UNLIMITED IMMIGRATION INTO THE UNITED KINGDOM

Right now on January 2nd politicians of the two main parties along with sections of an unsympathetic if not downright hostile media are wringing their hands sorrowfully over impending large scale immigration into the UK of people from Romania and Bulgaria. Other groupings of the political and media establishment however are cheering it on. The major supporters and apologists for these coming large scale new arrivals are the Liberal Democrats, the BBC, and a small section of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Here the Lib-Dems are universally pro and vociferous. The BBC, typically sly and slimy, only has reportage and interviewees from those with an supposedly independent caste of mind but who invariably turn out to be in the pro camp providing an endless litany of rationalization about how mass immigration has always benefitted and will continue to benefit the British economy with immigrants providing the Government with increased tax revenue and the country at large with all the delights of cultural variety. Yes, they’ll all be paying tax, making a great contribution to the economy with all their amazing skills and besides, there’s always the new and tasty food they’ll be introducing us to!

Quite frankly, there are millions of people out there who’ve heard all this stuff time and again over the last thirty years and now quite rightly believe that they’re getting more and more of the same old crap from the same kind of people who’ve got nothing to do with the vast majority of the working population who live north of London. So having said that let’s take a look.

Most of the immigrants that came to Britain between 1870 and 1950 were Jews, Irish and Italian. The Irish helped build our roads and railways, the Jews the garment, food retail and light entertainment industries while the Italians contributed to our service sector. The Irish and the Jews were not economic migrants. They came to escape persecution. The Jews at the hands of the Russians, appalling treatment at best. The mainly Catholic Irish who suffered at the hands of British prior to Irish independence. At its maximum they accounted for a combined total of no more than three quarters of a million people spread over a period of some seventy years. The decade 1955-1965 saw the arrival of another half million immigrants, mainly from the Caribbean, who often took up employment in the transport and national health service sectors, generally making a positive contribution to British society. It is when television and media panelists along with politicians speak favorably about the benefits of immigration it is these groups to which they refer as a basis for reportage about the benefits of immigration.

Indeed, it is from this perspective that they view recent immigration into Britain over the last three decades. The trouble with this sleight of hand is that immigration into the UK over the last thirty years has been entirely different to what it was in the past, significantly both in volume and cultural character. It is the sheer volume that is glossed over more than anything else. We are not talking here of a quarter million Jews or four hundred thousand Irish over fifty years but over four million arrivals from Pakistan, Bangladesh and India in not much more than half that time along with another half million from Africa! To most people living in the Midlands, the North or Scotland and Wales before 1960, seeing such people was more occasional than anything. Today, most sizable cities north of London have large communities of Asian immigrants who in some cases outnumber the indigenous population.

This mass arrival of Asians in such a short period of time is now paralleled by another wave of mass immigration from East Europe, the main weight of which has been the arrival of one million Poles in the  last less ten years and the impending arrival of possibly one million Romanians and Bulgarians from East Europe’s poorest societies. Given these facts it might be useful to consider the political and historical circumstances surrounding these two great waves of inflow. There can be no doubt that this great influx of people began during the latter end of Margaret Thatcher’s political rule but increased without check or hindrance whatsoever during Tony Blair’s time in office and the Labour Party’s continued governance under Gordon Brown, ultimately turning into an avalanche. To supporters of unchecked mass immigration the use of this word is only too often branded as a heresy, or racist, fascist and worse. I’m sorry to tell you however that such labelling, snarling and finger jabbing is only too typical of an unresolved fascist mentality itself. The facts are plain enough. What is important however is to examine their causes and perhaps ask yourself why a situation of rapid, unchecked mass immigration exists.

Towards the end of its life the Thatcherite Government turned a blind eye to a steady trickle of immigration from Asia. As soon as Tony Blair’s Labour won its first election in 1997 however, this immigration was positively encouraged. In the great majority of cases these immigrants were Muslim. Before 1980 the sight of mosques proliferating in most British cities was unheard of. From the time of New Labour Government they became commonplace. Equally important, from the time of New Labour Government a remarkable new phenomenon appeared on our streets. Muslim fundamentalist clerics, allowed into Britain without let or hindrance by British Home Secretaries like David Blunkett, were allowed to preach race hatred against Jews and white people in general to large crowds of followers in streets outside mosques and along with this followed the unchecked sale of disgusting Muslim race hate literature. To all of this the police for no understandable reason turned a deaf ear and a blind eye. New Labour permitted and encouraged it all.

And with the fundamentalist race hate preaching came the radicalization of large sections of young Muslim listeners. The same youth who are today fighting for Islamic jihad and fundamentalism in Syria, throughout the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia. It is well known indeed to British security services that Muslim terrorism is a main British export round the world and a clear consequence of New Labor’s policy of turning a blind eye to unchecked immigration. So why did Tony Blair and his Home Secretaries permit it? Allow the UK to become a haven for mass South Asian immigration? The taxation and economic benefits argument doesn’t hold water. Most women arriving were unskilled and couldn’t speak English. In this respect things haven’t changed. If they did work it was within small family shops supplying south Asian products for their local community, the great majority of their husbands and other male relatives doing likewise, so the notion of economic benefit is simply a myth.

More important than anything else though is that the many millions of Asians who came were not fleeing from any form of persecution. To claim that is false. They were in main economic migrants and came to Britain purely for economic reasons.  

This first great wave of mass immigration under New Labour has brought no real economic benefit at all to the UK. What it has brought however is cultural diversity and with it on the downside a climate of tension and terrorism into our homes and onto our streets. Such a downside includes a plainly racist attitude to those among whom they live and their cultural values such as equality between sexes, rights of women, tolerance towards people of other races and differences of sexual gender along with a general belief in equality and democracy. In the case of the above first wave of mass immigration, New Labour Government was under no legal obligation to admit such numbers. They did it as a matter of policy. It has been suggested that this was done to create greater competition in the labour market. Something that an undoubted Thatcherite like Tony Blair might have wished to do. Greater competition of course being a euphemism for cheap labour or cheapening the cost of labour. This is hardly likely as the vast majority of Asian arrivals were hardly more than small shopkeepers or employees in the services industries at best. Another view, that of attacking the British working class by diluting its cultural integration and cohesiveness so soon after its battering by Margaret Thatcher and her police is more tenable.

It is now generally felt that New Labour, over its more than a decade in Government, did little to nothing for British working people and was generally hostile to the Trades Union Movement. Indeed, Blair himself is often called Tory Blair and recognised by many in that Party as a political descendant of Thatcher herself. His successor Gordon Brown certainly was. Both men and their Governments it is recognised did little to nothing for the poor and the working people of Britain. In fact the consequences of their financial policies has been a great impoverishment of most British people. After Thatcher most working people in Britain expected something far better from Tony Blair and New Labour. Instead what they got soon after Thatcher and Major was a huge wave of Asian immigration into their towns and their cities. The latter it has been suggested is hardly coincidental in that piled onto their weakened position in economic depression was having to contend with a vast and challenging immigrant influx occupying their minds and their thoughts. In my view this kind of ploy is a typically New Labour thing. A kind of Social Democrat neo-Toryism which Blair and his acolytes certainly were.

However it wasn’t the end. From his mid-term in office Tony Blair turned towards Poland, newly admitted into the European Community, with Community law regulating the flow across Europe of labour. Poles were now able to circumvent all employment and travel restriction. However not to worry, we were all told by New Labour at the time, and BBC pundits of course! Labour’s expert statisticians assured us that no more than 15 thousand, 20 at most, would arrive each year and furthermore they would all be highly skilled people, so no fears for employment on that score! Yes, they would all be highly skilled so the tens of thousands of unemployed men, women and teenagers in Britain need not worry! If ever there was a damnable lie that was it! In the first five years of Blair’s open door policy over one million Poles have arrived. It is now an all too common joke that Polish is the first language of dozens of towns and cities throughout the south of England and West Country. But then the Poles are really great for our economy so we are told! They can be taxed on their high British wages and they buy so much food from our shops… except that they don’t! They buy from their own Polish shops of which there are thousands all over the place, and then in the building industry in which many of them are employed, they mostly work off the books! THEY DON’T IN MAIN PAY TAX AT ALL!

