Black and White offence

One of the most popular British TV entertainment programmes was the Black & White Minstrel Show broadcast between 1958 and 1978, which regularly attracted audiences of over 15 million during its peak in the 1960s. Such was its popularity and fame that the BBC was able to sell the broadcasting rights to over 30 countries worldwide, it won the prestigious Eurovision Montreux Golden Rose award in 1961, it spawned a succession of top selling chart LPs and formed the basis for one of the longest running London stage shows that extended for a period of over ten years.

For most of the first decade it was an entirely uncontroversial programme that epitomised wholesome family entertainment. The arch BBC critic Mary Whitehouse declared it to be a ‘delightful’ programme. This was not a view shared by all since it was enjoyed mostly by ‘mums and dads’, and teenagers of the time rejected it as hopelessly and irredeemably ‘square’, compared with pop music shows such as Top of the Pops and Ready Steady Go.

The show was based on a slick song and dance routine performed by blacked up men and young attractive white women. The music was mostly old time songs from the American Deep South, mixed with country and western tunes and some 1930s musical numbers. It was very professionally performed, requiring careful choreography to match the songs with the dance routine. The contrast between the blacked up males and the white women provided a strong visual image which appreciably enhanced the spectacle, as well as creating a distinctive brand for the show. The blacked up minstrel tradition extended back to Victorian times, and enjoyed a revival in the 1920s with the huge popularity of Al Jolson. So the whole concept made a lot of sense in appealing to public taste.

There was certainly no suggestion during the early to mid 1960s that the blacked up faces were in any way intended to be insulting to black people, and there is no evidence that black British residents of this period ever complained to the BBC about this, since the matter never appears to have been raised on Points of View which featured viewers comments. This was an outlook and concern that just never arose amongst the BBC programme makers and British public of the time, who regarded the show as nothing more than ‘good clean entertainment’, as one viewer described it. One thing is crystal clear, this programme attracted tens of millions of ordinary viewers during its first decade, and virtually no one then appeared to find anything offensive about it.

The first public sign of dissent came in May 1967 when the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination (CARD) called on the BBC to withdraw ‘this hideous impersonation which causes much distress to coloured people’. It was also claimed that the show ‘creates serious misunderstanding between the races and gives a wrong understanding to impressionable whites’, adding that ‘all it is intended to do is to caricature people and stereotype them’. Leaving aside the slur against white people, it should be stressed that this clearly hyperbolical complaint had nothing to do with racial discrimination. It was instead an attempt to impose on wider society a largely contrived victim agenda of a tiny vocal coalition of mostly white liberals and a few black activists, with the objective of curtailing the legitimate enjoyment and entertainment of a huge number of television viewers. CARD would collapse later in the year after infiltration by black power extremists and deteriorating relations between Asians and Caribbeans, an outcome at odds with the idealistic multiracial harmony envisaged by the white liberal founders.

A couple of months later the TV critic of the Spectator magazine Stuart Hood echoed these concerns when he opined that ‘the BBC should ask itself whether it ought not at last remove from its future schedules’ the Black & White Minstrels since, in the language of the time, ‘the days are long past when a coon show is tolerable on air’. This presumptuous statement is rather surprising since Hood was the BBC Head of Television in the early 1960s when it must be assumed that, like everyone else, he found nothing objectionable about the programme. A reader took a different view praising ‘the world acclaimed Black & White Minstrel Show as demonstrating ‘nothing but the highest reflection being cast upon West Indians’ by the wonderful voices of the minstrels and ‘anyone who thinks differently must have a warped mind’. He added that the show gave his 90 year old mother ‘the greatest pleasure which she never misses’ remarking that ‘there must be many more elderly folk to whom the loss of this show will be one further pleasure gone from their lives’.

One member of the BBC staff who found the programme objectionable was the Chief Accountant Barrie Thorne. In an internal memo he questioned the then BBC line that it was a ‘traditional show enjoyed by millions for what it offers in good-hearted family entertainment’. Thorne ludicrously dismissed this view on the grounds that ‘the same was said of throwing Christians to the lions’. He regarded the show as ‘Uncle Tom from start to finish’ that was offensive to many despite the size of the audience. The Director-General’s assistant responded to Thorne’s memo by stating that ‘it was absurd to imagine that people who are not already racially prejudiced could possibly in some way be contaminated by the Minstrels’. His frank advice to ‘coloured people’ on this issue was ‘we can see your point, but in your own best interests, for Heaven’s sake please shut up. You are wasting valuable ammunition on a comparatively insignificant target’. A robust common sense statement of the obvious that today would likely result in instant dismissal by BBC management, identity obsessed, PC speech enforcers.

During this period the BBC was moving in a liberal direction, away from what many regarded as its earlier stuffy and staid conservative image. But there was no question then of imposing politically correct speech codes, since these concepts were yet to developed or defined. The whole progressive ethos of the time was to challenge the heavy censorship regime on subjects such as sexual expression that had until relatively recently been prevalent. It was this development to which Mary Whitehouse’s campaign against ‘permissiveness’ was targeted. The response of liberals to her concerns was that if she did not like the programmes for which she found the subject matter objectionable or offensive then she should switch off, and not interfere with the enjoyment of those who wanted to watch these programmes. The whole progressive outlook then was strongly anti censorship, and in this climate the BBC would have been very reluctant to drop an immensely popular programme like the Minstrels to appease a tiny vocal minority, particularly when no offence was intended.

The BBC stuck by the show for another decade until its final appearance in 1978, by which time the calls by liberals to end the programme had become more vocal and persistent. The ratings had also begun to drop quite appreciably, and by the time of its demise it is unlikely that many viewers would have been under the age of 50. So the decision to pull the plug came as no surprise, and many wondered why it had not been put out of its misery rather earlier. However, ‘progressive’ liberals were not content to just take the programme off air, they wanted to demonise and denigrate its memory together with the kind of society which allowed it to be shown in the first place.

Foremost amongst those seeking to trash the memory of the programme is the BBC itself. The corporation now contends that the Minstrels were ‘arguably the BBC’s most glaring failure to understand the damage it could do when it traded in out of date stereotypes’ and asked why ‘this infamous programme could have lasted so long’. The BBC’s extended mea culpa seeks an explanation as to why ‘it didn’t seem to occur to anyone in a position of authority at the BBC that the series really was offensive to more than just a few killjoys’. As part of the BBC guilt trip their light entertainment chief Bill Cotton confessed that the ‘racist implications’ should now be ‘obvious to all’ declaring that ‘its the people who are black whose views surely need to be taken into account’, and then denouncing ‘the BBC’s belated, faltering progress in understanding the implications of a multicultural Britain’. This feast of emoting self flagellation ignores the fact that one of the main BBC objectives should be to provide quality entertainment to the public, rather than engage in virtue signalling to placate vocal minority agitators.

The posthumous fate of the Black & White Minstrels epitomises the will of the politically correct elite to rewrite history to promote and enforce their agenda. As George Orwell observed ‘he who controls the past controls the future’. But as its creator George Mitchell affirmed ‘the show represented all that was best in the world of light entertainment. It was magical and full of colour, entertainment at its best, family fun and friendly. Yet gradually its memory became contorted and warped’. He regretted ‘the repeated focus on the so called racist element of the show which gradually became adopted as the truth, simply because it was repeated so often, slowly turning the show and all it stood for into something hateful’. In fact all the critics of the show succeeded in doing was to infantilise black people, as being so hyper-sensitive that they were assumed to be unable to cope with anything perceived as a mildly unfavourable interpretation of their culture.

So we moved from a society in which virtually nobody found this programme offensive, to one where anyone trying to defend it risked being branded as a racist bigot. We all suffer from a loss of liberty through this kind of soft totalitarianism in which an elite minority can enforce their own self regarding virtue on the rest of society. It is worth comparing the wholesomeness of the Minstrels with how mainstream black ‘entertainers’ portray themselves today through the degeneracy of their repulsive foul mouth gangsta rap videos. But there is no rush by white ‘progressives’ to criticise these self promoted ‘stereotypes’, to do so would be far too ‘judgemental’.

In defence of Islamophobia

Normally the internal affairs of Pakistan would be outside the remit of this blog. However, an exception can be made to consider the case of Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy. As widely reported, the Pakistan supreme court recently acquitted her after no less than eight years on death row, declaring that she had been a victim of accusations that were ‘concoction incarnate’.

Clearly this sentence was utterly barbarous beyond comprehension even if she had been guilty. But instead of rejoicing that an innocent woman had been reprieved under a malignant law, huge numbers of protesting Muslims demanded that she should still be executed, also making death threats against the supreme court judges and her lawyers. As a consequence the Pakistan government have surrendered to this mob pressure by preventing her leaving the country pending a review of the court decision.

