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Tommy Robinson: Double standards, not fear of diversity, provoked the EDL

The first time I met Tommy Robinson I told him to fuck off. The English Defence League (EDL) had just formed and Robinson came up to me after a public interview I was doing in London. Without knowing anything much about them, I am afraid I assumed (white, working-class, Cross of St George at demos) that the EDL were a British National Party front. Which was why I ended up advising him of the procreative way in which to travel. He took it very politely, said he understood that I didn’t know their views and then said, ‘We’re not racists — we’re just working-class guys who are losing our country

The Silk Road has been busted – but its legacy to the international drug trade will remain

Since 2011, the Silk Road has infuriated governments the world over by allowing digital pirates to operate above the law. It has been – in effect – an eBay for Afghani heroin, cocaine and all manner of illegal goods. Hosted in the virtual tunnels of the ‘Deep Web’, transactions are made in BitCoin and up until yesterday, it was doing roughly 60,000 a day. But now, it seems, the cops have swooped. Yesterday afternoon Ross William Ulbricht, known by the pseudonym ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ was arrested – on charge of being the owner. Drugs were the site’s bread and butter, making up 70 percent of sales. But you could buy

A man of his Times: Lord Danny Finkelstein

Thomas Barnes, who edited the Times from 1817 to 1841, declared that the ‘newspaper is not an organ through which government can influence people, but through which people can influence the government.’ There have been periods when principle guided the Times — for instance when the great war correspondent W.H. Russell exposed government incompetence in the Crimean War. At other times the newspaper has a tendency to become the organ of official opinion, impartially supporting any political party (just so long as it happens to be the one in power). Ten years ago its political pages resembled a New Labour noticeboard. As Tony Blair fell and a Conservative government started

Somali savages update

Here’s a story from today’s Daily Mail, with a cut-out-keep picture, of Somali Muslim savages stoning to a twenty year old woman for the crime of adultery. Last year they killed a thirteen year old girl in a similar fashion; seven Muslim states stone women to death for adultery, and they will even provide the stones for you, which is thoughtful. Eleven will chop your head off if you renounce the Muslim faith. The overwhelming majority of Islamic states will either kill you, send you to work in a labour camp, put you in prison or fine you if you are gay. Bugger someone adulterously in Somalia while calling a

Diary – 4 January 2003

Delhi If you are invited to one of these grand Indian weddings, you should jolly well make an effort. I inquired about the dress code, and was told that it would be all right for me to wear something called Kurta Pyjama. So I got the full bollocks. No mucking around. I went to the Delhi equivalent of Harrods, where the Suits-you-Sahib boys kitted me out, at some cost, in a green silk smock, an off-white silk waistcoat, and those funny drainpiped white pyjamas called churidars, not to speak of the agonising Jesus sandals called chaptals. And then there was the turban. Until you have had a turban wrapped around