The Vidal Sassoon Treatment.

You could hit him with your purse then tell the cops it was an accident.

What’s absolutely fascinating is that the BNP is claiming to have set aside their anti-semitism, and reached out to the London Jewish community in order to stoke Islamophobia (the Jewish community thankfully by and large rejected their approach):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/apr/10/thefarright.race

What this depressing episode tells me though is how much Islamophobia has come to resemble old-school European antisemitism…

It is possibly worryingly easy, I fear, to gain a misimpression from the reference to the street fights of Vidal Sassoon in Harry’s thread starter that widespread antisemitism was rife, or at least latent, in London in the aftermath of WW2 when such impressions, whether explicitly or implicitly conveyed, are remote from the truth.

A personal insight comes from the fact that I was born before the war in inner London and lived there through the war and the aftermath. In June 1944, a V1 flying bomb had dropped down at one end of the road where I lived then and in January 1945 a V2 ballistic rocket landed at the other – altogether, the V1s and V2s killed almost 9,000 Londoners, according to official statistics.

A close boyhood friend in my secondary school years was from a German refugee family who had settled in Britain shortly before the war. Later, there were other friends from refugee families and then girl friends. At no time was I aware or made aware of any antisemitic sentiments directed at them or myself. Least any here think I have a peculiarly narrow or prejudiced perspective, I can invoke Sir Jonathan Sacks in support:

“Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, told the committee that Britain was manifestly not an anti-Semitic society: ‘It is one of the least anti-Semitic societies in the world.'”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2346373,00.html

I think a “cordon sanitaire” is the only way of dealing with these types. We used to have the far-right Centre Democrats in parliament here in the Netherlands. They were totally ignored. A comparable situation exists in Antwerp.

They should be allowed the freedom to talk and we accordingly take the freedom not to listen.

C’mon, I appreciate the concern and the advice but let’s get a perspective on this.

Please, have a watch of this BBC news clip about: London – The Great Divide
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7368326.stm

Just one of the many differences between London and the rest of Britain is the report in the clip that 40 per cent of London residents were born abroad. 40 per cent.

We now have, for the first time, one BNP candidate elected to the London assembly. Wow!

The truth is that we are a very unfascistic people, especially Londoners, who have a long history of radicalism, which is why London, the south east and East Anglia were for Parliament in our civil war in the 17th century, while the north and south west were for the King. John Wilkes – Wilkes for Liberty – was one of our previous lord mayors of London.

Ever since our unfortunate historic experiences with Oliver Cromwell, as Lord Protector, and the Duke of Wellington, as prime minister, military men have found it difficult to make much headway in politics in Britain despite the empire on which the sun never set.

For entertainment, I sometimes watch Google video clips of Nazi troops doing their goose step ceremonial march to see how they compare with Russian, North Korean and Chinese troops also doing their ceremonial goose steps. Then I turn to watch the military precision of Trooping the Colour:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_yP-Aoopu4

Terrifying.

I’m curious who dilbert (no. 4 above) thinks killed JFK and RFK.

According to wikipedia the guy got 70K straight votes and 130K second-choice votes. Refraining from looking at him is not a solution.

If racism is so rife in London then how come the BNP has got only one member elected to the London assembly, and that for the first time last Thursday, when 40 per cent of London residents are reported to be foreign born?

For an assessment of the BNP gain posted on the BBC website:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7382831.stm

Arguably, this popular but completely outrageous British comedy monologue provides a more accurate insight into how many of we Brits regard current inter-faith controversies:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY-ZrwFwLQg

Be warned – prepare to be outraged!

If people were eager to argue the Vidal Sassoon treatment on fascists, at least they should be smart enough not to do so on the internets, as incitement to violence/murder charges often offend.

Apart from that, there’s no “one size fits all” strategy for dealing with fascists. When the Centrumparty got seats in parliament in Holland back in the eighties, mainstream politicians made sure to shun them, freezing the party out of normal politics, while more radical anti-fascist activists went for more drastic measures (like arson). That worked well then, but the simular “cordon sanitaire” in Belgium against Vlaams Blok/Belang hasn’t stopped their rise much.

Personally, I feel that the more it’s made clear that voting fascist is beyond the pale, that it falls outside the acceptable spectrum of politics, the easier it is to stop them. In other words: “if you have a fascist friend now is the time for your friendship to end”.

But as long as the major parties keep making dog whistle appeals to the BNP’s electorate, the BNP will profit.

The problem with this ’43 Group’ analogy is not that it offends, but that these days violent opposition to fascists by Muslims (assuming they are the main target) plays into the stereotype and thus is sorta counterproductive.

I have to say, pointing out to diminshing antisemitism (as bob b does) and saying that all racism has disappeared in Britain is a HUUUGE fallacy. As Tony Judt would tell you, antisemitism has moved so far beyond the pale since the end of WWII that it is not surprising that bob and Jonathan Sacks haven’t seen any antisemitism.

