All full up?

by Greg McDonald

While the Prime Minister should have gone further in today’s landmark immigration speech and capped Britain’s population at 65 million, we should not confuse a balanced migration policy with racism.

Gordon Brown’s pledge that Britain’s population will not be allowed to exceed 70 million by 2029 is long overdue. But it at least breaks fundamentally with the sleepwalking policy of an out-of-touch political elite - typified by Home Secretary Alan Johnson’s infamously drowsy nights spent dreaming of the arrival of Britain’s 65 millionth citizen.

The balanced migration argument is not about ethnicity but numbers. Simply, most Britons believe our overcrowded island doesn’t have the space to build another Birmingham.

The solution? Britain should adopt a one-in-one-out balanced migration policy of the kind long supported by Conservative MP Nicholas Soames and Labour’s Frank Field, co-chairmen of the Cross Party Group for Balanced Migration.

But as the Government finally joins the immigration debate, the rest of us should be crystal clear that - however racist elements like the BNP seek to exploit our fear of change to stir up division and hatred - the issues of immigration and racism are wholly separate.

Britain’s 61 million citizens are richer for our cultural and human diversity, our tolerance and our pluralism. We just don’t have the room for another nine million people.

The plot thickos

by Alan Tyers

The convictions for the would-be bottle bombers are just the tip of the iceberg…

Good news, bad news, ugly fears for future news with the conviction of the three men who plotted to blow up planes with liquid bombs. Great that they have been brought to justice, a shame that it has cost us all about 135 million quid in police and legal fees, and worrying that there might be more where they came from.

On the one hand, something was obviously seriously wrong with ringleader Abdulla Ahmed Ali, key gang member Tanvir Hussain and Assad Sarwar, the gang’s quartermaster. On the other, they don’t sound that unusual.

Ali, the brains of the outfit: born in London, engineering graduate, a dad. Did charity work in Pakistan, became outraged and then radicalised by seeing the displaced from Afghanistan. There must be plenty of others who have had similar life experiences.

High Wycombe-born Sarwar sounds like one of life’s losers: shy, failed student, low self-esteem, drifting in and out of lowly jobs, easily manipulated.

And as for fashion-conscious Hussain, who carried on with his part in the plot even once he knew that MI5 were onto him… well, they won’t be fighting over him for the prison quiz team, it seems fair to say.

Three unremarkable young Brits, selected, trained and manipulated by men much smarter than themselves and brainwashed into a truly evil plot. With whole communities apparently perusing separatist aims – Sharia law, segregated schooling - the soil is fertile for more bad seeds.

Hats off to the security forces for catching the bottle bombers before they could do anything devastating. But how do we, as a society, make it totally unappealing for the next generation even to consider getting involved in such hare-brained schemes?

Give the BNP enough rope

by Greg McDonald

The BBC is right to invite BNP leader Nick Griffin to appear on Question Time – but as Auntie has the Nazis round for tea, it’s essential there’s someone at the table capable of showing up this little Hitler for what he is.

The BNP leader is right that, following his party’s success at June’s European elections, greater exposure of the BNP would best serve the British voter.

For example, the million people who voted BNP earlier this year are largely unaware that Griffin has sought alliances with Libyan dictator Colonel Gadaffi.

Yet as repulsive as Griffin’s views are, let’s not kid ourselves that a million Brits voted Nazi at the last election because Joseph Goebbels visited them in a dream.

The truth is that our mainstream politicians have allowed poor parts of Britain to fragment, while sending their own kids to private schools far from the troubled areas where the BNP succeeds – and the current breed of identikit Labour/Tory drones are simply incapable of putting the argument for freedom.

It’s essential that the BBC ensures Griffin faces at least one genuine champion of liberal democracy: Labour’s Tony Benn, the Tories’ David Davis, or the Lib Dems’ Charles Kennedy spring to mind.

So good on the Beeb: let’s give Griffin’s supporters the chance to hear him defend his support for the Waffen SS and his calling Britain’s WW2 airmen “murderers” - but let’s also hear a response Churchill would have been proud to call British.

Send the burkini away with the burqa

by Greg McDonald

French authorities are right to ban "burkinis" in public swimming pools, just as their President is right to condemn the burqa for "debasing" women.

The burkini, a three-piece burqa/bikini hybrid, theoretically gives Muslim women the chance to swim publicly, without breaking the flesh-covering rules written down by men free to splash with the sun on their skins to their hearts’ content.

