Asian rape gangs? Don't be racist

Yes, that is, in essence, one of the damning findings of the report published today that comprises the findings of an inquiry carried out by Professor Alexis Jay looked at how Rotherham Council's children's services department dealt with cases involving child exploitation between 1997 and 2013.

You can read the report here.  It is not just a damning indictment of Council staff, but also Councillors (in a Council that has been run by a large Labour majority since its inception in 1974) and the Police. 

Key findings are:

- 1400 cases of child abuse over a 16 year period, of whom over one-third were already known to child protection authorities some down to the age of 11;

- Examples of "children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone";

- "They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated"

-  Police regarded many victims with "contempt";

-  Of three previous reports into the problems, one was suppressed and two others ignored.

Beyond the utter incompetence is a more sinister element, you see "By far the majority of perpetrators were described as Asian by victims", but Councillors preferred to treat such cases as "one-offs" refusing to see a pattern.

The bigger concern was "several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist. Others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so."

In other words, Council staff, with support from Councillors, were more concerned about being accused of racism, than they were about young girls being raped.  

"One senior officer suggested that some influential Pakistani-heritage councillors in Rotherham had acted as barriers. Several councillors interviewed believed that by opening up these issues they could be 'giving oxygen' to racist perspectives that might in turn attract extremist political groups and threaten community cohesion"

Yes there was genuine fear of racist nationalist groups using reports of Pakistani gangs committed sex crimes to stoke hatred, but what was the most important thing here?  Avoiding political fallout and backlash, or protecting the vulnerable?

The cultural relativism also nearly risked Pakistani women who were abused and given shelter.  

"several of those involved in the operational management of services reported some attempts to pressurise them into changing their approach to some issues. This mainly affected the support given to Pakistani-heritage women fleeing domestic violence, where a small number of councillors had demanded that social workers reveal the whereabouts of these women or effect reconciliation rather than supporting the women to make up their own minds".

The Council leader has resigned, but I am less interested in who is found accountable, charged and sued for this right now, than the philosophical failings that it has exposed.

Check your privilege

Identity Politics is an arm of new-leftist political philosophy that takes class analysis (whereby your perspectives are driven by your class, defined mostly by wealth) and extends it to race and sex.  It identifies racial groups as being either privileged or disadvantaged, and by extension every member of such group is deemed to have such privilege or disadvantage, from birth.  

This is applied primarily in the Anglo-Saxon world, with the United States leading with the "check your privilege" expression deemed appropriate on the basis that all white European Americans are deemed privileged, whilst African-American, Hispanic and Native Americans are not (Asian Americans are inconvenient to this theory so typically ignored).

In the UK, it is more complex, but in essence white British people are deemed to have privilege over any migrants from non-European backgrounds.  This is deemed to be so because of historic state and societal racism.  Yes, that does mean that men of Pakistani background are deemed disadvantaged over people from white British backgrounds. 

The implication is that privilege brings power, unavailable to the "disadvantaged".  Don't confuse things by pointing out if the privileged person is poor or uneducated (although being a woman and disabled loses you "privilege points") or the "disadvantaged" person is a tycoon.  Reality is relative, and Identity Politics acolytes trade in moral and cultural relativism, and in groups, never individuals.  Individuals don't readily fit theories and disrupt careful classification.

So what may be said in Rotherham is that when confronted with evidence of gangs of Asian, predominantly Pakistani men, gangraping young girls, the "check your privilege" monitor went off in the heads of the Identity Politics trained officials and politicians.  How racist to assume this is true or a pattern rather than an aberration? For the narrative of a gang of oppressed men raping young girls is difficult to reconstruct into the politically correct one. (i.e. poor people sometimes abuse their kids because life is too hard, as this Kiwi Marxist proclaims) 

Instead of ignoring the politics and doing their jobs, they rubbed their hands in anxiety, not about the crimes, or the safety of the girls, but about how "offended" some would be at the fact that groups of Asian men felt freely able to embark on brutal, sadistic and egregious sex crimes on vulnerable young girls.

