Saturday, February 28, 2009

EDUCATION REALISM

As the famously ignorant and vulgar slobette Jade Goody (esp. famous for her ‘Big Brother House’ ‘racist’ taunting of beauteous Indian actress Shilpa Shetty as a “Papadum”) prepared to die of a fast-acting cancer in a blaze of guilty media publicity, she revealed what life had taught her. “I may be ignorant, but my sons won’t be,” she said – referring to how her celebrity-acquired wealth would be used to save her kids from Labour Britain’s dumbed-down, ‘comprehensively ignorant’ state-school system and ‘send them private.’


NULABOUR NONCENCE EXPOSED

After twelve years of NuLabour hounding paedophile choirmasters, tennis coaches, magicians, soccer stars, computer geeks, investment bankers, mountaineers, TV dieticians, Romanies and kindred ‘nonces,’ it turned out that a trim and leggy 15-year-old girl in Newcastle (the daughter of an immigrant mother from Eastern Europe) had been able to earn £84K in just two months as a high-class hooker servicing the needs of Geordies for chicken sex – the case came to light when a teacher happened to notice the girl’s handbag contained a generous supply of condoms and the address of her pimp and his ‘escort agency’ (Sun, 26 ii – no names or pictures supplied ‘for legal reasons’ lest the idea should catch on yet further). Police confiscated the lass’s cash as being ‘obtained from crime,’ and doomed her future – which would surely have been bright for such a hot and desirable girl if only the law had allowed her to find a husband.

{In Phoenix, Arizona, two fat coloured girls of 16 were charged with pimping girls of 14-17 to local enthusiasts (Sky News, 26 ii).}


NULABOUR (surely terminal) FINANCIAL INCOMPETENCE EXPOSED

It transpired that, as Labour had 70% nationalized the Royal Bank of Scotland in October last year, thus saving that institution from sinking with all hands (it had made in 2008 a £25B loss – the biggest annual loss in British corporate history), the bank’s ‘dynamic’ Glasgow-council-house-born supremo Sir* Fred ‘The Shred’ Goodwin, once an admired pal of P.M. Crash Gordon, had been allowed to walk away from the shipwreck, at age 50, with an annual pension income of £650K for the rest of his days.

* How the ‘Royal Bankrupt of Scotland’ remained ‘Sir’ through all this was a mystery.


ENVIRONMENTALUNACY EXPOSED

A three-year-old Russian girl was declared by doctors to be mentally and physically normal despite years of neglect by her 23-year-old single-parent alcoholic mother who had left her to be largely raised by dogs – when discovered by social workers she walked on all fours, gnawed at bones and growled at strangers (Sun, 26 ii).


OXFORD GIRL BRAINBOX VICTORIOUS AND ESTEEMED

Intelligence got a largely good press as bespectacled Gail Trimble, 26, of the tiny Corpus Christi College (where the mighty race realist William McDougall had once held a lectureship – prior to his World War I service), knocked the spots off Manchester University in TV’s ‘University Challenge’ competition – attracting two million viewers more than normal in the process (Daily Mail, 26 ii). (However, academia-headed Gail would not divulge the encouraging IQ assessment which had been made of her at age nine; nor would she strip off for the lads magazine Nuts. Gail had got engaged on St Valentine’s Day to her 27-year-old boyfriend, trainee solicitor Tom West, the son of a vicar.)

{Sadly, Corpus was subsequently deprived of their title by the BBC because one of Gail’s team-mates, Sam Kay, had actually left Corpus before some of the later episodes of U.Challenge were filmed. But Manchester gamely said it made no claim to the title, regarding itself as fully and fairly beaten in an enjoyable competition. Kay had intended to continue at Corpus but his would-be supervisor had been unsuccessful in getting funding for a D.Phil. place for him. Kay, 22, said he had honestly believed he was eligible as he had told his course dates to the BBC when applying to take part in the quiz…. Corpus had won by 275-190.}


JOYS OF DIVERSITY

Despite both groups being Muslim, Afghani and Somalian youths committed themselves to “race gang war” (probably over the drugs they peddled) on the streets of London – resulting in two Somali boys being knifed to death in one week alone (Daily Mail, 21 ii).


BOY WRITER SAVED BY IQ DIES

Ireland’s tribute to the importance of IQ, Christy Nolan, who suffered gross cerebral palsy but, identified by intelligence tests as capable of normal schooling, became a celebrated writer despite lack of normal ‘interaction with the environment’ (cf. the equally ‘basket case’ but high-IQ young poet, Davoren Hanna – detailed in Chapter 3 of The g Factor), died amidst many tributes at age 43 (Economist, 26 ii).


Nature NULLIFIED

The tired IQ-bashing of ‚anti-racist’ Steves Rose and Ceci in unlucky-for-some Nature (Friday, 13 ii) was pretty fully answered by ‚Razib’ and correspondents at Gene Expression and AmRen – though none felt it worth quoting The g Factor….


FREEDOM DEFENDED

A fine denunciation of Britain’s withdrawal of freedom from its citizens under NuLabour was provided by famous children’s author Philip Pullman (Times, 27 ii) – though he could not bring himself actually to mention political correctness, ‚anti-racism,’ paedohysteria or yag bullying....

And the heroic Geert Wilders (under police guard for four years, facing prosecution in Holland for his film ‚Fitna’ and unceremoniously denied a visit to the House of Lords and thrown out of Britain by Home Secretary Jackboots Spliff) was able to talk in New York, to attract 30K signatures to his internet petition and to be talked of as a future prime minister in a coalition to save the Netherlands for freedom (AmRen, 27 ii).