Go ask the Muslims, or the afro-carribeans, of London and the rest of the UK whether racism has died and they will laugh in your face!

Re 23 & 24…

Rumours of anti-semitism’s death (in the UK) seem a bit premature.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/denis_macshane/2006/09/post_354.html

And by police figures, Jews, proportionally, are four times more likely to be attacked than are Muslims.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1537128/Jews-far-more-likely-to-be-victims-of-faith-hatred-than-Muslims.html

Also:

http://thepcaa.org/writtenevidence.pdf

http://abs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/51/2/232

http://fra.europa.eu/fra/material/pub/AS/Antisemitism_Overview_Jan_2008_en.pdf

“relevance?”

Different ethnic groups – including working class white boys – may experience discrimination for various combinations of reasons besides ethnic origins or skin colour:

“An ethnic breakdown of [2004] GCSE results in England shows that ‘black African’ girls are scoring higher grades than ‘white British’ boys. . . ”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3517171.stm

I expect the many professional muslims settled in Britain – the doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, opticians, academics and the like – experience no more discrimination than professionally equivalent ethnic Indians, Chinese etc. Education attainment makes a substantial difference to life chances.

In the early 1980s, by chance, I encountered someone who had been recruited to research this in a town in the north of England. He had come originally from the south of England so the local economic and social circumstances were new to him.

What he soon noted was that in the 1960s and 1970s, the managers and owners of textile mills in northern textile towns had actively sought and recruited peasant families from rural areas in Pakistan to migrate to Britain and settle here in order to work in the textile mills. The motivation was, basically, to extend the commercial viability of the mills when competition from low-cost textile imports was increasing. Eventually, the textile mills closed anyway and that created economic tensions arising from unemployment and the competition for jobs with low-skilled indigenous workers. But there were also social tensions due to a whole series of cultural conflicts. Basically, migrants from rural areas, with their own distinctive religion, language and culture had come to settle in urban areas in a distant country where very different social values and aspirations prevail.

“Racism” is a convenient portmanteau expression with negative connotations but we ought to probe and analyse the circumstances in which it is applied to see whether it is describing quite the same phenomena. This official report shows that different ethnic groups in Britain are characterised by very different levels of attainment in the GCSE school exams taken by 16 year-olds:
http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/secondary/keystage3/downloads/ws_attain_0006907.pdf

How come and – importantly – does it matter when unskilled manual jobs are rapidly going out of fashion? Why is it that, reportedly, exclusion rates from school are so much higher for, specifically, afro-caribbean male youths compared with male youths from other ethnicities?

One outcome of all this computer stuff is that using computers stresses literacy and numeracy skills. From report in The Economist in 2006: “Nearly a third of British adults do not have a basic school-leaving certificate. More than a tenth have no qualifications at all. A fifth are functionally innumerate and nearly as many are functionally illiterate. And the workers of tomorrow aren’t much better. One student in six leaves school unable to read, write and add up satisfactorily.” [Link available]

“Last year [2004], a report from [OECD] revealed that Britain came seventh from bottom in a league table of staying-on rates for 19 countries. Only Mexico and Turkey had significantly lower rates of participation for this age group. Italy, New Zealand, Portugal and Slovakia have marginally lower rates.” [Link available]

“Countries—such as France or Germany or somewhat Japan—with a responsible right-wing party have antibodies to fascism that the rest of us do not.”

LOL! C’mon. How come Jean-Marie Le Pen as a candidate for the French presidency in the run-off election against Chirac in 2004 because Jospin, the Socialist candidate, had been knocked out in the first round?

“Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a Socialist and former finance minister, said he would support the conservative president, Jacques Chirac, in the second round because ‘It is the honor of our country that is at stake.'”
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D02E5DD1F3FF930A15757C0A9649C8B63

As for Germany:

“Sixty years after the end of World War II and the Holocaust, the right-wing, extremist National Democratic Party of Germany is attempting to shake up Germany with its confrontational slogans and mass demonstrations. Both the government and the opposition parties are alarmed — and at odds over whether to pursue a ban of the party.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,339604,00.html

In Japan, there has been continuing political infighting since WW2 over how school textbooks describe events in Nanjing in 1937/8.

Somehow, in Britain we manage without having to make holocaust denial a criminal offence – because we don’t need to.

What’s revealing is the use of the term “white working class”, as it usually signals the user as a stone cold racist.

Will, imagine how many girls the other cohorts must have to make up the difference… Just fail your year, and move to another cohort.

#29: “the term ‘white working class’, as it usually signals the user as a stone cold racist.”

Doubtless fascinating stuff. Presumably, BBC polls and surveys of the following kind, which refer to “white working class”, will all be banned in the New Order.