You see the men who abused the girls thought of them as "sluts", "deserving it" with a level of misogyny that all leftwing oriented feminists would jump on in an instant if it were not men of an ethnic minority background.  However, the Identity Politics element makes them pause, for they fear that identifying the cultural factor (as distinct from racial) will be seen as racist and scapegoating.

Yet the cultural factor is clear - rampant misogyny and belief that young girls exist as the sexual playthings of men, and that their religion and race will protect them from law enforcement, for they can cry "racism" for being "targeted".

Those who thought they could protect Rotherham's Asian community from a neo-fascist nationalist backlash now risk causing much more harm to the law abiding members of the Asian communities in Rotherham than what would have happened had they done their jobs properly.  Not least because it was Asian girls and women who were also victims, and because it fueled an attitude amongst perpetrators that they could act with impunity.

You can bet that racist groups, ramshackle as they are, will find this abject failure to protect young girls because of the race of those who raped them, will happily feed the racism they were trying to avoid, because of the racism they chose to apply themselves.

Ultimately, what's wrong with Identity Politics, is that it is juvenile. A simplistic attempt to try to extend the banality of Marxist group analysis onto wider groups, that has little more than superficial value in explaining outcomes and providing answers as to the causes and solutions or wider social problems.

For in the UK, power in any relationship, is a function of multiple factors.  Family, age, size, wealth, legal authority, employment and yes, sex and in some cases race.  It depends on the individuals.

It is the Identity Politics adherents that ignore the individuals, and focus on race, and as a result, in their jobs, they truly did ignore the individuals, who were victims.

Labour's attack on payday loan companies ignores the underlying culture of irresponsibility

As the Labour Party strives to become popular, and be seen as new, dynamic and able to "think differently", it shows itself to be anything but that.

The announcement that it wants to increase the power of local authorities to ban a type of business that it doesn't like just shows Labour has really only got one answer to everything - more statism.  It discourages individual responsibility, and I don't just mean by those whose behaviour is self-destructive, but by those wanting to change their behaviour.  Passing laws to stop people harming themselves or selling goods and services to a few people who do so, does not promote better behaviour.  It's the uncivilised tool of the big brother bully saying "do as I say or else" rather than convincing people to change on the merits of your argument. 

The BBC reports that Ed Miliband wants councils to be able to ban bookmakers, payday loan shops and pawnbrokers, motivated no doubt by the desire to want to reduce gambling, borrowing and sales of assets by the poor.

Yet there is little doubt that plenty of people on low incomes waste their money gambling and foolishly take out payday loans (although I am far from convinced that pawnbrokers are necessarily thriving on poor decisions, except of course offering thieves a chance to cash in their gains).  Given the increasingly prevalence of online gambling and online and mobile phone based payday loan companies, shutting down the retail fronts is hardly going to do much to limit access, but it will cost jobs.

It thinks that by reducing the supply and availability of such businesses, it will reduce demand and save people, but it will do little to do any of that.  Indeed it smacks of middle class champagne socialist distaste for such shops in the local high street, and the people who go into them.  You can't really imagine anyone on the Labour front bench going to any of them.

Which is what Labour means when it says when "people" say "no, enough is enough", he actually means middle class do-gooders.  Because if people, generally, didn't want those businesses, they wouldn't exist, they wouldn't be viable.   It's the flipside to HS2, because people aren't actually willing to pay for it, but politicians say people want it.

People go to bookmakers for recreation, and yes often with a misguided sense of hope that it might change their fortunes (albeit in most cases relatively modestly).  The do-gooders who want to shut down those businesses could take responsibility for promoting their point of view, by buying advertising time explaining the poor odds of winning and the alternative of saving (although the QE mainstream means that saving in a bank account is a losing battle with inflation).  They could actually take the initiative instead of using force to shut down shops that people evidently want to patronise (which also employ people).  Taking responsibility for promoting responsibility would be a positive move, but not one that Labour even recognises.  It is addicted to using force.

