Question Time Shows Equality's True Meaning

When people say that they want equality, what they often actually mean is that they want to be more equal than others.

This can be seen in the case of the extortionist rob-the-rich taxes that people of the Left advocate as a means to wealth equality. In this case they want to be more equal by arrogating for themselves – or for the state acting on their behalf – the power to steal from the rich without being prosecuted, which puts them above the law against theft that applies to everyone else.

In last night's Question Time in Cardiff, this was brought home rather nicely when the leader of Plaid Cymru Leanne Wood, supporting a request from a member of the audience, called for Wales to be treated with parity with Scotland in relation to England. She went on to ask for Wales to be given more money, specifically an additional £1.2 billion a year. In response, another panellist in the debate, Labour's First Minister of Wales Carwyn Jones, uttered his only sensible sentence of the entire evening, when he pointed out the paradox of Wood‘s wanting at the same time more money from London and more independence from it.

She retorted that she does want independence for Wales but not before the playing field has been levelled up. At that point the moderator David Dimbleby gave everybody some sobering figures: Scotland gets per head over £10,000, Wales almost £10,000, Northern Ireland £10,800 and England £8,500.

Now, that's what the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish call equality.

But not the English.

"Gay" Leader Sentenced for Paedophilia

You won't see the news in the mainstream media. After all, this is not a priest.

44-year-old Stefan Johansson, former President of the RFSL (Riksförbundet för homosexuellas, bisexuellas och transpersoners rättigheter), or the National Association for the Rights of Homosexuals, Bisexuals and Transsexuals, was sentenced on 24 October to five years in prison and ordered to pay 60,000 euros for pain and suffering caused by rape, pimping and paedophilia.

Founded in 1950, the the National Association for the Rights of Homosexuals, Bisexuals and Transsexuals is Sweden's largest organization of its kind, with more than 6,000 members. The RFSL was recognised in 2007 by the United Nations as a non-governmental organisation with consultative status. In Sweden, the RFSL was in 2009 one of the main promoters of the legalization of homosexual marriage.

According to the indictment, he administered alcohol and drugs to minors in order to have sexual intercourse with them, and he also alleged to have embezzled $ 3,000 that were supposed to be donated to AIDS research.

On his Facebook profile, he published among other things, an invitation to a [sic] "Education Day", which was organized on 18 July 2013 for "LGBT people with experience in the sale of sexual services" and specializes in "young people who prostitute themselves on the Internet".

The Homo-Imperial Association as an Offshoot of the Gay Lobby ILGA

The RFSL was the Swedish branch of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), which in turn has promoted pedophilia for about ten years and is certified there at the UN as a non-governmental organization with consultative status, the European Section and in the EU , The RFSL always maintained pedophile contacts to a workgroup as well, which have campaigned for the legalization of sexual relations between adults and minors.

ILGA has openly revealed since 2001 that the majority of their funding is obtained directly from the European Commission. The gay lobby is thus financed by the European taxpayer. And the rich. In 2012 alone, 1,017,055 euros flowed from the EU Commission in the ILGA-coffers. That's more than 52 percent of the annual budget. Over such a windfall, other, more widely socially relevant associations were also pleased.

Gay lobby: Funds Come From the EU and George Soros

Among the other sponsors, there is the ubiquitous in the left-liberal spectrum, financier George Soros, who contributed 200,000 euros, which is more than ten percent of the total budget. ILGA today enjoys consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). This is a position that was long been denied it, because the homo-association refused to condemn "sex between adults and children". But then it was possible that the gay lobby has brought this last dam to collapse, without having to relinquish these positions.

And now Johansson's conviction follows, who was certainly not in the last rank of gay lobbying. Most media take no notice of such news, however. With their gender-ideological blinders on, they do not see what they do not want to see. A flimsy pretext can always be found where the crimes are trivialized. Most editors are also much too busy to demand ever new and radical gay rights, as they would deal with the dark side of their ideological zeal. Self-criticism anyway, has not been a strength of ideologues nor of those who ride the waves of fashion. The results of this attitude are known. Stefan Johansson is one of them. Only: The public should know nothing of it if possible.