With Poland having EC membership, their population could choose to work just about anywhere so why did a million choose England? No problem at all! It was the best place for easy cheap council housing and free financial benefits anywhere in Europe, thanks to Tony Blair and New Labour. No such open arms, however, for young workers here. With an influx of one million Poles in five years New Labour assurances and statistics were all shown up as lies. However, it’s a cheering fact that in the last year some ancient New Labour Grandees from past times have crawled out the woodwork and admitted they’d made a mistake and got it all wrong!

Oh dear, oh dear… They’d got it all wrong! They’d made a little mistake about immigration! But then as most British people now know, if they’ve made such an acknowledgement it’s only because they’re red hot to be elected in 2015 with Ed Miliband at the helm. Dear old Ed… one of the architects of Gordon Brown’s policies of mass immigration! What actual benefit did the immigration of one million Poles and along with Latvians, Lithuanians, Slovaks and others bring to the UK. Well, and here is the other very well prepared answer… They do all those jobs that most young British people would never do. And that is because all those young British people are LAZY… they simply won’t do that kind of work… They want to earn lots of money for doing nothing!

Yes… they want to earn lots of money for doing nothing… I can read in so many downright reactionary newspapers… Hear it from the lips of so many miserable old bastards!

Yes, let’s run our own youth down and call them all lazy! They want to earn lots of money for doing nothing! Well I for one can’t hear you saying that about the scumbags in banking and finance who’ve cheated us all. All I can hear is you turning your spleen on our own kids and calling them lazy when they won’t pick vegetables for two quid an hour or scrub plates in a kitchen for less. So why did Tony Blair and his political friends let them enter in droves? The answer’s more than clear. They’re simply cheap labour, especially in unskilled occupations such as the building trade or clerical doughboys working for banks and insurance companies. Have a mind for them though. Most work hard and mean well. It’s tough leaving your parents, family and friends for somewhere many don’t want you to be!

Romanians and Bulgarians. Great! As long as they’re not on our street! Well if Boris Johnson has any say they’ll all be working in London! Surely not all of them begging down Oxford Street, Boris? Maybe you ought to think of taking some of those kids in prams home with you! With one of their mothers as wet nurse, or maybe two or three, all scamming food out of your kitchen!

YES, BUMBLING BLOND BORIS LOVES ROMANIAN BABIES! So we suggest that you all look him up when you arrive and pay him a visit. But please don’t worry! If you can’t find where he lives then you can start asking around. Ask our lovely police first. You can be sure that they’ll help you! Then you can go on working in Oxford Street with your fingers real itchy. Please don’t worry! All our best BBC liberals and friendly Liberal Democrats think you’ll be making a real contribution to our economy. Helping with the free circulation of money. From our pockets to your bank account in Bucharest. And good luck to your wives and your two dozen babies all begging. You see, that’s what we British all like. Seeing all you good folk coming here and working so hard. And if you want to park your Mercedes in our drive than you are welcome. Or if you need a short term loan may we suggest you give Wonga a miss. Just look up the Liberal Democrats Executive Committee, make a list of their names then go pay them a call. Holding up all those Oxford Street babies with television cameras present that you’ve arranged to be there! May I suggest to you good Romanian or Bulgarian folk that you go pay that really nice man, Nick Clegg and his wife, a visit… Or better still Mister Vince Cable. Yes, the minute your coach arrives in London why not try looking them up?

And after that there’s always Ed Miliband and his family. They’d really love to have you all camping in the back garden. That’s why they’re bringing you all in. So you can camp on everyone else’s! But actually, our politician who wants to see you most of all is a lovely lady called Teresa May. All her tens of thousands of immigrant well-wishers call her Mother Teresa!

And don’t any of you forget now. You’ve all got the support of the Bulgarian President who recently said that Britain can’t turn you away because we’ve got no right to. Isn’t that really nice. Our Government refuses to let the British people have a vote on whether to stay in the EC or get the hell out, so your President can actually say that, you see. He knows that you Bulgarians and Romanians have got more political rights and freedoms than we have in Britain! He knows that you’ve got the right to take a coach over here from the shit-hole you live in over there, put your feet down and fuck over the British.

By the way, has anyone told you? There are one hundred and thirty thousand Romanians and Bulgarians living in Britain already and the flood gates haven’t yet opened. And they are all such lovely people! If you don’t believe me just listen to BBC television, or better still Channel 4!

CHRISTMAS TIME IN BRITAIN : AN ALTERNATIVE VIEW ON THE THEME OF MAKING WHOOPEE!

Christmas time in Britain is oh so very traditional. We’ve always seemed to have had two kinds of people and two kinds of situations around. Firstly the very sensible, self-satisfied folk who’ve rushed around buying all their food shopping and presents for days, weeks and even hours before December 25^th and can now sit comfortably at home while the big dinner’s being prepared in the kitchen before getting down to enjoy it, meanwhile smugly watching all those others on television who didn’t have the sense to do what they’re doing. Those bright clever people who decided to do something different this year! Yes, those who thought they’d be smart-arsed and take a break from it all. Go to Spain or Miami or the Caribbean, somewhere warm for a nice sunny Christmas! And look where they wound up. Stuck in a motorway traffic jam somewhere near Gatwick or Heathrow in blinding rain or on ice… or stuck in some airport lounge with no heating because all the flights have been cancelled. Yes, there’s been another instant baggage handlers’ strike or a big pile of snow outside the window and to make it all worse there’s ten toilets for ten thousand people and eight are blocked up with no-one to fix them because the maintenance men are quietly sitting at home with their families eating roast turkey while you are stuck on a floor somewhere with your wife and kids waiting for a flight that won’t happen till sometime in Easter! Alternatively you could be in a railway station with thousands of others because you decided to travel. Spend Christmas with a relative somewhere or maybe your boyfriend and you bought him cufflinks all special and now you might not see him till the New Year!

But then you could be caught in a flood. At Christmas time it’s traditional! Appalling freezing or wet weather and FLOODING. Flooding just about everywhere but especially where you are! Christ, not again! You went out and watched the river rising, with all those guests you’d invited coming by train all that way specially. So right now you’re fucked both ways. You don’t know whether they’ll get to wherever you are and you don’t know whether you’ll be completely flooded out and won’t have any lighting let alone any power to cook.  Yes, it’s all your fault! You decided to be adventurous for a change and invite people… You decided to drive with your family to the airport and spend Christmas abroad somewhere all warm and sunny… take to the roads in blinding rain, arrive at some terminal with thousands of others waiting there all ruing the day… Yes it was you who decided to sell your house somewhere safe on a hill and go and live on a flood plain close to a river… And it was you who never thought for one moment you might be on some BBC News program with your wife up to her neck in a river holding a turkey over her head. And then it gets into your head that there are millions of people out there ALL WATCHING YOU in an airport, railway lounge, motorway traffic jam, flooded kitchen, freezing community hall, with your kids shouting and your wife looking daggers, being served a bowl of Heinz soup over Christmas Day while everyone else is sitting at home chomping on turkey, listening to the Queen and feeling all smug!

Yes, it was YOU who branded all these stay-at- homes as unadventurous traditionalists!

Christmas in Britain is that traditionally cruel frost time of the year nicely divided between kings, pages and poor men. Royalty opens windows and looks about before calling for bread, wine and pine logs. Poor men, that’s you and me, go gathering fuel to save on our energy bills and if we’ve got any time left go hunting up presents. It’s a deep, crisp and even time for most of us though, whether it’s turkeys roasting in an oven or the municipal and energy supply services shoveling up snow or coming out to do reconnecting. Those who decided to be adventurous for a change suddenly had some advertisers bubble come into their heads, had a mental collapse and picked up a phone to make reservations and give the wife a surprise. Yes and for that all they got was a bollocking! For most people though it’s all snug at home, big or small arguments and Casablanca on television or Gone With The Wind. Alternatively for the intellectuals among us it’s the BBC’s version of all the year’s news.

