Bye, Bye, King Newt

I was so glad on Saturday, so glad that, against all the odds, against a tidal wave of electoral hostility flowing over the Conservatives, Boris Johnson prevailed in the London race.  I was even gladder, though, to hear Ken Livingstone’s final farewell, not so much swan as crow song.  At last London is rid of this maudlin, self-pitying old narcissist, the worst thing ever to have been inflicted on the city.  Bye, bye King Newt; please take Polly Toynbee and all your other nauseating acolytes with you.  Never turn again; thou shall never more be mayor!

I wrote recently celebrating Boris, the best thing to happen to London in years.  Now comes the time to write Livingstone’s epitaph, a farewell to arms for conceivably the most unprincipled flash harry ever to disgrace London politics.  I became aware of him and his antics when he served as Mayor from 2000 to 2008.  By his friends I came to know him, and his friends included dictatorial thugs like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro.  It was London tax payers who funded his trips to the latter’s communist paradise.  London as Havana; that was his view of the future, and if you know Havana you will understand just how bleak the future! 

Livingstone, insofar as he has any principles at all, is a hard rock of the old hard left, a chip off the Berlin Wall.  His ideas are all in the past, washed up on a shore of ideological failure.  With the fall of the old Soviet bloc he was one of those socialists who had lost an empire but not yet found a role.  It was fashionable leftist causes at one turn - rainbow alliances and what have you - and radical Islamists at the next.  He could preach homosexual rights and then embrace reactionary Muslim clerics calling for the death of homosexuals, with no apparent sense of the contradiction.  You see, it was all for the greater good of Ken. 

In the course of a disastrous mayoral campaign he cynically tried to appeal to Muslim voters in the manner that George Galloway did in the Bradford West by-election.  A good many people I came across in the course of the contest, not all natural Conservative supporters, were sickened by his antics and his opportunism.  Boris had the capacity to charm everyone; Livingstone, I hazard, charmed no-one, not even those who voted for him.  Who could not feel sick watching him weep at a party election broadcast which he claimed represented the view of ordinary Londoners when it turned out to be paid ‘supporters’ reading from a script.  There is really no end to the newt’s cynicism. 

His is the Socialism of Fools, and I feel sure that some people will understand the reference.  He could sneer at the rich, especially rich Jews (in his mind all Jews are rich).  He could rage against tax avoidance, only to be embarrassed by a revelation that he, too, was a tax avoider, paying a lower rate than any of his rivals in the mayoral contest, paying a lower rate than a good many of the Londoners he expected to support him.  This hypocrite-in-chief went so far as to reach for the rich person’s gambit – he set up a company to reduce his tax liabilities. 

All in all his election campaign, conceivably the worst ever by a major politician, was disaster hard upon gaff hard upon disaster.  The more time went by the more hollow, tired-looking and self-pitying he became, promising everything to everyone if only he could get back into office.  Who was to pay for all his lavish promises on public transport fares on what have you?  Not Ken, I can guarantee that munch at least. 

I read in the Sunday press that he was bullied at school.  All I can say is he wasn’t bullied enough!  Farewell to corrupt Tammany Hall-style politics; farewell to cronyism and junkets, farewell to all of the old tired shibboleths, farewell Hugo Chavez and Yusif Al-Qaradawi.  London has seen the last of Ken Livingstone and his causes, the last of the sad old whinger.  Hurrah! 

Loving the Blonde Beast

When I was eighteen I wrote to Boris Johnson, the present mayor of London.  He was then shadow Minister of the Arts in the front bench team of Michael Howard, the Conservative Leader of the Opposition.  

Johnson was also at the time the editor of the Spectator, a weekly political magazine that I’ve been reading since my early schooldays.  It was on his watch that an editorial appeared criticising the people of Liverpool for displays of ‘mawkish sentimentality’ over the death in Iraq of a prominent local figure.  They were also accused of wallowing in a ‘vicarious victimhood.’  Howard, in overreacting to the ensuing squeals of protest, ordered Johnson to make a personal pilgrimage to Liverpool, draped in metaphorical sackcloth and ashes, offering a humiliating public apology. 

It all seemed so ludicrous to me.  In my letter I said that it called to mind the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV, who had to journey to the fortress of Canossa in northern Italy, there to abase himself before Pope Gregory VII. Poor Emperor Boris; he had ‘nach Canossa gehen.’ 

I didn’t really expect a response; it was just a minor gesture of solidarity.  I got one, though, a lovely and thoughtful letter thanking me for my understanding.  Up to that point I had admired him as a politician and as a writer, as well as for his endearing appearances on Have I Got News for You, a BBC comedy cum news quiz.  Ever since I’ve adored the blonde beast! 

This coming Thursday, 3 May, he is standing for re-election in the London mayoral contest, with Ken Livingstone, the former Labour incumbent, the main challenger.  I loath Livingstone, a sleazy, self-regarding and unpleasant little man, a friend of backward Muslim clerics, which is reason enough to support Boris.  But setting the negativity to one side, there are so many solid reasons why BJ is the man for London.  I’ll come on to these in a bit but first ecce homo – look at the man and the enormous difficulties he faces.