How to Make Immigration Look Good

They've done it again. Here's the umpteenth attempt to portray immigration as economically useful for Britain, if undertaken by selecting only a particular group of immigrants for a carefully chosen period of time.

The media report that a new study by University College London (UCL) claims that immigrants to the UK from the 10 newest EU countries (those that joined the EU in 2004) have benefited the British economy. In the years to 2011, it says, they added £4.96 billion more in taxes than they took out in public services.

It turns out that this is not so much a new study as a revision of a previous one whose faults had been rightly criticised.

The original University College London’s study (conducted by Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, CReAM for short), published in November 2013, was the most far-reaching study ever carried out on the impact of migration on taxpayers, covering 16 years from 1995 to 2011, based on official and government figures.

It concluded that immigrants from the EEA (European Economic Area) contribute 4% more in taxes than they take out in benefits. Non-Europeans immigrants, on the other hand, are a financial burden: they take in benefits and services £100 billion (or 14%) more than they put back.

CReAM also found that British-born people pay into the Exchequer 7% less than they receive from the state.

So, because that study includes both European and non-European immigrations, it calculated an overall net benefit of £25 billion to the UK from recent migrants, which it described as "a very sizeable fiscal contribution".

But, if you analyse further, you see that, as explained above, non-European immigration, far from contributing positively, is a huge economic burden for Britain. So there is no rational motive to support that type of immigration on financial grounds.

But there’s more. A more in-depth assessment of the fiscal effects of immigration to the UK published in March 2014 analyses the CReAM research. This study, by Migration Watch UK, found some serious faults in the CReAM paper.

Migration Watch experts found, for example, that its authors themselves, even using their over-optimistic calculations, had found a cost to the UK from migrants of £95 billion between 1995 and 2011, but they had buried the figure, which could only be found at the end of their paper but was not mentioned in their text.

Migration Watch also makes clear that the the CReAM study's authors, Dustmann and Frattini, have overstated revenues and understated expenditures for the migrants arriving after 2000. Among the extremely unrealistic assumptions made by CReAM is that even the most recent arrivals contribute as much as long-term migrants and the UK-born, whereas both their younger age and lower incomes make this highly unlikely.

When these over- and under-estimations are adjusted, the result is – assuming that Dustmann and Frattini were otherwise correct - an overall fiscal cost of migration to the UK of £148 billion (more than £22 million a day) during the 1995-2011 period.

Interestingly, the two academics did not reply to these criticisms but only made vague remarks about "derogatory language seemingly attempting to undermine our reputation".

This was the preamble, the story so far.

Now CReAM has published a revised version of its November 2013 original study discussed above. The authors claim they have made "robustness checks", taking into account some points raised by Migration Watch.

This new paper only concerns itself with immigrants from the so-called A10 (Accession Ten) countries, namely those that joined the EU in 2004: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. They have been making a postive contribution of almost £5 billion between 1995 and 2011.

The problem, according to Migration Watch chairman Sir Andrew Green, is cherry-picking. The overall effect of immigration resulting from this study – although not publicised in headlines - is now a fiscal cost of £114 billion as a best-case scenario and £159 billion at worst, therefore higher than the previous CReAM paper's calculation of £95 billion.

He said to the BBC:

If you take all EU migration including those who arrived before 2001 what you find is this - you find by the end of the period they are making a negative contribution and increasingly so.

And the reason is that if you take a group of people while they're young, fit and healthy they're not going to be very expensive, but if you take them over a longer period they will be.

Anthony Reuben, head of statistics for BBC News, added:

If we are only interested in tax and benefits, the perfect person for the economy would arrive the day after they finish education, work for 40 years, not have children and then leave the day after they retire.