So we sit there all soporific and pissed, hearing about the Liberal Democrats and how they want a million more East European immigrants a year living exactly where we are; and jug-head Nigel Farage going on about Europe while his mate Godfrey Bloom calls all the girls sluts; one desperate crisis after another all over the world with rape, murder and mayhem and charities asking us to put our hands in our pockets and fish out bundles of notes most of which they’ll stick in their own for ‘expenses’; Members of Parliament going to prison for fraudulent expense claims; coked up celebrity chefs; banking executives endlessly busy organising big bonuses, cheating and fraud; and then the police! Unleashed in a demoralized society, lying and abusing people all over the place. Just about anyone with money cheating, thieving and shagging while the Coalition Government attacks the standard of living of everyone else, depriving the needy and poor, especially young people of benefits. Yes, we can sit at home and watch all the unfortunates on television, feeling genuinely self-satisfied that we did what was needed, necessary and sensible!

Well actually that’s the alternative BBC News. The one you don’t get! What you actually get are the Royals going to church, British servicemen serving overseas, the weather and a few lousy films. Oh yes, I forgot! There’s always Brian Cox! The man who knows about everything and how it all works. Quite frankly I’m shocked. So far he hasn’t been on Strictly Come Dancing, East Enders, Masterchef or some other wretched cookery program telling us how to make soup! Anything to make you feel drowsy. Speaking for myself I’d like to see him in Coronation Street, working in Nick’s Bar or having it off with Gail! Now that would really be fun! But then there was Edward Snowden’s Alternative Christmas Message on Channel Four and his earnest concern about all of us being spied on by the British and American intelligence services. As though we’re not being spied on enough with police cameras on just about every street in town centres, these people are doing it all through every piece of electronic equipment we have. Perhaps they should tell us what they’re actually doing it for?   

Christmas is a time of year when so many suffer. It’s not just those we occasionally see from our sofas. It’s also the countless numbers we don’t see. Those who haven’t got a bed or a meal for the night. Who are separated or divorced and can’t be with their kids, who spend a freezing cold night in tears under a blanket in a shop corner full of longing and sadness and years of regrets, dirty, unshaved and unloved. And then spare a thought for the lonely, those without family, those who are old, who are sick. Those who couldn’t buy this or that for children they knew or know now let alone food for themselves while celebrity chefs cook for the rich. Every year this one single time comes to be the sharp apex point of our society. For some another jest at the table and counting up loot in their heads, for others a warm satisfaction that they never booked a flight out of Gatwick, got stuck in a railway or coach station or never took to the roads let alone bought a new house on a flood plain, then yet again for others a smothered cry of despair in their heads. For some its pure fun, for others plain satisfaction, and for others again simple plain misery. For just a few it’s a matter of conscience. What’s good and what’s bad, what’s right and what’s wrong.

Yes it’s a time for the churchmen to talk. About right and wrong, good and bad. Well if you’re concerned about people that much, I mean really concerned, well go sell off all your paintings, your gold and your silver, your precious gems and your commercial property. Go sell off the loot you’ve acquired down the last two thousand years in the name of a Jew that got stuck on a cross and go out and spend it on those who are needy rather than feel a need to mess with their heads. In Spain, Italy and Mexico alone we’re talking of trillions! Yeah Mister Churchman, time to stop squawking and get down to walking and actually looking around you rather than going on from somewhere high up in a pulpit.

Time to listen up for the Pope! Time to listen up for the Queen! Time to get down to your dinner. Time to get down to the end of a miserable sandwich and stay out of the rain, cap still out on the pavement, hoping someone will notice, somewhere, with all that wind, all that rain, all that cold on the streets. That’s Christmas in Britain. People don’t care so much about others since the time that Thatcher took over. There’s far less of a communal spirit, far more of a cold hard individuality. But then if it’s true why do we all make a such a fuss about Christmas? Heaven help us if we forget what it means to be human.  

NEWS OF THE WEEK BEFORE CHRISTMAS - NIGELLA : HOUSE OF LORDS RIP OFF : CONFLICT IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA : COLLAPSING THEATRES : BORIS JOHNSON

The jokes currently making the rounds about television celebrity chef Nigella Lawson preferring a Coke to a Pepsi are now wearing thin, same as they once did about George Michael loving cottage cheese. Celebrities in trouble seem to be fair game for all kinds of people. The unfortunate Nigella being no exception. Alas it simply didn’t help having the Prime Minister giving her his support while she was a witness in a trial after she’d admitted resorting to cocaine to help alleviate her domestic problems, but then who knows. She may have lost her case but at least she wasn’t raided by the police for being a user. Having her front door smashed in the way we see it in police programs on television and grilled about her supplier. The police have said that currently they’ll be taking no further action so maybe David Cameron’s intervention helped a bit after all. But then maybe that’s all part of another joke making the rounds about half the Tory Cabinet being on something or other. Drugs and the celebrity-rich and their problems are something quite outside the understanding of most people, ordinary people like you and I. The death of Nelson Mandela covered it all up for a while in the media then out it all came after the Mandela media-sickener subsided and there she was front page looking all sleepless and haggard.

Who knows what goes into all that food she’s been cooking, people will ask? Will they be able to associate her with anything else than the Grillo Sisters and coke while they’re watching her cooking program on television? So many stories, so much innuendo. Will the moralizing BBC continue allowing her to work on television or squeeze her out as a bad example to housewives? Who can say? She is after all the daughter of Margaret Thatcher’s once closest ally, Tory-Boy Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson who’s economic policies kicked off the financial ‘revolution’ from which we’re still suffering today, the rich excepted that is, while her husband until only recently Charles Saatchi ran the advertising agency which helped the lovely Margaret to power. Poor Nigella, caught up in a privileged life of endless credit card use, drugs, Tory politics and an unhappy marriage. A real nasty stew if there ever was one and nothing like those delectable little things she’ll rush up on telly, so far from the kitchen of most women who are, by necessity, into fish fingers or burgers and chips for their kids. Please don’t tell me you did all your shopping at Iceland my dear!

So England get thrashed by Australia three games in a row and lose the Ashes. Then a day or two later we see them on television having fun and laughing their heads off together in some light relief test driving. So that was your reward for a gross failure. For a casual unprofessional attitude and a total lack of commitment, being allowed to go out and have fun. For treating the game and your country with disrespect you needed rewarding! It’s all part of the attitude that pervades this country today. Lords and Ladies absolutely and deeply honorable Members of the House of Lords checking in for fifteen minutes and then checking out for three hundred quid, DAILY, FIVE DAYS A WEEK! Now please tell me and tens of millions of hard working people, millions of those who are unemployed, poor, homeless and destitute… IS THAT TAKING THE PISS OR ARE YOU LAZY BASTARDS JUST HAVING A LAUGH ON THE TAXPAYER… LIKE BANKERS OR DIRECTORS OF COMPANIES ALLOWED TO GET AWAY WITH TAX AVOIDANCE AND OTHER FORMS OF BLUE MURDER BY THE RASCALS AT THE INLAND REVENUE?

Are you members of the House of Lords just taking the piss? Fifteen hundred a week for seventy-five minutes work? Okay, I know it’s not what the jokers in the Premier League are getting so I know there are  some serious issues here, but then pissing on nurses, teachers, firemen, ambulance workers train drivers and dinner ladies for an hour and a quarter a week! And then you people being called Honorable and My Lord and making the laws of this country and all! I suppose you think you really deserve it, don’t you, your Lordships?