The problem is that burkini-dipping, as any Parisian enfant could tell you at a glance, is basically just swimming with your clothes on. It’s unhygienic. It’s unsafe. And banning it without exception down at the public piscine is not the “segregation” opponents claim, but common sense.

But while the spectacle of an adult woman swimming with her trousers on might be comical to some, what’s tragic is the spectacle of women fighting for the right to be oppressed.

For the truth is that the burqa is sexist and oppressive, and opposing it is no more intolerant than were the Enlightenment figures who fought the patriarchal oppression of the Christian church.

It’s for that reason that France is right to have taken the lead in banning the burqa in schools, facing down appeasers whose “tolerance” condemns schoolgirls to religious apartheid.

It’s also why French President Nicolas Sarkozy is right to condemn the burqa for making women "prisoners behind netting”. Sexist oppression has no more place in a post-Enlightenment European country than it does in a swimming pool.

Nothing to Hyde?

by Alan Tyers

Today’s the fourth anniversary of the 7/7 bombings: there’s a memorial being unveiled in Hyde Park, but no public inquiry.

Saba Mozakka, who is one of six relatives of the deceased on the memorial’s project board, said: “We think it is truly incredible and reflects the importance of the people commemorated.”

But the authorities do not think that their deaths were important enough to have a full public inquiry into how the events of four years ago came to pass. This is despite calls for the same from relatives, the public, and even a former head of counter-terrorism.

Some idiots have concocted a conspiracy theory about the attacks. They believe that the absence of a public inquiry means the Government did it. This is laughable and contemptible: like our shambolic Government could put together such a complex operation.

An inquiry into the bombings is going in front of the Commons Home Affairs Committee today, although it’s hard to have too much faith in these sort of closed-shop investigations these days.

The Committee will no doubt find that police and security services did all they could, and that the events of 7/7 were beyond their skill to avert. OK then. So is there any reason to suppose there won’t be another similar attack? No, not really.

Tessa Jowell and Prince Charles (the dream team) were at Hyde Park today. Who will be unveiling the next monument to “important people”?

No gays? No lobsters or Gillette either, then!

by Greg McDonald

The Bishop of Rochester's ignorant homophobic diatribes are not only wrong, not only deliberately divisive, not only cynical political opportunism of the lowest kind – they’re an insult to the spirit of the entire Christian faith.

Michael Nazir-Ali says homosexuals are welcome in his church – on the small condition that they "repent and change". Which is rather like you or I being made welcome by the Satanists next door – just as soon as we've offered up our first born in sacrifice to Pan.

Yet while the Bishop's opponents – those inclusive, generous-spirited Anglicans who live according the essential spirit of the fundamental Christian instruction to "love thy neighbour" – understand that homophobes are wrong, they have a problem, for while they may be on the side of the angels they're patently against part of their own scripture.

Christianity's journey of faith, charity and culture may have come a long way since the Sermon on the Mount, but for Nazir-Ali and his divisive Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, the primitive laws on homosexuality laid down in the Old Testament, and the eternity in hell awaiting such sinners, remain carved in stone.

Yet in drawing on such scripture Nazir-Ali is committing the grossest hypocrisy: while the Good Book does indeed outlaw men lying with men, the youthful-faced Bishop forgets that his scripture also equally condemns as "abomination" men who shave their beards.

And just three lines before Leviticus's condemnation of homosexuals, another group of sinners find themselves in the queue for Hell: those Satanic sea-devils you and I know as lobsters!

Faced with the scientific and social evidence of their error and the threat of being, in Nazir-Ali's words, "rolled over" by the irresistible process of a cultural enlightenment their prejudice can no longer hold back, the worst homophobes stoop to using faith as justification. Such an insult should be recognised by Anglicans for what it is: an abomination.

Why it's still wrong to negotiate with kidnappers

by Greg McDonald

Our hearts go out to the families of Jason Creswell and Jason Swindlehurst, the two British hostages whose bodies have been identified in Iraq.

Our thoughts are also with the families of the three Britons who remain captive. Their daily suffering is unimaginable, and as the extremist militia responsible demand the release of Shia prisoners in the next months, we can all understand calls for any demand to be met if it brings the innocent safely home.

But, and as harsh as it seems to say this right now, we must stand firm in support of the British Government’s policy of not making concessions to hostage-takers.

The cold truth is that bowing to demands will only act as a spur to future kidnappers. We will never know how many lives the policy of refusing to negotiate has already saved.

