An annoying early-morning start to the day, waking up not far past the middle of the night to typical rubbish on the BBC World Service. A programme called United Zingdom, in which what sounded like two Welsh women (one certainly was, being one Lisa Angharad) got together to trash England, the UK, and the British people. One of them apparently has a Singapore passport as well as a British one.

Everything, it seems, is the fault of “the British” (English). They, the English, are basically nasty, “racist” etc. They should not want their own country, language, customs, population. Now Wales, Wales is different! It (apparently) should have its own language etc. The bias and sheer untruth in that little broadcast was incredible.

The woman with the Singapore passport was asked about whether she would prefer to live there and seemed to affirm, though she said that “but they have anti-gay laws there…”, which apparently was a drawback. She then added “…but the British brought those to Singapore“. Ah, so once more the British (and failing that, no doubt any other white Northern Europeans) were to blame! I should have guessed. The other woman then chimed in with “ah, the British again“. Why are we paying (forced to pay) the BBC so that it can pay bitches like that to spout anti-British propaganda?

They should have added that, until the British arrived on the island of Singapore, there was nothing there at all, and had not been for at least 200 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Singapore

Another couple of deliberate inaccuracies: we were told that the Welsh language is vibrant and becoming more spoken, and that there is “a huge upsurge” in Welsh nationalism.

Language: I myself know from experience in the 1980s that Welsh is naturally a first language in some areas, in West Wales especially. It seems however that less than a quarter of the Welsh population as a whole speak Welsh to any useable standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language

Welsh nationalism: Plaid Cymru is only nominally “nationalist” anyway, willing to have people in Wales “whatever their race, nationality, gender, colour, creed [etc]” [Plaid Cymru platform].

Even leaving aside the above, the Plaid electoral performance has been poor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaid_Cymru#Electoral_performance

Plaid Cymru controls only one local council in Wales (out of dozens). It also has 4 out of 40 Westminster MPs (a figure unchanged or not much changed since the 1970s), and in the last (and final) EU elections had elected 1 MEP out of 4 (their best result was in 1999, 2 out of 5).

Conclusion: there is no upsurge of Welsh “nationalism”, let alone a huge one.

The trashing of the World Service has been one of the saddest things over the past 30 years. It was once interesting, lively, truthful, stimulating. 1970s and 1980s. Now, it cannot even seem to be able to tell the time clearly! The World Service seemed to go into a kind of spiral of decline in the 1990s. A Jewish woman whose name I forget was on constantly, and —quelle surprise— obsessed on air about “holocaust” and “Nazis” almost nonstop.

The decline of BBC World Service continued, reaching (I hope) the bottom round about 2010. In the past year or two, there has been a slight improvement, but only slight. There are still only a few worthwhile programmes, the best being The Forum, especially when presented by Bridget Kendall: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cszjvc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridget_Kendall.

Martin Bell, the famous broadcaster, journalist and one-term MP [Independent, Tatton] made the point several times that, in dangerous parts of the world (Iraq, Bosnia etc) people know the BBC World Service, yet the World Service is funded on a shoestring compared to rather useless projects such as the British Council [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Council]

I really value the BBC World Service, which is precisely why I despise what it has largely become. As Nietzsche wrote: “the great despisers are also the great reverers” [Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra].

Tweets seen

I’m so sick of this ‘The British People’ nonsense. It’s inflammatory and divisive and also errant vacuous nonsense with no meaning in a multi-party democracy. The phrase should be banned from political discourse. https://t.co/zVW56W5qlZ

— Brian Cox (@ProfBrianCox) August 8, 2020

Here we see science popularizer Professor Brian Cox putting forward, yet again, his tendentious political views. The sort of person all too common in the UK, meaning someone who wants the country to become even more of a multikulti dustbin. After all, “I’m all right, Jack”.

There are two types of scientist: the ones doing serious research and perhaps making real and even great discoveries or leaps forward; then there are the others, who are basically popular in the mass media, write books popular with the public, are on TV frequently, rack up official honours (and plenty of money) for all that. Nuff said…

https://twitter.com/osindileyo/status/1292355973420654592?s=20

https://twitter.com/ericbwfc/status/1292356271090302977?s=20

https://twitter.com/LordProtector11/status/1292356426099294210?s=20

Cox is a good example of the “clever person” (not infrequently someone of scientific background) who has come to think that he is a good deal more clever than he is and who, at least when out of his specialist area or areas, is rather silly.

Incidentally, he presumably meant to say “arrant nonsense“, not “errant nonsense“…

they are criminals trying to break in to our country illegally. We shouldn't be saving these people at all. They could stay in France and have zero need to come here apart from to fleece our country.