It’s alright then! A Chinese warship cuts directly across the bows of an armed American Missile Cruiser in the South China Seas without warning and it’s alright! Never mind that the American Government have described the incident as serious, as a provocative act, the response of Chinese officials was to state that the issue was resolved through formal procedures whatever that meant. What it actually means is nothing at all!  It means nothing, and it means everything! What it actually means is that the United States with Japan close behind are gearing up for naval conflict with China over small inlands territory in the South China Seas whose ownership is hotly disputed. Japan, China and even South Korea all claim the islands, now currently occupied by Japan and the clock is now running down. Inexorably ticking to conflict.

It all seems far from us now, however it’s not. In the last week Japan has announced a multi-billion dollar program to upgrade its military forces, manpower and equipment. China has now condemned this as a highly provocative act. The United States has begun moving serious naval power into the region with ships carrying nuclear armament. And what’s it all for? Truth to tell, a handful of tiny islands! What is its cause, truth to tell, China’s fast growing status as a regional power and hence an inevitable nationalism. The force driving the upcoming conflict is likewise the economic rivalry and competition between the two Asian powers being irrevocably played out on the world stage. The microcosm of the conflict, a handful of tiny islands, much the same as the assassination of one man in 1914 was the microcosm for a World War. The islands themselves actually mean nothing. It is their symbolic value that will focus the storm. This year has seen a growing military preparedness by the two interlocked players, stormy exchanges of words and near naval collisions. Next year might lead to matters altogether more serious.

The situation is complex! Washington is a key ally of Tokyo, yet Washington is in debt to Peking to the tune of trillions of dollars! If the Chinese call in the debt the US economy will sink. If the Americans don’t go to Tokyo’s aid in a conflict with China they will lose Japanese support in all things. Never mind! I feel quite confident that with William Hague at the helm of the British Foreign Office, Britain’s power and authority, coming through our lead in the Commonwealth, will prevail upon all powers involved in any such conflict to see the error of their ways and immediately desist!

Oh dear, oh dear! The plaster ceiling of the lovely heritage Apollo Theatre in Shaftsbury Avenue collapsed onto the balcony below throwing a large number of people who’d paid good money for their tickets down into the Stalls where they might have got a much better view of the play but for the fact that many were injured and the fact that the debris also fell on the actors themselves. Result, many theatre goers got the kind of participatory performance they’d never expected in something that came close to a farce never mind a serious tragedy. The sight of trembling bewildered people covered in blood outside the theatre in various transports heading for hospital was a sight straight out of a nightmare. Instead of a fun evening out in theatre land they got something quite unexpected and lo and behold, theatre owners and associated management bodies all hurriedly rushed to declare that their buildings were all safe as houses and this was an event quite out of keeping and character. Unfortunately, events over recent years have proved quite otherwise.

Their concerns are quite understandable. Filling the West End Theatres twice a day at this time of year with the prices of tickets quite serious money is an extremely lucrative business and the well publicised images of customers emerging from the Apollo covered in blood, and talk by Westminster City Council of concerns about safety, building inspections and regulations, along with similar talk of risk by the Fire Brigade isn’t likely to enhance reputation or takings. What it’s more likely to do is advance the cancellation of tickets during the key Christmas Season so it was therefore quite natural for the owners of these places to rush headlong into heavy assurance. If the televised sight of theatre goers looking like participants in Julius Caesar was to be somehow assuaged then guarantees and promises of security and safety had to be given.

One of the ongoing problems of London’s theatre land is the lack of financial investment for modernizing  many of these old and ornate buildings, particularly the facilities provided for customers. Many toilets, both men’s and women’s, are seriously outdated and look like something straight out the ark. Not quite like having to shit through a hole in the floor but not far short if you know what I mean and quite frankly disgraceful for the price you pay for a ticket. Dirty, unclean and out of date is the best way of describing the general situation making it all quite an experience for the fussy middle class customer. Theatres are a serious business with piles of loot for successfully packing bums on seats which is why newspaper theatre critics get to be given stacks of complimentary tickets for themselves, family and friends in the hope of RAVE REVIEWS for the all-important good publicity they might engender.

Complimentary tickets? Is that all one wonders! Yes, for the owners it’s a very serious business. Maybe someone ought to write a deadly black satire about what REALLY goes in in theatre-land with its implicit stack load of bitchiness. That would really pack all the cynics in but quite frankly it might spoil the party and would almost certainly never see daylight. Besides, people go to the theatre to have fun and be entertained and the truths that might emerge from any such dramatization of social reality might be too serious to contemplate and never be profitable.

Did anyone ever think that theatres were about conveying social and political truths to an audience? If so think again. Theatres first and foremost are about making loot. Still, I do think that some talented playwright ought to consider it. Written with truth in mind it might make a perfect subject for having a real belly laugh.

Boris Johnson’s been busy lately. Closing down fire stations in London and campaigning to build a dirty big island in the Thames Estuary on which he can plonk yet another airport for London. This public school Tory boy stalking horse of the Party’s visceral vicious right wing has suggested that most people in Britain have a low level IQ and in this he may be right, after all a majority of Londoners voted him mayor, but his striking up a pose of serious intelligence is quite frankly ludicrous as are most of his seeming strengths. I use the word ‘seeming’ because that is how they appear when set against the intelligence and capabilities of so many of his opponents. The man quite frankly is borderline dense but when set against the acumen of his opponents and critics he comes out sounding like Einstein. The question is how does he manage it? Well as I’ve suggested it’s undoubtedly the inferior qualities of others that magnifies his own, but more important perhaps is the pose he strikes up, invariably confronting challenge and criticism with a superb public school air of insouciant bluster that makes people think he simply must know what he’s talking about or else he’d be full of bullshit and he can’t be that, can he. After all he’s an ex-Eton public schoolboy and seems to know all the top Tories!

It’s those winking little piggy eyes of his and that genuine air of leery insouciance! Mix it all in with his well calculated bluster and you have the kind of comic book character that the British lower classes love and find sympathetic. He has all the air of a wayward bumbling blimp and to anyone seriously intelligent brings a refreshing touch of a wilfully anarchic idiocy onto the British political stage. Set this against the dour unfunny charm of Muslim fundamentalist friendly Ken Livingstone and he’ll come out smelling of roses time after time. He’s a British political jackanapes who understands his electorate with a well-manicured charm. Meanwhile he’s managing a city that’s been fast turning into an immigrant rat hole of countless East European illegals soon to be joined by numberless more. Under his command London has been turned into a duality of jack the lad financial rascals in the City and Dockland and a great sea of on the make begging, importuning, petty theft and East European gang controlled cheap labour day to day employment in a wide variety of unregulated off the books employment from the West End to Hammersmith and beyond. It’s a nasty little place with theatres and museums lodged at its center, cheek and jowl with islands of immense property wealth at Mayfair, Kensington and Chelsea. And right at its heart is the well-guarded holy of holies, Buckingham Palace.

These islands of wealth are already seeing charming incursions of Romanian beggars, mainly Roma women with dirty babies, doorstep sleepers and con artists against all of whom the powers of the police seem quite inadequate, instead being used against student demonstrators protesting against Tory welfare cuts, young people for whom Boris Johnson has entirely no sympathy! If the police are short of manpower as they claim the trick is to help recruit this whole army of East European illegals into the police and make them respectable! Then they can help guard all the palaces and officially patrol Kensington and Chelsea instead  of urinating in the doorways of all the rich émigré Russians! Make that your major achievement and your return to Westminster with a top job in David Cameron’s Government will be assured, namely as Minister for Pompous Insouciant Leery Bluster and Bullshit.   

WEEK’S NEWS: DECEMBER FIFTEEN

The death of Nelson Mandela may have wiped out the world for so many but it still continued to turn along with all its stories and news. Most of it nasty, slipping into oblivion under the weight of obsequious slushing and gushing. For some, one man’s demise was a treat, such as News International journalists up in the dock for phone hacking and other miscellaneous dirty deeds. Like others with the power of the press behind them along with powerful political friends they thought they were immune and perhaps they still are! Then there’s the family saga of a celebrity chef in all its misery, dragged into public view for everyone to sneer at. Poor Nigella, having to pay the price for the life of money and celebrity she chose. Never mind, there was always David Cameron to come to the rescue, drugs or no drugs. But then trawling through the dirt of the rich has always been a specialist subject for certain newspapers who know there’s an avid public out there ever ready to lap it all up.