“A majority of white working class Britons feel nobody speaks for people like them, a BBC survey has suggested. Some 58% said they felt unrepresented compared with 46% of white middle class respondents to a Newsnight poll. White working classes were also negative about the past decade with 62% saying life had generally become worse in the UK.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/7279997.stm

Readers may be interested to know of this assessment of the potential economic consequences of continuing large-scale immigration by Professor Robert Rowthorn, professor of economics at Cambridge:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/07/02/do0202.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/07/02/ixop.html

“The injection of large numbers of unskilled workers into the economy does not benefit the bulk of the population to any great extent. It benefits the nanny-and housecleaner-using classes; it benefits employers who want to pay low wages; but it does not benefit indigenous, unskilled Britons, who have to compete with immigrants willing to work hard for very low wages in unpleasant working conditions.”

A longer study of the subject is at:
http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/Rowthorn_Immigration.pdf

Professor Rowthorn is author of several books, including: Capitalism, Conflict and Inflation (Lawrence Wishart, 1980). He is not widely regarded as being “right-wing”, rather the opposite, in fact.

Sure enough, resident Londoners come from all over.

Oop north, they knew how to deal with foreigners:

“During the Napoleonic Wars there was a fear of a French invasion of Britain and much public concern about the possibility of French infiltrators and spies. . . ”
http://www.thisishartlepool.co.uk/history/thehartlepoolmonkey.asp

But times change. It emerged during President Sarkozy’s recent state visit that with 300,000 resident French citizens, London is currently the 6th largest French city, equivalent in numbers of resident French citizens to Nice – but then Nice, appropriately, has a Promenade des Anglais along the seafront.
http://www.clipser.com/watch_video/133391

An impressive display of Britain’s military might turned out there, even without goose stepping, but I’ll bet the French residents of London don’t all speak English when they get home, despite Mr Blunkett’s injunction.

Perhaps one of the more significant issues is to wonder why so many folk from around the world come to London to live. Until about 20 years ago London’s resident population had been falling on trend since at least the 1930s – something which is relatively easy to document. Mrs Thatcher changed that and London’s population has been growing since.

The fact is that travelling on public transport in London – which I do almost daily – is a multicultural experience, as is a visit to any of the several superstores or pubs in my neighbourhood. What I notice is that most folk get along well and with a goodly sprinkling of ethnically mixed couples.

Btw I live in what was the Saxon heartland of England. At a place about five miles away from my home, seven Saxon kings were crowned there before the Norman conquest of 1066. About a mile away, the archaeologists uncovered the foundations of a substantial Roman villa. The local parish church is part Norman and the manor house nextdoor, with a great hall dating back to the 14th century, once belonged to a Norman family. About four miles away are the ruins of Nonsuch Palace, built by Henry VIII and intended as the finest palace in all Christendom. There’s a bricked up cave about 200 metres away which – according to the London Encyclopaedia – contained evidence of human habitation going back at least to the middle stone age. The neighbourhood contains the span of human history.

george’s comment got hung up in moderation, so most of you will have missed it. Here it is:

Re 23 & 24…

Rumours of anti-semitism’s death (in the UK) seem a bit premature.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/denis_macshane/2006/09/post_354.html

And by police figures, Jews, proportionally, are four times more likely to be attacked than are Muslims.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1537128/Jews-far-more-likely-to-be-victims-of-faith-hatred-than-Muslims.html

Also:

http://thepcaa.org/writtenevidence.pdf

http://abs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/51/2/232

http://fra.europa.eu/fra/material/pub/AS/Antisemitism_Overview_Jan_2008_en.pdf

It would, in a kind of perverse way, be comforting if anti-semitism in Britain was predominantly a response to conflict in the middle east. But I can’t quite accept the idea that most of the shaven-headed idiots who spray swastikas on gravestones give a stuff about the plight of the Arabs in Palestine. I suspect that a good chunk of them would more happily spend their down-time listening to Griffin on the evils of Islam. But this is only an anecdotal view, and some empirical evidence on this would be very welcome.

But I can’t quite accept the idea that most of the shaven-headed idiots who spray swastikas on gravestones give a stuff about the plight of the Arabs in Palestine. I suspect that a good chunk of them would more happily spend their down-time listening to Griffin on the evils of Islam.

If that’s true, then what appears to be anti-semitism here could be just a symptom of general xenophobia, and Jews may not necessarily be the preferred target of the perpetrators. If Laleh in #3 is correct, then it could be just a bunch of hoodlums who didn’t get the memo.

On desecration, one of our local war memorials was badly vandalised shortly before armistice day on 11 November last year. The memorial was speedily repaired in time for armistice day commemorations as the result of generous action by a local craft builder supported by local philanthropy. Subsequent police inquiries established that the memorial had been vandalised by a cow-boy jobbing builder for the sake of some of its paving stones which were used on a contract job in the locality.

I mention this here to show that there was, in fact, a basically straight forward venial motive for an act of vandalism that had understandably led to speculation as to more sinister motives, including mindless xenophobia. As a fact, over centuries past, many historic ruins of castles, abbeys, cathedrals and even Stonehenge have been cannibalised for their stones.