I have no doubt that Boris is not just the most important Conservative in London but in Britain as a whole.  As David Cameron’s star wanes Boris’s waxes.  Though not in the government, he has a recognition factor that most front bench ministers would envy.  He’s also hugely popular and I have little doubt that in normal circumstances he would be a shoo-in on Thursday.  But these are not normal circumstances; Boris is swimming against the tide. Shifty Ken has one major advantage; Cameron and George Osborne, the Chancellor, have been batting on his side.

With the present government it’s been disaster after disaster, not least with Osborne’s botched budget.  With the tide of opinion moving heavily against the Conservatives, Boris may drown in an electoral tsunami; he may go under in a deluge of political factors over which he has no control.  The copy gets worse day by day.  No sooner had the government announced that it had loaned a further £10billion to the IMF than even deeper cuts in domestic spending were revealed. With friends like these who the hell needs enemies? 

Writing in the latest issue of the Spectator Fraser Nelson reminds us just exactly what Boris has done for London and Londoners.  His 8000 ‘Boris bikes’ have been taken on no fewer than ten million rides.  Altogether the city is a much more cyclist-friendly place than it was when I was in my teens (I never dreamed then of negotiating the many hazards on my bike!).  Under the watchful eye of our dear Gauleiter there has been a ten per cent reduction in street crime.  The Greater London Authority Tax has been frozen, saving the average Londoner a cumulative £445.  Boris has pledged to reduce it by a further ten per cent if re-elected.  All this and Boris bikes; what more could one ask for?!  

But, as I say, he is swimming against a particularly strong current.  With George Galloway, Britain’s number one Islamist, out campaigning for Livingstone, it’s clear that there is a cynical attempt to play the Muslim card in the same fashion as the recent Bradford East by-election. 

Nelson concludes his piece as follows;

The Mayor matters because he represents a certain strand of Conservatism, unashamed about Tory principles and unafraid of making unpopular arguments. His Toryism is one of tax cuts, standing up for British bankers and defying the European Union when it threatens our prosperity. Boris embodies the rejection of the Blair/Clinton ‘triangulation’ politics, where the least offensive politician is deemed the most successful.

This election was always about more than just London. It is about how we do politics, who fights and who wins. Over the last 20 years, our politics has been reduced into a battle for swing voters in swing seats. This has led our political class in a certain direction, directed by the sat-navs of the opinion polls and focus groups. Boris has defiantly set off in another direction, guided by instinct and brio. And this is why his victory matters so much.

Indeed it does.  I’m campaigning for Boris; I’m persuading as many people as I can to support Boris; I shall be voting on Thursday for Boris.  You see, I love Boris, just as I love London.  

Kaa Livingstone

The one figure I admire above all others in the Conservative Party is Boris Johnson, the present Mayor of London. He is a clever, affable and self-assured chap. Beneath an occasionally bumbling exterior there is a shrewd mind at work. In contrast to Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne, he is comfortable with who he is and where he has come from, carrying none of their exaggerated fears of appearing to be upper class ‘toffs.’ Boris is a toff and people love him just the same, or perhaps even more for his honesty! He is, as Nick Cohen wrote in an article last year, the Bertie Wooster of English political life.

This year he faces a fresh mayoral contest with Labour’s Ken Livingstone, the former incumbent defeated by Boris in the election of 2008. If Boris is Bertie, Livingston with his heavy eyelids and generally shifty appearance calls to mind another literary figure altogether – the Indian python Kaa as depicted in the 1967 Disney movie version of The Jungle Book. Last year he published his autobiography, You Can’t Say That. To this I respond I Won't Read That, but according to Cohen, whose judgement I trust, it’s verbose, self-pitying and petty, very much as I see Kaa Livingstone.

Livingstone is a perfect example of the idiocy of the left or the socialism of fools. This has seen supposedly ‘progressive’ elements carry out incredible ideological contortions to ally themselves with some of the most reactionary forces on earth. Yusaf al-Qaradi, spiritual guide for the Muslim Brotherhood, is a man, Kaa hisses, who is attempting to “reconcile Islam with democracy and human rights, in particular women’s rights.” As Cohen pointed out in the political journal Standpoint, he conveniently forgets to mention Qaradawi’s fatwas in favour of the genital mutilation of girls, wife beating, and the murder of gays, Jews and apostates.

Livingstone’s position here is even more hypocritical and disingenuous, for he also overlooks Qaradawis’s links with Jamaat-e-Islami, the far-right Islamist party, whose leaders stand accused of aiding and abetting the Pakistani army’s massacre of civilians during the Bangladeshi war of independence.

So this Kaa, the face of the London left, a face that looks with favour on the most obscurantist forms of fundamentalist opinion. I just hope, like Mowgli, the city evades his slimy grasp in the coming election. Better off with Bertie by far.