Let’s leave them to swill at the trough. Other matters run deeper and are far more important. Yes, the police are at it again. Not content with now being officially allowed to decide what is right or what is wrong they’ve become semi-official arbiters of political correctness as well as public morality. True, they’ve missed a whole number of big tricks in recent times like Jimmy Savile, or being caught earning bundles of notes selling stories to journalists then coming up wanting over the Hillsborough Disaster let alone the demise of innocent bystanders, but now they have others well in their sights. They’re into politics all over again. Not content with their role in protecting fascist marches during the 1930’s, ‘dealing with’ the Print Workers Strike years not so far back on behalf of News International then the Miner’s Strike and lately doing in Tory politician Andrew Mitchell, they’re now busy with students. Having decided that it was quite lawful to detain and imprison them on the streets they’re now arresting them for occupying university premises demonstrating against social welfare cuts and increased tuition fees. Arresting them, taking them away in vans and locking them up with all that it means. The semi-literates attacking the literate and clearly enjoying the brutalizing of those who are decent and caring.

However it is entirely naïve for students to claim that the police are becoming political. The police would say that they’re only doing their job and quite rightly so. ‘Dealing’ with striking print workers and miners IS their job, same as it is arresting students occupying university premises. This is the job the State requires them to do and if necessary rough up participants, so no complaints please from the politically naïve if they think the police are acting out of hand.   

And if few people care, what does it say about Britain today, when so many are out shopping for Christmas, spending money they don’t actually have or working for wages that are pitiful at best? What kind of country are we living in when so many contribute hundreds of millions of pounds to alleviate natural disasters overseas and have no concern for their own basic rights here? Students, and there are so few of them nowadays that care about anything compared to the sixties, seventies and eighties, are at the very front line of the nation’s social conscience and having to deal with police who decide what they can say and exactly where or where not they can say it. On the other hand there are those who commit crimes ten a penny like cycling on pavements, being illegal immigrants, aggressively begging on the streets of Central London, or far better, defrauding the public of money through innumerable financial swindles and selling horsemeat for beef. No-one ever arrested or prosecuted for these things! Strange how the police see nothing wrong in such criminality! That it’s all somehow okay! What is not, however, are student demonstrators who believe in something worthwhile. No such ‘scruples’ for them. They’re just attacked, rounded up and locked away for a while! And for actually what? Yes, the police are busy again. Deciding on who may protest, how and why.

That’s the Liberal Democrats in Coalition Government for you. Betray their promises to students first then turn a blind eye to their protest after which put them in the hands of the police.

Some news from overseas that isn’t Mandela! It’s deep winter over parts of the Middle East. In Syria and the Lebanon the plight of refugees spilling out from the Civil War in Syria has been worsened by snow and sub-zero temperatures. In response, the Government of Israel has opened its northern border to accommodate and give refuge to many thousands of desperate people, supplying them with food, shelter and medical aid. And that is with both Syria and the Lebanon still technically at war with the Jewish State. So how has this great humanitarian gesture been reported by the television news channels, by the BBC, Sky and Channel Four. Answer, not a mention! Let’s be clear. Saudi Arabia and Dubai, two of the richest nations in the world with their territories close to the crisis HAVEN’T CONTRIBUTED A PENNY OR LIFTED A FINGER, but the Israelis have opened their border to help. But please don’t be critical of the BBC or Channel Four for keeping quiet. Friendly to the Jewish State they’re most definitely not and never have been!

The situation in the Ukraine is hotting up. Just consider recent events if you will. The Foreign Minister of the European Community, Baroness Ashton, went to Kiev the capital last week, met the leaders of anti-Government demonstrations in the streets and commended them for their actions! These actions, let it be said, are against the democratically elected President, Government and Parliament of the Ukraine for refusing to sign a trade treaty with the European Community!

So what does the EC do? It sends its Foreign Minister to that country to join the protesters and stir up as much trouble as possible with British and other Western news media all there in advance primed up ready and waiting! Talk about damnable cheek! This is such a flagrant example of interfering with the internal affairs of a sovereign state that it surely has the hands of United States Government agencies all over it, but then so what when most of its security apparatus, along with that of the United Kingdom, is busy spying on the population of Western Europe and not least its politicians like Angela Merkel. It’s actually quite fascinating. In recent years, British, American and European Community politicians have been getting up to some quite extraordinary mischief. Many, like David Cameron, seem to have entirely lost the plot being caught smiling a ‘selfie’ at the memorial ceremony of Nelson Mandela, added to which was his coming out in support of celebrity chef Nigella Lawson in the little matter of cocaine addiction. And Cameron such a Pepsi man and all.

Finally, hearty congratulations to China for successfully landing a spacecraft on the Moon, and then rolling  a Lunar rover called Jade Rabbit onto its surface. A really great achievement, made possible not only by its scientific community but all the many hundreds of millions of people round the world, particularly in the United States and Western Europe who avidly buy Chinese made products and other crap to give that country a fantastic financial trading surplus enabling it to afford such splendid ventures while leaving everyone in serious debt to mainland China. Particularly the United States whose economy is currently bankrolled by that country! Well done China for being so canny!

WHO, EXACTLY, BURIED NELSON MANDELA?

At first glance the question might seem preposterous. Yes, we all know who buried Nelson Mandela! It was his family and this wife or that. It was the ANC and the new so called Rainbow South African State. Yes, and it was all the world’s politicians and heads of state former and current… And then, to many of us here  in Britain watching the endless rolling eulogy from the BBC in hush toned sycophancy that blotted out everything else that happened in the world over the last week, all of us knew that it was this disgustingly obsequious organisation to which we’re forced to pay a license fee that actually buried Nelson. Albeit under a ton of bullshit and other verbal garbage.

There is much that has come out of the Nelson Mandela Show as it was turned into by the BBC. The man’s status has now been elevated from global political icon to super-hero. A person whose value and worth exceeds Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Abraham Lincoln and dare I say it even Bill Clinton, all rolled into one. Just about the greatest human who ever lived. And whoops, sorry, I forgot, The Virgin Mary and Leonardo da Vinci. Okay, let’s look at it closely. When his jailors took him off the 27 year cross at Robben Island Prison it wasn’t black South Africans who turned him into a hero but the white political regime that put him there along with all those white liberal intellectuals who’ve done time worshipping black political leaders because they think it showed cred. Same as they once adored Robert Mugabe! On his release the ‘forgiving’ figure of Mandela was not only a gift to them but to all those black and white political rascals who’ve been attending official ceremonies in South Africa today. Naturally at their taxpayers’ expense!

What honest or genuine questions did the BBC ask of itself before sinking into its endlessly idolizing hysteria. Hello? Did anyone there ever ask themselves who it was who ACTUALLY ended apartheid because one thing is for sure as historical fact, it wasn’t Nelson Mandela but F.W.de Klerk, South African Prime Minister at the time who freed him from jail and then worked with him in an inspirational partnership as Joint Presidents to get rid of the scourge when he could have just as easily turned the army on the ANC in a bloody race war. It was de Klerk who abolished apartheid as no longer tolerable,  not Nelson Mandela.

Right now it comes to mind that I’d better stop calling him Nelson because that’s no longer his name! Jacob Zuma, current ANC President of the Republic has rechristened him as someone entirely black for the whole nation, the world and for posterity! None of that white man Nelson stuff, he’s now simply Madiba, everyone’s Father. The BBC arse-crawlers could therefore no longer call him by the white Christian name his parents had chosen. No, black South Africa was running the show so it couldn’t permit a white hero’s name from a white colonialist past. The world’s greatest human being and political hero was black so his name had to be black through and through. None of this Nelson stuff, understand! And naturally every BBC reporter and journalist understood. After all, they were in on the greatest event in human history since the Resurrection, and a resurrection it was!

