James Delingpole's Blog, page 11
September 3, 2014
David Cameron’s greatest legacy: the rise and rise of UKIP
British Prime Minister David Cameron has been making bold, statesman-like noises about Islamic State and President Putin this week. Well, of course he has. It’s what desperate leaders always do when their domestic policies and popularity ratings are tanking.
Unfortunately, it may be too little too late.
Cameron has reached that stage in his political career where, even were he singlehandedly to liberate Mosul, personally undo the handcuffs of all the captive Yazidis, Christians and Shias, stop the Syrian civil war, and engineer an enduring peaceful settlement in the Ukraine, he would still go down in history as one of Britain’s lesser prime ministerial also-rans.
Indeed, it is looking increasingly as though his single most significant legacy will be the one summed up by the cover of this week’s Private Eye satirical magazine: David Cameron, perhaps even more so than charismatic leader Nigel Farage, is the man most responsible for rise and rise of the Britain’s tea party UKIP.
Consider the latest opinion polls.
YouGov/Sun poll CON 32%, LAB 35%, LDEM 8%, UKIP 15%
This spells out the situation in black and white. Cameron’s Conservatives stand barely a prayer of winning a working majority at the next UK general election. And this despite the fact that Cameron’s prime opponent, Labour leader Ed Miliband, is widely considered such a weird, comical, economically illiterate joke figure as to be almost unelectable. And also, despite the fact that Britain currently has one of the world’s most successful economies and is enjoying a house price boom which is making many of the people who ought naturally be drawn to voting Conservative earn more in a year, tax free, than they do from their day jobs.
Why then are the Conservatives still polling so relatively dismally?
Read the rest at Breitbart London
Everything is the fault of the ‘Far Right’. Everything…
“I didn’t want the story to be true because it made me deeply uncomfortable. The suggestion that men from a minority ethnic background were committing sex crimes against white children was always going to be the far right’s fantasy story come true. Innocent white victims, evil dark-skinned abusers. Liberal angst kicked instinctively into top gear.”
The thing that disturbs me is this: that Norfolk was apparently less discomfited by the enormity of the crime itself than he was by the spectre of the “far right’s” likely response. I’m sure he didn’t mean it to come out that way. I’ve no doubt he cares deeply about the suffering of the children he interviewed in the course of his investigations.
But the fact that he even raised the issue speaks volumes about the mentality of the liberal-left: so great is its fear of the Far Right Bogeyman that it will do almost anything avoid incurring its wrath – even, in some cases, if it means turning a blind eye to rape, fraud and worse.
Read the rest at Breitbart London
September 1, 2014
What the left would prefer you didn’t know about multiculturalism…
All right, so it was only a straw poll conducted among viewers of yesterday’s BBC Sunday Morning Live debate programme: 95 per cent of Britons think multiculturalism has been a failure.
But as majority verdicts go, it was a pretty resounding one – and it was delivered despite the BBC’s best efforts to muddy the waters, first by wheeling out two of the nation’s Multi Culti Apologist big guns Owen Jones and Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, and second by pretending that multiculturalism means something other than what it actually means.
Multiculturalism is a very specific political philosophy which could scarcely be further removed from the idea that we should live in one big, happy, multi-ethnic melting pot and all just get along. That’s because it means the exact opposite. It’s about separatism, not integration.
It was championed from at least the 1970s onwards by effete bien-pensants like Labour MP turned Social Democrat Roy Jenkins and is essentially a manifestation of the cultural guilt and self-hatred that afflicts the left-wing chattering classes. Rather than accept the truth which to most of us is glaringly obvious – that some cultures are manifestly superior to others – it urges us all to celebrate our differences and to accept values that we may personally find alien or even abhorrent in the name of creating a fairer, more tolerant and inclusive society.
So, for example, we in liberal Western culture generally take a dim view of marrying members of your own family, female genital mutilation, forced or arranged marriages, second-class status for women, voter fraud, systematic political corruption, honour killings, the organised grooming, trafficking and rape of underage girls, and so on.
In some of our immigrant communities, though, such practices are considered more or less acceptable. (And I’m only using that “more or less” modifier out of politeness).
Read the rest at Breitbart London
August 30, 2014
You’re never too old, they say. But I am
For my 49th birthday treat, I went to see Shakespeare in Love at the Noël Coward theatre in London. Expensive but worth it: spry, funny, uplifting and moving but also, for all the surface froth, quite a deep meditation on the creative process and the enduring power of art.
