Rod Liddle has grown up

As 'Today' producer, Rod Liddle was my bete noir, proof of Marxist infiltration into the bowels of the BBC. With carefully cultivated estuary accent and exquisite mockney glottal stops, the Millwall-supporting Liddle took pride in his Souf Lon|on lad made good. His hatred of field sports led eventually to so flagrant a breach of impartiality that the BBC sacked him. Since then, I have rather taken to him; writing now for the Speccie amongst others he seems to have lost his Marxist edge and to have become as disillusioned as any of us with political stupidity - including the idiocy of multicultutalism.

With dripping sarcasm he one wrote for the Speccie "Incidentally, many Somalis have come to Britain as immigrants recently, where they are widely admired for their strong work ethic, respect for the law and keen, piercing, intelligence" and earned his first shrill scream of 'racist'.

Now he's in trouble for a Speccie blog entry commenting on the just-sentenced teen rappers jailed for attempting to murder a 15 year old girl;

It could be an anomaly, of course. But it isn’t. The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.

Predictably, the cultural-apologists have gone into overdrive. The teeth-jarring Bonnie Greer commented to the Standard "My response would be to say that the overwhelming majority of paedophiles, murderers, war-mongers and football hooligans are white males and all we got in return was beans on toast and Top Gear."

Any copper worth his salt will know the current cultural crime specialities; Albanians do prostitution, trafficking and protection, Romanians are organised pickpockets and bag thieves, Turks have cornered the heroin market, Nigerians stick with fraud, the Vietnamese dominate the home-grown Skunk business, Russians are contract killers, Jihadists have taken the terrorism top spot and Africans and Afro-Caribs dominate street crime.

This isn't to say these are racial characteristics; just the latest chapter in London's long history of immigrant crime. In my youth it was the Maltese who ran prostitution and porn, the Irish who did terrorism, Ugandan Asians who did the fraud and Sardinians who snatched handbags. I can't recall the ethnic cuisine that the Malts and the Sardis brought with them - unless it was the Trattoria food of the '70s - but whatever it was, like Rod, I'd say many thanks.

Those latest Quango jobs in full

In the spirit of open government, all new appointments to Quangos are now advertised by the Cabinet Office on the Publicappointments website. We bring you the latest vacancies in full, and encourage suitably qualified and experienced readers to apply:

Commissioners for the Infrastructure Planning Commission - £450 per day
Commissioners are required to act as decision–makers, either singly or sitting on panels to consider approve applications for development consent of nationally significant infrastructure projects e.g. nuclear waste dumps, runways and similar. Experience of toeing the government line whilst giving the impression of independence useful.

NEW Non-executive Director (private property development) Covent Garden Market Authority - £9,831 pa for 15 days, plus claret and limo allowances
We now need another vote on the board in favour of selling-off the successful Nine Elms horticultural wholesale market site for private development. An understanding of claret and the ability to undertake complex lunching would be an advantage. People not called 'Sir' are unlikely to be successful.

Up to 15 Board Members of The Young People's Learning Agency - £4,000 per annum, maybe meet twice a year if we can be arsed.
Do you want to make a real difference in the delivery of education and training provision for the nation’s young people and help to secure the country's economic future? Need something impressive on your CV? Losing your seat in Parliament and still want to feel important? Applications are welcomed from suitable skilled and experienced members of the Labour Party who, from April 2010, will work with the Government and local authorities to help develop and deliver our exciting vision for young people’s learning - which is basically that it would be a good idea. Falafel and beansprouts provided.

Directors - Sustainable Development Commission - £230 per diem plus business-class airfares or private-hire car expenses and free lunches
To be frank, we haven't a clue what this Quango actually does, except genetically-modified non-farting cows were mentioned. To be on the safe side, Directors should have the ability to undertake long lunches overlaid with social concern, the ability to feign a belief in MMGW, and an appreciation of decent 'second' clarets such as Pichon Lalande. Candidates lacking the required extent of broken nose-veins are unlikely to be invited to interview.