Shame none of them asked themselves or anyone they interviewed, singly or in the dancing crowds, what the man had actually done to improve their living conditions. What he’d done to make the circumstances of their lives better and more tolerable, during the ten years or more he’d been President. If asked many of them might have said that what was important was that he’d freed them spiritually. That he’d liberated their minds from oppression. True indeed perhaps, and in the circumstances of a new and changed nation very important… only politically naïve. Nothing more loved by the hard-nosed political rascals and dignitaries who attended those rites, rituals and political speeches. A revolution of spiritual liberation. Well praise Jesus and Hallelujah! From all the world’s liberals to black African dictators, from Selfie Obama to East European and South American thugs of the right, the one thing they all love to hear are matters of spiritual inspiration. It means they won’t have to do anything concrete to make people’s lives any better! Freedom? The Spirit? It all sounds like flower-power and hippies, straight out of sixties California, when you could live in the sun, man, and love was all free.

No wonder so many of the world’s political elite were in attendance. Mandela? Freedom? It was all a matter of spirit, of liberation. Meanwhile he and his Party had done little to nothing for their fellow black Africans  during that time, except of course, enrich themselves with fine new houses and gifts of land, same as everywhere else throughout Africa over the last fifty years. No, Mandela began a spiritual revolution and left it at that. That’s what all the politicians and dignitaries there in adoring attendance love him for. A spiritual revolution and sawn off at that because no revolution is complete unless it is, at the same time, a social revolution. Betterment of the social and economic conditions of life of the masses of people. In South Africa that meant both the poor blacks and the poor whites. Mandela came out of prison, allowed himself to be iconized, canonized if you will as leader of a spiritual revolution while the ANC took over the politics. As its leader he had the power to do anything for those living in poverty in the townships but instead he did nothing. Just rested on his world given status as inspirational spiritual icon.

If doing nothing is satisfactory to the liberal intelligentsia then it’s satisfactory for the world’s political leaders. These people spend their lives thinking up creative talk about future promises of prosperity. Only spiritual regeneration first if you will and betterment of people’s lives second. Always second! In Nelson Mandela politicians saw one of themselves. And if he’d held up a mirror they’d have seen their own faces. That in truth is why so many attended. To be among one of their own. Of the same political character and class. So how did the mass of black South Africans see it. I’ll tell you how. Forget about the BBC love-in with the carefully selected handful on the streets or the myriad of adoring ANC hangers on… when the crowds in the stadium in Soweto heard the speech of Jacob Zuma, current ANC President of the Republic and a Nelson Mandela successor they wholesomely jeered and booed. Shouted their anger and booed. Rolling waves of disapproval and booing in contrast to BBC and other world media adulation along with the adoring rolling adulation of all the political dignitaries. And if they could have done the same they’d have booed them too… for allowing European and American bankers and finance jockeys to swindle the people of their countries. For lowering their expectations and hopes and indeed doing sweet nothing for them while they enriched their own friends.

Politicians helping themselves on one side while doing nothing for anyone else. And the masses of people on the other, black or white, booing at them in derision. This is what the BBC chose not to hear, whether it was in a black South African township or closer to home. That was the reality of Nelson Mandela’s legacy. Booing! Not something the grinning President Obama or the plump jovial David Cameron or the buxom Prime Minister of Denmark all smiling a selfie would have wanted to hear! Booing? No they definitely weren’t there to hear that. Only to participate in all that was righteous!

The ANC legacy of Nelson Mandela was treated with rightful contempt. Not the man himself. The legacy alas had promised so much and provided so little for so many for so long. Whose fault was that? The man who was the inspirational force for their struggle or his successors who inherited it? Almost certainly something of both. The ANC inherited Mandela’s inspiration but quite frankly not much else. They were guided by inspiration alone but never by a clear set of principles, a worked out ideological view for creating a just and egalitarian society. A socialist perspective. So sad to disappoint the liberal intelligentsia who spent so many years frothing at the mouth with adulation at the mere mention of the man’s name but your hero was never a socialist. Same as Robert Mugabe and all the other black leaders who’d inherited a mantle of anti-colonial struggle and took it forward. None of these leaders were socialists. None of them ever believed in social equality or tribal fraternity as is evidenced in their own post-colonial struggles for personal tribal domination. There never was and never would be any unity between tribes as is evidenced all over Africa, let alone social equality between rich and poor. The tens of millions in South Africa’s post-apartheid black townships know all about that. After 20 years of ANC rule and freedom, no running water, no electricity and no sanitation for most. 

In short just about nothing! That was why Jacob Zuma was booed, but then it wasn’t his fault. The party political mantle he inherited from Nelson Mandela and others came without definitive principles. Sure, there were members of the ANC engaged in the struggle who were socialists or communists but they were white, and black nationalists have never regarded socialism, Marxism or communism as anything more than European. The faith they inherited, as is quite logically the case, was one of anti-colonialism, or as it was in South Africa, anti-racist. Interestingly enough it was the white minority Afrikaaner who also inherited an anti-racist struggle, theirs being against the British who regarded them as racially inferior until the time when they fought them in the Boer War! In short, despite all the wretched comical mumblings of the white liberals, and in South Africa they are certainly more disgusting than anywhere else, none of that can detract from the fact that every ideological honor they give to Mandela is plain wishful thinking.

Or is it? Not if we recognise that any socialism espoused by such liberals, social democrats or others is about as revolutionary as Gordon Brown. What all these people are is probably only what they like to think they are over a good meal in Chelsea. Their radical leftism is only a delusion, something given them by others in jest or flattery. The whole damned lot of them wouldn’t know a day’s work in a packing warehouse, a building site or underground in a mine if you showed it to them. They’re as far from a black laborer living in a South African township as Nelson Mandela was from Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin.

Given the intellectual poverty of his own heritage Nelson Mandela struggled to educate himself and to a fair degree was successful, but what he couldn’t overcome and probably would never have wished to overcome was the history of the struggle he came out of. A struggle for dignity and his own humanity along with that of millions of other South Africans denied basic rights. He didn’t come out of any kind of European tradition of class struggle. Struggle for a fair living wage or for trades union rights. He came out of a struggle of racial intolerance and exploitation that affected everyone. It made those who were nasty even nastier while in South Africa itself most white liberals continued enjoying a splendid lifestyle and were damnably complaisant.  It’s all going to get worse. Rainbow Nation of many colors? Quite frankly the phrase is a joke. Under ANC control a once successful economy based on farming and mining is going down the tubes fast. Those whites remaining will either be murdered, dispossessed or forced to emigrate with everything they own stolen or looted. It’s a processes that has repeated itself throughout decolonized Africa so why not there too?

And the logical consequence? When their economy becomes a basket case the ANC will turn to the EC for loans and after that China, ever hungry for minerals and gold. As for Mandela all that will remain will be a name out of memory and today’s adulation will seem like a myth. Time itself destroys all icons and legends. Men have their moments and moments degenerate. It was and is required that the youth of the townships be educated and given a future. Given the promise of a place in a prosperous and equal South Africa. The great legacy to come out of Mandela’s struggle was hope. With no promise to come out of the struggle for hope there is simply no legacy, just a betrayal of promise.

Who buried Nelson Mandela? Well right now they’re all burying him fast. All those heads of state there, politicians and presidents past and present on some tribal jamboree to bury one of their own. Made in their own image. Someone who promised everything and actually did nothing. His political party and the state they control can’t bury him fast enough, and the same goes for his family too, all hungry to take over a legend and sell it off piece by piece as mementoes . He may be dead but the Show must go on, with the BBC undoubtedly wanting to get in on the ground as stage managers.

LATEST NEWS : EARLY DECEMBER

MANDELA

The death of Nelson Mandela it seems has come as a gift for the entire fawning white liberal middle class intelligentsia along with the BBC, Channel Four and the entire world’s collective of politicians, heads of state and reigning monarchs all of whom claim to have known the man one way or another, giving them the opportunity to display the kind of adulation that can best be described as arse crawling creepy.