Starkey and the Morlocks

I recently watched a movie called Adulthood. I can’t tell you an awful lot about it other than it was set in London among an unprepossessing set of violent thugs and drug dealers. The reason I can’t describe what it was about is because I barely understood one word in ten. They were all speaking a language that I take to be a form of English, the argot of an underclass, referring to each other as bloods or buds or bluhs, I really can’t be sure which, the sort of gobbledegook that I suppose gives these types ‘street cred.’ It just so happens that I saw this a few days before the London riots. There they were again, the same types, all the same types, all the bloods or buds or bluhs.

When I say ‘all’ I mean black and white; I mean that white teenagers of a certain class have adopted aspects of what I take to be a type of black culture, specifically a kind of coded language, because it’s considered to be ‘cool’ or because they have never known anything else, growing up in places like Hackney or Tottenham or wherever. There is nothing racist about this kind of observation; it’s nothing to do with skin colour and everything to do with cultural identity. Oh, but it is racist, at least according to some.

David Starkey is a historian who specialises in Tudor England, an expertise which he has carried so far as the nation’s television screens. But he’s also an all-round media person, offering his opinions on a variety of subjects. I find him highly entertaining, not just the way in which he presents his historical documentaries, but his direct and no-nonsense approach in discussion. He speaks to the point, not suffering fools gladly or at all. Altogether there is a refreshing honesty to his manner, quite free from cant and anodyne platitudes.

Last Friday he offered his opinion on Newsnight, a current affairs show, saying that the recent riots happened because too many young white people “had now become black.” It was all because a “violent, destructive and nihilistic gang culture” had been embraced by as many white people as by blacks, a culture that militated against education. As for their speech patterns;

Black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together. This language which is wholly false, which is Jamaican patois, that’s been intruded into England and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.

Shock, horror; crucify him!, crucify him!, the cry went out. To paraphrase Macaulay, I know of no spectacle more ridiculous than the liberal chattering-class in one of their periodic fits of moral outrage. One by one his fellow broadcasters fell over themselves in attempts to drive home the nail. Piers Morgan, another media person and a bit of a twerp, had a tweet – “RIP David Starkey’s TV career. And good riddance. Racist idiot.”

Now, if you don’t know Morgan let me just say that he is well qualified to refer to other people as idiots, being a first class idiot himself, a kind of jumped up chav, Burberry Man at his finest, easy to make fun of, as he has been made fun of during his embarrassing apperances on Have I Got News For You. He’s as stupid as Starkey is clever. He’s also a hypocrite. But he’s in so many ways typical of the oiks that dominates so much of contemporary life.

His word has been added to by Robert Preston, the BBC’s business editor, saying that “David Starkey’s nasty ignorance is best ignored not worthy of comment or debate.” Oh, really? Then why, I ask myself, did this clot feel compelled to comment? I don’t suppose it really matters now, as his intervention is doubtless evidence that Starkey’s TV career is indeed over, that his voice has forever been silenced by Auntie’s Marxist Men.

It really makes no difference that Starkey was talking about gang culture and not skin colour or ethnicity, a point he has made since, raising this issue at all has ensured him a passage to the gulag of all that is unacceptable, all of the issues that dare not speak their name.

Unlike Piers Morgan, aka Baron Phone Hacker of the Daily Mirror, I do not see any racism here. I see plenty of idiots, though, arbiters of what can and cannot be said. The evidence is overwhelming that the low life gangstas, bloods or buds or bluhs, the semi-literate rappers, black or white, are to blame for London’s madness, that they represent an alien culture and a wholly alien world that I despise, a threat to culture and every standard of civilized decency. They are a wretched sub-class, Morlocks and Calibans, who should be ushered off to some nether world where they can all speak their incomprehensible jargon in complete freedom. Either that or they could set up home besides Piers Morgan.

The Shaming of England

One other circumstance is worthy of remark; and that is, that from the moment of their first outbreak…every symptom of order or preconceived arrangement among them, vanished. When they divided into parties and ran to different quarters of the town, it was on the spontaneous suggestion of the moment. Each party swelled as it went along, like rivers as they roll towards the sea; new leaders sprang up as they were wanted, disappeared when the necessity was over, and reappeared at the next crisis. Each tumult took shape and form, from the circumstances of the moment…in a word a moral plague ran through the city. The noise, and hurry, and excitement, had for hundreds and hundreds an attraction they had no firmness to resist. The contagion spread, like a dread river: an infectious madness, as yet not near its height, seized on new victims every hour, and society began to tremble at their ravings.

So, what do you think? Is this a description of events in London last week? It’s a description of events in London alright but it’s not August, 2011; it’s June, 1780, the Gordon Riots as depicted by Charles Dickens in his novel Barnaby Rudge.

The savagery of 1780 was brought on by a wave of anti-Catholic hysteria, but this kind of thing really requires no motive; disorder, violence and the ugliness of the mob becomes an end in itself; it became an end in itself last week in London and other English cities, as a Twitter contagion spread across the land, shaming it in the eyes of the world.

The thing that outraged me most about this outrage was the way that it was wilfully misinterpreted, a serious news story draped in an ideological fog, balderdash about deprivation and cuts. I wrote Shopping with Violence, my previous article, as a rapid corrective to misinformation. I also wrote it, I freely confess, in a mood of acute anger. But I had no time to stand and stare; I had to react, a little attempt to ensure that a lie was not swallowed as the truth.