— The Gers (@TheGers5) August 9, 2020

I fancy a nice house on the beach in either Africa or Asia. I'll admit, government benefits would do nicely too, along with free education & health care. Guaranteed sunshine. Do you think the natives would accept me & my white arsed family when we pitch up?

— Manuel Heistenberger (@Heistenberger) August 9, 2020

There are huge numbers of bien-pensant idiots in the UK, who love to think of themselves as kind, compassionate, generous etc, as they virtue-signal on Twitter and elsewhere. The famous or infamous ones, such as Yvette Cooper, Lily Allen, Gary Lineker etc are only the tip of the iceberg. Below their capital, income, and public-recognition levels, there are thousands, perhaps even millions of others.

I hesitate to say that none of those people, the “refugees welcome” dimwits, would ever accommodate migrant-invaders in their own homes. A few of the brainwashed and obscure ones might, just as, out of tens of millions, a very few people swim the Channel (to France, usually!), or learn to speak 10 languages fluently.

I met a man once who worked near Elephant and Castle, London, and who could speak, not 10 languages, admittedly, but certainly 8 languages fluently, and those languages did include some of the near-“impossible” ones, such as Finnish and Hungarian.

Such people are rare. They are not the general run. Most of the “refugees welcome” dimwits want the State and/or other people (which is all the State is, in the end) to house and feed those migrant-invaders, and to educate the children of the invaders. The dimwits prioritize the invaders over English/British people such as the ex-soldiers sleeping on the streets, or the middle-aged Brits struggling to survive after the (basically Jewish-influenced) “austerity” of 2010-2020 and the socio-economic upheavals which have occurred and those which lie ahead.

Interesting report

“Israel has the highest per capita COVID-19 morbidity rate in the world, according to Gamzu. As of Thursday, the total number of cases in Israel stood at 78,514 with 569 deaths and 53,362 recoveries, according to the Johns Hopkins coronavirus tracker.” [Jerusalem Post] https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/tourism-officials-were-ready-for-foreign-visitors-when-skies-open-up-637789

More tweets seen

pic.twitter.com/bJ5IuDdXi1

— Nick Griffin (@NickGriffinBU) August 8, 2020

pic.twitter.com/7yhcNArlJk

— Nick Griffin (@NickGriffinBU) August 9, 2020

If the covid death figures were corrected from "died with" to "died of", the contrast would be even worse.

Do you REALLY believe this utter disaster is almost worldwide government incompetence? Or do they have a UN/WHO agenda? https://t.co/oBar1TW3jK

— Nick Griffin (@NickGriffinBU) August 8, 2020

https://t.co/Gb0mnbCGwv

— Bertie (@Bert42230157) August 9, 2020

House of Lords, Brexit Party and Nigel Farage

I thought that Richard Tice, 2-i-c of Brexit Party, had been nominated for a peerage; apparently not. Claire Fox has, though. What a strange nomination that is.

I first saw Claire Fox [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claire_Fox] on TV about a decade ago. I think that it was on Newsnight. Or Daily Politics. I think the former. She was supposedly the head of something called The Institute of Ideas. I was curious enough to look it up via Internet. There was not much to see. The “Institute” seemed to consist mainly of Claire Fox, and (I found out after a while) seemed to be funded mainly by a City of London hedge fund speculator Jew, whose name I cannot at present recall.

As for Claire Fox herself, as seen on TV, she was not at all impressive, not convincing; there was something fake about her and her “Institute”, even before I started to look into it.

I found the “Institute of Ideas” to be little more than a facade; indeed, little more than a catchy name. I was unable to discover much about it. The whole thing seemed opaque, insubstantial. One could not grasp hold of it.

I see now that others, such as the journalist and TV news presenter, Jon Snow, had similar problems:

” The news broadcaster Jon Snow, according to a Guardian article, withdrew from an event to which he had been invited by the Royal Society of Arts after realising the IoI’s involvement. Snow felt there was a lack of transparency. ‘I didn’t have a clear idea of who they were,’ he said.  This lack of transparency affects almost every aspect of IoI events, as the article notes:  ‘From the platforms and the floor, the LM [Living Marxism] line is assiduously promoted by the magazine’s supporters and contributors – often without clear attribution of their affiliations.’ ” [Lobbywatch] http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=142]

It seems that the “Institute” was founded in 2000 by Fiona Fox, sister of Claire Fox, and other undisclosed persons. Fiona Fox also heads the Science Media Centre [http://www.lobbywatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=121], which is embedded within the very Establishment scientific body, the Royal Institution [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Institution]. Another sister, Gemma Fox, heads an EU-funded IT organization in Wales.