If there was any doubt that concessions don’t work, the militants surely vanquished it by following up the release of Laith al-Khazali from a US detention centre in Baghdad this month with the handover of the bodies of two men long since dead.

This latest awful chapter in the wider tragedy of the Iraq story should hammer home the need for an open inquiry into what Britain was ever doing in Iraq in the first place.

Today, though, our hearts go out to the families of the deceased, and our hopes lie with those charged with securing the safe release of the remaining hostages.

No excuse for Belfast violence

by Alan Tyers

The attacks on Romanian migrants in Belfast shame our whole country.

Twenty families sheltering in a church hall in fear for their lives, youths giving Nazi salutes and hurling bottles at anti-racist protestors, thugs breaking into people’s houses and threatening women and children… Life in that bit of South Belfast doesn’t sound much fun.

Maybe it’s just a few local idiots with nothing better to do now that the decline in sectarian violence has left them with time on their hands, or maybe it is part of something more organised and sinister. Whatever it is, some people in Belfast obviously think – if that’s not giving them too much credit – that this handful of Romanian people put such a blight on their lives that they want to drive them away with violence.

While some people might say that knee-jerk cries of “racism” have made constructive debate about the immigration debate more difficult, let’s not kid ourselves: this is racism in its most straightforward, brutal form. The attackers believe that “all Romanians are thieves/beggars/criminals, etc” and are determined to force them out, regardless of what individuals may or may not have done.

The police, and society as a whole, should have no sympathy at all for this sort of ill-informed, unfair mob rule. It disgraces our whole country.

Government guilty of torture?

It's all gone a bit Jack Bauer... the British Government is being sued for torture.

Displaying a rather flattering, although not widely shared, view of the Home Secretary's reach and influence, lawyers for Briton Jamil Rahman have written to Wor Jacqui accusing her of colluding in their client's torture and imprisonment.
 
It is as yet unclear if Jacqui has put in an expense claim for pairs of pliers, waterboards, aggressively bright desk lamps and so on.

It sounds like Mr Rahman has had a hell of a time of it: tortured for two years in Bangladesh while his own Government, in the shadowy shape of MI5, left the room (literally) and let his captors do their thing.
 
Rahman is not the only one: a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, Binyam Mohamed, says he was tortured in Pakistan and Morocco with the knowledge of MI5.
 
The question, raised by the magnificent Mr Bauer time and again in the brilliant documentary 24, is the utilitarian one. Namely: is it right that one guilty (or possibly guilty) person should suffer to protect thousands of innocents?

While Jamil Rahman and Binyam Mohamed are innocent and beyond reproach, not everyone is. So do we trust the security services to get it right?

Would you torture a terrorist for information if that would definitely prevent the death of 1,000 innocent people?

If your answer is “yes”, well – the rest is just a slice of an already-cut cake. Cases of “probably guilty” and “maybe possibly guilty” and “probably not guilty of this specific crime but definitely a wrong ‘un” all flow, inevitably, from there. Mistakes will be made. Sadists will get involved. Innocent victims will find their faces fitting.

Is it worth it?

Why nasty Nick should shun the Queen

by Greg McDonald

The media storm over nasty BNP leader Nick Griffin being invited to tea with little old Elizabeth II shows our corrupt political elite up for the self-serving hypocrites they are.

If anything, Griffin, a man standing for democratic election, should shun the Queen as a totalitarian whose family represents a thousand years of brutal violence, religious oppression and white supremacy.

Now before anyone thinks I’m advocating hanging swastikas in Trafalgar Square, let’s be clear: the BNP's policies (more hitting of defenseless children, less of those awful darkies who give us Olympic glory and our national diet) are an embarrassment to anyone who understands what it means to be British.

Yet should Griffin and co gain seats in June, much of the blame will lie with the self-serving greed of a corrupt mainstream political elite guilty of upholding the undeserving at the expense of the unrepresented many.

As Fred Goodwin enjoys his pension pot, Lord Michael Martin arises, and the rest of us suffer on their financial and political watch, what’s required is genuine representative democracy. That means proportional representation, four-yearly elections, the abolition of unelected Lords and heads of state, and representative governance.

We must not let the corrupt mainstream use the threat of the BNP to distract from the rot at the heart of our system – and there couldn’t be a better symbol of that rot than a woman who’s never had a job throwing a knees-up at the Palace.