Payday loan companies exist for a reason.  Banks wont loan to the people who take out these loans, because they are a bad risk (and there is a broad consensus that the state backed banking system should be highly risk averse).  This is something endorsed by the Labour Party.  It doesn't want banks lending to people who can't pay the loans back.  So now it wants to stop those who risk their own money lending to such people, for potentially high returns.   The implication is that nobody should take out payday loans.  However, people with few alternatives do so for a range of reasons.  Of course those who do so to fund whimsical consumption (like a night out, or a holiday) are just plain stupid.  They eventually will reap the consequences of their behaviour, and learn from that.  However, some take up such loans for other purposes, such as paying for emergencies like car repairs (which in some cases means being able to get to work or not), or to replace an appliance or pay the excess on an insurance claim. Restricting such loans would harm those people, and drive some into the real loan shark industry of informal loans from gangsters willing to use violence to extract their repayment.  That's the real risk of limiting pay day loans.

However, once again, the responsible approach would be to counter-advertise.  Why don't those who oppose pay day loans produce ads that explain the consequences of borrowing for consumption?  If you care so much for those who get harmed from such loans, then reach them directly.  In fact, why not set up your own pay day loan company offering loans at far lower interest rates, to help out people.  Of course the latter wont happen because anyone doing that would be flooded with applications and it would cost a lot to work through them to find the cases that were thought to be "justified".   So most people would simply revert to the high interest pay day loan companies.

The bigger problem across all of this is the culture of irresponsibility.  This is promoted by a state, and a political culture that implies that it will "save you from yourself" and ban things that tempt you to doing the "wrong thing".  The only way to change that is to promote the opposite, and for the state to stop saving people from themselves.  

I think, on balance, that most people would be better off not taking pay day loans, or gambling or pawning goods for far less than their value.  I also know that I actually don't know any better about anyone's individual circumstances, and so I shouldn't be forcing others around, including those doing business with them legitimately, without fraud.

Moreover, if you really do want to help the poor, the first steps ought to be reducing the tax burden upon them (raising the income tax free threshold to the minimum wage, resisting increases in retail taxation) and getting rid of measures that increase the cost of living and reduce employment (e.g. green levies on energy, restrictions on shop trading hours and other measures that reduce employment, opposing further QE and supporting freer trade).  

The next step is far more pervasive, and that is to change the culture of entitlement and short term whim worshipping that has been prevalent for several decades.  That means transforming the welfare state into a system of personal catastrophe insurance, scrapping benefits that encourage irresponsibility and opening up the education system beyond those who teach the culture of statism.

It's about returning to the poor and needy a sense of esteem, of belief that they can transform their lives, and that the answer is not to expect the faceless, amoral state to give it to them, but for it to get out of the way.   

All Labour is selling the poor is a patronising nanny state, that shuts down the things they like, keeps paying them to do nothing and rewarding them for breeding more, and telling them the reason they are poor is because they are big bad businesses out there ready to exploit them, and are not hiring them or paying them enough.  It's a malignant attack on personal responsibility and aspiration that keeps people addicted to the state, and it nobody any good except the politicians whose careers are built on pandering to it.

The economic and moral vacuum of Ed Miliband's politics

According to today’s interview in The Times, Ed Miliband probably thinks he’s had a good week. After all, he converted the leader of the Liberal Democrats to press regulation and as a result got David Cameron to surrender as well. Then it became abundantly clear from the Budget that George Osborne’s approach isn’t delivering economic growth or fiscal discipline that remotely represents what he has said. This was cue for Ed Miliband’s “We told you so” barely concealed glee on the economy, that being the now clichéd “Tories cut too far too fast”, which is the single dominant message from Labour since the election – that the solution to a budget deficit is to oppose all spending cuts. Plain politically driven Opposition, as vapid as ever. 