As noted in the Lobbywatch piece, above, the so-called “Institute” was founded by people connected with the tiny, obscure, and superficially uninfluential Revolutionary Communist Party [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Communist_Party_(UK,_1978)] and its connected magazine, Living Marxism or LM [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Marxism], which formally shut down in 2000 but in reality has now been rebranded as the online magazine Spiked [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiked_(magazine)], which has a fairly high profile on Twitter etc: https://twitter.com/spikedonline

Another fairly high-profile person connected with the above is Frank Furedi, a person of Hungarian origins, frequently on BBC radio [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Furedi], whose wife is the head of the UK’s largest abortion “advice” organization.

The “Institute of Ideas” has now retitled itself “The Academy of Ideas” [https://www.facebook.com/instofideas/]. Oddly, on Wikipedia, neither “Institute of Ideas” ror “Academy of Ideas” have pages, though the “Academy” has its own website: https://www.academyofideas.org.uk/.

Some of the tweets of Spiked can command my support, many cannot, such as this pitiful article:

Hiroshima was an experiment in extermination. The West viewed the Japanese as racially distinct and inferior. Sadly, this kind of racial thinking has returned with a vengeance. We must say loud and clear: there is only one human race, says @MsDinglehttps://t.co/vKTf4MrWc1

— spiked (@spikedonline) August 9, 2020

Taking just the main contention of that article, the Anglo-American atom-bomb project aka the Manhattan Project or Tube Alloys [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_Alloys] had as its primary aim the destruction of Germany and the German people, not Japan. Most of the scientists of importance were Jews. They hated Germany and National Socialism. Some were also Communists. Germany was only saved from atomic destruction by its unconditional surrender before the bomb was ready to be used.

The above exploration may or may not be interesting, but what interests me now and particularly is why did Boris-idiot (Boris Johnson) nominate Claire Fox for a peerage? Why?

Claire Fox has no real academic pedigree. Even in the 1980s (i.e. before the start of the present “award inflation”, by which almost all students get a supposed “First” or “Upper Second” degree), a 2:2 in English and American Literature scarcely cut it in the academic world! She was a mental health social worker for some years after graduation, then for 10 years a lecturer in English Literature at a couple of technical colleges in South Essex and in South Hertfordshire.

I think that we can be sure that Claire Fox’s peerage nomination was not for “services to education”!

We have already seen that, as a “think tank”, the “Institute of Ideas” scarcely existed. Even as an active lobby group, its activities do not seem to have had much impact. Claire Fox, despite a few appearances on TV, including the —now very outdated— Question Time, was not until recently (until 2019) a very publicly-known person; neither has she been involved with anything normally likely to attract an honour of any sort, let alone a peerage.

What about Claire Fox’s political life? Well, membership of the Revolutionary Communist Party or anything like it has never been an easy route to the House of Lords! Anyone with similar views who ended up with a peerage at least had to pretend to be “Labour”! I cannot think of many, even so. A few Jews, now long gone, perhaps. As for a “revolutionary communist”, even one now sort-of apostate, being ennobled “on the recommendation of” a Conservative Party Prime Minister would have been unthinkable, until now.

Claire Fox joined Nigel Farage’s pop-up “Brexit Party” in 2019, was selected (along with at least two other “former” Revolutionary Communist Party members) as a candidate for the European elections. She was elected, and was an MEP for about a year, until the UK nominally left the EU. One year…

It goes beyond that. Claire Fox has said things that many consider unforgiveable, such as, and in particular, her championing of IRA bombing in 1993, specifically the killing of a child.

Looking at it all, it seems inconceivable that, even a few years ago, or today, such a person could ever be nominated for a peerage, to become one of the UK’s upper house legislators, even bearing in mind the weird collection now in the Lords. Yet there she sits (soon). In fact, her previous (never reversed) support for the IRA has not stood in her way. Even the Sun “newspaper” has her on its YouTube channel!

Not that I disagree with everything she says. I agree with some of what she is saying in the above clip. [Having now —several hours later— seen all of the interview, I concede that I agree with a good deal of what she says in it].

So why was she given (nomination for) a peerage? I cannot entirely work it out, but it is obviously connected with her work for Brexit, and even more so with the standing down of most Brexit Party candidates while the election campaign was ongoing. A stunning act of betrayal by con-man Nigel Farage. He shot his own party in the neck. Or the back. Moreover, he stood down only candidates facing previously-incumbent or new Conservative Party candidates! Including Conservative Party candidates who were Remain supporters!

Nigel Farage ensured that the Conservative Party won the 2019 General Election. It might have won anyway, but might not have done, and certainly would not have achieved a Commons majority of 80 (or any majority).