What everyone secretly loves best about it, though, I suspect, is the way it so shamelessly flatters their intelligence. We’re all aware that Shakespeare wrote a sonnet that begins ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’; that Marlowe was stabbed to death in a pub brawl; that Malvolio wears yellow stockings and cross garters. This is basic, middlebrow general knowledge. But the way the show plays with these details and weaves them into the plot without bashing you on the head or over-explaining has the pleasing effect of making you feel like you’re in on a private joke which only an exclusive few get.
The performances in the new stage version are a delight, especially David Oakes’s languid Kit Marlowe and Lucy Briggs-Owen’s adorable Viola De Lesseps. But the thing that really makes this production sing is the live incidental music (as was also the case with two of the other excellent productions I’ve loved recently: War Horse and the RSC Richard II). Nothing quite beats a nice bit of crumhorn or viol or plainsong or rustic balladry to get you in the right period mood.
Don’t worry, though. This isn’t an audition for Lloyd Evans’s job. I’d absolutely bloody hate to be a theatre critic, not least because I remember from my time as a showbiz correspondent in the early 1990s that perhaps eight in every ten productions you have to see are dross. Rather, I wanted to muse a little on the career choices I’ve made and on the regrets that now haunt me as a result. Fellow nearly-fiftysomethings — and post-fiftysomethings — will I’m sure understand where I’m coming from. Time is running out and the options are closing by the day.
Read the rest of my depressing whinge at The Spectator.
Does no one care about the plight of drowning Samoa? Apparently not…
The Prime Minister of Samoa has launched a heartfelt plea in theGuardian newspaper on behalf of his allegedly drowning Pacific nation. (H/T Bufo 75)
Unless concerted international action is taken to deal with the threat of ‘climate change’, apparently, small islands like his will be “inundated by rising sea levels.”
Tragically, it looks as if this request by the splendidly named Tuilaepa Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi, is destined to fall on deaf ears.
Even a fair chunk of the Guardian’s impeccably green, left-liberal readership, it seems, is now sufficiently well-informed to appreciate that sea levels aren’t actually rising in any dramatic, significant or unprecedented way, and that the “drowning Pacific islands” meme is just a piece of a Third World blackmail designed to guilt-trip richer Western nations into stumping up more aid.
Here’s one comment:
I’m afraid that, just as was the case with the Maldives story, this is an utter fraud being attempted by a money grubbing politician. Check the facts about what is happening.
Read the rest at Breitbart London.
Where is Jessica Hyde? (And why am I the world’s most useless TV critic?)
Where is Jessica Hyde?
If those words mean nothing to you then I have some excellent news. If not, then you’ll already be aware that I have failed you totally. And not for the first time, either. I was about a series (sorry, ‘season’) late to Game of Thrones; not much quicker into Breaking Bad; and now here I am again belatedly drawing your attention to something we all really should have seen last year if we were to consider ourselves even halfway in the loop…
Anyway, for what it’s worth, the show is Utopia (Channel 4, Tuesdays) and I can’t remember when I last saw a British drama series open so strongly. Probably, like, never — for how often is it, even on Channel 4, you come across a series so edgy, uncompromising and assured that it actually allows one of its main (and most likable) characters to have his eyes gouged out with a teaspoon in the first half-hour? (It’s the kind of initiative of which — one for my father-in-law, this — Tony Blair would surely have approved.)
Utopia, you can tell from the start, is not afraid to break the rules. Or, rather, it’s dementedly eager to play by the new rules as previously established by Game of Thrones: no one is safe; everyone is expendable — including cute kids; all bets are off as to where the plot might go, a) because the creator, Dennis Kelly (previously best known for co-writing the hit musical Matilda), probably doesn’t know himself and b) because even if he did, he’d deliberately do what you didn’t want just to frustrate and annoy you.
I love it and so, if you can stomach the ultra-violence and the insufferable hipness, will you. We were introduced to it by our quite straight lawyer friends from London, who don’t generally watch much TV and who infuriated us by arriving at our annual summer holiday let in Wales last week saying, ‘Sorry. Can’t play bridge for long tonight. Got to catch the final episode of Utopia.’
Read the rest – including my parody of Made In Chelsea – at The Spectator.
Comedian Frankie Boyle is a bully and a politically correct coward. Wish I’d never stood up for him.
‘Outspoken comic Frankie Boyle has called on the BBC to sack “cultural tumour” Jeremy Clarkson.’
Can anyone tell me what’s wrong with this opening sentence from a recent news report?
Clue: it’s that first word. In order to qualify as ‘outspoken’, surely, you need to be the kind of person who fearlessly, frequently and vociferously sets himself in opposition to the clamour of the times.
