The Population Bomb That Isn't

Of all the conspiracy theories attempting to explain why Europe's leaders have decided to commit ethnic suicide by opeingn the floodgates to unlimited Muslim immigration, one that crops up rather a lot is demographics. According to this narrative, Europe's population is aging and having too few children. The continents generous pension and social security systems rely on an ever growing population to provide working age tax payers to fund it. In the absence of this mass immigration can be used to plug the hole.

Mark Steyn explores this in the excellent book America Alone. It's persuasive, and the numbers are stark. Going off the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) measure, each woman needs to have at least 2.1 babies to maintain a steady population. Looking at a list of countries by TFR the EU average is 1.59 with Greece at 1.3, Germany and  Italy at 1.4. Britain a relatively healthy 1.9, but still pointing towards long term population decline. By contrast Niger leads the world in baby production with a TFR of 7.6, beating Somalia (6.6) quite comfortably with Mali and Chad tied for 3rd on 6.3.

The list goes on in that fashion. By these figures the world is becoming more African and more Islamic at a fairly alarming rate while Europe is failing to produce enough people. So Africa and the Middle East have too many people, Europe has too few. Surely the answer is obvious, and the huge cultural shift that will come of importing over a million Muslims a year is just something we'll have to learn to live with?

No. Like most attempts to use broad and simplistic statistics to explain complex problems this is hugely misleading.

A very unscientific walk up a European street will show you this. Many couples do have 2 or 3 children. Some have more. Some stop at 1. The vast majority of these will live to be adults and a good deal of them will have children of their own. There are still Europeans being born.

According to the BBC, who would love us to believe the population decline narrative, there were 698,512 live births in 2013, and 26.5% of those were to mothers born outside the UK. Hugely significant, but not quite panic stations. 73.5% of 698,512 is 513,406 British babies born in England and Wales that year. With a life expectancy of 81.5 years that gives a steady state population of 41.8 million, compared to the current 56 million. A decline, but hardly a death spiral.

In fact with a fairly crowded country with a seemingly religious aversion to building new houses or roads, a 30% decline in population might not be a bad thing. Yes we would have to deal with the pension and social security problem, but we will have to deal with those anyway. There is really no need to add a load of aggressive Muslims into the equation.

Steyn's explanation is that the post-religious, rudderless, secular liberal societies run by self-indulgent baby boomers and passed on to their eternally adolescent offspring are simply not motivated to have children. Perhaps a better explanation is that as people have more control over their reproduction, something really quite recent in demographic terms, certain groups have shown themselves to be a sort of evolutionary offshoot. This still ties in with the selfish boomers hypothesis but recognises the fact that they are only one component of the population.

Of course whatever the explanation, importing the wrong sort of people to make a dysfunctional system work is sheer insanity. If the alternative was extinction then it probably wouldn't really matter, but the actual alternative appears to be a country of around 40-45 million people, the sort of levels we had in the 1970s. Only they would be better housed and wealthier. They might have to pay higher taxes for a few years and they might have to make their own pension provisions. But they wouldn't have to live with the pleasures of mass third world immigration and creeping Islamisation.

Sounds good to me.

Missing the Point - Pickles Letter to Muslim Leaders

What on earth is wrong with our government? This is a letter from Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, addressed to 1,000 Muslim leaders.

Firstly, the claim that a ‘great faith’ has been ‘hijacked’ and that this extremism is not a true representation of Islam. In what possible sense is supremacist violence against non-believers a hijacking or misrepresentation of Islam?  It is quite clearly not only allowed but exhorted in many sura of the quran, and was practiced by Mohammed himself with great enthusiasm.

Most notoriously in surah 9:29

Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given the Scripture - [fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humbled.

What's peaceful about that? The jizyah incidentally is a special tax imposed on non-Muslims by Muslim rulers.

Secondly the idea that 'British values are Muslim values' is deeply offensive. It appears to be subordinating British values and implying that they are essentially derived from Muslim values. This simply is not the case. What Muslim values does Britain hold?

But even taking this as a clumsy way of saying that Britain and Islam share some values, what exactly are they? They certainly don't seem to relate to free speech, freedom of religion, equality before the law or anything else I would recognise as being a British value. Nor would I recognise subjugation of women, hatred of Jews or killing of apostates as relating to any British values.

Thirdly, what exactly is Islam’s message of peace and unity? Where is this message in any Islamic scripture, jurisprudence or scholarly interpretation?

Finally, is it really necessary to describe the EDL as thugs espousing vitriol? To what vitriol is referring to? What thuggery does he mean? It appears that Pickles sees Muslims as the victims here, which of course is exactly what many jihadists would like people to think. 

Where does this notion of Islam as a peaceful religion come from? Who advises Eric Pickles on these things? Does he listen to any counter arguments?

Our government appears to be utterly blind to the dangers of radical Islam, because of it's pathological refusal to understand it. In 2013 we very nearly used the British military to attack Assad in support of a fundamentalist insurrection backed by Al-Quaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. Only a narrow defeat for Cameron in parliament prevented this.

We appear to have learned absolutely nothing from this, and still insist on dealing with this problem through empty platitudes and the blind hope that all Muslims and Muslim groups who haven't actually committed acts of terrorism are basically on our side. 

This basic failure to understand our enemy means we are constantly being manipulated into allowing, encouraging and funding a jihad against ourselves waged by people who seek to fundamentally alter our society for the worse. Until we have a far deeper understanding of political Islam we will continue to do so.

The Difficulty of Reforming Islam

Amongst those who have come to the realisation that Islam is not in fact a religion of peace at all, there are a strand of optimists who think it can somehow be reformed in the way Christianity was reformed in the middle ages. American reformist Muslim Zuhdi Jasser appears to be of this belief.