Today Ed Miliband spoke at the annual Labour Party conference recycling the same old message, the claim that what has been called austerity, has strangled the economy. Meanwhile, he has churned out the same so-called answers, that higher taxes on those on highest incomes and taxes on wealth, offset by a cut in tax on consumption (which would be many times greater in reduced revenue than the tax increases), will deliver the sort of boost needed. The view that borrowing more for the state to build more state housing will reduce the deficit. Labour wants more people living in homes owned by the state. If that was the answer to prosperity, then the former Soviet bloc would have thrived. If massive capital spending saved economies, Japan would be booming, as the country is awash with bridges, roads, airports and railway lines that are grossly underutilised.  Yet Labour isn't promising to do anything of that either, except of course the cross-party totem of HS2.  

It wouldn’t be so bad if there wasn’t so much at stake, but there is. 

Public debt has gone up 38% since the coalition was elected and will be double that level by 2018. The coalition is essentially doing the bare minimum to avoid spooking the bond markets, assisted considerably by the money printing, euphemistically called QE, that is in part, monetising UK public debt, at a cost of a 3% haircut in people’s savings year on year (or 9% if you count the depreciation of the pound relative to the US$). Yes, don’t be shocked by Cyprus, for QE is doing the same, by stealth to bank deposits, and no major party opposes it. 

The private sector is sitting on piles of cash as security, and because of a lack of confidence in future growth. Cash that, when eventually it is spent, will unlock inflation and the inevitable monetary policy conundrum of whether to choke off the inflationary recovery with higher interest rates. However, wilful blindness to this is not confined to Miliband. 

However, his vision is one where the state restarts the economy by spending more so people spend more on consumption, by spending more on the commercially unsustainable “Green economy”. He happily embraces a UK economy where the state sucks up 50% of GDP, and talks of “supporting” families, businesses and every other group where he thinks there are swing voters. He preaches state dependence, state welfare and state corporatism. 

Ed Miliband offers absolutely nothing to change that, dismissing demands for what “he would cut” by saying “we don’t know what things will be like in 2015”. Well Ed, we do. At best, there will be a budget deficit of £100 billion to add to the public debt by then. We know the UK now has one of the worst budget deficits in the Western world. Ed might want to evade that fact, or he might think he can tax 1% of the population to fix it, but he can’t and that wont. He claims that if you “get people back to work” that will do it, but even if ALL jobseekers’ allowance and income top ups for the unemployed were eliminated, it would only save £13 billion a year. It’s exacerbated by his war on large businesses, his attack on energy companies, which charge customers more in green levies imposed by government than they charge to make a profit and which operate the most competitive energy market in Europe. Miliband ought to know, since the current system is the one he developed as Secretary of State for Energy. However, like his demand for another tax on the banking sector, it just shows his Marxist anti-big business credentials, with no regards at all for whether the taxes and regulations he wants will benefit the general public. At a time when there are concerns over a lack of new electricity generation capacity, his bashing of energy companies would accelerate an age of shortages. 

Miliband economics don’t add up. 

The moral vacuum is the class warfare that has infected, yes infected, the Labour rhetoric. Labour’s big message is that the Conservatives are the party of the rich, governing for the rich. It is pure Marxism from past generations, as it is just absurd to think that most people who are wealthy regard the state as a way to make more money. The message is “the Conservatives say they are trying to fix the economy, but they give tax cuts to their friends and deliberately target the poor to cut the deficit”. Yet conversely, Labour has opposed every attempt to eliminate welfare for the wealthy, including capping the total welfare anyone can receive to the average wage, and capping child benefit. Surely if the Conservatives wanted to help the rich, they would universalise benefits? 

Yet the moral abyss between Ed Miliband and reality is clearest here, and it is in the masterful use of Gramscian techniques of manipulation of language and discourse. It is riddled with shameless lies, but you know them already: 

 - “Tax cut for millionaires” to describe a drop in the tax rate for those earning over £150k;

 - “Bedroom tax” to describe the cut in housing benefit for individuals, couples or families in properties with spare bedrooms;

 - “Granny tax” to describe a one-year freeze in the tax free allowance for pensioners (instead of inflation adjusting it); 

- “swingeing cuts” to describe total cuts of just over 1% in two years in real terms. 