There have been suggestions that she should be given asylum in Britain. But according to reports the government is unwilling to take this action because of fears of ‘unrest’ amongst the Muslim community. To be realistic, asylum in Britain would not be a safe option, as she would very quickly be recognised and there would likely be a serious risk that our own home grown fanatics would attempt to carry out the demands of the Pakistani mobs. In practical terms, she would be much safer in countries such as Hungary or Poland whose governments have so far not succumbed to our own elite’s enthusiasm for multicultural ‘enrichment’.

Both the British government and the liberal media seem to have been largely unperturbed by the death sentence for blasphemy, the grossly trumped up nature of the allegations, or the grotesque behaviour and shocking demands of the fanatical howling mob. This contrasts with the vociferous denunciation by pontificating politicians a few years back, condemning as excessive the relatively lenient sentence handed out by the Russian courts to the degenerate collective known as Pussy Riot, for their sacrilegious puerile antics in a Moscow cathedral.

We are continually warned by our politically correct establishment of the supposed horrors of encouraging Islamophobia. One of the greatest mysteries of our time is the quite literally unholy alliance between self styled ‘progressive’ liberals and regressive Islam. If this global superstition had been a political movement grown out of English working class communities, it would have been quickly proscribed because of the terrorist links of some of its activists.

The recent events in Pakistan should be a wake up call, giving us an insight into the disturbing consequences of Islamic group fanaticism, in contrast to the sugar candy version of this backward belief system served up by mainstream politicians and liberal media outlets, the BBC being the main mouthpiece of this deception. So the question that needs to be asked in response to the events surrounding Asia Bibi is why any sane rational person would want to be anything other than Islamophobic.

The first Race Relations Act

The first legislation to outlaw racial discrimination was introduced by Harold Wilson’s Labour government in 1965. It fulfilled a manifesto pledge ‘against racial discrimination and incitement in public places’. The main provisions were to outlaw racial discrimination ‘in places of public resort’ such as hotels, restaurants, pubs, theatres and cinemas, and to prohibit the incitement of racial hatred, through both publications and public meetings, in a manner deemed to be ‘threatening, abusive or insulting’. Although well intentioned, this was the first step on the slippery slope of creating a race relations industry, and introducing the concept of ‘hate crimes’ which would come to have a pernicious impact on free speech and public debate, particularly on immigration control.

The Race Relations Bill was introduced into the Commons by the Home Secretary Sir Frank Soskice. He justified the legislation on the grounds that there should be no ‘distinction between first and second class citizens and the disfigurement which can arise from inequality of treatment and incitement to feelings of hatred directed to the origins of particular citizens, something for which they are not responsible’. He paid lip service to free speech proclaiming that we ‘cherish the right of the freest possible discussion and debate within the limits of the law’. He claimed that his ‘approach has two aspects. One is the exercise of an effective control on the numbers who come to our shores’. In practice this was an ‘approach’ that was immediately broken since there would be no meaningful control over ‘numbers’ during the coming decades. The other aspect was ‘directed to achieving the task of settling the new arrivals into our community as in every sense first-class citizens. It is to the achievement of this task that the Bill is directed’.

The Home Secretary stressed that the new legislation would deal ‘with every minority group of citizen in this country. We have chosen the words colour, race, or ethnic or national origins widely enough, we hope, to cover every possible minority group’. The intention was to deal with the ‘more dangerous, persistent and insidious forms of propaganda campaigns which, over a period of time engender the hate which begets violence’. He acknowledged that ‘certain clubs may indulge in discriminatory practices in the selection of their members, it is of the very nature of clubs to be selective, and the extension of the legislation to them would, therefore, be going much too far’. Future Home Secretaries would disagree that interfering in the decisions of club members would ‘be going much too far’. Indeed this particular measure heralded the first shot in the state hijacking of, and meddling in, many matters which had previously constituted the private domain and activities of its citizens.

The shadow Home Secretary Peter Thorneycroft opposed the Bill. He considered that this was a subject ‘which, of its nature, tends to be explosive. It is certainly one which needs to be dealt with restraint and moderation’. He outlined the Conservatives policy ‘to ensure a drastic reduction in the importation of new male immigrants into this country and to do everything that was possible or open to us, as a country, to facilitate the absorption of these new immigrant communities into our community as a whole’. In practice, under future Conservative governments, visibly identifiable immigrants of both sexes continued to enter the country in huge numbers, regardless of whether or not they wished to become absorbed into our ‘community’. Mr Thorneycroft criticised the bill for ‘widening the frontiers of criminality’. These frontiers would in time come to be greatly widened once the concept of hate crimes and identity politics took hold, including within today’s Conservative Party.

Mr Thorneycroft questioned whether the problem was ‘so widespread as to justify an important change in the criminal law’, and whether it was necessary for ‘the already overworked police force to go round making inquiries and investigations in a matter which is not the easiest field for the police force to operate in’. He considered that the use of the criminal law ‘will not work because, to start with, people are very loath to bring a prosecution at all’. On the question of free speech he believed that ‘throughout the history of this country, it has consisted in allowing people to say things which the majority thought were very wrong, or evil, or misguided. That is what free speech is about. We certainly want to be careful before we alter the law in regard to it’. These are sentiments that appear to be almost an anathema amongst today’s self styled ‘progressives’, intent on silencing viewpoints that challenge their cherished orthodoxies.

One Labour MP supporting the legislation warned that ‘it deals with an important issue, the preservation of and respect for human rights, and undoubtedly will result in reducing the grave dangers, which lie in the gross abuse of freedom of speech and freedom of the written word by those who would themselves prohibit the exercise of any such freedom’. In support of this belief he raised the spectre of the evils perpetuated in Nazi Germany, as necessary justification for the proposed restraints of free speech. This kind of alarmism would be a continuing theme employed by the left over the coming decades.

A former Conservative Home Secretary deplored ‘any form of colour bar’, and declared that ‘any attempt to arouse racial hatred fills me with disgust. But I am bound to ask whether this Bill will do more harm than good’. He wondered whether ‘it may not be more provocative to make discrimination in a place of public resort a criminal offence than simply to let healthy public opinion deal with it if ever it arises’. He claimed never to have heard of anyone in his constituency committing such behaviour and warned against ‘any encouragement of snoopers looking round to see whether they can promote a criminal prosecution because of some alleged case of discrimination’. The former minister asked whether ‘is it desirable that our law should emphasise racial or ethnic or national divisions?’ observing that ‘the age-old battle in this country was not fought to enable people to say pleasant and fraternal and acceptable things. That is not what was meant by free speech. It was fought to win their freedom to say distasteful, unacceptable, provocative, antagonistic things’.

Another Conservative MP considered that ‘the Bill places the police in an intolerable, indeed an impossible, position. They will be agents for enforcing something which, I am afraid, lacks the support of many members of the community’. He added that ‘the Bill will not have the backing of the reasonable man. He has not asked for it and, in my opinion, he does not want it, and rightly or wrongly, considers this to be unnecessary that will make the task of the police very hard indeed’. In contrast, the police today pay scant attention to the views of the ‘reasonable man’ having become the most enthusiast enforcers of hate crime legislation. The MP concluded by branding the legislation as ‘not so much a social measure; it is primarily a sympathetic political gesture’.

A further Tory MP echoed concerns about undermining the right to free speech, supporting the view that ‘it is not the function of the criminal law to articulate the conscience of society’, adding that ‘there is no right to freedom of speech which does not include the right to say things which outrage one's contemporaries’. He feared that the Bill ‘will stimulate resentment throughout the native population of this country’. In time the concerns of the ‘native population’ would almost vanish from sight in the attempt to appease the vocal clamour made on behalf of minorities, more often than not voiced by white liberals. On the incitement to hatred provisions he observed that ‘in the past we have always looked to the question whether a breach of the peace was likely to result, now for the first time we shall be looking to the content of the words which are uttered, and it is the opinion, the view itself, which will be outlawed’. This is indeed what happened; the purpose of such legislation became a mechanism for shutting down debate.

One former Conservative cabinet minister believed that ‘it is not a good thing to make classes of people specially protected on the ground of colour or race. I do not believe that many of these people want it, and do not want the feeling that they have been selected for special treatment and special protection’. He thought that ‘judging the criminality of utterances by reference to their subject matter and content, rather than by reference to their likely effect upon public order is an instrument of potential censorship’. He concluded that ‘free speech must mean freedom to say what people object to and what they resent. Although one may detest the view held, one must fight to retain the right for it to be said. I do not accept that what happened in Germany in the 1930s is a pattern of what may happen here’. In retrospect, the support of Tory MPs at this time upholding the right to free speech is one that now seems impressive, in contrast to the cowardice of many of the party’s MPs in more recent years.