Reform is clearly necessary. 1.5 billion Muslims are not just going to disappear, and after 1,400 years it's deeply ingrained in the culture of huge chunks of the human race. It is not, like fascism or communism just going to evaporate or collapse under it's own weight.

It's almost impossible to overstate the difficulty of reforming Islam though. Reforming Christianity already took several centuries and much bloodshed. It's important though to understand how Islam is inherently anti-reform. One of the fundamental premises of Islam as a religion is that Mohammed was the final prophet and that the 'People of the Book' - the term the Quran uses for Jews and Christians - had over the years perverted and forgotten important parts of the message given to them by previous prophets,

In a sort of divine 'for the last bloody time' God decided to dictate his commands word for word, via the angel Gabriel to the prophet Mohammed and this became the Quran. Not only is it unchangeable, perfect and complete according to every extant Islamic tradition, but it was actually brought about by our bad habit of reforming previous revelations. How then, can you significantly alter the meaning without undermining the very purpose of the book?

The way in which a phrases in the bible such as "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" can readily be taken as an example in a certain historical context and applied to warn followers against hypocrisy or over zealous moralising. The direct, divine command in the Quran to "slay the non-believers where you find them" has no historical context. It is just that, the word of God as revealed to Mohammed.

To reform this will require either a fundamental shift more profound than anything experienced by Christianity, or a gradual withering to replace the ideological components with a vague cultural Islam which largely ignores the actual teachings of Mohammed.

Either of these could take centuries and have huge overspill for the rest of the world. The important thing at this stage is to understand this and have our own strategy for protecting our culture and security at home and our interests and allies abroad.

The Narrative Must Survive

Why is it so difficult to accept that Islam has deep rooted problems? We have 14 centuries of evidence and a core text which gives explicit sanction to every single action of Islamic State and all the actions of the various Islamic extremist groups. Yet still we stick with this ridiculous notion that it's all some sort of a misunderstanding. That an essentially peaceful religion is being twisted by a small number of fanatics.

There's a line in the film Full Metal Jacket which so brilliantly sums up the main attitude behind this brilliantly. When confronted with a young private who appears to have doubts about the war he explains that they are helping the Vietnamese because "inside every gook there's an American trying to get out." In a politically incorrect way, this articulates the very politically correct conceit at the core of the multicultural dogma - that our western values are universal human values, and only entrenched tyranny and ancient prejudice is preventing the world from living up to them.

The reality is a little more complex. Even if this is true on a genetic level, deep cultural values are ingrained in people from the moment they enter the world, and clearly not everyone aspires to the secular, western lifestyle. The tyrannies are as much a result of the culture as the culture a result of the tyranny, and thus the prejudices become self-reinforcing.

In this way 'diversity' tends not to lead to a united whole where everyone converges on a central idea and maintains superficial differences, but quite the reverse. People converge on superficial ideas while the deep rooted differences actually grow as they regard each others cultures with horror and recoil into self-propagating isolation.

In this way Muslim communities across the western world are more isolated than they were 30 years ago. Young Muslims born in western countries are more radical than their parents. Young women are more likely to wear hijabs and young men more likely to join IS. The entire narrative and ideology behind peaceful coexistence with curry and real ale has fallen apart.

A collapsing narrative of this type is difficult to process. The film Goodbye Lenin! captures this beautifully, following an East German family attempting to hide the collapse of Soviet Communism from their bedridden mother. It is something that people have a deep emotional attachment to and when defending it logically fails they will swear black is white rather than change their premises.

Thus David Cameron can say with utter certainty that Islam is a religion of peace just days after the Paris atrocity, sanctioned by a man with a Doctorate in Islamic studies and perpetrated by devout Muslims shouting 'Allahu Akbar.' Thus the media greeted with delight the advert in the Telegraph taken out by the Muslim Council of Britain condemning the attacks in the loosest terms. Thus the entire body of incredibly detailed research by the likes of Robert Spencer and Daniel Pipes, along with the pronouncements of Muslim scholars themselves can be completely ignored in favour of vague platitudes.

The narrative must survive, even if it is wrong, because if it fails then all manner of assumptions which rest upon it also fail.

Secretary of (Islamic) State

US Secretary of State John Kerry made a telling remark recently about just how far down the Sharia road the Barak Hussein Obama administration is. Responding to the Paris attacks of the 13th of November he contrasted them with the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January:

“There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, ‘Okay, they’re really angry because of this and that.’"

Absorb those words. A sort of legitimacy to mowing down cartoonists and back office staff in a magazine office because they published something that offended them. He backpedalled on the word legitimacy fairly quickly, but his meaning is quite clear. The west must bend and moderate it's values to accommodate Islam.

Viewed as the inane mewlings of an outgoing 'progressive' Secretary of State this is one thing. However, that would be the wrong way to view it.

People have a misconception that sharia law in the west means beheadings and stonings. Sharia does mean these things in it's most extreme form, but that is just one aspect. It's like equating secular law with incarceration. 

Sharia is a legal system outlined in the Quran and developed over 1,400 years of Islamic jurisprudence. It covers how Muslims should live but also how non-Muslims must act, and how the two should interact. It is shamelessly supremacist, relegating non-Muslim dhimmi to second class status by treaty. Those who seek peace without converting to Islam are subject to a raft of restrictions and impositions. Converting to Islam removes these rules. 

The key point for Kerry's comments relates to the principle that the dhimmi, as such conquered people are known, is the well established principle that those who criticise Islam have broken their treaty obligations and are no longer protected.

The west is developing it's own form of Sharia, not by a formal pact but on a case by case basis where overt criticism of Islam or the defence of western values is seen as an afront to Islam.

A better lens through which to view this insane comment is to see John Kerry as some vanquished local priest in the medieval Levant. His church crumbling and his congregation dwindling. His response to another random outburst of sectarian violence against Christians is to try and restore order and safety at any price. To remind Christians that it's their fault for breaking the terms of the pact. 