It is no surprise, then, that the relatively young, already educated migrants from EU accession countries are closer to that model than people who have arrived in Britain longer ago, or indeed the population in general.

The big question that this research does not address is what happens to those migrants in the future; in particular, will they stay in the country after they retire?

And also, what effect if any have they had on the amount of in-work benefits and out-of-work benefits paid to the rest of the population?

Sir Andrew Green also said:

This report confirms that immigration as a whole has cost up to £150 billion in the last 17 years. As for recent European migrants, even on their own figures - which we dispute - their contribution to the exchequer amounts to less than £1 a week per head of our population.

And, if even the BBC admits that "over the longer term, immigrants to the UK had been a burden on the state", it must mean that as far as immigration is concerned we'got to the end of the road.

Labour's Immigration Plan Is Unravelling

This article is by our guest writer Cassandra.

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Did you notice the shift in British 'Left-wing' orthodoxy? You might have missed it if you weren't paying attention since our 'progressive' overlords changed tact without acknowledging what they had tried to do, and what they had in fact succeeded in doing, to British society since circa 1997.

It is now apparently acceptable to criticise the open-door policy to immigration that this country has had over the last decade and more. A policy which, for the most part, it still has today. Even the leadership of the Labour party has come out of the 'bigot' closet to admit that perhaps, just maybe, the level of immigration into Britain has been a tad high. They've even gone as far as to admit responsibility for the dramatic demographic changes that many cities have undergone and, what's more, to reluctantly admit that the 'pace' of immigration has been a little too fast for some people's liking.

What the intelligentsia more broadly (not just the Labour party and their clique) has not admitted responsibility for, however, is its attempt to indoctrinate and cower people into allowing it to continue its grand project unopposed by condemning those who opposed it as 'racists', 'bigots', 'xenophobes' etc. What project is that, you ask? Why, the project, as revealed by Labour speech-writer Andrew Neather, of opening up 'the UK to mass immigration' thereby transforming the make-up of British society in order to 'rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date'. Opposition to that project was quelled through the dogma that opposing it automatically made one a 'racist', a 'bigot' and a 'xenophobe' – all very bad things. So bad, in fact, that there was nothing worse than to be labelled as such.

That dogma was not something that the party attempted to impose by itself. Its law-making power and control of the education system was not enough. The media were roped in to help to impose a fog of fear and silence upon society. Comedians were used to poke fun at anyone who dared to step out of line.

These tools worked together so effectively that average people came to police themselves. They came to learn, by indoctrination, what the right things to think and say about immigration were. Moreover, they imbibed all the buzz words ('racist', 'bigot' etc.) to be used against those who did not conform in order to pressure them into conforming. It didn't matter that, if pressed, most of the people using those words couldn't actually provide a clear and precise definition of their meaning, as long as they understood when to apply them - i.e. when somebody is critical of immigration -, and understood that, in applying them, they proved to themselves and their overlords that they belonged to the 'right' group. They learnt from our 'progressive' rulers that language is a weapon to be used with extreme prejudice against the enemy in order to inoculate yourself from the very same treatment that you yourself give others - thereby perpetuating the system.

So what happened? Why the change? What made the 'progressives' who sought to bully an entire society into conforming to their ideology abandon their dogma to such an extent that they now talk in the same vein as the very 'racists' and 'bigots' they once condemned?

Part of the truth is that their success, such as it has been, has been a superficial one. It was never really more than skin-deep. Of course they succeeded in creating an atmosphere wherein people felt that they had to keep their true feelings about immigration unvoiced, but they did not succeed in actually forcing people to abandon those views. There remained a silent majority who was waiting for its opportunity to express its true feelings, and that opportunity came in the form of the UK Independence Party (UKIP).