The man served a fair part of his time in a nasty little racist hell hole believing in justice and dignity, maybe for most of the people of the land that he lived in, not knowing at first how much time was on his side until it inevitably came. A brave man who might have now laughed at all the slush pouring out of so many mouths that did nothing for him and the cause he espoused over so many dark years in jail in the hands of the brutal and stupid.

Let’s call it for what it was then and for what it is now! The regime that sent him down was arrogant, vile  and seriously thick. The regime that replaced it is plain neglectful. The former was racist, the latter hardly much better. The black urban poor have benefitted little over the last decade. The black rural poor hardly at all. The only people who came out of it nicely were the political elite of the ANC and their myriad hangers on. Most whites who had any money or career prospects have left. Their future in the so called Rainbow Nation just about zero. Only the white poor and farming community remain and they’re fast being wiped out in the Rainbow world’s murder center. So much for a legacy of peace and reconciliation. Not that it matters much to the Rainbow Coalition of the world’s white liberal crawlers.

With these people particularly in mind let’s take an honest look. In the last year or more large numbers of black miners living in dreadful squalid shacks and filthy conditions under the control of South Africa’s giant and fabulously wealthy overseas controlled mining houses have gone on strike for better pay and better living facilities. In response the ANC Government with full company support sent in armed state police who together with company police shot and killed hundreds of striking miners in cold blood, many at point blank range, leaving their wives and families destitute. Here, state and company police acted together to break strikes on behalf of local company management and international company executives. This was mainly the work of the white liberals’ much adored new black African Government. That said, where was the voice of Nelson Mandela, the great hallowed Father of the Nation, now in retirement? Where was the voice of this man on behalf of these grievously oppressed black mining workers and the trade union that was fighting for them for a living wage. These were the people who voted for him and his ANC Party. These were among his greatest supporters. Why did he fail to stand up for them when his word would have carried such weight. Why did he fail to even open his mouth when his support would have counted for everything.

Only a deafening silence. The man was living in retirement in one of his many homes, from a mansion in the Johannesburg white suburb of Houghton to his sprawling spread in Soweto… Being endlessly visited by the world’s white and black political so called great and good and showered with every honor imaginable while black mine workers were being shot dead in their hundreds, and tens of thousands were living like animals in company slums. Where was his voice?

Nelson Mandela was never a man of religion but neither was he a socialist. Having become President of South Africa after his release from prison he sought to put his just anger aside in order to achieve some kind reconciliation between people in general. A nasty race war was on the cards in the process of black Africans taking political power and this he wanted to avoid. Under his guiding leadership the ANC achieved that end but that was just about it. Over the last decade little else happened. The African National Congress had never been committed to achieving social equality between white, black and coloured. The urban and rural black working class and peasantry were desperately poor. Most of them living in great slum townships without electricity and running water and toilet facilities and the poor whites weren’t much better off either. What did Nelson Mandela and his Party do over the last decade to raise the standard and quality of life for tens of millions of black people over this time? THE ANSWER QUITE FRANKLY IS LITTLE TO NOTHING. Little has changed. Black miners throughout the country fighting for a better wage and better living conditions are mercilessly put down in a gruesome massacre that easily rivals Sharpeville or the worst that the white nationalist apartheid Government ever did!

So let me ask then. With all this shooting and murder of black working people over the last year or so where was the voice of the world’s politicians, the voice of the white liberal intelligentsia, and all the musicians who organised concerts for freeing Mandela? Where was the wretched BBC and Channel Four? A few words and lines here and there from the whole puerile collective. Little more. Oh yes! I forgot! Where were the words of condemnation of the ANC from Ed Miliband and the Labour Party? From Nick Clegg and all the other scummy Liberal Democrats? From America’s President Obama? From the Clinton’s, bless their little whiter than white liberal cred socks? Where were the words from any of these when their favourite political party, the African National Congress sent in armed police to shoot dead hundreds of black miners? Not a word from the whole wretched lot. Instead they continued to play their favourite little white liberal game called kiss-kiss Nelson Mandela.

The truth is there, staring anyone plain in the face who cared to consider. From the moment Nelson Mandela was released from prison and ‘reconciliation’ officially on a roll, South Africa’s Mining houses that employed hundreds of thousands of men who worked hard underground for a pittance, many far from their families and homes, knew they had it made and that they, too, were on a roll. The ANC would give them carte blanche to act against their Union of Mineworkers. And it was the same for most other employers. Socialism and any struggle for social equality was NOT PART OF THE ANC STRUGGLE. Theirs was only a political struggle against white political rule. SOCIAL EQUALITY FOR BLACK PEOPLE AND THE POOREST WHITES WAS NEVER PART OF THEIR MANIFESTO.

Nelson Mandela never went any further than politics. His struggle was to free South Africa from white political rule. Nothing more. So the socio-economic status quo in the country stayed the same and all those people jiving around outside his houses today will go back to their slums and maybe, just maybe start thinking… Just what did Nelson Mandela do for us during his time of political leadership? Just what did he and his Government do to make life better for us? These are fair questions. They won’t of course, be asked by all those raucous overseas liberals, black or white. The kind of people who call you a Nazi if you disagree with ANYTHING they say! They will only be asked by the black or white working or unemployed poor, the people who the ANC turned their backs on to become one of the world’s most corrupt money and bribe taking gang of politicals.

These days Nelson  Mandela is being hailed as the greatest human being who ever lived in the Western liberal media. He was already iconized the minute he walked out of prison. Now he’s being deified! It’s fitting I suppose that a man who ACTUALLY did so little for so many should be turned into a God. Once it was the same for Roman Emperors. So what’s changed? As for the white liberals of today, quite frankly most are simply not worth pissing on. Remember, it wasn’t the so called liberal John F. Kennedy who gave civil rights to black African Americans but the hard headed southern conservative Lyndon Johnson who did this.

South Africa had to change. The white political regime released Mandela so it could change on the surface. Underneath it all it’s still much the same. Only different in one major respect. This time it’s black politicians responsible for shooting black workers… not white!

Was that what you served 27 years in prison for, Nelson Mandela?

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THE CRYSTAL IS SINGING: THE ANCIENT PRE-INCA LEGEND OF THE LOST CHORD

This story, as presented by me now, may seem to my readers somewhat fanciful, like something straight out the pages of a novel, or one of those tales of the silver screen portraying the exploits of an Indiana Jones. Well if you like that kind of thing, fine, but what I have to tell you here is nothing like that at all. It is more interesting perhaps. Perhaps more strange. Sure the facts are rooted in legend… A lost party of early Spanish explorers disappearing without trace high in the Bolivian Andes… A search party stumbling across a half crazed survivor clearly gone native many years later at the edge of the jungle… His fevered account of a great calamity that saw his friends cut off from civilisation forever.  All of it scarcely believable and with it too the horror of cannibalism. Words tumbling from the lips of a sick, dying man. Almost incoherent, as Joachim de Souza’s Journal recorded, except for that brief final light in his eyes and those words, rasped out for legend by someone who’d heard, someone who’d seen something special.

De Souza’s Journal is clear so we can now only wonder. THE CRYSTAL IS SINGING were the words that came from his lips! The young explorer then tells us how, startled by such seemingly incomprehensible revelation, he bent over the man only to find his arm powerfully gripped. Raising his head the man stared directly into his eyes, repeating the words with a force and power that came unexpected… THE CRYSTAL IS SINGING… before falling back dead on the matting inside his hut.