Does demanding that a public figure lose his job for some mildly sexist/racist/homophobic/ableist remark fit into that category? Hardly. In the current climate it’s about as heroically contentious as, say, a private school prospectus that promises ‘We believe in educating the whole person’; or a sign at a Co-op declaring its commitment to social justice, diversity and sustainability; or a Conservative Prime Minister declaring that three letters — NHS — are engraved on his heart.
The only mildly interesting aspect of the statement is that Frankie Boyle is not, contrary to all impressions, a junior policy co-ordinator at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, nor the head of diversity at a firm of chartered accountants, nor yet the health inequalities, disability and lesbian affairs officer at Strathclyde council. Amazingly — don’t laugh, because it really ain’t funny — Frankie Boyle is one of Britain’s most successful comedians.
Read the rest at The Spectator
August 29, 2014
Muslim rape gangs and the disturbing role of Britain’s leading child welfare charity
Among the more nauseating spectacles of the Rotherham child rape scandal has been the squirming evasion and shameless attempts at face-saving by the various authority figures whose job it supposedly was to prevent such horrors happening.
One of them is a man named Javed Khan. He is the head of Britain’s largest children’s charity Barnardo’s which now stands accused of having known about the Muslim rape gang problem for well over a decade – but which chose to do next to nothing to confront it.
In an ugly interview with Sky News, Khan infuriated viewers – and his normally mild-mannered interviewer Eamonn Holmes – with his mealy-mouthed evasiveness.
Not only did Khan refuse to call for the resignation of South Yorkshire Police Commissioner (and former head of Rotherham Council Children’s Services) Shaun Wrightbut it often seemed as though he was trying to make excuses for the various institutions which allowed mass child rape to occur on their watch.
Holmes could barely contain his fury.
“You’re the expert in the field. You’re the man who people turn to when all else fails. Your charity’s job is to protect children, to protect the innocence of those children. I put it to you, Mr Khan, no one else has bothered: are you going to fail them as well?”
Khan once again evaded the question. As well he might – for the children’s charity he represents is almost as heavily compromised by this scandal as Rotherham Council and South Yorkshire Police.
We know this thanks to Peter McLoughlin’s detailed report Easy Meat: Multiculturalism, Islam and Child Sex Slavery. A whole section of it is devoted to Barnardo’s.
Read the rest at Breitbart London
August 27, 2014
Rotherham: 1400 kids groomed, drugged and raped by multiculturalism
Q: When is the sexual abuse of children culturally, socially and politically acceptable?
A: When it’s committed with industrial efficiency by organised gangs of mainly Pakistani men in English Northern towns like Burnley, Oldham and Rotherham, of course.
But obviously you’re not allowed to admit this or you might sound racist. That’s why, for example, in today’s BBC report into the fact that at least 1400 children were subjected to “appalling” sexual abuse in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, you have to wade 20 paragraphs in before finally you discover the ethnic identity of the perpetrators.
And even then, the embarrassing fact slips out only with the most blushing mealy-mouthedness:
By far the majority of perpetrators of abuse were described as “Asian” by victims.
Well hang on, a second. What this phrase seems to be hinting at is the possibility that the men involved weren’t “Asian” (note to US readers: Asian is UK PC-speak for Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, not orientals) but that the victims mistakenly took them to be so. Is that actually the case or not?
Let’s have a look at the names of the Rotherham men found guilty by Sheffield Crown Court in 2010 of raping or sexually abusing girls as young as 12 shall we. Maybe that’ll help.
Zafran Ramzan
Razwan Razaq
Umar Razaq
Adil Hussain
Mohsin Khan
Nope. Absolutely no clues there, then…
Read the rest at Breitbart London
August 25, 2014
Australian Bureau of Meteorology accused of Criminally Adjusted Global Warming
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has been caught red-handed manipulating temperature data to show “global warming” where none actually exists.
At Amberley, Queensland, for example, the data at a weather station showing 1 degree Celsius cooling per century was “homogenized” (adjusted) by the Bureau so that it instead showed a 2.5 degrees warming per century.
At Rutherglen, Victoria, a cooling trend of -0.35 degrees C per century was magically transformed at the stroke of an Australian meteorologist’s pen into a warming trend of 1.73 degrees C per century.
Last year, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology made headlines in the liberal media by claiming that 2013 was Australia’s hottest year on record. This prompted Australia’s alarmist-in-chief Tim Flannery - an English literature graduate who later went on to earn his scientific credentials with a PhD in palaeontology, digging up ancient kangaroo bones – to observe that global warming in Australia was “like climate change on steroids.”
But we now know, thanks to research by Australian scientist Jennifer Marohasy, that the hysteria this story generated was based on fabrications and lies.
Read the rest at Breitbart London
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