He still notionally proclaims the truth of his faith, quietly, out of earshot of the Muslim rulers. But the message is clear. We must change to accommodate their violent intolerance. We know the rules, and we can't complain too much when they enforce them.

It is a sad and pathetic attitude for anyone in a free western country to have. For one of the most powerful political leaders in the most powerful of western countries it is appalling. What hope does anyone have of defending free speech when such a figure gives 'legitimacy' to the Charlie Hebdo attacks?

Five Days

Five days. That's how long it took for someone to come out with the phrase that rightly deserves to be a parody of political cowardice and duplicity as regards violent Islam. The phrase of course is 'Religion of Peace.' I am amazed anyone can say it with a straight face.

"It cannot be said often enough that these butchers of IS are no reflection of the true religion of Islam, which is a religion of peace."

And it gets even stranger

"But we do have to recognise that whether these terrorists are in Tunisia, Paris or London, they spout the same bile that they claim comes from the religion of Islam.

That is why we have to take apart what they say and prove that's not the case."

What if when you take apart what they say you find that what they say exactly corresponds very closely to Islamic scripture and Islamic jurisprudence? A possibility he appears to have already ruled out, which is a strange starting point, unless he claims to know more about Islam than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of IS who has a PhD in Islamic Studies and has dedicated years of his life to better understanding the religion. Of peace.

An Unlikely Islamophobe

The excellent website of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) posts translations of items from the media of the Middle East, and often comes up with interesting things. One recent article in particular stands out as being especially illuminating.

Adnan Hussein, the Editor if Iraqi daily newspaper Al-Mada wrote this excellent article in response to the attacks in Paris.

Discussing the causes of terrorism, he nowhere mentions the iniquities of global capitalism or the legacy European colonialism. He doesn't even mention the muddled American led intervention in his country. He uses no empty platitudes about a religion of peace.

Instead he lays the blame firmly at the door of radical Islam and the all pervading culture of teaching this insane creed to generation after generation of Arabs and Muslims.

Had he written this article in a western newspaper he would have been derided as a racist and an Islamophobe. As an Arab Muslim saying this he is simply ignored.

Why do we insist on maintaining this bizarre insistence that Islam is nothing to do with terrorism?

The Need for a Western Culture

Islamic State should be a pathetic side show. A rabble of fundamentalist nutcases and disgruntled, bored youths running around the deserts of the middle east living out some depraved fantasy which seems half Qu'ranic literalism and half Grand Theft Auto. Yet this disjointed band of crackpots have managed to baffle the world's major powers and now carry out a serious terrorist atrocity in a major European city. 

If it came down to guns, bombs, planes and military tactics then the silliest, weakest most pacifistic of western powers could crush them in a week. The trouble is it doesn't just come down to that. It comes down to will, and the west had collectively lost it's will to stand up for it's values, or even state them. 

This is particularly so with the pro-Islamist left. All the decent things 'the left' have stood for over the last century from female suffrage and women's rights to gay rights, racial equality, the fight against anti-semitism, racial and religious equality, self governance and the end of imperialism have all been thrown out. Radical Islam stands directly against every single one of them.

I think it's a form of cultural masochism. People with an essentially slave or subordinate mentality now have their freedom and they don't know what to do with it. It scares them. They now have to think for themselves, make moral judgements or drift around in a relativist quagmire clutching at fashionable ideas which later turn out to be wrong.

They hate the culture they have created and find the certainty and moral absolutism of radical Islam appealing. They can still have the same old enemy of the stodgy old conservative white men who disapprove. Their more repellent attitudes can be blamed on their poverty and lack of education, which is our fault. Their radical and violent tendencies towards us can be blamed on our support for Israel and our imperialism a century ago. The continued failure of many Muslims to integrate into secular western democracies is our fault because we're racist.

They couldn't possibly, with a very few exceptions, go back to the culture they hated and I don't suppose most people now would have any real working memory of life before the cultural revolution of the 1960s, nevermind before the post WW2 welfare boom, or the certainties of a bold and confident British empire, run by white protestants.

Nor should we look to go back to these things. They were already out of date when they were overthrown.

What we have failed to do is create or evolve any sort of alternative which is both inspiring and inclusive enough to really motivate people to defend it, let alone evangelise it or wish to see it spread in the wider world. Instead we have a sort of loose buffet of ideas about a welfare state which is already essentially collapsed, freedom of expression so long as it doesn't go too far or cause any real offence, multiculturalism which is fragmented and divisive and gives no central values which all people living here can be expected to share.

We 'tolerate' everything without really standing for anything.

To me, we have many things that are worth standing for. We have had them for centuries, but they have become tarnished by imperialism, militarism and national, religious and racial chauvinism of a long gone era, and we have essentially thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

The Religion of Peace Fights Back - Or Does it?

There isn't a lot to say on the Paris attacks that hasn't been said already. Another 130 lives lost to the religion of peace, and the worst act of violence in France since the end of World War 2.

The immediate aftermath of the Paris attacks provided fairly slim pickings for those of us who were looking out for the usual idiotic platitudes about the religion of peace, and the claims that it is somehow misunderstood by a tiny number of Muslims, who take a few passages of the Qu'ran out of context and blacken the name of an otherwise peaceful creed.

Piers Morgan was first out of the traps with his absurd suggestion that they were not 'real Muslims.' As though the dough faced loudmouth was somehow better placed to determine what constitutes true Islam than Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who has a PhD in Islamic studies.

Then the Islam PR machine got into gear, with Qanta Ahmed in the Spectator describing the attacks as 'an act of war against Islam.' An absurd 'black is white' statement and frankly insulting to the scores of people who died in Paris for whom, like many others senselessly slaughtered throughout the world, the last words they heard on earth would have been "Allahu Akbar."