The Solicitor-General, Sir Dingle Foot, closed the debate. In response to the question of what was the justification for the Bill, and where was the evidence that it was needed, he stated ‘the justification is simply this. We have in this country at the moment upwards of 800,000 coloured immigrants. The number is growing; we cannot tell how far it will grow’. He added that there can be no doubt ‘that there is a section of the community, no doubt a very small section, which is guilty of incitement to racial prejudice and racial violence.’ Thus he deemed it necessary ‘to prevent arising in this country in relation to the coloured immigrants the kind of situation which arose in relation to the Jews in this country in 1935 and 1936’, which resulted in the introduction of the Public Order Act. He concluded that the aim of the legislation was ‘to promote a deeper respect for human dignity and to eliminate racial discrimination and incitement’.

The Bill was passed, divided on party lines, supported by Labour and the Liberals, but opposed by the Conservatives. It crossed an important line; previously the law had concerned itself with the actions of its citizens, it now sought to criminalize their opinions. As such it gave the green light for future governments to expand the control of public speech under the subjective and often emotive concept of hate crimes.

UKIP on the mend?

UKIP have been in a troubled state since the EU referendum. After the resignation of Nigel Farage the party has experienced a succession of dud short term leaders. At one stage matters had so deteriorated that some were suggesting that the party should be wound up, since its main raison d’etre no longer existed following the vote to leave the EU. However, since new leader Gerard Batten has taken charge, UKIP once again seems to have gained a sense of purpose. So it is worth examining its current policies to see whether UKIP has anything worthwhile to offer.

UKIP has traditionally placed itself to the right of the Conservative Party. In theory this was a shrewd move, given the Tories infatuation with big business and surrender to political correctness, resulting in a significant proportion of the electorate effectively becoming disenfranchised. Yet it has to be recognised that the Tory party still manages to maintain a sizeable brand loyalty, aided by the first past the post electoral system which makes it difficult for new parties to gain a foothold.

UKIP’s interim 2018 manifesto gets off to a good start by declaring the intention to move in a ‘populist’ direction. This involves opposing ‘government from Brussels by the EU, open-border uncontrolled immigration, and imposing an alien politically correct cultural agenda’. They intend to ‘protect our freedom of speech and the right to speak our minds without fear of the politically correct thought-police knocking on our doors’. These are all matters which the Tories have conspicuously failed to address.

UKIP stands for the complete and total withdrawal from the European Union that the electorate voted for in the referendum. This will allow Britain outside the EU to become a more prosperous nation, regain control of its trade policy, free business from unnecessary regulation and regain control of agriculture and fishing. It will also mean that no more money will be paid to the EU, and that Britain will leave the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.

UKIP rightly point out that “mass uncontrolled immigration has been extremely damaging to Britain. We have imported cheap labour by the million. This not only exploits migrants but depresses the wages and living standards of those at the bottom end of the economic scale, and drives up property prices”. British governments have clearly failed to control immigration from outside the EU and so UKIP policy is that in the future it will be necessary that immigration for permanent settlement must be strictly limited. However, UKIP’s proposed ‘points system’ to control immigration may not be the best way forward, since it appears open ended. In comparison a ‘failure to train’ levy of at least £10,000 per annum on businesses for each immigrant they employ, would raise money and better achieve the objective.

UKIP rightly identifies that the current housing problem has largely been caused by uncontrolled immigration, declaring that the ‘supply of housing simply cannot keep up with demand. We cannot stabilise the housing problem until we have controlled immigration’. Attention is drawn to the unacceptable practice whereby overseas investors can buy up properties, particularly in London, and then keep them empty. Policies are proposed to significantly increase the rate of house building, although the use of ‘modular’ construction techniques seems questionable.

UKIP will reform education to ‘re-focus on teaching children the basics’ and encourage the building of new grammar schools. They will seek a wider range of different types of school to make ‘our secondary school system more responsive to the differing aptitudes, capabilities and speed of development of our children’. Sensible proposals for higher education include dropping the artificial 50% admissions target, and waiving tuition fees ‘in subjects vital to our national life’ such as science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine.

Some additional common sense measures proposed by UKIP are that they will end investigations into ‘hate crime’ and ensure that police ‘investigate real crimes against the person and property as a priority’. They will end involvement with the European Arrest Warrant and the one sided USA extradition treaty, replacing them with new treaties that ‘protect the fundamental rights of UK citizens under our laws’. UKIP will also scrap the Climate Change Act, end subsidies for renewable energy and ‘rejuvenate the coal industry’. So all in all UKIP would deliver a much needed radical change of direction in British politics for which they must be commended.

Racism - the 1964 debate

The election of the Tory candidate for the Smethwick constituency Peter Griffiths in the 1964 general election became a national political talking point. In his campaign, Griffiths focused on the issue of race and immigration, and consequently was roundly condemned for stirring up racial hatred. It is true that some of the language used in his leaflets was unacceptable, but his critics rarely asked themselves whether his opposition to immigration might be justified. This was the time when the term ‘racist’, or the now unfashionable ‘racialist’, began to gain common currency amongst self styled progressives. It became a catch all word to denounce anyone expressing concern about the level of black immigration into Britain, and its widespread use since then has been largely successful in shutting down frank and open debate on this controversial subject.

As a result of the furore, the Spectator magazine gave a platform to three politicians of the left, right and centre, to expound their views under the heading ‘The Colour Problem in Britain’. The first article was by the veteran Labour politician Fenner Brockway, who had lost his seat at Slough in the general election because of his support for immigration. He began by proclaiming that ‘ideally there should be no restriction of immigration’ as it was contrary to the UN human rights declaration. However he accepted that in practice it could be restricted when ‘conditions require limitation, including pressure on the population and the state of the economy’, but considered that neither factor then currently applied to Britain, declaring that in any case the ‘issue of race is irrelevant to these conditions’. He condemned the Tories recent immigration legislation as being motivated by ‘agitation, prejudiced by colour feeling’. He deemed the Act to be a ‘charter for the protection of a white society’. In proclaiming this virtuous position, his idealistic rhetoric completely ignored human nature and the need to maintain social cohesion, as well as overlooking the relatively recent Notting Hill race riots, and the clearly expressed views of the majority of his constituents.

Brockway did acknowledge that the influx of large numbers of immigrants into his constituency had exacerbated housing problems, leading to overcrowding. He pointed out that fears that the immigrants were given priority over council housing were unfounded. Although, this was undoubtedly true at the time, as we have seen from the Grenfell disaster, public sector housing in more diverse communities is now largely occupied by people of ethnic origin, so his constituents’ fears about the future were not without some justification. He concluded that ‘immigration control should not be imposed upon Commonwealth nations’ but should instead be subject to ‘mutual agreement’, and that overcrowding and poor housing conditions should be overcome by a ‘gigantic nationwide crusade of house building’. However, house building at the time was high by recent standards, and a significant proportion was targeted at slum clearance. High levels of immigration only served to delay achieving that objective.

The second article by the Tory MP Sir Cyril Osborne outlined the problem from a right wing perspective. He considered the issue to be the ‘gravest crisis facing our country’, accurately describing the recent Tory legislations as ‘so moderate and so late’. He correctly analysed the cause of this government inaction as ‘they were far too frightened of Labour fanatics and of alleged Commonwealth opinion’, adding that ‘had they imposed greater restrictions years earlier, there would have been no problem in England now’. Osborne drew attention to the already high population density in the UK, the population explosion taking place in the Indian sub continent, and the high relative income levels in the UK so that ‘naturally they want to come here to share our affluence’.

More questionably Osborne judged that ‘the problem of immigration is not one of colour, but of poverty and numbers. We can absorb neither their numbers nor their poverty. That is why - and not because of their skins - restriction and control is inevitable’. Although he was undoubtedly right that the large numbers and relative poverty are important considerations, he is being somewhat naïve in assuming that racial identity was not a factor that weighed heavily with the electorate. Osborne declared that ‘the English people have a perfect right to protect their own way of life in their own country’. He concluded that ‘if unlimited immigration was allowed, we should ultimately become a chocolate coloured Afro-Asian mixed society’. That I do not want. Nor, I believe, do the vast majority of the working families of this country against whom the human tragedies of immigration press hardest.’ This common sense observation rather contradicts his earlier statement that ‘the problem of immigration is not one of colour’.

