Bel is thinking

A self-styled former liberal writes an article in the Daily Mail. It is entitled ‘The night my daughter was stabbed - and my liberal instincts died’.

In summary, his daughter had gone out one night to the shops in their affluent North-West London neighbourhood. On her way back, she was stabbed in the ribs by a hoodie who grabbed her bag and ran away. Mercifully, she survived, but her father has swiftly recanted his liberal ways. Hear him:

Nothing shatters one’s dearly-held liberal beliefs quite like a brutal clash with the reality of crime.

On our streets today it is the middle-class young people - the products of our liberal homes - who are being targeted.

That’s right, sir. Welcome to the real world.

Faced with what happened to his daughter, he states further:

So is there anybody out there who is accountable? The terrible fact is that, in these well-tended million-pound-plus houses with their state-of-the art security systems, people have long known what’s going on in the street outside.

But they have closed the blinds and simply turned away. And so have I.

…

We have put our heads in the sand for too long about this problem and have done nothing about the indifference of the authorities to much that is wrong in our society. We certainly backed the wrong policies on education - no one who could possibly avoid it would send a child to a comprehensive school around here.

Worse, we have done this at the expense of our own children, who now have to forge their lives in the bleak urban environment we have allowed to develop.

Well said, sir.

As you can imagine, the readers’ comments to this article in the Daily Mail, while sympathetic, have chided him for his past folly. Many have made the sound observation that it is liberals like him who have denounced ordinary citizens and even politicians for daring to speak out against the prevailing tolerant attitudes to crime and criminals.

I am glad he has acknowledged the damage done to society by the ideology he previously espoused. His redemption is (almost) complete. All he needs to do now is share the news of his conversion with his fellow liberals. I fail to see the point of him writing this article in the Daily Mail. Preaching to the converted, as it were. Better that he takes his message to the Guardian, and let us hope it falls there on good ground and yields lasting fruit.

A supply teacher in a London school has been sacked, allegedly for claiming in a religious education lesson that most suicide bombers were muslim. Apparently, this upset the pupils, and that, according to the deputy head teacher, is the important thing.

I think the teacher was wrong, anyway. He should have said that right now, not most, but all suicide bombers are muslim.

In any case, what did he expect at the predominantly muslim school? Gratitude for pointing out the obvious truth?

Over at Raw Carrot, an interesting and thought-provoking video on multiculturalism.

So-called anti-fascists protested outside the home of the English National Ballet. They are unhappy about the ‘BNP ballerina’. Some of them carried placards calling for her to be sacked.

Let me get this right; membership of BNP should preclude one from gainful employment? Have we now come to the point of driving out from society anyone whose views we do not like? No doubt many of these ‘anti-fascists’ were earlier this week in support of the Sexual Orientation Regulations, stridently making the case that no-one be deprived of the right to buy goods and services on account of their sexual orientation.

All very well, but do they not see the irony in their position? Or is it simply that in our prevailing morality, members of the BNP have no rights?

In the so-called fight against fascism, perhaps a little consistency wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Tony Blair. I always thought it impossible ever to be disappointed by the man, such are my already low expectations of him. Even so, I cannot believe that he has backed down on his comments about not giving up long-haul flights. He has now given some mealy-mouthed promise to ‘offset the carbon emissions caused by his personal travel’.

I supported his original stance. A shame that he has now given in to the clamouring of envirofascists all across the land.

Nice to see that plans to indoctrinate the nation continue apace:

Businesses have been warned by a Government watchdog they must individually quiz every member of staff on gay rights - or risk being sued for discrimination.

Industrial relations quango Acas has spent thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money drawing up a detailed 18-question test to establish whether workers are being unfair to any homosexual colleagues. Employers are advised to use the so-called ‘audit tool’ on all staff, then check their answers against a special score sheet to ensure staff do not have a bad attitude. …

Questions range from knowing how many gays live in the UK, to whether the business displays a ‘rainbow flag’ - a symbol of homosexual rights - on the premises.’

Thus far, it is not yet compulsory for employers to administer the questionnaire, but I wouldn’t bet on it staying that way. Nothing like a little bit of ‘political education’ to have us all thinking as our masters would like. How long before a Government minister endorses the Acas approach?

And what happens if some hapless employee fails the test? ‘Diversity awareness training’, no doubt. Acas are laying on free ‘consultancy’ services for any employer who feels they are falling down in this area. For ‘free’ substitute ‘taxpayer funded’, and the picture becomes clearer.

Not quite Siberia, but we’re getting there.

Following the Guardian’s infiltration of the BNP, several people have been ‘outed’ as members of that Party.

One of them is the Sugar Plum Fairy in the English National Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker, known as Simone Clarke when she is at home. Her fellow dancers are reported to be confronting her, and members of the audience have been asked whether the ‘revelation’ has affected their appreciation of the performance.

But why should it? Are we now suggesting that BNP members should not have jobs in society? Do we expect them to be hidden in the shadows, sneaking out in the dead of night to forage for food while so-called respectable citizens are in bed? Shock, horror, they have lives like other people, sometimes fulfilling, sometimes not.

The story of the infiltration has a sense of the witchhunt about it which I do not like. What are we trying to achieve here? The agenda seems to run thus: ‘we don’t like the BNP’s views, so let’s smoke out their members and subject them to ridicule’.

As of this morning, being a member of the BNP is not a crime. Being a racist is also not a crime. The most effective way to challenge the ideology of the BNP is to encourage a society where open debate is possible. Perhaps there would be no need to ‘infiltrate’ the BNP if such an atmosphere of free speech existed in the first place. Then they would say what they wanted in the open, and we would challenge them.

As a tangential point, some people wish to keep their party affiliations private while at work. Even members of the sainted Labour Party may not wish their workmates to know about their political opinions. By acting in this manner, the Guardian has breached the privacy of these people. However, don’t expect the do-gooding types to lose much sleep over that; BNP members are apparently not to be treated as normal members of society.

The BNP’s views may be unpalatable to many, but that is no reason to infiltrate them as if they presented some grave and immediate danger from which the Guardian must save us. We all know that there are far more dangerous groups out there which threaten our very existence as a society. If any group is deserving of infiltration, surely it is these. But what’s the betting the Guardian won’t bother?

A comment or two on the ongoing row about two Labour bloggers putting up a spoof picture of David Cameron, blacked up as a minstrel. (One of them has removed the post from his blog and apologised to everyone who was offended ‘except Tories’. What about black Tories, I wonder)

What I have found really interesting has been the reaction of both Bob Piper and Ministry of Truth (for it is they) to the people who criticised them. Critics were subjected to all manner of abuse, along the lines of ‘you are Tories, so who are you to talk about racism’. In addition to that, there were personal attacks, not to mention a few attempts by Bob Piper to reveal the identity of a Tory blogger who blogs under a pseudonym.

The fact that they were hitting out so vehemently and viciously at anyone who criticised them made me think. Especially when one considers that if a Tory councillor had done the same, these two bloggers would be leading the way with the ‘nasty party’ digs.

I have come to the conclusion that blindness of a sort has befallen these people. They genuinely cannot see how the spoof post they created could have caused offence. As Dizzy puts it, ‘[t]here is something worrying with this intellectual position that many on the Left have which asserts they are not capable of racism because of their ideological purity.’

I agree. Regarding the indignation of the two bloggers, the sub-text seems to be ‘how can anyone accuse us of being racist and offensive? We’re on the Left!!!’

And to my mind, their bafflement is genuine.

Poor souls.