Meanwhile the twits on Twitter, so beloved of people who like to get a slogan across without having to back it up with any substance, have made #notinmyname the hashtag for 'moderate Muslims.' So moderate it seems that they have missed the point that jihad was never done in their name. It is done, as many Parisians found out on Friday in the name of Allah.

And better late than never, Reuters published this on Sunday night. The predictable grim warnings of an 'Islamophobic backlash' and the preparations for cries of persecution and discrimination against Muslims. As though they are somehow the victims here.

The biggest fraud of the moment though seems to be the open letter to al-Baghdadi, published late last month and signed by an array of Islamic scholars. The letter is the brain child of Abdallah Bin Bayyah, a prominent Islamic scholar and it does indeed condemn IS and their actions. There are however, a few problems.

At 18 pages and heavy with references to the Qu'ran and the Hadiths, it's not light reading. At this stage I have only skimmed it but a few things stand out:

Regarding the need to read the whole Quran and not just cherry pick parts of it the "Moderate" Muslims Scholars claim that the reason behind this is that everything in the Qur’an is the truth, and everything in authentic Hadith is Divinely inspired, so it is not permissible to ignore any part of it.

Pretty definitive. Not all that moderate. So presumably including this part

Quran 2.191-193 said:
"And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out. And Al-Fitnah [disbelief or unrest] is worse than killing...
but if they desist, then lo! Allah is forgiving and merciful. And fight them until there is no more Fitnah [disbelief and worshipping of others along with Allah] and worship is for Allah alone. But if they cease, let there be no transgression except against Az-Zalimun (the polytheists, and wrong-doers, etc.)"

This literalism is exactly the problem with Islam.

But the real give away comes when they cite this often misused quote:

Quran 5.32 said:
‘Because of that, We decreed for the Children of Israel that whoever slays a soul for other than a soul, or for corruption in the land, it shall be as if he had slain mankind altogether; and whoever saves the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind. Our messengers have already come to them with clear proofs, but after that many of them still commit excesses in the land .’
But Muslims are not the Children of Israel. Jews are. So this passage is merely saying that Jews are prohibited from killing anyone.

They acknowledge quite openly the desire for a Caliphate

There is agreement (ittifaq) among scholars that a caliphate is an obligation upon the Ummah. The Ummah has lacked a caliphate since 1924 CE.

Their objection to slavery appears to be mostly regarding the lewdness of taking sex slaves, and the bad image it will give Islam, ending as it does with the warning that

You bear the responsibility of this great crime and all the reactions which this may lead to against all Muslims.

Their section on hudud, the sadists charter for flogging, mutilating, stoning and beheading those who offend Islam begins not with, as you might hope, an unequivocal statement that while this may have been acceptable in 7th century Arabia, it is not acceptable anywhere today. Instead they write:

Hudud punishments are fixed in the Qur’an and Hadith and are unquestionably obligatory in Islamic Law.
They go on to point out that a high burden of proof is needed.


So at first glance it seems like more of the same duplicity (taqiyya, permitted by the Quran) and lame defence of a fundamentally violent and intolerant religion. And of course at the length and tone of this, few people will ever read it thoroughly. But the likes and the shares on Facebook (tracked on the site) will probably help the image of Islam, and provide a great reply to anyone looking to show how moderate Muslims do condemn IS.

Not that I imagine these scholars secretly support IS or it's methods, they probably don't. But they do not offer an alternative, peaceful, secular interpretation of Islam. They appear mostly to disagree on the means, not the end, and the finer points of it's application rather than the fundamental idea behind it.

They don't disown the principle of jihad, or put any clear distance between themselves and the brutal hudud punishments. They don't offer a reformed, moderate Islam compatible with life in a 21st century secular democracy. They appear to be offering first and foremost advice on public relations.

A long way short of anything that would convince me that the people who chose to slaughter scores of innocent men and women in Paris on Friday are just some loony fringe who have taken a few passages out of context.

On the plus side all of this is a lot more subdued than we have become accustomed to, and indeed than I was expecting. Poland has said no more migrants. France closed it's borders immediately. No major political figure has yet visited a Mosque. Perhaps Europe is finally starting to stir out of the deep and deadly slumber from which it has been so reluctant to awake.

The Great Guilt Trip

It was 12°C in Calais last night, where 6,000 illegal immigrants are still camped out trying to illegally enter England. Munich was 8°C. Malmo in northerly Sweden was a positively balmy 13°C. The migrant crisis has gone on against a backdrop of an unusually mild winter over most of the continent. This will almost certainly not last.

I don't suppose anyone knows with any accuracy how many migrants are actually sleeping rough across Europe at the moment but they certainly do know that there are many, and as it gets colder it will get much harder, especially for those from warm climates to sleep outside.

Over the next few weeks it will turn much colder and people who are ill equipped and unaccustomed to cold weather will die if they are sleeping in damp makeshift shelters without heating. Again, officials know this. Migrants know this. Anyone with a modicum of common sense knows that you can not sleep outside in northern Europe during the winter. Every year homeless and elderly people die this way. Any day now we could have a cold snap.

That means that any day now we could see news reports with the dead bodies of migrants being carried out of their makeshift shelters having succumbed to hypothermia. An amateur cynic might say that if this stems the flow of illegal migrants from the third world then it is a price worth paying, however distasteful anyone might find dead bodies. However, a truly accomplished cynic would notice that throughout 2015 perilous attempts to enter Europe have been orchestrated and encouraged and the drowned babies that have resulted from them have been used as a stick with which to beat those who oppose mass Islamic immigration, and say how cruel and heartless are those who wish to enforce, let alone tighten, our immigration laws.