Now I have had time to think, and I’ve been thinking hard ever since, talking to friends and contacts over the weekend, including some journalists I know. I’m no less angry but a lot more focused. There is now some additional information that I would like to share. So, let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London; I’ll show you something that’s bound to shake your mind.

Let me begin by telling you a tale of two cities, of two lives about as far apart as is possible to imagine. My first is an 89-year-old man by the name of Aaron Biber, a barber who has been cutting hair in Tottenham, the district where the riots started, for over forty years. His shop, a one-man business, was trashed; his equipment, such as it was, taken, even his kettle. “I will probably have to close because I haven’t got the insurance and can’t afford the repairs”, he said afterwards.

My second is Laura Johnson, a 19-year-old student. She does not live in Tottenham, oh, no; she is the daughter of a millionaire whose gated home, complete with tennis court, is in opulent Orpington. What on earth is the relevance of this spoiled little rich girl to the story of Biber the Barber? Simply this: he is a victim of a riot; she is an alleged rioter. She has been charged with driving away in a car containing stolen televisions, mobile phones, cigarettes and alcohol, all at an estimated value of $8000. Is if fair to ask if daddy was keeping her short in her allowance? Was she a victim of the government’s heartless cuts? Was she outraged by the condition of the hungry proletariat? I’ll leave you to make up your own minds.

It goes on like this, the stories go on like this, stories of little people whose lives and businesses have been blighted by a venal mob, out to take what they could, and what they could not take they destroyed. I mentioned in my previous article an injured man, robbed as he was helped to his feet, an incident filmed and posted on YouTube. I now know that his name is Asyraf Rossli, a 20-year old student from Malaysia, here on a visit. He has now become a symbol for the riot, a living indictment of the sub-human brutes that broke his jaw and took his things.

He is one symbol. Another is Chelsea Ives, an 18-year-old who was seen hurling bricks at the police. She also stands accused of leading an attack on a mobile phone store. This woman, who previously had been selected as an ambassador to promote the London Olympics because of her sporting abilities, later boasted that she had had “the best day ever.” Unfortunately for her she was spotted by her own mother, who, in a mood of disgust, reported the incident to the police. Ives has now been remanded in custody.

Now I’m going to take you further north, out of London to the city of Birmingham, where the disorder spread in Twitter copy-cat fashion. There 21-year-old Haroon Jahan was killed after a suspected looter drove a car directly at him and his two brothers as they attempted to defend shops, mosques and businesses from the contagion. As justifiable anger overtook the Muslim community, his father, Tariq, with incredible nobility of spirit, prevented an even greater evil:

I have no grievance against anyone, especially the guy who ran his car into my son. I don’t feel anger. What he did I leave in the hands of the Lord to punish him the way he wants. I have nothing to do with that. I don’t blame the police; their hands are tied by the Government. I don’t blame the Government; they can’t control the kids. They can’t stop everyone; there are more public that there are police.

I have a grievance alright; I feel anger and sadness on Mister Jahan’s behalf. I also feel anger and sadness at the fate of 68-year-old Richard Mannington Bowes, a pensioner from Ealing in London, who was beaten unconscious by a group of youths after he tried to stop them setting fire to large rubbish bins across the green from his apartment. Police were held back from reaching him by a mob throwing bricks and chunks of paving slabs. Mister Mannington Bowles died after three days on a life support machine.

I took part recently in a discussion thread on Blog Catalogue, a multi-author forum, concerning Another Brick in the Wall, a song by Pink Floyd, an old British rock band. “We don’t need no education”, they sing self-refutingly. The mobs in London, Birmingham and elsewhere do not have no education, I would guess, and do not want no education. But they certainly needed those bricks in the wall, to loot and to maim. There is a sickness in this land, the sickness of people who care for nothing but themselves and their own vile appetites, the sickness of those who would look for political purpose in murder and mayhem, people like Ken Livingstone the former mayor of London, a man whose brains are more addled than most.

Whatever the outcome of these August days, this summer in the city, I sincerely hope there is no repetition of the mealy-mouthed, hand-wringing liberalism that saw previous disorders given a kind of retrospective justification, which saw millions of pounds of public money wasted on wasters. I sincerely hope that you, who may not know this country, are not deceived by attempts at a political whitewash. I hope you understand that hooliganism is no more than hooliganism, theft no more than theft and that violence, for some, simply carries its own vicarious pleasures.

England was shamed last week but I would like to finish on the upbeat. There has been a huge upsurge in support for the police, a community counter-reaction against thuggery. There has been a popular surge in support for Mister Biber, an online campaign called Keep Aaron Cutting set up on his behalf. So far over $45,000 has been pledged. Aaron will keep cutting. London and England will keep cutting too; the world expects no less.

Shopping with Violence

This I a slightly amended version of an article I wrote for Broowaha.

I want to say a word or two about the riots in London, my city, my home. My view is that - as with the Norwegian massacre - it is best to stand back from such events before forming a definite judgement, simply to allow the facts to settle. But judgements are already being formed which have nothing whatsoever to do with facts and everything to do with politics. The suggestion is that these events, which have disgraced my country and its capital in the eyes of the world, are somehow to do with cutbacks. This is no more than a supposition, based not on evidence but wishful thinking.