Yet none of that is quite so egregious as the denial of the fiscal bomb created by the previous Labour government. It was acknowledged by Alastair Darling, which was why Gordon Brown tried to fire him. It could be seen in public sector wage increases faster than that in the private sector, in the spread of middle class and universal welfare benefits. Had Labour won, it would have had to cut spending and raise taxes, now it is carefully spinning the lie that if it wins in 2015, it will have to clear up a mess created by the coalition. Labour wants to claim that it wouldn’t need to cut any spending at all or it would be “nicer” about it. It also has hitched its wagon to a war on taxpayers and tax avoidance, raising the vile vision that anyone obeying the complex and byzantine tax system, is immoral.  Ed Miliband even says keeping public sector pay rises to 1% per annum is "reprehensible", presumably he thinks taxpayers working in the private sector should continue to support greater pay rises in public sector workers than they get themselves.   Public sector workers will love him, but really how can any politician justify forcing the private sector to pay for public sector workers to get ever greater pay that they themselves get?

Fortunately, a sizeable proportion of the public are not stupid. They know Labour, including Ed and Ed, governed the country for 13 years, running budget deficits for most of that period. The initial lie that deficits were due to the one-off bailouts of banks, is lost now. Labour is relying on its core tribal vote of state sector employees and beneficiaries, and hoping to capture a broader set of middle class voters disappointed at the performance of the economy. 

Yet what does it offer them? Envy and disdain for those on higher incomes and demands to tax wealth, as well as income. A war on those minimising their tax bills legally, rather than a war on complex tax rules that benefit tax lawyers more than anyone. More regulation of energy companies, rather than efforts to boost supply. More council houses, and no efforts to ease up the socialist style planning system that places property rights at the mercy of the “people’s committees” in local authorities. 

Ed Miliband likes to think he has shaken off the “Red Ed” moniker, but his unwillingness to admit the last government overspent, his unwillingness to propose spending cuts, and his continue class warfare like attacks on “the rich” (a class he belongs to) and big business, are tiresome and not inspiring the middle English voters he needs to win an election. His best hope is that they’ll vote UKIP so he wins by default. The emptiness of his rhetoric and vision deserves more scrutiny.   He's a Labour leader for the unions, for public sector workers and beneficiaries. He wants to use the phrase "One Nation Labour" to be a unifier, but he is a divider.  His answer to fiscal incontinence is to deny it, and want more tax from those who impose the least burden on taxpayers.  

He is in fact a "Two Nation" Marxist - promoting "them" (the rich, excluding he and his comrades of course, as rich and privileged as they are) against "us" (the proletariat).

Old Labour tribalism, and it's the kind that could (and should) cost him an election.  

UK press regulation is a matter of freedom

so says City AM editor Allister Heath in today's editorial, commenting on the press regulatory deal between two three parties that pay lip-service to freedom.  It is an editorial that points out very clearly what is wrong and the more fundamental philosophical point.

He's right.  It is worth reading his entire editorial, as he points out that the abuses by the press were illegal, the real issue was enforcement and corruption of the Police who colluded with the press on these actions (and the proposed law does not touch the Police, funnily enough).  

When you consider the reality and truth evasion that is part and parcel of contemporary politics, and the hyperbolic partisanship expressed by the Labour Party on this issue, it ought to send shivers down the spines of anyone who claims to be liberal minded. He says consensus in politics is a disaster, primarily because it means something has been surrendered.   He says:

few people would support cartels in business, so why are cartels of politicians so often welcomed? Ideological and political competition is just as important as commercial competition

Indeed, moreso.  I am far more threatened by a political monopoly, than having only one company selling a product that I am not forced to buy.