The third article from a centrist perspective was by the Conservative MP Christopher Chataway. He acknowledged that he had opposed the earlier immigration legislation, but now admitted that he had changed his mind on the issue, accepting that further restrictions on immigration were necessary, as a result of hearing the views of his constituents. In a style similar to the later ‘rivers of blood’ speech by Enoch Powell he quoted some of their comments. One widow complained that ‘the coloured family who have come to live next door hold deafening parties twice a week’, using the back garden as ‘a public lavatory’. She asked the MP why ‘you let us be overrun by these people’ adding that ‘the country was a happier place before they all flooded in’. A couple of elderly sisters pointed out that’ almost every face in their street had changed colour in the past five years’ but added that ‘nobody could ask for better neighbours’. A man living in the next road complained that now ‘his wife gets solicited whenever she goes out’ leading him to consider moving away from the area.

Chataway acknowledged that ‘the problem of achieving a multi-racial society remains’, suggesting that ‘a more even dispersal of the immigrants will certainly solve the sort of problems that today arise in my constituency’. As we have discovered since then ethnic minorities have shown little desire to spread themselves more evenly around the country, much preferring to stay in their own racial and cultural ghettoes. In practice nothing meaningful was done by future governments to allay the concern of the electorate on the level of immigration. As a result chain migration would continue of people who, because of their cultural and racial differences, would likely have great difficulty in assimilating into British society, leading to intractable problems undermining social cohesion and national identity.

The parliamentary leper

For many decades now Britain has had a race and ethnic identity problem. These were highlighted over a decade ago in the Cantle report which identified the existence of segregated communities leading parallel lives in several town and cities. More recently the Casey review http://bit.ly/2iEnfRB confirmed that nothing had changed and that integration between culturally and physically separated communities was still as far away as ever.

The problems of integration go back a long way. During the 1964 general election this problem became the dominant issue in the Birmingham constituency of Smethwick. Although the Tories lost over 50 seats to Labour nationwide, the Smethwick Conservative candidate Peter Griffith captured the seat from Labour against the national trend. He did so by focusing on the issue of black immigration and its perceived negative impact on local community cohesion. For his pains he was branded a ‘parliamentary leper’ by the new Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

It has to be said that some of the generalised pejorative language used to describe black people in Griffith’s election leaflets was completely unacceptable and out of order. Nevertheless he had the courage and honesty to raise an issue which mainstream politicians of all parties were only to happy to sweep under the carpet. This was a time when politicians, if they had had the foresight and determination, could have addressed and taken remedial action against what would become an intractable problem, which by their neglect has been handed down to future generations.

Although in a small minority nationally, Griffiths was not completely alone. A Birmingham resident wrote to the Spectator magazine, pointing out, in the language of the time that ‘ten years ago Birmingham had only 4000 coloured immigrants and now has over 80,000. That is hardly an encouragement to welcome more. Why should Britain, a little island already overcrowded, be asked to take more when there is abundant room in Canada? The real villains who allowed this stupid and unwarranted invasion are the ministers and staff of the Home Office. Is there anything wrong in Birmingham and Smethwick seeking to prevent the situation in their area becoming even worse’?

Another letter on this subject came from a British citizen working at Cape Town University. He noted with concern that ‘the colour problem is being played down as much as possible’ in the general election, asking ‘does Britain fear that race problems will dull her image’. He accused politicians of ‘placing party interest before the good of the country as a whole’ He then issued a warning that ‘the matter is more urgent than most people appear to think. At the moment the non-white population is very small, but it will continue to grow through immigration. Furthermore, the non-white birth rate is higher than that of Europeans, and one can thus expect a substantial increase in the number of British born coloured people. The fact remains that Britain has a colour problem that the future will not be able to ignore. Britain will be left with a coloured population that will increase rapidly and uncontrollably’.

He then asked ‘Do the British people want a large coloured population in the future? Do we want to leave our children with a Britain that is Asian and African as well as British? Do we want the English people to be known as a coloured race by the year 2000’? He claimed to have been motivated to write his letter by witnessing ‘the sorrow and suffering that the colour problem has brought to South Africa’. He concluded by asking ‘whether it is right for political parties to ignore so vital a question’.

None of the political parties of the time included anything meaningful in their manifestos to address the issues raised by the above correspondents. The Tory party manifesto had nothing at all to say about immigration. The Labour manifesto stated that ‘special help would be given to local authorities in areas where immigrants have settled’ and that ‘the number of immigrants entering the United Kingdom must be limited. Until a satisfactory agreement covering this can be negotiated with the Commonwealth a Labour Government will retain immigration control’. The Liberal Party evaded any responsibility instead calling for the ‘setting up a system of Commonwealth consultation towards an agreed policy for immigration’. In short, all the political parties conspired to continue the then existing policy of allowing almost unlimited Commonwealth immigration, regardless of the long term consequences, or the impact on British society, a policy which has continued to this day. As a consequence whites now comprise only 44% of the Smethwick population today.

Boris and the burka

Boris Johnson has come in for quite a lot of flak for comparing women who wear the burka with letter boxes and bank robbers. The BBC has predictably gone into overdrive, giving a platform to numerous critics who have accused Johnson of ‘Islamaphobia’. Others have come to his aid defending his right to free speech. So what are we to make of this brouhaha which shows no sign of abating?

This blog has previously raised the issue of the burka http://bit.ly/1XfT8hI, agreeing with Johnson that it would be wrong to ban this garment as has happened in France, and now Denmark and some other European countries. Although outlawing the burka would be an unnecessary overreaction, it is nevertheless perfectly legitimate to criticise Muslim women who choose to cover their faces in public. Such behaviour shows contempt for the widespread values of mainstream public opinion, demonstrates the wearer’s unwillingness to make even a minimal attempt at integration, and defiles women generally by requiring their physical features to be concealed. It also provides a continuing reminder to the rest of society of these women’s continuing very public solidarity with the fanatics who are willing to indiscriminately kill British citizens to further the aims of this regressive global superstition.

Conservative party chairman Brandon Lewis has called upon Johnson to apologise for his remarks, and has been backed up by Theresa May. Johnson now faces disciplinary action for behaviour which could breach the Conservative party’s code of conduct. There have been calls by the Muslim Council of Britain that there should be no ‘whitewash’ by the Conservative party when investigating Boris Johnson’s remarks. This concern is supported by many prominent Muslim Conservative members including former party chairman Baroness Warsi.

The Conservative party has for a long time been in thrall to political correctness, most visibly during Theresa May’s notorious ‘nasty party’ conference speech some years ago when party chairman. This virtue signalling does the party absolutely no good since it alienates potential supporters who hold political correctness in contempt, whilst doing nothing to win over liberals and ethnic minorities who believe it to be insincere.

In making Boris remarks a disciplinary matter the Conservative leadership seems to have boxed themselves into a no win situation. He has so far quite rightly refused to apologise. If they conclude that his comments do not breach the code they will be denounced by vocal and outraged Muslim members for endorsing ‘Islamophobia’. On the other hand, if they take disciplinary action, such as forcing him to attend a ‘diversity awareness’ course or even withdrawing the parliamentary whip, they will almost certainly antagonise the overwhelming majority of party members. This could trigger calls for a challenge to Theresa May’s leadership, who is already facing criticism for her handling of the Brexit negotiations.

So the end result is that a completely reasonable newspaper article could lead to a Tory party crisis, all because the leadership placed support for political correctness above the views of ordinary members and the majority of the British public.

PC establishment Savile group-think

The foremost authority on the fallout from the 2012 hoax ITV Exposure programme, which lit the fuse for the orgy of denunciation that engulfed the nation’s newly discovered favourite bogeyman Jimmy Savile, is the blogger known as Moor Larkin. He has has coined the word ‘Savilisation’ to describe the national hysteria over paedophilia and ‘inappropriate’ sexual behaviour which the Exposure programme triggered. A summary of his (and other investigative bloggers) main findings about the Savile scare is contained in this previous post http://bit.ly/2dybGYs

Moor Larkin is scathing in his scorn for the credulousness of the mainstream media, including the BBC, over the lies they have swallowed, and contemptuous of their wilful refusal to accept that they have been duped, even when presented with the true facts. He asks ‘why does pretty much everyone believe in the Savile myth? Well, like most things people believe in, it is because they have been told stories about it, and more especially, all the people they usually rely on to tell them true stories have lied to them. The police have lied, the mass media has lied, the CPS has lied, the BBC has lied and so has the NHS and throughout the years since 2012 politicians have intermittently joined in too. In other words, pretty much the entire establishment has lied. Why would “they” do this? Probably because a few key people in positions of authority believed a story too and failed to fact-check a single thing. Once they had announced their belief in that story and committed huge resources to it, in the form of Operation Yewtree, they became prisoners of their own presumptions and in the face of any doubt they have then had to move heaven and earth to make their truth remain the same. For them to now admit they were wrong - would utterly discredit them at every level and in every corner.’