The opportunity has also been taken to attack the police, that somehow they do not respect the 'right to peaceful protest,' an assertion that again is utterly at variance with the facts. No it's more; it's an outright lie, one that is clearly intended to give a completely wrong impression to people who know little of the Metropolitan Police, who know little of London and little of this country. If anything the police have gone too far in the opposite direction, a softly softly approach that sometimes makes the force look fumbling and weak, an approach that saw them lose control at the weekend

To try to play politics at time like this really is appalling. The present government of David Cameron has been in power for just over a year, inheriting a massive and unsupportable debt from the previous administration. There was no alternative to serious fiscal retrenchment, but the cuts, such as they are, have not yet had an impact. No, people are not starving in the streets while capitalist fat cats sit back complacently smoking Havana cigars. I would simply ask you to see this Marxist fantasy for the risible nonsense it truly is.

Simply put these riots are anarchy for the sake of anarchy, not for politics, disorder as an end in itself. Who are the targets? The bastions of capitalism, perhaps, the banks and the stock exchange? No, ordinary traders, little shopkeepers, who have seen their stores looted and their livelihoods destroyed. Workers of the world unite; you have DVDs and a couple of video games to gain, to say nothing of shoes and sofas.

So what is the truth? Rarely pure and never simple, perhaps? Pure and simple for some, that much is obvious. The reality is we are dealing with a hijack here. What started as a peaceful vigil over the shooting of a man called Mark Duggan (leader of a drug gang, incidentally) in the district of Tottenham was quickly taken over by those who had never heard of him and had no interest at all in making a political point. A great many involved in this Twitter riot (yes, that's the medium) are teenagers. One, a fifteen year old, was caught on camera, saying that it was 'fun.' Commenting on this Richard Evans, who edits an online news forum, said;

Make no mistake, they're not crusaders on some just cause, most of them don't even have a point to make, these are morons acting like morons — nothing more, nothing less. It must actually be insulting to Mark Duggan's family and friends — who have spoken out against the riots — that people are doing this in his name, using his death as an excuse to steal some crappy trainers from a JJB Sports.

Morons, well, that's certainly one way of putting it; I'm not quite sure what other term could be used for those who were filmed helping an injured and bleeding teenager to his feet, only to start rifling through his backpack to take anything of value. Was he a capitalist, a supporter of the cutbacks who just happened to have lost his way, perhaps having mislaid his merc? Well, that's one possible spin, I suppose.

Then there is the woman who was stabbed in a fight over...over what exactly?, over some principle of the revolution? No it was over a looted cut-price sofa. Incidentally, as the mob smashed its way into this furniture store a member of staff (a capitalist lackey) had his jaw broken while paramedics stood in fear of their lives. Elsewhere, in front of a smashed store window, a woman can be seen trying on a pair of shoes. As one report says, this wasn’t a spontaneous uprising of dissent from the downtrodden masses, it was shopping with violence.

Most people not from this country have probably never heard of Tottenham, Hackney and Brixton, the districts at the heart of the disorders, For the benefit of Americans, the closest parallel that comes to mind is Watts in Los Angeles. Yes, these areas of high social deprivation, much of it inherited, ghettos of state dependency. There have been riots here in the past. What was the result; more oppression, more deprivation? No millions and millions of pounds were poured into community reclamation schemes which have clearly reclaimed nothing.

There is racism here, something else an audience beyond England may not be aware of, but it's not as you may suppose. Black mobs were seen attacking white people but that's really only one dimension. The racism is multi-faceted. Think of the movie Crash, set in California, then you may begin to understand something of the complexity. The hostility is one of ethnic fragmentation, rather than skin colour, black Nigerians hating black Jamaicans, both hating people from the Middle East. Anybody who has managed to rise above the common herd, anybody who has made a success, no matter how modest, has turned into a potential target. One Tweet in this Twitter riot reads "F**k the electronics, them Turkish jewellers needed to get robbed." Yes, the needed to get robbed, as lots of others needed to get robbed.

There are no politics other than the political irresponsibility of the left, singing a hymn that bears no relationship to reality. This includes various Labour MPs, whose administration had over thirteen years to be tough on crime and the causes of crime and did absolutely nothing, other than to pour in endless doles. There are notable exceptions, including Diane Abbott, a black Labour MP, a former leadership contender and a leading left-winger, a person with whom I have virtually nothing in common, politically or ideologically. But she has taken the bold step, distancing herself from those who have irresponsibly blamed the illusory cuts, adding to the Twitter conflagration - "Cuts don’t turn you into a thief. What we saw was people thieving for hours...the violence in London was totally opportunistic and utterly unacceptable."

I would only add brutal and ugly. The victims will all turn out to be other members of the community, not bankers and speculators. The victim is also London, a city I both hate and love in equal measure, a city that is in my blood. I try to be measured but I have no respect at all for those who have abused the city, who have traduced and cheapened it in the eyes of the world and, above all, those who are attempting to twist the facts for their own ideological ends. If you think these dreadful events are about injustice, inequality and deprivation I would urge you to think again. It's no more than hooliganism, based on forms of avarice that would shame even the greediest banker.