If I am correct, and Claire Fox has been somehow rewarded for supporting Farage in his betrayal, why has Farage himself (or his 2-i-c, Tice), not been nominated for the House of Lords? There could be a number of reasons, such as (speculating) that Farage has been paid, as his reward, millions of pounds into an offshore secret account. Why not? I have no evidence that that is the case, but it seems not unlikely to me. £10 million? £20 million? Cheap at the price, when you get the UK in exchange…

Anyway, “the night is young”. Farage still might get a peerage from Boris-idiot; next year, or the year after. Tice too, maybe. Maybe Claire Fox getting one now is in the nature of a “statement of intent” or down-payment to Farage. Maybe giving Farage a peerage right now would make the corruption and betrayal just too obvious. Next year? 2022? Maybe.

The present politics of the System is more than sleazy. It has to be exterminated.

Other tweets seen

A must read. Gosh, this virus has brought out the inner nasty in so many. Sad. https://t.co/2ISqJBAOEJ

— Suzanne Evans (@SuzanneEvans1) August 6, 2020

Speaker of the Commons, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, has spent more than £7,500, just on mattresses and bedding for the speakers residence.

I’m guessing they don’t have a Home Bargains in Westminster.

— Rachael Swindon (@Rachael_Swindon) August 9, 2020

I went to a university, not a ‘uni’ and did not study PPE, @i0null. You, wherever you went, seem to have completely missed the point I was making, that the precaution should be proportionate to the danger, and have some experimental basis. Muzzles fail both these tests. https://t.co/TeIr94IzAu

— Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) August 9, 2020

In your ill-informed opinion. Evidence for this claim is extraordinarily weak. Look it up. https://t.co/rYJcf7Ynfx

— Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) August 9, 2020

Generally I have no trouble at all. Very few busybodies, plenty of cheerful smiles. Shop workers, not obliged to wear them , but under pressure to do so, may well welcome mask-free customers. https://t.co/EpL1DRsS9N

— Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) August 9, 2020

pic.twitter.com/zIqbYEqsmu

— THE CLOCKWORK ORANGE ¦POLITICAL COMMENTARY-SATIRE (@FineTunedOrange) August 9, 2020

Interesting how many of the muzzle zealots who attack me end their tweets with a peremptory 'Wear a mask!' or 'Wear a ****ing mask!' Yet I have never a suggested to any of them that they take theirs off (except by implication, during blood donations where a mask creates a risk).

— Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) August 9, 2020

https://twitter.com/MidnightBarber_/status/1292466107849342978?s=20

Orwell once wrote: "Remarks like ‘They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong’, or ‘They can’t do that; it’s against the law’, are part of the atmosphere of England." This powerful article (which I do not endorse) suggests this is no longer true : https://t.co/70ljflCb0V

— Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) August 9, 2020

In this country, until about 20 years ago. @klinkestu https://t.co/bJqF90t9xN

— Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) August 9, 2020

It’s ‘Mr Hitchens’ to you,@ionull . And no, I prefer not to cover my face with a loose soggy, porous nappy whose only true purpose is to proclaim my submission to and support of the stupidest government policy in history. Because I don’t support it. You wear one if you want. https://t.co/1WzZWzCQnA

— Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) August 9, 2020

Demonstration outside Bute House, office of Scotland's neo-Marxist First Minister, Ms Crankie. pic.twitter.com/Uoq7uF5iUa

— Nick Griffin (@NickGriffinBU) August 9, 2020

Patriots Day

Just watched an American film, Patriots Day, about the ghastly bombing of the Boston Marathon, and the hunt for the perpetrators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriots_Day_(film)

I think that the film is one of the best of its type that I have seen. Quite long on TV (with ad breaks, 2 hrs 35 mins), it nonetheless kept the attention throughout (and that is not always the case with me: in younger days, as a 20-something, I was notorious among my friends for getting bored and walking out of cinemas after 20 or 30 minutes of the start of a film).

Assuming that the film was accurate (and I do remember some of the details of that terrible event of 2013), the wife of the main terrorist —she was a Muslim convert, he a Chechen resident in the Boston area— was lucky that it was considered that there was insufficient evidence to charge her.

As for the surviving terrorist, he only last week won his appeal against the death sentence he eventually received. He will spend the rest of his life in some soulless American prison. He was only 19 when he helped his brother to bomb the marathon event.

Such people cannot be described as “urban guerrillas”, if that term is still in use. They are purely terrorists, actuated by malice rather than anything approaching real ideology.

Some may say, “but look what American forces do, bombing civilians“, and that is true, but even from the point of view of hearts and minds, and leaving aside ethics, to bomb a civilian event like the Boston Marathon has no point and indeed is counter-productive: the Islamists gain nothing but the enmity of a superpower and its people.

A film I can thoroughly recommend.

Music at midnight

Update, 16 August 2020

Did No 10 power couple back peerage for ex‑communist Claire Fox?https://t.co/s3Y8hAHD4R

— Peter Hitchens (@ClarkeMicah) August 16, 2020