Every word of Moor Larkin’s account is spot on, the establishment, including the Metropolitan Police, has been a willing promoter of group-think, a herd mentality to uncritically accept whatever modish agenda or belief is in vogue, which currently is to automatically ‘believe the victim’. Unlike today, in times past such people were rightly described as accusers or claimants, but cheap emotionalism now trumps sober analysis.

In an attempt to ensure that the Exposure programme was properly investigated a complaint has recently been submitted to the media regulator Ofcom. It was hoped that this would prompt them to fulfil their statutory duty and start to make a long overdue thorough investigation of the allegations against Savile, and thus end the credulous and uncritical mainstream media acceptance of the deceits arising from this mendacious broadcast. Exposure contained numerous fabrications against Jimmy Savile contrary to Section 5.1 of the Ofcom Broadcasting code on due accuracy, and Sections 7.1, 7.9 and 7.11 relating to unjust and unfair treatment of individuals.

Evidence contained in the earlier blog post on Exposure was provided to Ofcom. Also supplied was the response from ITV Exposure producer Andrew Gardiner who claimed that ‘the subsequent independent investigations (by the police and by the BBC’s Smith report) have categorically established the truth of the central revelation in the programme, namely that Jimmy Savile was a predatory paedophile’. This was his full response. It should be noted that Mr Gardiner made absolutely no attempt to challenge or refute the findings and evidence of the investigative bloggers which had been presented to him, since to do so would, of course, have been impossible. However, he was certainly correct in pointing out that the intention of the programme was to brand Savile as a ‘predatory paedophile’, but this objective was based on smears and fabrications, not facts and evidence.

Ofcom responded to the complaint as follows ‘Ofcom’s procedures for investigating content standards breaches for television and radio require complaints to be submitted within 20 days of the relevant broadcast. While this can be extended in certain circumstances, given the length of time since the broadcast of this programme, we do not consider it appropriate to pursue your complaint’.

Anticipating this kind of evasive response the complaint contained the following request. ‘Although the Exposure programme was broadcast over five years ago, I hope that Ofcom will not use this delay as an excuse to evade their statutory responsibility to investigate this deceitful programme. To do so would be gratuitously negligent and a travesty of justice given that the accusations in the programme were based on events claimed to have occurred as long ago as four decades earlier. Unfortunately it has not been possible to provide Ofcom with the full evidence and facts until recently’.

The Ofcom response is both contemptuous and facile, as well as a total abdication of their statutory responsibilities. It is contemptuous, because it casually dismisses a complaint on a matter which has aroused an intense public debate that has continued up to the present time. It is also facile in that Ofcom inexplicably failed to recognise that it would have been completely impossible to gather the evidence to refute the claims in the Exposure programme within 20 days. In practice it has taken many years for a true picture to emerge.

Ofcom’s pathetic response has nothing to do with their 20 days target period, which in any case can be waived. So, given the national importance of the issues raised, an exception could easily have been made. As matters currently stand any broadcaster who generates fake news can now get away with their deceit, if the evidence to refute it cannot be provided within the 20 days deadline, which will often be the case. So this policy, both undermines Ofcom’s ability to undertake their statutory responsibilities effectively, and thus gives carte blanche to rogue broadcasters to engage in open deceit and more likely than not get away with it.

However, there must be a deep suspicion that the real reason for Ofcom’s decision is that, instead of being an independent regulator, they are clandestinely part of an establishment network tasked with promoting a pre-agreed PC viewpoint whilst ignoring any representations that might challenge this agenda. This network appears to be engaged in a determined conspiracy to cover up and conceal the truth about Savile because revealing the falsehoods would undermine their cherished mantra of ‘believe the victim’ for which the Savile hoax is the cornerstone. If the true facts became more widely known in the public domain, the whole house of cards promoting ‘believe the victim’ would come crashing down, resulting in untold damage to the credibility of the carefully crafted establishment PC narrative on this subject. It would also reveal their utter credulity in swallowing so uncritically the deceits in the Exposure hoax. Consequently, establishment group-think on this matter, which Savilisation has allowed to flourish unchecked, has now enmeshed the Metropolitan Police, the CPS, mainstream media journalists, virtue seeking celebrities, attention seeking politicians, ITV, the BBC and now Ofcom, all because, to repeat Moor Larkin’s words ‘a few key people in positions of authority… failed to fact-check a single thing’.

BBC Newsnight on the ropes

There appears to be no limit to the ever increasing eagerness of the BBC to promote identity politics and political correctness. Their coverage of just about every permutation of minority interests, whether it be extolling the ‘virtues’ of the LGBT lifestyle, the ‘enlightened’ outlooks of minority racial or religious groups, or the latest ‘overdue’ demands of feminists, is combined with a near incomprehension of any dissenting viewpoint. The invariable response to those who might question this agenda is the usual reflex accusation of racism, transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, bigotry, xenophobia, sexism or any combination of such ‘hate crimes’.

There is no more strident vehicle for the promotion of this agenda than the BBC2 Newsnight programme. A few weeks ago Britain’s best known political prisoner Tommy Robinson faced a barrage of vitriol from Kirsty Wark. Not to be outdone her colleague Emily Maitlis has more recently levelled her fire at the Hungarian foreign minister over his country’s immigration policies. Many East Europeans have witnessed at first hand the massive changes to Britain and other West European states that have resulted from the uncontrolled chain migration from third world countries. They have looked on in horror at what they have seen, and firmly resolved that the same fate would not be visited upon their own nations.

The context for the Newsnight interview was the stunning electoral victory of Hungarian premier Viktor Orban who was recently re-elected with a huge majority after an election in which his main platform was the maintenance of a hard line approach to immigration. During the interview the Hungarian foreign minister adroitly defended his government’s immigration policy in a calm and courteous manner, mixed with some bemusement at the excitable aggression displayed by Maitlis.

The foreign minister rightly condemned the hypocrisy and political correctness underpinning current EU policy on immigration, which he characterised as an open invitation to potential African migrants to make the hazardous journey across the Mediterranean to reach the shores of Europe. To forestall this development the Hungarian government has introduced legislation to criminalize individuals who actively aid economic migrants to enter Hungary. He justified this on the grounds that neighbouring countries such as Serbia had peaceful relations with Hungary, whose border was being violated by the influx of economic migrants from outside Europe, using Hungary as a migration route to Western Europe.

Maitlis facilely asked why Hungary had such a strict immigration policy when it had relatively few applications for asylum. The foreign minister responded by correctly reminding her that there were tens of millions of potential economic migrants who might take up the EU ‘invitation’ to attempt to reach Europe. Since the migration crisis in 2015 the Hungarian government has wisely used the time to build up their border controls to protect themselves from further waves of immigrants that might occur in the future.

Maitlis alleged that Hungary’s policy on immigrants was not really about immigration but was instead motivated by xenophobia. The minister regarded this accusation as an insult against the Hungarian people, stressing that they have the right to make their own decisions about whom they should allow and not allow into their country. In response to the claim by Maitlis that Hungary wanted to keep out Muslims the minister insisted that he wanted Hungary to remain Hungarian and rejected the notion that multiculturalism was somehow a good idea to introduce into his country. He added that allowing a huge influx of migrants into Europe without security checks was reckless as it facilitated the uncontrolled entry of potential terrorists.

Maitlis ended the interview by repeating liberal tropes that the Orban government had manipulated the recent election result, that press freedoms have been eroded under a government PR dictatorship resulting in the undermining of the rule of law, and that Hungary could no longer be regarded as a democracy due to creeping authoritarianism. The minister firmly refuted such claims by pointing out to Maitlis that her approach was unbalanced and one sided as she was credulously repeating the ‘lies’ and distortions of defeated liberal opponents.

The Hungarian government has shown great courage in resisting the demands of EU leaders to turn their country into a multicultural failed state. If only British politicians and governments of the past fifty or sixty years had shown the same resolve and good sense, many of the intractable problems Britain currently faces would have been avoided, and we would instead have a country in which its people enjoyed widespread social cohesion and community harmony. We would also be spared the self righteous posturing of Emily Maitlis and her kind.

The identity politics racket Part 4 – the dark skin people problem

The most strident element in the identity politics racket has always been the impossible fight against ‘racism’. Liberals are certainly right when they say that an individual can do nothing about the skin colour into which they were born. Thus it must clearly be unacceptable that people should be insulted and abused because of the colour of their skin, or face racial discrimination in the provision of public services. But it does not follow that the issue of race should be excluded from political debate, or that those who identify problems on the subject should be subject to vitriolic condemnation.