Ingland Is A Bich

Riots have become rather the fashion in London. In the wake of the recent anarchist fiesta I expect the police are more than a little worried about the peaceful prospects of the coming royal wedding. It gets even more worrying; for in our capital public disorder is not just practiced, it’s celebrated.

In Lambeth last week an event was held to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the 1981 Brixton riots, helpfully renamed the ‘Brixton Uprising’ by local councillors. The invited guests included the Jamaican ‘poet’ Linton Kwesi Johnson, who numbers Ingland Is A Bich among his greatest works. The spelling and the use of the upper case, incidentally, is all his.

This delightful event comes after the BBC held its own inimitable celebration. Radio Four broadcasts a show called Reunion, in which people who took part in some past event are brought together to reminisce. Last month it was the turn of those who were involved in the ‘Brixton Uprising’, a one-sided collection of deadbeats and do-worsers would be more difficult to imagine, best represented by that mouth Darcus Howe, a ‘thinker’ and all round professional Black Man. This broadcast was recently described as ‘naively one-sided’ by the Daily Mail, in uncharacteristically restrained language. To hell with restraint: stupid, ignorant and biased serve much better.

No ordinary people were invited, black or white. None of the people caught up in the violence were invited to describe the fear that they felt in the midst of the thuggery, sorry, the ‘Brixton Uprising.’ Writing in the Telegraph, Charles Moore reminds us that ‘Red’ Ted Knight, another of the participants, said in the aftermath of the riots that “We want to break the Metropolitan Police”, a view clearly shared by Captain Anarchy, one of the sponsors of the more recent London ‘uprising.'

He goes on to detail the other things the show failed to mention - that it was the first time in England that Molotov Cocktails were used, the first time that fire engines and ambulances were attacked by mobs. Most important of all, no mention was made of the fact that riot started when the police, condemned afterwards for 'institutional racism', stopped to help a black man who had been stabbed.

No, none of this was raised, even by the tame policeman among the guests. Instead Howe was allowed to witter on about Margaret Thatcher, the great Satan, explaining that she was “getting into Falklands mode”, rather odd when one considers that the riots came a year before the Argentine invasion of the islands.

Furthermore, according to Howe and Knight, the fact that so many additional policemen were sent to assist their beleaguered comrades in Brixton was all part of a ‘cunning plan’ by Thatcher to break the will of those opposed to government ‘cuts’. The simple fact is that, as Moore rightly says, the police were woefully unprepared for these events.

The legend still persists, perpetrated by the likes of Red Ted and Black Darcus, that Thatcher’s was a ministry that severely reduced public sector expenditure when the reverse is true. The riots provided yet another occasion for throwing more money at an alleged problem, this time racism and ‘exclusion’ in the inner cities, all coming in the wake of that old dotard Lord Scarman’s ‘findings.’

One by one new measures came into the light, with millions wasted, yes, wasted, in grants to this ethnic community organisation or that ethnic community organisation. The lie was swallowed whole that the ‘Brixton Uprising’ was something more than a fiesta of crime, looting and rioting in the guise of social protest, as Thatcher herself put it at the time.

On top of one evil came another - the great lie of ‘multi-culturalism’, that nation within a nation approach, the adverse consequences of which politicians across Europe are now becoming aware of. England, sorry, Ingland, was betrayed in those days by people pandering to thugs, looters, drug-dealers and idiots; Ingland is betrayed still.

The Masque of Anarchy

Decent people did well to keep out of central London on Saturday as a ghastly mob exercised their right to ‘peaceful protest’ against the present government’s cuts (cuts; what cuts?). How much more convenient it would have been if they had marched across the English Channel, the waters helpfully parted by God. How much we would have benefited if, half way across, God had allowed the waters to close again, in a moment of ennui or perhaps exercising His own peaceful right to peace.

Just think how much this country would have saved if these tax eaters, dole recipients, holders of worthless public sector jobs (Assistant Deputy Chief Liaison Officer to the Disabled Black Lesbian Caucus); student nurses, ready to learn how to abuse the elderly in lethally dirty National Health Hospitals; teachers who teach nothing in state schools to pupils too stupid to learn anything; recipients of third rate degrees from fourth rate universities, the work-shy ‘workers’, ignorant and worthless people of all sorts, had disappeared for ever. Oh, I can always dream.

No, instead they exercised their right to ‘peaceful protest’ bringing violence and chaos to the streets of our capital, summoned there by the Trade Unions Council; summoned by the likes of Red Len McClusky, a lover of Cuba, Communism and Castro (what; no peaceful right to protest?), so repellent to look at with his thick nose and his heavy features that he would win any ugly man competition nem con.