End of G8 meetings for the UK

Thanks to Labour's utterly incompetent management of the economy, a future British Prime Minister will be limited to watching the G8 Heads of Government filing into dinner on television; Labour have so mucked our national finances that we are set to slip out of the top ten world economies next year.

So as we beg the top dogs for financial scraps, Osborn will spend his term as Chancellor along with nonentity finance ministers from all the world's second-rate economies excluded from the top table, pushed out of the limo parade and off the red carpet round to the back entrance. To such have Labour brought this nation.

The economy that Labour inherited in 1997 was vigorous and in surplus; with prudent management, reserves would have been maintained to buffer the country in the downturn. But no. Brown's moronic fiscal grasp and the lunacy of escalating stealth redistribution and the flooding the public sector with a tsunami of cash way beyond our means destroyed the asset he was handed.

That Labour's leadership should escape not only unpunished but with devalued honours from this debacle stinks like rotten mackerel. Such malfeasance in public office is deserving of more than censure; when the implications of their destruction of the national finances become more widely understood, I think the people will demand their pound of flesh from Brown and his corrupt cabal.

A touch of class

Labour's desperate clutching at the straw of Class War in its death-spasm is a telling return to the womb for a party rooted in the evils of greed and envy. Making an utter mockery of the equalities agenda, throwing the concept of inciting hatred against any part of our society out of the window, Labour has shown its true roots - as a party of racists, bigots and thugs. In the party's dying months, it's placed itself head-to-head with the BNP in a struggle to attract the votes of the envious have-nots.

Can't get your child into a school where at least half the pupils speak English as a first language? It's the toffs' fault. Maternity wards full of Nigerian village girls and you can't get a decent midwife? It's the toffs' fault. Can't get a seat on the bus for the harem of Niqab-clad pushchair shovers? It's the toffs' fault. Can't get a Council flat for your twenty-something boy and his girlfriend? It's the toffs' fault.

Labour's choices to lessen the kicking that the country is ready to give them over immigration are limited. They can put their hands up and say "OK, fair cop. We totally buggered up on immigration"; they can deflect the voters' anger against the immigrants themselves, or they can try to deflect the voters' anger against a third party. They've chosen the last option.

In the London Assembly, Richard Barnbrook typifies the type of voter Labour are so desperately trying to woo back; cerebrally challenged, chippy, covetous, bigoted and deeply resentful of the meritocratic achievements of others.

How telling that Labour have abandoned any attempt to fight for the votes of Britain's majority middle class any more. The ABCs are lost to them - they're scrabbling in the filth for the DEs.

Richard Todd

Childhood hero, adult role-model. RIP.

More Old Toryism and confusing labels

Martin Ivens in the Times this morning looks at Cameron's relationship with Blond's Localist / Old Tory locus. Rightly, he identifies the IEA as the wellspring of the challenge to Welfarist thinking; under Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon, both of whom came from working-class East London communities, the disempowerment of the working class by the State formed the core of a whole caucus of social and economic thinking.

We can't blame Thatcher for losing her way. As more pressing issues - dealing with the unions and the militant left in the Town Halls - forced her into increasing centralisation and a Big State, so the ideas of the IEA, and Ralph and Arthur's influence, fell into desuetude. 1979 was the start of neoliberalism, and saw over a million local members leave the party. To look at the roots of Old Toryism, we need to look back beyond the 1945 - 1979 period of consensus Keynesianism. As Blond wrote in Prospect:

Conservatives who believe in value, culture and truth should therefore think twice before calling themselves liberal. Liberalism can only be a virtue when linked to a politics of the common good, a problem which the best liberals—Mill, Adam Smith and Gladstone—recognised but could never resolve. A vision of the good life cannot come from liberal principles. Unlimited liberalism produces atomised relativism and state absolutism. Insofar as both the Tories and Labour have been contaminated by liberalism, the true left-right legacy of the postwar period is, unsurprisingly, a centralised authoritarian state and a fragmented and disassociative society.