Dr Martin Luther King Jr urged that people should ‘not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character’. This admonition is fine in theory, but may encounter problems in practice. The main barrier is that people of different races are likely also to belong to separate cultures and religions, or speak different languages, so creating hurdles to communication. In addition, like it or not, most people instinctively tend to identify with others of the same racial group, thereby forming their own sense of community. So the fight against ‘racism’ is one that is unlikely to ever be achieved, as it appears to be against human nature, and this factor needs to be recognised if the problems associated with race are to be properly addressed.

It should be remembered that any racial problems created in this country have been caused, not by ordinary British people, but by past Conservative and Labour governments who permitted, and sometimes encouraged, the influx of large numbers of people of different races, despite warnings about the many problems this policy would likely bring. So lectures from politicians on the casual ‘racism’ of some working class white people should be treated with the contempt they deserve, since they as a class, not the public, created the problem in the first place. The blame for this situation should not be placed on immigrants either, since they were motivated by a desire to improve their standard of living and life prospects.

Those white liberals who are the most vocal in their condemnation of ‘racism’ are rarely inspired by a genuine interest in the welfare of black people. Their motivation instead is mostly a desire to parade their moral superiority, to indulge in a cheap and facile public demonstration of what has come to be known as virtue signalling. As a consequence, such posturing has for decades had a most pernicious effect, as the accusation of ‘racism’ has struck fear into the whole political class, including Conservatives.

The end result is that politicians have failed to tackle, or even address, the continuing chain migration that has allowed whole swathes of British cities such as London. Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester, Bradford and others, to become subject to the slow motion ethnic cleansing of their indigenous white British residents, replaced in turn by people of Asian, African or West Indian descent, whose main loyalty for many of them, is to their own communities and not to British society as a whole.

The effects of this damaging change have been highlighted in government reports and TV programmes about parallel communities leading separate lives within the same towns. Ethnic concentrations and white flight reflect the impact such divisions have made on the British nation. Although a minority of people of ethnic background do their best to assimilate into British society, a significant number make no attempt whatsoever, content to remain in their ethnic, cultural and religious ghettoes.

Given their wilful blindness you might expect that it would be politicians who would be condemned for allowing this situation to occur. But instead all the opprobrium has been directed at the ‘racists’ who have drawn attention to this open ended attack on the cohesion of British society. The current focus on identity politics by liberals, obsessing about the victimhood of black people, is only making matters worse, as well as alienating the white majority who, in their hearts and in their private conversations, do not share the outlook or priorities of the vocal anti-racists.

The problem may well be intractable but the most likely means of addressing it is by encouraging assimilation, and eschewing any preferential treatment or special pleading made on behalf of minorities. Surprisingly, the wisest response to the issue of ethnic immigration came from former Labour deputy leader Roy Hattersley who advised that 'without integration [having no] limitation is inexcusable; without limitation integration is impossible'.

Peter Hitchens Abolition of Britain Part 6 – Culture

Peter Hitchens book The Abolition Of Britain was one of the first to challenge the gradual takeover of British institutions by the politically correct class. Their modus operandi has been to introduce small changes incrementally, ostensibly to either protect our own personal best interests or to further the welfare of the wider community, but in reality achieving ever greater control of citizens’ lives with the further objective of policing the parameters of permissible political discourse. One change for the worst that Hitchens identifies is the degradation of traditional cultural values.

According to Hitchens a major factor in our cultural decline has been the influence of television. He accuses it of ‘helping to spread false ideas about society, through propagandist drama’ which has lead to ‘a national conformism among the young, in taste, humour, morals and politics’. As a consequence ‘the feverish, unsettling changes’ it has brought about have weakened people’s attachment to their ‘traditions and institutions, liberties and independence’ that has resulted in a ‘slow motion coup d’etat’.

Hitchens acknowledges that the British cultural revolution has so far been free of direct violence to people. Instead he argues that violence has been done ‘to institutions, to traditions, ways of doing things and to language’. In so doing ‘we have abolished the very customs, manners, methods, standards and laws’ which have restrained us from the ‘sort of barbaric behaviour that less happy lands suffer’. He believes that ‘the cultural battle, ignored by most politicians, is often more decisive and important than the noisier clash of parties’.

Hitchens draws attention to the long legacy of cultural conservatism which only began to break down in the 1960s. As a consequence this allowed ‘progressive’ cultural iconoclasts to reconstruct society ‘so that the most abject conformism appears to be rebellious and safely undisciplined’. This dissemblance allowed genuine individualism to be branded as ‘merely eccentric, barmy or contemptible’ resulting in a ‘soap-watching admass conformist society, happy to deride free thought and suppress heresy’.

Hitchens specifically addresses the devaluation of language ‘stripped of its literary references where almost nobody has heard of Cranmer or Tyndale, and Shakespeare is considered too rich a mixture for our young’. Similarly architecture ‘once full of messages of authority and faith, is now lumpish and unhistorical’ reflecting the worship of ‘money, power, technology, even of ugliness itself’. He eulogises a past when Britain was a ‘multinational state, though not a multicultural one’ in which people ‘understood authority and respected it without grovelling to it, for it was also a society of individualists’. In contrast he laments the present time which ‘in a generation, all this has been demolished, concreted over, reformed out of existence’.

He rightly denounces the supposedly Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher as a ‘false dawn’ since neither she nor her party were ‘interested in morals or culture’, believing instead in ‘the cleansing power of the market’. As a result she unwittingly ‘helped to destroy many of the things Conservatism once stood for’ and was ‘unable to reverse a single part of the cultural revolution’. In power the Tories could come up with nothing better than ‘the brute force of the market’, a materialistic outlook that ignored ‘patriotism, morality, tradition and beauty, elevating the businessman to the role of bishop’.

Fortunately, some of Hitchens fears have not come to pass. He predicted that ‘unfair referendums in which the BBC is not required to show balance’ would be held to ‘rush the country into the Euro and into proportional representation’. As it turned out the New Labour government was never able to commit to joining the Euro, and the referendum to introduce a PR system was lost as the British people voted overwhelmingly to retain the first past the post system. He speculated on whether the British people ‘any longer possess the will or the identity’ to resist Britain’s immersion in a European superstate, or whether they will ‘sink, exhausted and grateful, into the mushy embrace of the new Europe’. Reassuringly, the British public decided to leave the European Union altogether, so this threat has at least been lifted for the foreseeable future.

Peter Hitchens analysis of the cultural decline of Britain is broadly correct. The mainstream media has become debased and degenerate, continually pandering to the baser elements in society. The BBC, once synonymous with high minded cultural values, has been transformed into a mouthpiece for multicultural, politically correct, conformist group-think. Barbarous architecture is widespread, repulsive genres of ‘music’ such as rap, hip-hop and trance are promoted uncritically, and sensationalised, celebrity obsessed, gutter journalism has become the norm. Although Peter Hitchens is for the most part right on many issues, one subject he largely ignored was the impact of large scale third world immigration, with its consequential undermining of traditional British cultural values, social cohesion and sense of shared community.

Peter Hitchens Abolition of Britain Part 5 – Permissiveness

Peter Hitchens is one of the foremost critics of the British politically correct establishment, noted for its reflex group think orthodoxies and addiction to virtue signalling. Twenty years ago he wrote The Abolition of Britain, one of the first books to challenge this creeping authoritarianism. One trend he deplored was the rise in sexual permissiveness that occurred from the 1960s onwards.

Thus he condemns ‘the top shelves of newsagents that now sag with explicit pornography’, ‘mainstream newspapers which cheerfully display half clothed women’ and ‘bare breasts that are now so common on television’. He does not confine himself to his distaste for male titillation but also attacks ‘magazines for well-off, educated, professional women packed with blatant articles about subjects that were once judged to be so intimate that few would have dared mention them even to a doctor’.

He asserts that ‘millions of people probably shudder inwardly when they catch sight’ of this kind of material but they know that ‘it is not respectable to make a fuss’. He exposes the double standard whereby the feminist MP Clare Short condemnation of Page Three is endorsed by the ‘fashionable world’, whilst the equally forceful protests of the conservative Christian Mary Whitehouse are ‘ignored as embarrassing, suburban and repressed’.

Hitchens cites the impact of the Lady Chatterley trial in 1961, widely recognised as having kick started the permissive society, and the Oz schoolkids issue trial a decade later, seen by many as the high watermark of let it all hang out freewheeling bohemian sexual liberation, before feminism took hold. Also being prosecuted at this time was the Little Red Schoolbook, described by Hitchens as a ‘manual of sexual licence for the young’. However, in the view of the publisher the issue at stake was ‘not sex education for young people, but the ability of any people to question authority’. According to Hitchens much of the advice being offered in the book ‘would be issued at government expense to schoolchildren less than twenty years afterwards’.