Once this mob had gathered it was given the support of the Labour Party in the person of Ed Miliband, the leader of the opposition, a former member of a government, a criminally incompetent government, responsible for the financial morass this country is in at present. Oh, yes, however he may wish to distance himself from the thugs who rampaged along the city streets, sub-human orcs (sorry, I couldn’t resist that!) who relish destruction for the sake of destruction, his very presence was a spur, an indication of the true worth of his loathsome party. This rampage was planned months in advance, as a casual glance at Twitter and Facebook would have shown. Only an idiot would have failed to realise that a riot was in the offing. Oops, sorry, I’ve clearly given Ed a way out.



Only an idiot and the Metropolitan Police, apparently, who in their handling of the mayhem appeared more Keystone than ever, even more than they did in last year’s march against the increase in tuition fees. What the hell is going on? How much more pathetic can London’s police force become, not the ordinary officers, who had light bulbs filled with ammonia thrown at them, but the command, senior officers so anxious to be goody goody that that they invited civil liberties activists to monitor their softly softly approach. How are these idiots going to cope with the forthcoming royal wedding, another anarchist target?

On Saturday they probably took heed of Ugly Red Len’s admonition to keep their hands off “our kids”. I expect they planned a nice party with the anarchists, all sitting down and singing Kumbaya. What a pity it is that heads were not broken instead, what a pity that the ‘accidental’ mayhem was beamed across the world as ‘their kids’ behaved like the apes and troglodytes they are, what an impression others will have of England. How sorry I feel for the poor benighted tourists caught up in the sickening madness.

Does it get any worse? Yes, unfortunately it does. We have a government that pretends to cut public expenditure while increasing it in practice; we have a government that loses control of the nation’s capital while bombarding that of another; we have a government that last week sent six Storm Shadow rockets flying into Libya at a cost of £1million pounds ($1.4million) each. Yes, that’s quite right: £1million each! We have a government unable to read the intelligence properly, a government so besotted with ‘uman rights that it sees virtue in the ‘peaceful right to protest’ even when that ‘peaceful right’ is the prerogative of low class animals, the vermin of the inner city estates, trade unionists and other such creatures. I could suggest a better use for those rockets, another way of reclaiming the expense, just as efficacious as the waters of the Channel.

Last came Anarchy; he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.

The tale of Peter the Painter

Jack the Ripper is one of the black legends of London’s East End. But let me bring another to your attention, one you may not have heard of. It's the story of a man simply known as Peter the Painter. Peter entered the stage of our history exactly one hundred years ago, and then exited it again, almost as completely and as mysteriously as Jack the Ripper.

Let me take you back to a different time, a different England, one so unconcerned by the prospects of terrorism that it was even possible to bring firearms and bomb-making equipment across the border without raising undue concern. It’s London in the early years of the twentieth century, a city full of exiles from the Russian Empire, coming in the wake of the abortive revolution of 1905. These exiles, Latvians and Lithuanians among them, were dedicated revolutionaries, many of them Bolsheviks, who took refuge among the Jewish community of Whitechapel.

Where there are Bolsheviks there are also Bolshevik methods, including the doctrine of ‘expropriation’, theft by all normal standards of crime. All is fair in the ends of revolution, all capitalists were fair game, even if the ‘capitalists’ in question were petty shopkeepers. And if anyone got in the way, even the horny handed sons of toil, then that was just too bad. After a gang of these desperados killed a fifteen year old boy and wounded fifteen other people in a botched robbery in 1909 they were lauded in the French left-wing press as “audacious comrades” under attack from “citizens, believers in the State and authority.”

A year later other ‘audacious comrades’ were at work, trying to break in to a run-down jeweller’s shop in the district of Houndsditch from an adjacent property. So loud was the noise that the neighbours called the police. They came, only to be greeted by gunfire, killing one officer outright and wounding a further four, two of them mortally. The gang in question, as Clive Bloom details in the latest issue of the BBC History Magazine (Terror on the Streets of London), were all members of ‘the Flame’, one of Lenin’s criminal front organisations. Its leader, according to legend, was Peter the Painter.

The murderers, who treated the English police as if they were the Okhrana, the notorious Tsarist secret police service, managed to escape, but in the subsequent manhunt they were discovered to be of Latvian origin. Eventually they were found, holed up at 100 Sydney Street, a three-floored tenement near a brewery. Peter the Painter was believed to be there. This time the police came armed. Thus began the Siege of Sydney Street.

The details given by Bloom in his account are really quite startling, almost amusingly so. Police incompetence is nothing new, but it’s the naïveté of the time that it’s most astonishing, a time of greater innocence, a time when criminals, even foreign criminals, were expected to understand the rules, the gamesmanship. Inspector Wensley, head of the Whitechapel force, began proceedings at Sydney Street by sending some officers to knock on the door, seemingly having learned nothing from the Houndsditch incident. When answer came there none they even threw pebbles at the window! These pebbles were greeted by gunfire, wounding one officer. Things now went from understatement to overkill.

Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, was asked to provide military support. He did, and he also provided himself, helpfully armed, to be greeted by onlookers with shouts of “Oo let ‘em in”, an expression of their anger over lax immigration policy. He was also unwise enough to allow himself to be caught on film, later the cause of condescending comment in the foreign press, including the Russian and German, who offered helpful hints on modern policing methods!