Heath says that it is "the thickish end of an enormous wedge, the first time since 1695 that newspapers will be subject to statutory regulation", noting that it is unclear whether the provisions are compatible with Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, protecting freedom of speech

UKIP members and supporters, and indeed freedom loving Conservative might be given pause to consider their usual antipathy towards this piece of international law, that was born not from Brussels, but the Helsinki Accords, which opened the first crack onto the totalitarianism of the Soviet bloc in 1975.

Heath points out that the first amendment to the US Constitution would ensure that such a law would never occur, because it would be blatantly unconstitutional.  Constitutional monarchists and other defenders of the "unwritten" British "constitution" would be wise to consider this as well.

The Labour Party has chosen to make this an almost class oriented, even mildly xenophobic war on Rupert Murdoch, presumably for spurning Gordon Brown in 2000.   It pointedly focuses on his newspapers, ignoring those of other proprietors equally guilty of breaking the law and engaging in unethical behaviour.  To be so blatantly partisan about one set of newspapers should have meant it was shut out of any discussions on this matter.  You can't negotiate with a political party which is driven by political vengeance.  It is in itself a threat to freedom of speech, and its record in government is not glowing on this issue.  You can be sure that if the Sun and the Times had warmly embraced Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, a very different stance would be taken by Labour.

It has, of course, been working hand in foot with the Hacked Off campaign, a clever campaign, led by the charismatic and generally well loved Hugh Grant, with a leftwing agenda based on attacking the press for pursuing profit and commercialism, among other things (as if the contributors to that campaign work for free).     It has seconded victims of press criminality to harness their anger (few would sympathise with wealthy celebrities who get caught breaking the law) and garner public sympathy. 

The Liberal Democrats have a strong proud tradition (as the Liberal Party) of being scrupulous on these issues, but have been star struck by the Hacked Off campaign, and has continued to sell out principles it once would hold high.  It ought to drop the "Liberal" moniker once and for all, and replace it with "social" or some other insipid homely to distinguish itself as the socialist party that isn't aligned with the union movement.

Most disgusting though is how the Prime Minister has surrendered principle for political peace.  Not only did he let Hacked Off participate in discussions between the three main parties about press regulation (with the press excluded), he decided he's rather silence the braying mob and his political opponents by, in substance if not in form, agreeing with them.

Conservative MPs who hold freedom dear should cross the floor in disgust, indeed I cannot understand why such MPs who, if it were Gordon Brown proposing such legislation, would fight tooth and nail to oppose it, will tolerate David Cameron leading them anymore.  What freedom supporter in good conscience can now back a Conservative MP who will support this legislation, when the Socialist Democrats and Labour are all one and the same?  Even Dr Sarah Wollaston MP who stood up for free speech in the House of Commons yesterday is a vibrant advocate of minimum priced alcohol.  Most of those who speak of freedom always have a "but not here" in their pet area of control.  

UKIP, of course, has a golden opportunity to lead on this issue by principle.

Heath hits it on the nose with the core issue - freedom.  The public simply don't care.

 "part of the problem is that we have fallen out of love with freedom.  The public supports snooping, paternalism, curtailing civil liberties and endless regulation.  Many have no problem with the state dictating how much people can be paid and telling people what they can eat or drink, and what they can do with their property.  We may recoil in horror at the proposed state looting of bank accounts in Cyprus - but most Brits support wealth taxes.  Freedom , ultimately is indivisible; the only reason why regulation of the media didn't happen any sooner was because newspapers were too influential.  Now that their power is waning, they are fair game, like everything and everybody else"

and it is that, ladies and gentlemen, that is the problem.

David Cameron, Nick Clegg and maybe even Ed Miliband, will do more than pay lip-service to freedom when people demand it.  For they are all and the same pragmatists whose key objective is to win and retain power.  

You have to let them all know that your freedoms are not fair game anymore.  Most of the newspapers are going to fight this, it is time you got behind those MPs who will fight it too.  This isn't a left-right issue.   

Index on Censorship has come out against it, you should too.   Cameron, Clegg and Miliband deserve your anger.