The Journal itself is stored in the archives of the Spanish-American Institute in Madrid and is available for consultation by researchers and scholars should the Director find such a request reasonable. Understanding it is relatively straightforward given that it is an account of his experiences given by the explorer himself. Even so, geographical location then was not at all that it is today and makes little sense set against the advances of our modern technology. What is undoubtedly puzzling, for it seems to come out of nowhere, is his account of meeting this individual and those singular almost magical words about crystal. What on earth does it mean? De Souza himself comments on their strangeness but makes no attempt to consider the matter in depth. From the perspective of an 18^th century Spanish explorer it’s all too simple enough. He writes down what he’s heard.  The man’s dead and cannot be questioned. Why bother then with any conjecture? Intriguing as the words seem speculation can only be pointless. Gold… silver… precious gems and territorial acquisition, these things he understands! Singing Crystal? Well the man was indeed feverish. Desperately sick.

Time perhaps for a little digression. Most of us know about the 16^th and 17^th century Spanish intrusion into central and South America and their conquest and despoliation of the civilisations they found there. We all remember those magical sounding names from our history lessons at school. The Aztecs and Incas, Pizarro, Cortes and Montezuma. The grim Conquistadores and the tribes and civilisations they laid waste in their Conquest and Colonisation of Latin America! Words and names we associated with another part of the planet known for its mighty rivers and jungles, giant snakes and spiders before we forgot them and went out with our mates for a lager! For many of us though those names and places came to mean something. Conjured up something else if you like. A single word describes it all… Adventure!

There were of course many expeditions into Central and South America besides those of the Cortes and Pizarro. Mostly of exploration and territorial discovery rather than plain simple conquest for loot. The school history books only recall the big names. Those that reconfigured the Continent in their image as they carved out Spain’s Imperial portfolio in brutality and blood. Others, equally interesting, are perhaps more the subject of scholarship than anything else. When I first became acquainted with Olivares’ weird muttering I wondered at first whether I’d heard right. De Souza’s Journal had recorded his search for the lost expedition of Manuel de Fraga that vanished in the high Andes somewhere near the border with Peru. After weeks spent traversing high plateau de Fraga found himself in a singularly barren region. The few Indians they came across barely co-existing with nature, speaking in a dialect that none of them knew. Gifts of food helped open a dialogue. Slow, laborious at first as he records, but gradually by signs and gestures they learned of a great earth tremor in a region of mountainous peaks not too far to the north. Travelling there proved tedious but it was only then that they learned for themselves. There far below was a vast scene of desolation. A whole series of gigantic landslips had engulfed dozens of valleys, burying them in a terrain of rock and ice and cutting them off forever from the outside world. Here then was how Manuel de Fraga’s men had met their end. Later, much further, on they’d encountered Olivares.     

Somehow he’d survived. Perhaps having been on a ridge somewhere as an out-rider he’d avoided the great cataclysm. Been left on the other side and avoided the fate of his comrades by descending eventually to the forests below.

THE CRYSTAL IS SINGING… I’d read De Souza’s account in Madrid but was left puzzled. Almost enthralled by the words. What did they mean? They sounded like the raving of a madman, that is until I thought further. The word CRYSTAL was used in the singular, Crystal, not crystals! This wasn’t some raving about crystals per se but crystal itself. Quartz Crystal perhaps or Rose Quartz. Some type of crystal but what? Interestingly enough this particular location in the Bolivia-Peru Andes region was never noted for containing any reserve of Rose Quartz or Quartz Crystal itself. Certainly not in any historical record through mining. Such reserves are to be found elsewhere, mainly Brazil which has in modern times produced large quantities of massive Rose Quartz but rarely in the form of crystals which are indeed classed as scarce. Quartz crystals on the other hand are commonplace in that country. Rock crystal however is another story altogether. It is comprehensively massive with no known crystal habit. Brazil possesses a certain amount but nothing compared to deposits found in the Peruvian high Andes and those of Bolivia as evidenced in the cultures of ancient civilisations found in those areas such as those who preceded the Incas, and in Mexico the Aztecs. Skulls carved from rock crystal not only feature in legend and form part of their history but have come down to us today as the modern products of artists and craftsmen. They were not simply features of legend but indeed formed part of ceremonial ritual.

Such ritual and ceremony is not a matter directly concerning us here. Its importance and the use made of rock crystal however points to the existence of such deposits available for use so that when I became aware of De Souza’s Journal and Olivares dying words the existence of the mineral in such abundance took on an added significance. THE CRYSTAL IS SINGING… I again tried to make sense of it all. Fortunately an extraordinary discovery came to my rescue. It is sometimes the case that those investigating and exploring the legends of ancient civilisations almost lost to our modern era can search for clues months even years on end without finding any connections or any real meaning until suddenly, purely by chance they come across something that seems insignificant and is almost put by then in a moment of unexpected inspiration a flash blinding intuition hits home and with it a real joy of insight.

It happens to all of us reader. To you and to so many others, and it happened to me. I’d been rummaging in the basement archives of the badly run down Museum of Ethnicity associated with one of the University departments in La Paz, the whole place covered in dust and many ancient tablets and manuscripts there long unattended. It was simply an old habit, fuelled by a deep personal curiosity, to thumb through just about everything. See what I could find as it were. Anything, anything might turn up. It was my own personal philosophy. Part of my character. I just didn’t know what I might find. It had of course happened to me before, time back when I’d been rummaging through some old packing crates in the basement of a warehouse in Bulawayo, South Central Africa that belonged to a friend. Suddenly I saw something and out of one I pulled a whole series of beautiful, perfectly crafted miniature axes and spears that I knew were important. They turned out to be the ceremonial regalia of the last King of the Malagasy. My friend needed dollars and let me have them for just a few hundred. There they’d been at the bottom of a crate. Something he’d got hold of and forgotten years back and was now only too glad to have the money like it was for free!

The same kind of thing happened in that dusty old basement in Bolivia. With the light not all that great I began going over the tablets pertaining to the old pre-Inca civilisations. What the hell they were doing there was a mystery. Obviously they’d all been collected many years earlier and dumped. There’d obviously been revolutionary changes of Government, curators of museums coming and going. Disappearing when new regimes put in their own people who couldn’t be bothered with the work of the old, so collections of yester-year were left to gather dust and be quietly forgotten. It was in such a situation that I found myself. A nice little gift in someone’s back pocket and there I was, sitting on a wooden crate like the curious gringo I was then unexpectedly the whole cultural history of a people in tablet and script! Great mountain peaks, valleys, displaced rock and boulder moraine along with the story of what hit me as an extraordinary legend recorded long, long before Christ, the Assyrians, Babylonians or anyone else!

Talk about staggering! It was like I’d had a rush of blood to my head, stepped out of the crease and hit the bowler for six right over the stand! There it all was! The great eruption and avalanche! The deep powerful rumbling from the bowels of the earth and the Legend of the Singing Rock Crystal! I could scarcely believe what I saw. Almost immediately Olivares’ words came to mind… the great earthquake and eruption and the lost expedition of Manuel de Fraga high in the Andes! The connection I’d chanced on was inescapable.

… The great tremor far back in time and the cataclysm so many centuries later were the same seismic phenomena. Passing through the rock crystal deposits it had created a wave which, when finally released, sounded an extraordinary almost magical chord. A singular note so powerful, so intense, that it seemed nothing human. A great cry as it were of the spirit, straight from the depths of the earth…

At first it seemed barely credible but the facts as they stood were irrefutable. Thanks to a dying man’s words and the clues from ancient pre-Inca tablets I had established a historical timeline linking Rock Crystal and the seismic activity of the region with the authentic musical note inherent in the culture of its people. A continuing Lost Chord like a voice into the past now rediscovered as the authentic note of its song. Olivares wasn’t so deluded after all. He’d escaped the great cataclysm of his time only to die in the jungle and in his last words he gave up the clue. The crystal was indeed singing and had he been with his comrades down in the valley he would never have survived to give up the secret that led to my discovery in legend.

As for myself I hope that one day I might have the good fortune to be somewhere up on those peaks, safe from any disaster, so that I might hear and likewise marvel at the deep wondrous sound of that ancient lost chord. It’s unlikely, but adventurer that I am I always like to think that there are possibilities!