Hitchens quotes the aims of supporters of publications such as the above as being to abolish ‘undercover puritanism, the more relaxed people were in sex, the healthier the community would be’ and to criticize ‘the lack of dissemination of sexual education’. He concluded that these trials were ‘the last futile skirmish in a lost war’ against pornography and authority in general. As a consequence ‘television, radio and the cinema realized that the restraints were off’ leading to ‘nakedness, explicit portrayals of sex, liberal use of swear words, homosexuality and prostitution’ tentatively at first but ‘quickly becoming so commonplace that they ceased to count as news’.

Hitchens points out that the growth in material which he clearly considers objectionable was facilitated by the passing of the Obscene Publications Act, which included a provision of ‘literary merit’ a phrase he considers to be ‘utterly subjective’. This was exploited ‘to justify the breaking of old taboos’ in which the ‘arbiters of the new morality believed that one’s sexual life did not need to be regulated either by law or conscience’. He observed that ‘the fiercest resistance to this change ‘came from the lower middle class and the respectable working class’ who believed ‘most passionately in order, hierarchy and morality, because they live closer to the edge of chaos’.

Hitchens makes some valid points as the vast majority of pornography is degrading in nature, both to performer and viewer. Promiscuous sexual activity can be a physically risky activity because of the spread of contagious diseases, as well as being spiritually and mentally demeaning by setting a low value on physical intimacy. But at no time in the modern era have there been laws against fornication and adultery. Instead, until the 1960s, there were strong social and religious taboos against such behaviour, although often breached by mostly the higher and lower classes in society.

Virtually all pornography is now on line, and thus is mostly invisible except to those (mainly males) who actively seek it out. Also, the amount of casual exposed flesh of young attractive females has largely been curbed in most of the mainstream media outlets as a result of feminist pressure. The real issue at stake here, which Hitchens does not properly address, is the extent to which the state should intervene in the sexual behaviour of its citizens. He rightly condemns the growing authoritarianism of the left in personal matters, but seems content for the state to prohibit those activities which he personally finds objectionable. Not for the first time this leads him open to charges of hypocrisy and double standards.

Normal sexual attraction towards good looking members of the opposite sex should never be stigmatised. It must surely be possible to allow for a more wholesome interest to be fostered that avoids the debasement of pornography on the one hand, and the kind of prudery endorsed by Peter Hitchens, or the puritanism and repression sought by feminists. At the present time those on the extremes appear to be monopolising the debate at the expense of the vast majority with a normal healthy sexual interest.

Peter Hitchens Abolition of Britain Part 4 – Marriage

Nearly twenty years ago Peter Hitchens wrote his book The Abolition of Britain, a well timed riposte to the politically correct takeover of British institutions that had incrementally occurred during the previous quarter century or so. One issue he raised of much concern was the undermining of marriage through ever easier divorce, with the consequential huge increase in broken families resulting in serious damage to the upbringing of children.

Peter Hitchens describes the family as ‘the greatest fortress of human liberty, proof against all earthly powers’ than can ‘defy the will of authority, the might of wealth, and is the most effective means of passing lore, culture, manners and traditions through the generations’. He claims that leftists, with their addiction to state control and indoctrination, have always mistrusted the family since they ‘cannot control what goes on there, what ideas are taught, and what loyalties are fostered.’ Hitchens continues ‘full family independence would leave people free to cling to individual ideas of conscience’ adding that ‘the freer a society is, the more it leaves the family alone’.

Within traditional society ‘the family for all its faults, was one of the main pillars of the older British culture, including the idea than an Englishman’s home is his castle’. Hitchens deprecates the trend during recent decades which has resulted in ‘the least individualistic generation in known history’ through which ‘the growing child is much more easily influenced by his own age group, themselves under pressure from TV programmes, advertisers and fashion.’

Hitchens notes that ‘English marriage law was one of the oldest and most inflexible in the Christian world’. He then goes on to describe the measures that were gradually and incrementally introduced to make divorce easier, which are outlined in more detail in this previous post http://bit.ly/1U3ecFB It should be remembered that the early divorce reforms in the 19th century were openly discriminatory towards women. However, in more recent times the outcome of divorce law changes has impacted mainly on men.

So according to Hitchens we now have a situation where a husband could be ‘ordered from his own home without any suggestion that he had behaved violently towards his wife’. Courts increasingly failed to enforce husbands’ rights to visit their children, whilst the Child Support Agency was created with powers to compel a husband to provide maintenance to his wife. These recent innovations sent a clear signal that the state ‘was on the side of the wife, whether she was in the right or in the wrong’. As a result the overwhelming majority of petitions for divorce are now made by wives. This strong anti male bias remains the same today except that the state can now forcibly evict men from their homes much more easily by means of a Domestic Violence Protection Notice.

Hitchens cites the traditional view of the Church of England, still promoted as recently as the 1950s that ‘nothing but lifelong monogamous marriage can adequately establish home life; provide for the birth, nurture and training of a family of children over a period of years’. Opponents of weakening the divorce laws warned that ‘the abolition of blame would lead to divorce by consent’. So instead of being a public promise to society, wedding vows now became ‘a private contract that could be broken at will’. Hitchens noted the ‘revolution in views of chastity and constancy’ that had taken place in society since the 1960s, one consequence of which was to undermine the foundations of marriage.

As a result of these changes in sexual morality, and the relaxation of divorce laws, the British public ‘stopped disapproving of divorce in public’. This contrasts with the rumpus in the mid 1950s, generated by the affair between Princess Margaret and the divorced Captain Townsend, in which she was pressurised to carry out her ‘royal duty as upholder of traditional morality’ by deciding not to marry, despite being very much in love with him. Hitchens noted that within little more than a decade it became ‘bad manners’ to insist on what had formerly been the ‘cultural consensus in favour of lifelong marriage’, now replaced by a ‘new morality in which any assembly of children was reclassified as a family unit’.

Hitchens is right in identifying the impact and disruption that easy divorce can have on children and a stable family life. But he never explains why a married couple should be expected to stay together in a relationship that has clearly ended, once their children have reached adulthood. Easy divorce, which has now become firmly rooted, places the feelings of married couples, but mostly wives, above the interests and upbringing of children. Because of the unacceptable level of broken homes it is essential that divorce should once again be made difficult, so long a there are still children under the age of eighteen to consider. Once the children have reached an age to look after themselves, the state should no longer have any interest in whether a couple stay together in a marriage, and they should be free to divorce or separate without undue hindrance.

Peter Hitchens Abolition of Britain part 3 – Education

One of the first journalistic challenges to the creeping politically correct takeover of the British mainstream media was The Abolition of Britain written by Peter Hitchens, published nearly twenty years ago. An area of particular concern to him was the direction that education was taking. He attacked the ‘cultural revolutionaries’ who sought to transform the education system so as to ‘eradicate privilege and elitism, to spread the gospel of the new society in which everyone is equal’.

This fixation with educational equality was fine for the children of other parents, but when it threatened to ‘eradicate their own privilege by turning their children into mannerless, uncultured ignoramuses’ the egalitarians suddenly became less enthusiastic. They were faced with the choice of either ‘a state school in an expensive area of town, which selects through wealth, so paying their fees through their mortgage’, or to pay fees directly to an independent public school, which would be contrary to their principles.

Hitchens depicts the outlook of the British public schools system as based upon ‘tradition and deference, quite unapologetic about privilege, willing to sustain elites, foster their growth and encourage competition in work and sport’. He regarded them as deeply conservative institutions, necessarily so since ‘unless there is agreement about what is to be taught, who is to teach it and how it is to be measured, there can be no education’.

Hitchens described grammar schools as providing an ‘ethos, timetable and shape modelled on 19th century public schools, organised in houses, patrolled by prefects, housed in crenellated , vaguely baronial or churchy buildings’. As a consequence of this conservative outlook they came under attack by the left as obstacles to equality through the preservation of tradition, authority and higher culture. According to Hitchens the left were pleased to see the ‘dragooning of pupils into great education factories in modern glass cubes’ resulting in an end to ‘religious worship, hymn singing, honours boards, blazers, prize days and prefects’.

In mounting an attack upon grammar schools the progressives were not concerned about education but rather a means to further pursue their obsessions about ‘class and hierarchy, authority, permanence, deference and change’. Put simply, their purpose was social engineering. Leftist educational propaganda of the time called for ‘a more closely knit society’ in which ‘conditions in all different schools must be broadly based’ that would prevent any child from entering upon a secondary school career ‘with the stigma of failure’. The Tory party of the time robustly challenged these assumptions by declaring that comprehensives would lead to ‘free mediocrity for all in a mass factory of so-called education’. This would result in ‘the clever child’s progress being held up by the gropings of the sub educated’.