Now those of you who have read Ralph Harris will know he always described himself as a 'liberal' rather than a conservative - but an implaccable enemy of the authoritarian State;

Alas, you need government, but big government is subject to such flaws, incorrigible flaws. Big government is irresponsible government because they can’t know all the circumstances of the nation, the society, the families that they are administering. Big government leads to all kinds of deals, backstage deals about policies, and all the time they are governed not by the public interest, but by the self-interest of the politicians to maintain their power. You need politicians, but the more you can contain politicians to the central tasks they have to do, the less you tempt them into this vote-grabbing, this corruption and deceit which is inseparable from modern, mass, undiscriminating democratic politics.

Harris advocated Burkean solutions, the answers being with the Little Platoons; mutuals and co-operatives, friendly societies and sixpence-a-week insurance policies. As does Blond.

Labels are confusing, aren't they?

Brown gambles all on 'hate and greed' strategy

Abandoning any pretence at being a Statesman, at being a man to unite the nation, Gordon Brown reverted yesterday to the greasy-haired Scots technical-college lecturer heckling the visiting Mayor. Brown has stepped firmly back onto old-skool Socialist territory, garnering support by an appeal to men's lowest instincts, for hatred and naked greed. The ugliness and irresponsibility of Brown's reversion surprises me not one jot; all he's ever done is for personal and party self-interest at the cost of our national well-being. My loathing of the man and his government has never been deeper.

Labour is a party of two-nations; one to be robbed, and one to be bought. This is as far as Brown's distinctly third-rate intellect will take him. Cameron remains the sole advocate of a one-nation Britain, in which we all move forward together. He hasn't accepted it yet, but Localism is the one approach that will kill Labour for ever and cement us as one Britain, one people. As Philip Blond had it in Prospect:

The next step for conservatism is to reverse the old politics of class, by restoring capital to labour. Cameron should reject the Marxist narrative that paints Tories as wedded to a disenfranchised proletariat. On the contrary: conservatives believe in the extension of wealth and prosperity to all. Yet the great disaster of the last 30 years is the destruction of the capital, assets and savings of the poor: in Britain, the share of wealth (excluding property) enjoyed by the bottom 50 per cent of the population fell from 12 per cent in 1976 to just 1 per cent in 2003. A radical communitarian civic conservatism must be committed to reversing this trend. This requires a considered rejection of social mobility, meritocracy and the statist and neoliberal language of opportunity, education and choice. Why? Because this language says that unless you are in the golden circle of the top 10 to 15 per cent of top-rate taxpayers you are essentially insecure, unsuccessful and without merit or value. The Tories should leave this bankrupt ideology to New Labour and embrace instead an organic communitarianism that graces every level of society with merit, security, wealth and worth.

I think it is a complete misnomer to call Blond a 'red Tory'. Cameron is a red Tory. Eric Pickles is a red Tory. Why? Because red Tories believe in a central State, in a Federal Europe, in a metropolitan concentration of power, in political patronage and the primacy of central party apparatchiks, in over-riding personal freedoms 'for your own good'. Cameron's Socialist Conservatives are only a whisker away from Brown's Blue Labour party. Blond is off the scale, on a fourth axis, espousing a manifesto that is wholly Old Tory.

Brown has moved forward, and left his goal completely open. This is Cameron's final chance.

The banality of evil

Danny Finkelstein's natural repulsion in a Times piece at the idea of describing John Demjanjuk as a victim is perhaps understandable but perhaps also too simplistic.

Germany, like the UK at time, had the death penalty on the statute book, and throughout the war undertook the judicial murder (by Guillotine) of German citizens just as we did here (by Hanging). Putting people to death per se was not seen as wrong, unjust or illegal in either Germany or the UK. Statutes defined capital offences, courts passed judgement and those at the bottom end of the criminal justice system, the policemen and prison guards, carried out the confinements and executions.