That party refused to be cowered although it was demonised (and continues to be demonised) for criticising immigration. Seeing this, the silent majority used UKIP to express its own views through the ballot box, so that the party came to speak for that silent majority. The people came to see the demonisation of themselves and their views in the demonisation of the party, and reacted accordingly by supporting it.

It is the success that UKIP has had most notably during the 2014 European elections, and more recently at the Clacton by-election, that has caused the Labour Party to begin to scurry around trying to find some way to show that it 'understands people's feelings' about immigration. It has made Labour aware not only of the failure of its grand project, but also the flimsiness of the tools with which it, and the intelligentsia that it represents, used (and continue to use) to impose its orthodoxy upon British society.

What happens when the threat of being condemned as a 'racist' and a 'bigot' is no longer an effective means of scaring people into conformity and into voting the way that you want them to? What happens when pillorying them as uncouth and absurd no longer works to turn them into passive, malleable group-thinkers? What happens is that our 'liberal' rulers get an inkling into their own weakness. They are floating in dinghy upon a sea of opinion that is diametrically opposed to their own. They are trying to keep the waves from swallowing them up, and they realise that their only weapon is flimsy. Their only weapon is words.

What happens when 'sexist' and 'homophobe' no longer calm the waves? What happens when 'islamophobe' falls on deaf ears? You may soon find out, comrades!

Libyan Soldiers Bring Mayhem to Cambridgeshire

Great and greatly funny article by my friend, the brilliant author Alexander Boot. Below is part of it.

An update. Now 300 soldiers are guarding out 240 Libyan cadets. Cameron insists we won't grant them asylum.

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But God forbid our leaders utter a single word suggesting they realise that the West and Islam are irreconcilable – that even in its present debauched state our civilisation simply can’t accommodate Islam as a dynamic force within our borders.

Yet our electorate has been corrupted to such an extent that, for any ‘statesman’ to be politically successful, he has to be politically correct. Hence the respect, both preached and practised, for any religion or civilisation, provided it isn’t Christian.

Hence also the criminal stupidity of our leaders who destroyed the demonstrably un-Western but still workable power balance in the Middle East to plunge the region into a blood-filled abyss of violence and unrest.

Now that the violence looks as if it’s about to spill over way beyond Iraq, Syria and Libya, our governments are reviewing their options.

One of them is yet another direct military intervention, and we all know how hugely successful this has proved so far.

Another is to intervene by proxy, using Iran (what with the Nato member Turkey refusing to play) to do the fighting for us. Ancient Rome had that kind of arrangement with the Vandals, remember how that turned out?

We may suffer the same way, since the inevitable price for Iran’s involvement will be the opportunity to acquire nuclear weapons, and you aren’t getting three guesses to figure out how they’ll be used.

The third option is related to the second: arming and training those local groups we perceive as our friends. ‘Perceive’ is the operative word: there are no groups in the Islamic world that are genuinely friendly to the West.

Some, however, are ready to fake amiability for tactical reasons, something we accept as the real thing. Both sides are perfectly aware of the ad hoc nature of any such alliance, invariably underpinned as it always is by background hostility.

They pretend to be our friends, we pretend to believe them. However, the two sides still diverge in one important area. They have a long-term strategy, we can’t think beyond the next election.

That’s why we refuse to recall that every time we trained and armed Muslim soldiers in the past they eventually turned their weapons against us. Who do you think armed the Taliban? Al-Qaeda? Saddam? Gaddafi? Isis?

Training thousands of Libyan soldiers at our Cambridgeshire base is a sign that we’re as ever prepared to equip our future enemies while pretending they’re our present friends.

We simply refuse to admit that our quarrel isn’t with this or that Islamic faction but with Islam as such. Well, if we still haven’t realised that there’s a clash of civilisations under way, we ought to be thankful to the Libyan soldiers for clarifying the point.

Since arriving in June they’ve succeeded in turning their corner of sleepy Cambridgeshire into a scaled-down version of Tripoli’s outskirts.

