with the blessing and assistance of the UAF, that it was a "gay-free area". So much for diversity, then.

Every single speaker exhorted us to respect Lee’s memory by ensuring that the demo didn’t turn violent. It didn’t, thank God. We are all angry, and our task now is to take our anger to the ballot-box at the next general election and, if our political classes aren’t getting domestic terrorism sorted using measures already on the statute-book, vote accordingly.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

View more Newcastle demo pics on Flickr

In Memoriam: Drummer Lee Rigby - Poems Noticed

Bud, Britain's bravest police horse, returns to duty after being punched by football thug - Daiy Mail

the fascist campaign against UKIP has begun

There are two ways to view Nigel Farage’s ill-treatment by the thugs of the Radical Independence Campaign.

The proximate cause is that UKIP is a real threat to the Scottish National Party’s predominance in the Scottish Parliament. This predominance owes its existence to the mass of Scottish working-class voters abandoned by the Labour Party who, for better or worse, cannot bring themselves to vote Conservative. UKIP’s participation in Scottish elections mean that the SNP is no longer the only populist non-Labour, non-Conservative party on the block.

However, for a fuller explanation of what was really behind the RIC riot we need to look back to March, to the conference of the so-called Unite Against Fascism. One of the themes of the conference was that "Ukip Must Not Be Allowed To Influence Politics And Immigration" (my italics).

This is the language of fascism. Modern fascism might have rounded corners and polished voices, but its message is still the same: "believe what you want – within the limits we set for you". All three main parties – the lib-lab-con trick who kick the ball to each other to create an illusion of democracy – buy into this view to some extent: witness the junta of party chiefs and unelected Hacked Off members meeting to draft legislation which they hoped would muzzle our free press. Goebbels (right) couldn’t have done a better job.

I’m pretty sure that if there’s an investigation into how and why knuckle-dragging RIC stormtroopers were mobilised the SNP will be implicated at high levels, as well as other parties who feel threatened UK-wide by UKIP. For these reasons, I’m also pretty sure there will be no such investigation. But be in no doubt: the forces of fascism that have uninterruptedly consolidated their power over the British Establishment since 1997 are on the move.

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

'Scottish nationalists are fascist scum': Nigel Farage hounded by mob says they were driven by hatred of the English - Daily Mail

GERALD WARNER: Yes, Scottish nationalism DOES have an ugly face - Daily Mail

UAF Conference: Ukip Must Not Be Allowed To Influence Politics And Immigration - Huffington Post

Hacked Off's blackmail letter to Miliband - Guido Fawkes

EDL Dewsbury bombers: not warriors but pawns

BBC Radio Two news, on one occasion only, carried a reaction from a Muslim "community leader" to the guilty pleas of the would-be Dewsbury bombers:

If this had gone ahead, then I think we could have seen a serious massacre – lots of people could have been injured, possibly killed as well, with no discrimination. There could have been younger people, older people, black, white, Asian, etc. Anybody could have been affected by that.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion the soundbite was pulled because somebody realised it was substantially similar to a denunciation of the plot made by our own Tony Curtis at the Bristol demo in July 2012. Curtis added that the bomb could have killed not only so-called "antifascists", but also police officers when the terrorists’ car, impounded for not having insurance, was being driven to the station.

Some detest the EDL. That’s their right. We were in Dewsbury peacefully exercising our democratic right to protest not against Muslims but against Sharia and Jihad. These are in the news as seldom before, with a boy beaten by Palestinian "modesty police" for an "un-Islamic" hairstyle and Saudi Arabia’s first campaign (right) against the entrenched problem – justifiable by Sharia – of domestic violence.

The Dewsbury Six might style themselves warriors with their nail-bomb-carrying rocket, but in reality they are pawns near the bottom of the Jihadist food-chain. Their puppet-masters intended the atrocity to turn public opinion against Muslims so as to make younger co-religionists feel categorised and alienated, and therefore easier to radicalise.

As Henry Kissinger points out in Diplomacy, a government needs to defeat terrorists every time, while terrorists only need to get successful once. It is reassuring to know that 7/7-sized terror plots are being foiled every year, but the BBC asks a disturbing question about the Dewsbury bomb-plot: did police miss it?

Gerry Dorrian
300 words

Resources

Speeches from the Bristol 2012 rally Tony Curtis' is the second clip down. He speaks on the indiscriminatory effect of the Dewsbury bomb from 2:25-3:00

Steve Wright in the Afternoon, 30/4/13 news-clip featuring community leader on indiscriminatory effect of bomb, 2:01:30-2:02:14 - listen again until 6 May 2013

Terrorism plot size of 7/7 attacks 'foiled every year' - bbc.co.uk 21/4/13

EDL bomb plot: did the police miss it? - bbc.co.uk 30/4/13