How much more effective would this guilt trip be with the corpses of women and children being carried out of camps in Calais and Malmo? Tiny body bags laid by adult ones. If a handful of these stories come out, in the run up to the season of goodwill how will Europe react? How many really have the stomach to say let them die, or deport them? Do we even have the ability to deport these undocumented people in this time frame? To where? Even ship them, against their will, to warmer climes within the EU would be a logistical and political nightmare?

Of course we have no such stomach anyway. European politicians and the public will cave in and house them, and as a result millions more will come. The media, the government, the churches and the Islamist terrorists who have manufactured this crisis will have achieved their ends for the price of a few dozen deaths or poor, ignorant migrants and the women and children they drag along with them. Something they have already proven themselves completely indifferent to. The already strong fifth column of angry young Muslim men across the continent will be further strengthened, and the pathological self-loathing masquerading as good nature, will be even more ripe for exploitation.

If we want to have any chance of stopping this blatant set-up from being a success then we had better fortify ourselves now for the sight of people frozen to death, in Europe, and reconcile ourselves to the idea that the migrants themselves and the 'kindness' of the liberal left have brought this about by encouraging vast numbers of people to come here in this fashion.

BBC Bias - The Little Things

There's sometimes a perception that BBC bias means the whole organisation is simply a mouthpiece for the Labour Party, a latter day Pravda grotesquely distorting the facts to promote it's own view of the world.

Understandable, but also simplistic. The BBC's bias is also a subtle and maybe subconscious reflex, as demonstrated by the headline of this fairly trivial article about the European Union referendum, which reports that the 'No' campaign are urging the incoming head of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) to rethink their unswerving support for EU membership.

The trouble is there isn't a 'No' campaign. After the Electoral Commission criticised the inherently biased wording of the original question it was changed from Yes or No to Leave or Remain. It is the 'Leave' campaign who are lobbying the CBI.

The BBC continue to call it the No campaign because, as the Electoral Commission ruled, this has connotations of a negative, regressive and insular stance, which is exactly how the typical BBC staffer perceives those who wish to leave the European Union.

Whether this was a conscious decision or an involuntary oversight is anyone's guess, and anyway it doesn't really matter. The BBC view is that being in the EU is inherently good, progressive and nice while leaving it is bad, and this continues to leak through into their coverage.

Not All Hate Crimes are Created Equal

Another blast from the past.

2011 this time and two stories which appeared within a month of each other.

The first one in March concerns Emdadur Choudhury, a self proclaimed Islamic fundamentalist on benefits who decided to protest at a remembrance day parade with his fellow jihadists in East London. In front of past and present British soldiers and their families they chanted "British soldiers burn in hell" and burned poppies Choudhury was fined £50 plus a £15 victim surcharge.

The second story was about former soldier Andrew Ryan of Carlisle, who was understandably annoyed by poppy burning. So annoyed in fact that he went to a library, took a copy of the Quran and set fire to it outside the Old Town Hall in Carlisle city centre. Ryan was jailed for 70 days.

What the hell is wrong with England? How on earth can a man be sent to prison for burning a book in the street, while a self declared enemy of everything Britain stands for can disrupt a remembrance parade in such a foul way and be given a fine that is less than you would get for a parking offence?

There are two possible explanations. The first is that the British establishment is cowering in fear of these Islamic extremists. They are desperate to be seen to be tough on Islamophobia, and equally desperate not to be seen to come down too hard on Islamists. The second explanation is that they secretly agree with Choudhury, they want to promote fundamentalist Islam. They give a derisory fine which he will probably never pay anyway as they have to be seen to be doing something, yet they come down hard on any resistance to it.

The Quilliam Foundation and 'Moderate Muslims'

Aren't the Quilliam Foundation a reasonable lot? Dedicated to tackling extremism in all it's forms, the Muslim think tank claims to stand for 'religious freedom, equality, human rights and democracy' who could object to that?

It's co-founder and Chairman Maajid Nawaz is a former Islamist, imprisoned for 5 years in Egypt  for extremist agitating. There he was adopted by Amnesty International as a 'prisoner of conscience' and his life seems he have gone upwards and leftwards ever since. He was instrumental in creating the new, more conciliatory Tommy Robinson, and later stood as a Liberal Democrat MP. So he must have reformed himself, right?

First things first, William Henry 'Abdullah' Quilliam is a strange choice to name your moderate Muslim think tank after. A 19th century convert, he is credited with building the first Mosque in Britain in his native Liverpool and worked tirelessly to promote Islam there with generous funding from Muslim countries. His political activities were not limited by his new found spirituality though. He was insistent that no Muslim should ever fight for a European power, he opposed British intervention in the Sudan and swore allegiance instead tot he Ottoman Empire. He didn't go to live there though. He stayed in Liverpool, calling for a worldwide Caliphate.

So it's not really surprising that despite their 'reasonable' image and reassuring disavowal of extremism 'in all it's forms' they seem to have a particular interest in the usually fairly trivial examples of anti-Islamic extremism such as racial profiling, and so little to say on the hateful, fundamentalist preachers operating in Mosques across the country with the aim of creating an Islamic state in England.

That's not to say that Quilliam is a hotbed of extremism breeding the next generation of suicide bombers. In fact it's worse. They exist in a grey area who share with ISIS the same end of a global Islamic Caliphate, but disagree on the means to get there.

So far there is much talk of not alienating moderate Muslims, and driving them into the arms of extremists. Such talk is complete nonsense. any Muslim who, considering the events of the last few years, is driven to Islamic terrorism by the understandable suspicion many people have towards Muslims was clearly never very firm in their belief in secular democracy to start with. Conversely any Muslim who is sincere in his belief in secularism is more likely to be angered by his fellow Muslims bringing such suspicion and attention to the personal matter of his faith that he is likely he will reject all the more the extremist elements of it.