The Libyans went on an alcohol-fuelled rampage and there I was, thinking Muslims were supposed to be teetotal. A few of them spent £1,000 on booze in a single visit to a supermarket, an amount that buys a lot of mayhem.

Two of the soldiers have now been charged with raping a man, who presumably was wearing a provocative business suit. Not to discriminate, three others are being held on remand for several counts of sexual assault against women.

These peccadilloes were augmented by attendant charges of theft and threatening behaviour towards a police officer, which is legalese for head-butting. (Since no one has suggested that ‘Glasgow kiss’ be renamed ‘Tripoli kiss’, I’m hereby putting this initiative forth as my own.)

Anyway, this is where our MoD officials unveiled their comedy routine, and I thank them for making my morning so much more upbeat for it.

In a nutshell, the training programme, originally supposed to last until the end of the month, is being terminated effective immediately, and no future training will be done in Britain, what with the UK’s surfeit of tasty men and women roaming the countryside freely.

Instead of describing this simple development in this kind of language or, as would be my preference, more colloquially, the MoD spokesman delivered his first knee-slapping line:

“We have agreed with the Libyan government that it is best for all involved to bring forward the training completion date”. (“We can’t have too many raping and thieving Muzzie soldiers about…”)
Encouraged by the outburst of laughter, he continued in the same vein: “There have been disciplinary issues.”

I suppose homosexual rape, sexual assault on women, theft and head-butting a cop could be described that way for comic effect, but, playing it straight, I’d have settled for ‘crimes’ instead.

And then came the kicker, having punters rolling in the aisles: “As part of our support for the Libyan government, we will review how best to train Libyan security forces – including whether training further tranches of recruits in the UK is the best way forward.” (“…and neither do we want them to darken our doorstep ever again.”)

To add a few delicious touches to the stand-up gig, several Libyan soldiers, presumably not the defendants, have requested political asylum in Britain. And their government has so far failed to pay for the programme, while not offering much hope it’ll do so in the future.

Oh well, we’ve made our bed of nails, so we must lie in it – and it’s no laughing matter.

Why Communism Dominates in the West

"Red Herrings" is a brilliant historical article by Andrew C. McCarthy that explains one of the most important reasons of the current dominance of the Left in the West (and more than that).

It's a review and a defence of Diana West's book American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation's Character (Amazon USA) (Amazon UK) , which was published last year and provoked much controversy, as you can gauge from the review itself.

The way Joe McCarthy has been treated in America reminds me a bit of the way Enoch Powell has been treated in Britain: both were fundamentally right and both were vilified. But Farage wouldn't say that - especially about the latter - in a million years.

The only misconceived thing of the article is when it quotes Diana West's favourable view of "Enlightenment logic".

The Enlightenment has brought to Europe the first sparkles of totalitarian thought. Marx was an intellectual heir to the Enlightenment.

The problem is that we ourselves have been indoctrinated by intentional "disinformation" - possibly of Soviet origin -, and it takes us time to get through the fog.

Here's part of the very long article:

Stumbling into a barroom brawl was the last thing I’d intended. Lined up on one side: sculptors of a hagiography that is now conventional wisdom crow about a noble conquest over totalitarian dictators. The other side bellows: “Nonsense! In defeating one monster, your heroes merely helped create another, sullying us with their atrocities and burdening us for decades with a global security nightmare.” The first side spews that its critics are deranged, defamatory conspiracy-mongers. The critics fire back that these “court historians” are in denial; their heroes did not really “win” the war, they just helped a different set of anti-American savages win—in the process striking a deal with the devil that blurred the lines between good and evil, rendering the world more dangerous and our nation more vulnerable.


