Britain's pagan police

The Times reports that

pagan police have the right to take their festivals as official holiday after their support group won formal recognition from the Home Office... The Pagan Police Association was announced by co-founder PC Andy Pardy, who, when he is not patrolling the beat in Hertfordshire, is a heathen worshipper of Norse gods including Thor and Odin.

... By allowing pagans to set up their own organisation, the Home Office has officially sanctioned a string of wicca and pagan-related holidays — including, naturally, the festival of lactating sheep. Thus, while their fellow officers are spending the summer at Center Parcs, or possibly jetting off to Florida, pagan officers will be drinking mead and dancing naked to celebrate the coming harvest.

Isn’t diversity wonderful?

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Into the murk

Everyone lost!

Who can be surprised? Only the political class (and its media groupies) who refused to heed the unequivocal message being shouted from the rooftops by the public at every opportunity, that as far as they were concerned all politicians were venal, incompetent and untrustworthy, and that people had had it up to here with the entire political system. So when increasingly panicky Labour and Tory politicians desperately warned before the election that a hung parliament would be a disaster because it would not deliver the strong and decisive government that the system was tailored to provide, the voters said ‘Yesss!!!’ Or to be more precise, they turned their backs on the big national picture and voted local: the candidate who impressed them on his or her own account won, largely regardless of party; simple as that. True localism!

So now all is murk. And no, the likely political paralysis is not good at all. But then, no party was offering any prospect of getting to grips properly with anything important anyway. It is the condition of British politics, and beyond that the state of British society, which is not good at all and of which this election result is an accurate reflection.

The big shock last night was the drop in the LibDem vote. So much for the ‘Politics Idol’: it looks like when it came to it the voters had more sense. But the real losers were the Tories. Yes of course Labour was smashed (although it’s a brave soul who would say even now that Brown has no prospect of hanging on to power). For although the Tories are the largest party, they fluffed a goal that was wide, wide open. Given the unprecedented incompetence, corruption and chaos of the Labour government and with the country screaming for relief, the Tories should have walked it. If Cameron becomes Prime Minister, it will be by default – and with a fragile hold on power making the prospect of having to hold another election in the near future all too likely.

This result finally proves that the Cameroon ‘hopeydopeychangey’strategy was a bad mistake, for all the reasons discussed here month after month. Will the Cameroons now admit it?

Is the Pope a Catholic?    

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More in common than we like to think...

‘We have something in common’, said the New York taxi-driver to me after I had given him the address in the city where I was going. ‘The same bastards want to hurt your country and mine’.

New York had a very lucky escape indeed last Sunday when the car bomb left in Times Square failed to detonate and was defused after an alert local raised the alarm. The US authorities also got lucky in arresting the prime suspect Faisal Shahzad because, as the New York Times reports today, at least two significant lapses by both the government and the airline involved almost allowed him to get clean away.

As we are now learning, Shahzad was trained in bomb-making in Waziristan, and a number of people are being questioned in Pakistan in connection with this attack. This despite the fact that Shahzad had spent a decade in the United States, obtaining two university degrees and working for a Connecticut financial marketing company. A model citizen, in other words. Yup, it’s the pattern we know so well in the UK.

Yet as an article in The Weekly Standard notes, the US authorities initially played  down this attack as some kind of random development unconnected to anything or anyone very significant (how good of them to make me feel so much at home this week). Indeed, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg went to far as to speculate that the Times Square bomber could be

a mentally deranged person upset with the Obama administration’s health care policy.

Mental derangement at work here? Sure; but not in quite the way Bloomberg suggests.

Something in common between the US and UK indeed.

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The view from America

A novel experience, this, viewing the climax of a British general election campaign through American eyes. ‘Who’s gonna win?’ I am asked several times a day. I attempt to explain the various phenomena of the British constituency system v the popular vote, hung parliaments and Nick Clegg and watch an expression of stupefaction settle on the face of my interrogator. The idea that possibly no-one might win is very un-American, it seems.

Sometimes the sharpest perspective comes from far away. I was struck by this story by John Barnes in the New York Times. Under the headline

Immigration Could Sway Coming Vote in Britain

he reports:

LUTON, England — When Mohammed Qurban stood outside the Jamia mosque in the heavily Muslim Bury Park district on Tuesday and spoke anxiously about Britain’s record-high levels of immigration, he was reflecting a powerful undercurrent that could help tip victory in dozens of constituencies in Thursday’s general election to the main opposition groups vying with the governing Labour Party for power, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

 “I think this country is coming overpopulated, too many people coming in from everywhere, especially Europe,” Mr. Qurban said, as fellow worshipers nodded in assent. In particular, he said, thousands of Poles in Luton were taking jobs from the children and grandchildren of a previous generation of immigrants like himself, those who arrived from Pakistan in one of Britain’s early waves of migration in the 1960s.

The conversation with Mr. Qurban, and at least a dozen others like it with Muslims in Luton, captured a shift of potentially far-reaching significance. The most strident opponents of large-scale immigration have traditionally been white, native-born Britons, and their favorite target immigrant blacks and Asians, particularly Muslims.

The incongruity was not lost on Mr. Qurban, 56, a rental agent who seemed keen to separate himself from the skinheads and others whose anti-immigrant agitation has sometimes turned violent. “This is my town, this is my bread-and-butter,” he said. “I’m a law-abiding citizen, never crossed the line, that is definitely out of order. The Poles have a problem at home as we do in Pakistan, no jobs, no money. I want to go along with them. But definitely, it’s up to the government to put a cap on it.”

Very droll. I await the charge from the usual suspects that Mr Qurban is, er, a racist.

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Reverberating across the pond

Extraordinary the waves still being made beyond British shores by Gordon Brown’s fateful encounter with the ‘bigoted woman’ of Rochdale, aka the decent, bewildered once-Labour- but-not-this-time voter Mrs Gillian Duffy. Here in the US, where I am currently promoting my new book, people appear quite riveted by this event, which appears to have gone viral round the world at virtually the same instant that it was transfixing British TV viewers. So why such an impact?

Partly, of course, this is because it was a made-for-TV event, captured on camera and in sound in real time. But it’s more than that. It’s because the issue so graphically illuminated by this political debacle for Brown, the impact of mass immigration and the fact that no-one is allowed to express concern about it without being demonised as a bigot, is not particular to Britain but is a phenomenon afflicting America and other western countries.

In the US, feelings are still inflamed over the way in which Obama waded into the uproar over Arizona’s attempt to crack down on illegal immigration and slammed it as unfair and un-American and likely to usher in a police state. Or something like that. People feel doubly outraged: not just that immigration is out of control, but that those who applaud the attempt to enforce the law and police the boundaries of the nation should be vilified – at least by implication – by the President, no less, for doing so.

It seems to me that the issue of immigration is as toxic as it is because it stands proxy for a profound disdain for the very idea of the nation as a discrete entity bound by a shared culture and set of values and contained within policeable borders. The absurdly utopian and anti-democratic view that, since the nation is the cause of nationalism, and nationalism is the cause of horrible things like bigotry and wars, if the nation gives way to supra-national entities (like continents) there would be no more wars or bigotry and the Brotherhood of Man would finally materialise. Thus the ‘transnational progressivism’ now so in vogue in high-minded circles.

That’s why those who object to mass immigration are doubly demonised, not just as racists but as xenophobes standing in the way of the Brotherhood of Man. And that’s why Mrs Gillian Duffy of Rochdale lit a beacon whose flame has been noticed all the way across the pond.

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