We actually need to polarise Muslims to that we know what we're up against. So that Muslims who are genuinely secular and moderate are brought into the side of secularism and moderation, and those who are secretly or dormantly fundamentalist are shown to be so.

Sharia Cherie Blair and Cultural Masochism

Last week I talked about Lauren Booth, half sister of Cherie Blair, wife of King Tony. But somehow I missed this little gem from 10 years ago.

Shabina Begum was a 16 year old student of Bangladeshi extraction, and in 2006 she took her school to the highest courts in the land to argue for the right to wear the jilbab, the formless bag that women in Saudi Arabia wear to demonstrate that they have no rights at all.

When the High Court rejected her case, frogmouth Cherie Blair (nee Booth) herself stepped in to represent Begum in the Court of Appeals. They won, in what Sharia Cherie described as "a victory for all Muslims who wish to preserve their identity and values despite prejudice and bigotry."

It seems worth mentioning at this point that Begum is of Bangladeshi extraction and was born in the UK around 1990. The jilbab meanwhile was invented in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, loosely based on a specific Wahabi interpretation of the Qu'ran. Bangladesh is traditionally a relatively moderate Sunni Muslim country. The jilbab forms no part of it or Shabina Begum's traditions or identity. It's a potent symbol of the absolutist and insanely literal interpretation of the Qu'ran which pertains in Saudi Arabia and is behind much of the militant Islam which drives terrorism. I'm not a human rights lawyer but I would imagine Cherie must have known this before taking the case to the highest court in the land.

Quite aside from the absurdity of a high profile case in the House of Lords to enable her to defend her "modesty" this must have made for some interesting evenings at the Blair household, what with Tony then engaged in the height of the war on terror, and Cherie fighting for the right of a British Bangladeshi girl to dress like an Arabian fundamentalist.

To their great credit the school, Denbigh High School, to their eternal credit fought on to the House of Lords where Booth again represented Begum and finally lost, establishing the principle that the school dress code did indeed trump the right to dress like someone you wouldn't want to sit near on public transport.

There was something else a bit strange about this case though. Denbigh high school is in Luton, and at the time of the case it's pupils were some  80% Muslim, and 4 of the 6 governors of the school who fought so hard against this display of Islamic extremism, as represented by the wife of the then Prime Minister, were also Muslims. 

The interesting character Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, leader of the organisation Muslim Parliament said that  "This may be a victory for human rights but it is also a victory for fundamentalism." Siddiquie is something like the Muslim equivalent of the Archbishop of Canterbury. He supported the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and strongly criticised the Iraq war in 2003, but is also a founding member of British Muslims for a Secular Democracy. He's a crackpot by any reasonable standards, but by the standards of modern British Muslims he's a hand wringing moderate.

In fact by the standards of Cherie Blair he is a wet. Clearly like her half-sister, only the full fat Wahabi lunacy fresh from Saudi Arabia is interesting and enriching enough for Cherie and her view of multicultural Britain. 

It's a curious case for a leading human rights lawyer and a self-appointed first lady of President Blair to take up. And it adds to my suspicion that at the very heart of New Labour, and throughout our political establishment is deep seated wish to actually promote Islamic fundamentalism at the expense of our own culture. Even when the genuine "moderate Muslims" who they claim to support are dead set against it.

The explanation that this was driven by a sort of soppy liberalism taken to an extreme simply doesn't wash. Cherie Booth wasn't fighting a stuffy white establishment for the right of a ethnic minority to wear her colourful traditional garb and enrich us, she was fighting moderate Muslims for the right of a second generation Bangladeshi to wear the uniform of militant Wahabi Islam from Saudi Arabia. It is not tolerance or diversity it is wanton cultural suicide.

Looking the Wrong Way

200 years ago Thomas Robert Malthusians was predicting that the population boom at the time would lead inevitably to hunger, disease and war. In 1811 the population of England was 8.7 million, by 2011 it was 53 million, according to Wikipedia. It had multiplied by 6, and yet food was cheaper and hunger less widespread than in Malthus' time, and the anniversary of the battle of Waterloo passed in June without much possibility of a rematch.

What happened in the interim was two things. Most importantly and best known is that technology and trade gave us more food, advances in medicine and general living conditions conquered many diseases and with a couple of false dawns, Europeans finally tired of slaughtering each other and decided to go on holiday and swap wines and cheese instead. The other factor, much less discussed, is that people stopped reproducing at the same rate. According to this study the Total Fertility Rate peaked at around 1820 and then simply dropped off a cliff from a high of nearly 6 children per woman, and fell below the replacement rate of 2.1 women per children by the 1930s. It briefly spiked after World War 2, giving us the baby boomer generation who are now in their 60s and 70s. However, after peaking at 2.95 in the 1960s, not a "boom" which would have impressed demographers in the 1820s, the rate fell again. It's currently hovering around 1.9, which is below the replacement rate, but far from the worst in the developed world. 

We hear a lot about over population. That is people who believe that the biggest problem we face is ever more people leading to ever greater competition for resources this will create. I've never bought this, for the same reasons Thomas Malthus was wrong originally - we tend to get more efficient at using the resources we have, extracting resources we didn't know we had and finding substitutes for resources that do become too scarce to use economically. 

What doesn't seem to get a lot of attention is the opposite problem. Densely populated and expensive as Britain is it's far from packed to bursting point, nor starving for the lack of food or other necessities. A far greater problem is our massive unfunded pension liabilities, because the burden on a much reduced working population supporting a greatly enlarged non-working population will be enormous.

And it isn't just a British problem by any means. Nor even a developed world problem.

Here's the World Bank's data on fertility

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN...

We are facing a global equivalent of what has happened in Europe and Japan. A fertility rate in freefall, an aging population which is declining and not enough people of working age to actually extract and use the resources we need.