The siege lasted for more than five hours, coming to an end in a shoot-out, with the building on fire. In the ruins the bodies of two men were found – Fritz Svaars and Joseph Sokolow. There was no sign of Peter the Painter.

Peter, like Jack the Ripper, was never to be caught. For a long time his presence was so elusive that questions were raised over his very existence. The problem here is that Russian revolutionaries were in the habit of using a huge number of code names and aliases. Lenin and Stalin had dozens before alighting on their final forms. Some of the more obscure figures are therefore almost impossible to trace. But, in the end, Peter was traced, although it took almost a hundred years. Discovered, yes, but in such a way that the mystery deepens even further.

In 2009 British scholars working in the Latvian archives managed to piece together the story of one Peter Piatkow, who also went by the name of Janis Zhaklis, a house painter and dedicated Bolshevik. Even before coming to London he had been involved in robbings and shootings in his native Latvia, then a province of the Russian Empire. As with so many others in the shady revolutionary underground, it’s also possible that he was working as a double-agent for the Okhrana.

But that’s it; there is nothing more. After 1911 Peter the Painter vanishes from history. It still cannot be proved that he was head of the Sydney Street gang or not; it cannot be proved that he was even there. There is just one tiny and intriguing fact, that of an unnamed prisoner in Stalin’s gulags who, as late as the 1950s, told intimate and detailed tales of the activities of the Bolshevik underground in London. Was this Peter the Painter? Alas, we will never know. There are some mysteries that history never reveals.

Coming to London in 1700

Imagine yourself, if you will, as a traveller coming to London in the early 1700s. The first thing you would notice is the almost constant pealing of church bells. They were rung not just to summon the faithful, but to alert the community to a hanging-a popular spectator sport-or to a death, when it would toll nine times for a man, six for a woman and three for a child, followed even more sombrely by one stroke for each year she or he had lived. The bell was also a prompt for the 'searchers', the old crones employed by the parish "to repair to the place where the dead corps lies, and by view of the same, and other enquiries, to examine by what disease or casualty the corps died." They were on the look-out chiefly for signs of the plague, and their instant 'diagnosis' would then appear in the London Bills of Mortality.

London by 1700, with half-a-million people, was the largest city in Europe, and with no sanitary arrangements whatsoever. Those approaching from the countryside were first alerted to its presence by smell before sight. Heaps of human sewage was deposited by 'night-soil' men by the roadside. Walking through the streets the traveller had to be constantly alert to the sudden emptying of chamber pots out or windows into the 'kennels', or open-drains running down the middle of the street. Jonathan Swift describes these delightful depositories being blocked with "Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts, and Blood, Drown'd Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench'd in Mud, Dead Cats, and Turnip-Tops." If this was not bad enough our lucky traveller would have to breathe in air thick with sulphurous smoke from domestic fires and industrial furnaces. Those living near graveyards would also have to endure the stink of decaying corpses, buried just below the surface.

Having survived the baptism of stink and smoke, the said traveller was highly likely to contract some fatal disease soon after arrival. Malaria was commonplace, as was typhoid from the contaminated water-supply. Contaminated food was a major cause of dysentery. Poor personal hygiene meant that most people, high and low, had fleas and lice, even to be found in the gentleman's periwig. Smallpox was also rife-so called to distinguish it from the great pox, or syphilis, which was all too common among certain sections of the community. Tuberculosis, also common, was the cause of endless spitting and retching, both indoors and out. One in three babies died before the age of two; and of those who survived, half were dead before the age of fifteen. A great many of these unfortunates simply died of ignorance, with mothers using dirty coins to sooth the pains of teething, and forcing babies to eat solids.

Our traveller would have to find some means of supporting herself or himself quickly, for life was hard and there was no allowance for failure. Suicide was common, and the details of the deaths were eagerly reported by the hack press of Grub Street-"Yesterday morning a woman near White-chappel, who workt to a throwster in those parts, and earned 8 shillings a week, hanged herself in her lodging; but nobody can guess at the reason of her despair."

Welcome to London!

Ravens of the Tower

The first written reference to ravens being kept in the Tower of London dates no further back that the 1890s. If we go a little further back than that the Tower first established its place in the Gothic imagination with the publication in 1841 of The Tower of London an historical novel by Harrison Ainsworth. It included an illustration by George Cruikshank of large dark birds, possibly ravens, gathering around the scaffold erected for the execution of Lady Jane Grey. This, in turn, is likely to have been a reflection of the folk tradition that associated croaking ravens with death.

It would seem that as the popularity of the Tower began to grow the keepers decided to exploit the public's appetite for the macabre by, first, erecting a plaque in 1866 to the spot on Tower Green where the scaffold is supposed to have stood, a complete fiction, for there never was a permanent scaffold; and second, by amplifying on the raven stories.

The Tower from Within by George Younghusband, published in 1919, was the first to describe the ravens in detail. By this time the Yeomen Warders were in the practice of telling visitors that the raven used to gather at the site of the scaffold to pick at the severed heads. The earliest written reference to the legend that Britain will fall if the ravens leave the Tower dates to a letter published in the magazine Country Life in February 1955, which probably means this 'ancient' story was invented sometime during the Second World War.