To readers of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character, this heated debate will sound familiar. American Betrayal is the bestselling author and syndicated columnist Diana West’s cri de coeur against Anglo-American collusion with Stalin’s hideous Soviet Union in the war that vanquished Hitler’s hideous Nazi Germany. The controversy swirling around the book exposes a chasm on the political Right: on one side, admirers of Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II leadership; on the other, detractors who blame FDR’s indifference to Communism (and, particularly, Communist infiltration of the U.S. government) for the rise of what Ronald Reagan dubbed “the evil empire.” The resulting acrimony is what put me in the mind of the aforementioned brawl I wandered into twenty years ago, involving a different, albeit related, episode: the Central Intelligence Agency’s collusion with the Afghan mujahideen, which hastened the Soviet death throes.

I was a federal prosecutor in 1993 when the World Trade Center was bombed. We indicted the offending jihadist cell for levying a terrorist war against the United States. Several of the terrorists had been major mujahideen figures. Their lawyers thus thought it exculpatory to claim that they could not have conspired to wage jihad against America; after all, they had actually been allied with America in the jihad against the Soviets. The provocative claim was implausible as a defense, the Soviets having left Afghanistan (and the USSR having collapsed) years before the Twin Towers bombing. Still, it is standard procedure to investigate even dubious defense claims. Hence, my unwitting stumble into a heated controversy.

The cia and Reagan administration veterans passionately proclaimed that the $3 billion in aid and armaments funneled to the mujahideen—matched dollar-for-dollar by Saudi Arabia, with Pakistani intelligence as our “cut-out” for deniability purposes—was an unvarnished triumph. The war became the Soviets’ Vietnam, bleeding the Red Army to death even as a humiliated Kremlin buckled under the pressure of Reagan’s arms build-up. In sum, I was told, “Look, we liberated half the world from Communist tyranny. Case closed.”

Yet, it wasn’t that simple. The mujahideen begot al Qaeda. A fifth of the U.S. aid, plus most of the Saudi contribution (real money in those days), was channeled to virulently anti-American terrorists. They proceeded to take their jihad global . . . eventually to Manhattan. The rest is history—the history we’ve been struggling with for two decades.

Belgium To Ban Ritual Slaughter, Sign Petition

The petition "Stop the barbaric slaughter without stunning of animals under the guise of religion" has almost reached its target of 4,000 signatures.

The petition, which I've also signed, is addressed to the Belgian politician Ben Weyts, who is Flemish Minister for Animal Welfare, and to Janez Potočnik, the European Commissioner for the Environment.

Ben Weyts said on the Belgian television show De zevende dag on the VRT network that he would actively pursue a total ban on ritual slaughter. The ban, he added, could be implemented by 2015, as well as further legislation.

In the meantime, Weyts called for Muslims and Jews to adhere to current laws, which allow animal slaughter without previous stunning to be carried out only in licensed abattoirs.

The cabinet office of his Belgian government counterpart, Wallon Minister for Animal Welfare Carlo Di Antonio, indicated it would "take the same shape as that suggested by" the Flemish Minister.

Please sign the petition now:

The slaughter of animals without stunning is not only barbaric, it is also very painful as vets proclaim for years. Waiting animals know exactly what is going to happen, they are stressed by the smell of blood, urine, feces, by the cries of fear and pain of the animals slaughtered in front of and before them. Muslims do not have a valid reason to slaughter animals in such a cruel way: apparently nowhere the Koran states that animals may not be stunned for slaughter! As well for the Jews: Kosher slaughter is as reprehensible as halal ! There is no immediate or painless killing for slaughter without stunning. We live in the 21st century. Peoples knowledge has grown such as the means to slaughter animals painless. If you really want to hold on to the tradition of 'cutting throats', then just do it to animals who were stunned before slaughter! That is not only human, it is a form of respect! Or do Muslims nor Jews need to respect animals? I do not believe that. Religion should never be an excuse to let animals suffer ! Stop the slaughter of animals without stunning worldwide. Provide a law that forbids slaughter without stunning in Belgium and Europe, and hopefully the whole world will follow. Do it now !