China, Thailand and Cuba are well below the 2.1 replacement threshold.

Even much of the Arab world is hovering in the 2-3 zone and falling, and to find positive growth you have to go to sub-Saharan Africa, which dominates the top of the data. But even here it's falling dramatically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate...

The world as a whole is at 2.36, just above replacement.

Our current predicament in the UK of high prices for first time buyers and a large pension liability might be just a foretaste of global population decline, and the same problems on a world wide scale as billions of people live longer, work less, consume more and have fewer children. And the house prices and taxes required to cover it won't encourage people to have more children or have them younger, which might avert this.

Anyone think we're going to run out of people before we run out of oil, water, land or food?

It's not quite clear if or how this trend can be reversed. Maybe it will self correct after the baby boomers die off, freeing up resources. Maybe populations will move around according to which countries have a shortage and which have a surplus. Something that will have profound cultural implications but perhaps make the situation at least economically sustainable. 

Lauren Booth - Supreme Cultural Masochist

I missed this at the time but in 2010 Lauren Booth, half-sister of Cherie Blair, converted to Islam. She's now set up a blog full of nonsense, promoting Islam and denigrating Britain. It's quite an interesting insight into the mind of an über cultural masochist.

We hear how unfair it is that vocal Muslims face extra security checks, just because a few of their number happen to have flown planes into buildings to make their point. We hear how Islam is good for the environment, and the generosity of Muslims brings communities together, two favourite hobby horses of the left. We hear how it's people vs. government on the case of refugees, 'the people' saying let them in and the government saying No. She obviously doesn't speak to the same people I do, but then seeing as she lives in Qatar, who have taken a grand total of zero Syrian refugees as far as I can tell, she wouldn't.

Her article about inviting her mother to Qatar which is illuminating too. Their respect for the elderly and parents in particular is admirable, though in Lauren's case clearly this respect hasn't prevented her from moving half way around the world to pursue Islam or mocking her mother's fear and antipathy towards Islamic extremism. Instead she tells her that Qatar is "like Cannes in the 1950s,with lots of glossy sheikhs wafting around and beautiful women, dressed modestly and behaving with casual decorum.” In contrast with a picture of an elderly white British woman covered in blankets, clutching a hot water bottle and sitting by a gas fire with the mocking subtitle "Another British pensioner lives life to the full."

This is probably the most telling. Of course Booth wasn't in Cannes in the 1950s. She means it's like her romanticised vision of Cannes in the 1950s. Stylish and elegant where Britain is stuffy and conservative. Exciting and intriguing where Britain is drab and familiar. Flogging and stoning wasn't legal in Cannes in the 50s of course, but let's not get too hung up (pardon the pun) on such trivia. If you're a well off, liberal lefty looking for something stylish and exciting then converting to Islam and having a place Qatar trumps any amount of volunteering in Africa or buying a bolt hole in Tuscany. It's way more committed than getting a tattoo. Let alone such a simple and mundane thing as looking after your elderly mother and adhering to the culture she brought you up in. Suck on that big sis.

Of course, Booth fits few people's definition of a normal or decent person in many ways. She left her husband Craig Darby after he a motorbike accident left him with brain damage, and her way of finding a husband might raise some eyebrows, or indeed some stone throwing hands, in the countries of her adopted religion.

It all starts to paint a picture of a selfish and rather bitter woman with a grudge against Britain, choosing the most shocking way to rebel and denigrate western civilisation by aligning themselves with it's most aggressive enemy. For Tony Blair's sister in law it might all seem chic and stylish, something to write Guardian articles about as though converting to Islam was something akin to becoming a vegan or joining Greenpeace. Of course this is not the reality for the dim witted school girls who elope to join ISIS or for the girls who do their rebellious exploration closer to home and end up being raped by Muslims in Rotherham or elsewhere.

It's not quite clear whether these attention whores actually understand that Islam is not some exciting diversion like a tattoo or a motorbike. It's a vicious death cult which is busily engaged in maiming, killing and oppressing millions of people across the world. If they don't then they're just gullible fools, but I suspect they know full well what Islam is, but are so consumed by their hatred of western civilisation that they don't care.

Don't worry, the tax payer won't be paying for it. The nice people at Serco dug deep and transported 7 illegal immigrants from Heathrow to Manchester on behalf of the Home Office, for the sum of £3,000.

Of course the tax payer is paying for it somehow. Even if Serco are making a "loss" on this you can be very sure they're making it back with what they're milking from such ridiculous contracts elsewhere.

Never having made this particular journey before in my life, and lacking the wisdom and economies of scale that we pay these experts at Serco for, armed only with a laptop I Googled "Heathrow to Manchester" and found this:

National Express coaches range between £34.50 and £45.90 depending on when you leave. 7 seats at the top price would cost £321.30.

Standard rail fare without booking is £189, so times 7 is £1,323.

SkyScanner shows BA flights today as £195, so £1,365 for 7.

Sixt will hire you a 15 seat minibus for £335 for 24 hours. £120 for a driver for a day, same again on fuel makes it £575, £22 for the M6 toll both ways and it's a shade under £600.

I couldn't get a quote from people smugglers, but Mogdan paid £370 to cross the channel, which is a bit closer but involves an international border and a stretch of sea. If you could do a deal to get these people the rest of the way up to Manchester for the same price that would be £2,590.

So can I get a job in procurement at Serco? Or better still, the Home Office? I'd only ask about triple what someone of my experience would get on the open market, which is the first of many bargains for them. Maybe not, as in a full 15 minutes I haven't been able to find a more expensive (not to mention gratuitously offensive) way of transporting 7 people from London to Manchester short of chartering an aircraft.