Hitchens considers that ‘proper education is a fundamentally conservative activity, based on the assumption that a body of knowledge exists, is in the hands of the adult and educated, and can be passed on in measurable ways, by disciplined learning reinforced with authority’. He regarded the continued existence of public schools to have ‘frustrated the ultimate levelling purpose of the comprehensive system, and provided an inconvenient outside measure by which comprehensive failure can be judged’. Whilst Hitchens is no doubt correct that public schools deliver results and that many comprehensives are sink schools, he overlooks the fact that the former can select their pupils, whereas the latter have no control over admissions which will include many children with low educational motivation.

Hitchens singled out the 1967 Plowden report for castigation, accusing it of ‘encouraging the spread of discovery learning, and a bonfire of old fashioned desks and blackboards’. The result of these ‘progressive’ innovations was that many children could no longer read, write or count and that ‘standards of behaviour, of self-control, of ability to respond to authority, or concentration on any task, have sunk’. He condemned the move away from whole class teaching to the ‘new child centred world of discovery’ in which desks were arranged in groups rather than in rows facing the teacher. This new informal design ‘was hostile to the old, hierarchical methods which handed down knowledge from on high, often in the form of rules and truths learned by heart’.

He also condemned the Plowden recommendation to abolish corporal punishment, despite having the overwhelming support of teachers, and agreement by a considerable majority of parents to its continued use. Hitchens is right in justifying corporal punishment on the grounds that ‘ a rebuking smack, slap or blow from a ruler on the hand, are all symbols of authority’ which ‘define the limit of a child’s behaviour, and make it plain that the child is subject to the adult'.

Hitchens is right to stress the importance of public schools to the national education system by preserving educational standards and academic rigour. However, because of the financial barrier only about 7% of pupils are able to attend them. Grammar schools were an effective substitute freely accessible to all pupils who passed the 11 plus entrance exam. In pursuit of the leftist agenda of egalitarianism most have now been abolished although a few survive in Tory controlled areas. Hitchens fails to mention the main advantage of grammar schools in that they facilitate social mobility. They allow bright pupils to escape from the anti learning background of most of their peers and to provide them with an ethos and environment that is conducive to the fostering of academic learning.

Hitchens ignores completely the fate of children who fail to make it into grammar schools, nor does he address the perception of many that secondary moderns were widely seen as second rate institutions. Clearly not all children are receptive to the largely academic education which grammar schools were intended to deliver. To meet their needs technical schools should be established in which academic, vocational and practical skills can be taught, underpinned by a sound grounding in literacy and numeracy.

Hitchens is right to dismiss the child centred approach of the Plowden report which is detrimental to a structured system of learning, and to adult guidance and supervision that is vital to children in their early years. He is courageous in his support for a measured return of corporal punishment, necessary to maintain discipline and to establish boundaries of acceptable behaviour. However, there should be no return to the free for all which allowed a minority of sadistic teachers to brutalise their pupils.

Peter Hitchens Abolition of Britain Part 2 – Homosexuality

It is nearly twenty years since Peter Hitchens wrote The Abolition of Britain, one of the first books to challenge the near mainstream media hegemony exercised by our politically correct elite who, by stealth, were gradually tightening their grip on policing and controlling the parameters of permissible political discourse on many subjects. This post deals with Hitchens’ views on homosexuality in which he, in contrast to virtually all other commentators, raised the issue of the health dangers arising from homosexual activity.

He opens the chapter on this subject under the title ‘Health Warning’ with the claim that ‘buggery and smoking can both kill you, by exposing you to diseases you would not otherwise get’, each of which are actions of choice. He drew attention to the manner in which the dangers were treated in a contrasting manner. Whilst smokers are always blamed for their illnesses, homosexuals are never chastised for becoming HIV positive or contracting other sexual transmitted diseases. He ridiculed the Government’s warnings of the time aimed at combating the increase in Aids, which spread disinformation that the whole population was equally at risk, when in reality it was specific groups, most notably homosexuals, who faced the greatest danger.

He noted the differing approach between Aids victims, whose cause is promoted by the wearing of red ribbons, whilst smokers who contracted lung cancer and other diseases receive scant public sympathy. Smokers are never advised to practice ‘safer smoking’ but are warned instead to give up the habit completely. In contrast, any doctor suggesting that homosexuals should abstain from their sexual practices would be condemned for being judgemental against a minority group and could face disciplinary action. As Hitchens states ‘there is not even a hint of disapproval of anal sex in official propaganda about Aids’, which instead urges the practice of ‘safer sex’, involving the use of condoms. According to Hitchens the reason why this inconsistency goes unchallenged is due to it being ‘a key part of the cultural revolution, the propagation of a new morality’. He believed ‘this deliberate avoidance of truth was meant to avoid offending or scapegoating homosexuals’.

The logic behind this according to Hitchens is that ‘homosexuality, as an activity, could not be attacked in a society which had accepted heterosexual liberation’. In support of this belief he claimed that ‘the pill had turned heterosexual intercourse into recreation rather than procreation’ as it removed the fear of pregnancy, thus making women more willing to agree to sexual activity. Thus there was now no difference between ‘sterile heterosexual sex and sterile homosexual sex’ and so nobody could logically continue to object to homosexuality, without serious hypocrisy. In reaching this conclusion Hitchens overlooks the fact that heterosexual sex is biologically normal even when contraception is used, unlike homosexual sex which must always remain unnatural. So his accusations of hypocrisy are wide of the mark, since it is more likely that the distaste felt by many towards homosexual activity is what determines the double standard, since recreational heterosexual activity does not arouse the same repulsion.

Hitchens believed that the decriminalisation of homosexual acts was motivated by a ‘wave of tolerance and compassion, intended to lift an awful burden from individuals who were seen as sad victims of a needlessly harsh morality’. MPs could no longer see the justification for a law which frequently led to blackmail, and which could ruin the careers and lives of men amid shame and embarrassment. However Hitchens is sympathetic to the opponents of change who ‘saw quite clearly what was really at issue – legalization would lead to social acceptance’, which in time is what ultimately happened. He reminds us that the general view among educated people then ‘was similar to the hostility people now feel towards child molesters, It was an embarrassing, even disgusting, perversion not spoken of if possible’.

After the passage of more than thirty years he lamented that ‘many of the arguments against legalization have become quite simply unspeakable, because legal acceptance has led first to tolerance and then to respectability’. In fact it has now become worse than Hitchens then feared as we are now urged by liberal ‘progressives’ to celebrate homosexuality as an activity that is somehow intrinsically virtuous.

He outlined how the effect of this change in attitude became cumulative as the significant increase in the number of openly homosexual people made it ‘seem bad manners to criticize the homosexual lifestyle’. As a consequence social disapproval shifted from homosexuals themselves to those who openly disapprove of their actions. Hitchens drew attention to the then relatively recent invented word ‘homophobia’, intended to stigmatise ‘the feeling of those who do not accept homosexuality as the equal of heterosexuality’. He accurately identified its purpose as being ‘to produce guilt, impute personal failings, even some sort of mental disorder’ against those who might challenge this agenda, describing it as ‘one of the most unpleasant techniques of the new conformism’.

Hitchens ended this chapter by attacking moves to remove the prohibition preventing schools from teaching that ‘homosexuality is a lifestyle choice equal to and comparable with heterosexual marriage’, and also condemned proposals for the introduction of ‘some sort’ of homosexual marriage, which he described as a contradiction in terms. He concluded by noting that equality between homosexuality and heterosexuality, which had been denied as an objective by 1960s reformers, had now become a matter which we are all expected to unquestionably accept.

Peter Hitchens analysis is broadly correct. He is right to stress the dangers of the homosexual lifestyle, although he focuses on the impact of anal sex rather than the bigger problem of rampant promiscuity. This contrasts with the mainstream sanitised version of homosexuality promoted by LGBT History Month, Pride marches etc. The absurdity of so called homosexual marriage, and the malign indoctrination in schools of the supposed normality of homosexuality, are both treated with the contempt they deserve. He sits on the fence on the issue of decriminalisation of homosexual activities, recognising the blackmail threat and personal ruin caused by this private activity. But he also identifies the normalisation and acceptance which lifting the legal prohibition has introduced, and the authoritarian measures that have been adopted to silence opposition to the homosexual normalisation agenda. Unfortunately, although opposed to authoritarianism when practiced by liberals, his apparent willingness to condone authoritarian interference by the state in a private sexual activity of which he disapproves leaves him open to charges of hypocrisy and double standards.