Indeed, all societies with law enforcement agencies depend on a certain kind of person to fill the ranks; those with a respect for authority, those who find it easy to defend the supremacy of Law, those who don't question too deeply the moral legitimacy of their orders and instructions. In a free and democratic society, with local rather than State control over law enforcement agencies, such human qualities are not a bad thing, and recruiting such people, as we do now, into the ranks of the police and prison services puts the most suitable sort of people into the job. But only because they have others standing over them who do scrutinise, question and poke at the morality and legitimacy of the legal framework within which they operate.

Franz Stangle, Commandant at Sobibor extermination camp where Demjanjuk worked, started life as an ordinary Austrian policeman. After Anschluss, a law was passed allowing the compulsory euthanasia of the severely mentally and physically handicapped without hope of recovery. The law required the signatures of two doctors and a court order, and the subjects were (at first) 'humanely' killed by lethal injection. This was the T-4 programme, and Stangl was put in charge of carrying out the judicial killings.

Now this was the point at which we expect a law enforcement official to cavil; we can see the difference between guillotining a rapist and euthanising a paraplegic in a permanent coma, why couldn't Stangl? Was it because he was inherently evil (as Finkelstein would have it) or was it because he was, as just an ordinary policeman, too overwhelmed by central State authority and legitimacy to question? And when the method of euthanasia changed from medically-administered lethal injection to Carbon Monoxide gas why didn't he question then? Many policemen did - after their first T-4 killings they requested return to normal duties, and were not penalised or persecuted.

Finkelstein has the answer, I think, in the Milgram experiments. Some subjects turned the voltage knobs right up to 'lethal' - not brainwashed Nazis, but preppy American college kids. Some individuals are just programmed to accord a legitimacy to authority that others are not. Are they evil? Or victims, their 'flaw' misused and exploited by those in authority above them?

This isn't an obscure debate about the events of sixty years ago, but the most cogent and compelling reason to take great care of the way in which we design and develop our own system of justice and law enforcement. It is the reason I am unequivocally opposed to judicial murder, particularly if imposed and determined by a remote central State. Once you let them start killing, once the initial hurdle is cleared, then broadening the 'offences' of those to be killed becomes much easier. It may start with paedophiles but could rapidly include those caught with illegal firearms. Once the process and apparatus of judicial murder is in place, once the executioner has tasted his first legal blood, then it becomes so much easier to expand the process.

It's also the reason I'm unequivocally opposed to a national police force under central State control. As much as we need those individuals with character traits that make them suitable for law enforcement work, we need also to keep them under close control and not to allow others to exploit those traits against our own interests. If Demjanjuk represents evil, it is a banal and unremarkable evil, an ordinary human evil. And it's everywhere amongst us.

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The street rats are mostly Balls' bastards

Ed Balls is either a very stupid man or one blinded by ideology to the evidence of the effects of family background on children. The evidence that children who grow up without their biological fathers are not only likely to be damaged but likely to damage others is overwhelming. For the sake of balanced, healthy, achieving children and for the sake of society as a whole we should be doing everything we can to promote stable families that retain both biological parents, and marriage is the best mechanism for formalising those bonds. What doesn't Balls understand?

Somewhere in the Sundays over the weekend was a story that surfaces from time to time, of the desire for an equalities counter-reformation. All the things that should have liberated women into a new equal world - the pill, employment rights, the outlawing of taste discrimination - have actually left women worse off, the piece stated, and for every ladette happy to fight their way up the career ladder there was a potential housewife happy to care for home and children, but the latter lifestyle choice had become increasingly difficult.

And of course our tax and benefits system must support not just the best evidential relationship structure for our children, but the most moral also - for without a common morality our laws, our social structure, our respect for the rights of others are nought but dross.

The next government will still have to deal with the underclass, with the street cohort of violent, illiterate young men dealing drugs and murdering each other for the pettiest of reasons, young men whose life expectancy doesn't stretch much beyond their forties, and half of that spent in prisons, care homes or young offenders institutions. These street rats are Ed Balls' bastards; they are the product of Labour's 'any lifestyle choice is good' policy that eschewed fatherhood for State co-parenting. And Balls, like all men who get bastards and flee, will leave it to everyone else to pay to solve his problem.