Even the most obvious explanation of blatant corruption doesn't seem plausible. If you were going to help out your brother/uncle/mate on the Home Office's tab you'd probably be a little bit more restrained. Half that price would leave you room to hire and fuel a minibus and still pocket £1,000. Why the stretched limo? Why blab about it in the pub? 

It looks like another example of our influential cultural masochists seeking to elevate these people to a privileged class.

World Power in a Week

If it wasn't so entirely possible that it would lead to World War 3, the flapping indignation of NATO would be comical. Four years after the US started providing material aid, and after one year of actively bombing Syria while achieving nothing, Russia appears to have achieved much within one week of a concerted campaign.

There are sound, obvious reasons for this success. Firstly is their willingness to put adequate firepower behind it - Russian fighter planes and cruise missiles, supplies of military hardware to the Syrian government, and now it seems Russian troops actually on the ground. Contrast this with the drone strikes and long range bombing runs of Obama who clearly wanted the glory of overthrowing a brutal regime and fighting terrorism, but not the bad publicity of American troops dying in Syria.

Most importantly though, the Russians are succeeding because of their wholly sensible decision to work with the Assad regime. At the very least, the regime has proven itself capable of running a stable country which tolerates minorities and will fight ISIS, even if it's not exactly a liberal democracy. It is quite simply the only possible way of stopping vast swathes of the country falling into the far worse hands of Islamic State. The western approach of adding yet another faction (one which no-one in Syria seems to want anyway) to the tinder box was always folly.

Such obvious folly that it makes one wonder if perpetual civil war and instability was the American objective all along. But this is the other thing that is so impressive about the Russian intervention - they seemingly haven't speculated about American motives, or got bogged down with the absurdly complicated politics of the region. Instead they have gone ahead with a very straight forward intervention to support a somewhat friendly government against a terrorist insurgency. Had America and it's allies done this 4 years ago, or even 1 year ago then this whole debacle could have been finished far quicker.

Instead, whether through indecision or malice, they have gifted Russia something it has longed for since the collapse of the Soviet Union: being a genuine world power which can look Washington in the eye. Shrewdly however, Putin has left the door wide open for the US and it's allies to cooperate with the Russian intervention. A deviously magnanimous move which leaves Obama with the choice of either standing back and letting Russia succeed where they have failed, or to petulantly condemn the Russian action while providing no better ideas. So far it looks like they're opting for the second course of action, with ill tempered accusations of Russian fighters violating Turkish airspace and the like. Unless Washington is prepared to risk World War 3 to repel these brief aerial incursions into the porous and barren border regions of southern Turkey, it is so much hot air.

So Putin's task is complete. After the serial failures of western countries to achieve their publicly stated objectives in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or elsewhere, Russia has shown that it has the military capability and the political will to act where America can not. Countries facing an Islamic insurgency have a new number to call when they need outside assistance, and the world is significantly more bipolar than it was this time last week.

Fight Eggs with Eggs - Not Shit Eating Grins

Looking at that young man who got egged at the Conservative Party Conference in Manchester, I couldn't help but feel that it painted a rather pathetic picture of the state of the so called right. Not that the Conservatives are really right wing in any meaningful sense, but they are the least left wing of the major parties. I was quietly pleased, if not ecstatic when they won the election and while hardly radical their attempt to reign in the worst excesses of the public sector largesse they inherited from Labour seems a worthwhile exercise.

Of course it's no great surprise to see the shrill left "protesting" outside, often aggressively shoving, blocking paths and throwing eggs. In a perfect photo op, one young Tory was hit right on the head with an egg. So there he is, this preppy looking Young Conservative with a gormless grin laughing at being hit by an egg. Great.

Where's the F off? Where's the anger? Where's the eye for an eye? It's fine to take these things in good humour, but you can't just take these things lying down. Egg them back. This is not the new testament, it's a power game. John Prescott understood this, which is why he lamped the man who egged him in Wales in 2001.

Seems like a small thing but it goes right to the heart of the total failure of British conservatives to make any mark or be taken seriously - they're too damn nice. The term cuckservative describes it well.

Why I like Jeremy Corbyn

I've finally worked out why I quite like Jeremy Corbyn and want him to be the next leader of the Labour Party.

He actually has ideas. Really bad ones, but ideas none the less. He thinks stuff like railways should be owned and run by the government. He thinks the erosion and degradation of British society is a good thing. He thinks we should destroy our military capability.

All of these things are wrong. All of them have happened anyway under both Labour and Tory governments who said these things were wrong and that they wouldn't happen. I don't know if Blair or Cameron actually think these things are good like Corbyn does. I suspect they just don't care and do them when in office because it's expedient.

If Corbyn stands up and says they are right then he has to say why they are right, and the Tories have to say why they are wrong. Cameron and his ilk can't do this because they don't really believe they are wrong, but others can. Whether that's a rump of level headed people in the Conservative party, UKIP or someone else compeletely doesn't really matter.

Next time we might not have to suffer the banality of the last election, with two vaccuous imbeciles arguing over basic administrative competence (of which neither have any) and attempting to outbid each other on a meaningless array of tax and spending promises they couldn't possibly keep.

Instead Corbyn's stupid, failed and wrong headed ideas would be brought out into the open where they would once and for all be smashed to pieces by uncompromising reality, probably even more comprehensively than they were smashed in the late 1970s where a then timid Thatcher was being advised by wets from the Heath camp, and Hayek, Friedman et al were a guilty secret, and the National Front was the main opposition to mass immigration. Now we have the likes of John Redwood who have been in governments who implemented free market policies and saw them work. We have the likes of Nigel Farage who can make a compelling case for national independence without being fascists.

So bring it on. Verbalise what the Labour party actually think and are planning to do next in their century-old quest to ruin Britain and watch the rotten idea fall apart. Or vote for another bland "modern" candidate who says all the right things about free markets, moderate taxes and national independence then continues to piss all over them.