And top actor Clint Eastwood, 78, put in his two penn’orth, pining for the days when ethnic jokes could be told {and not just against Whites....} (Daily Mail, 26 ii).

Sunday, February 22, 2009

FREE SPEECH, R.I.P.

As British immigration wallahs at Heathrow bundled the defiant blond Koran-basher Geert Wilders* (see 11 ii) on to the first plane back to Amsterdam, Wilders achieved top-story media coverage (e.g. 15 minutes on BBC News 24) which made him the first Dutch politician Brits had ever heard of and gave worldwide publicity to his on-the-face-of-it reasonable claim that "Gordon Brown is the biggest coward in Europe" (Politics.co.uk, 12 ii). Index on Censorship specially went out of its standard liberal-left way to condemn the illiberalism of prominent Liberal Democrat Geoff Huhne who had sided with the ban on Wilders (12 ii).

Understandably, Jerusalem Newswire talked of the "cowardly British" and of "once-Christian, once-great Britain" (12 ii). Shamefully, only 21 peers turned up to show solidarity with the heir to the murdered anti-Islamofascists Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh by attending the showing of Wilders' film in the House of Lords (Daily Mirror, 12 ii). In 2008, Wilders had been voted `the most effective politician in the Netherlands.' He was known - though this was seldom admitted by Britain's media - to be a libertarian who admired Mrs Thatcher and scorned the standard `right-wing'/nationalist parties of Europe. The International Free Press Society condemned HMG's "authoritarian" ban unequivocally, especially pointing out that it made a nonsense of Europe's supposed policy of `open borders' (12 ii). The Danish Government also condemned HMG and urged politicians not to behave in such an unChurchillian "cowardly and subjugated fashion" (12 ii); and HMG was comprehensively rubbished as both illiberal and inconsistent by the Sun's John Gaunt (13 ii).

{This was not the first time Mr Brown had been accused of cowardice. He had become known as `Bottler Brown' in 2008 when he would not risk calling a General Election (before the economic recession began). Strange, for he was the author of a book on courage! How glad he would have been to turn to the usually unobliging Torygraph to find a leader blaming Home Secretary Miss Jackboots Spliff and urging Brown simply to sack her (12 ii).}

* The Times [London] had pointed out: "Mr Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party, has been under 24-hour police protection in the Netherlands since 2004. He faces prosecution for incitement to hatred and discrimination based on the content of `Fitna' (an Arabic term meaning "disagreement and division among people") and his calls for the Koran to be banned under a Dutch law which bans Mein Kampf."


DARWIN AS THEIST AND RACE REALIST

In all the haggling over Charles Darwin around the bicentenary of his birth (and the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life), some of the wisest words were those of Telegraph reviewer, historian Jim Endersby (U. Sussex, previously a fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge) (8 ii).
Consider the famous final sentence of the Origin. In the first edition, it read: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one." The word `breathed' was already reminiscent of the book of Genesis, but in the second edition (published a few months later) Darwin amended the sentence to read: ".. originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms.." And he kept the words "by the Creator" in all the later editions. ..the clergyman Charles Kingsley (of Water Babies fame) wrote to Darwin to tell him that evolution seemed "just as noble a conception of Deity" as that given in scripture.

..[Adrian Desmond and James Moore, in their Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins], argue convincingly that Darwin's horror of slavery was one motivation behind his determination to show that humans were indeed a single species [as the Bible envisaged] and their varieties could be explained by his other evolutionary theory, sexual selection. In setting out to prove that Darwin's science had a moral core, they are [however] perhaps a little too ready to downplay Darwin's own racism.. For Darwin, the superiority of white people to black ones (and of men to women) was simply one of the scientific facts his theory needed to explain; it was a common assumption of the times.



RACE REALISM DAWNS

Ten thousand White sun-worshipping holidaymakers cancelled their vacations in the French colonies of Guadeloupe and Martinique (in the Caribbean) as extensive Black rioting (after weeks of striking) broke out in pursuit of largesse from the islands' White property owners or the French Government (which promptly came up with Danegeld of 500M pounds) (Daily Mail, 19 ii; Daily Telegraph, 20 ii). France was obliged to send 300 police (all White) to quell the riots; but police had difficulty smashing through roadblocks under fire to get tourists to the Guadeloupe airport and advised tourists to stay in their hotels and hope for luck. Parisian media described the situation as one of civil war.

{Meanwhile, Kenya's Blacks were in a state of excitement that US President OSambo, who was probably born in Kenya, would soon be admitting them to the USA in impressive numbers, allowing them to escape the horrors of Black rule (crime, corruption and general inefficiency) - as was also increasingly the ambition of South Africa's Blacks (AmRen, 20 ii). At the same time, Zimbabwe's racist followers of Dictator Mugabe aimed to complete the expropriation of White property and to celebrate in champagne and caviare.}


TEENS ADAPT A LITTLE TO WELFARISM AND WORKLESSNESS

Under-16 girls in Eastbourne and Liverpool showed their reaction to Britain's years of reckless welfarism, multicultural `subprime' lending and final pennilessness by producing babies (twin boys in the Liverpool case) - though sadly to underage `fathers' rather than to any of Britain's fifty-year-old demoralized men in pubs, `banks' and `universities' who, faced with a nubile weenie gagging for it, would have been able to provide more serious support and guidance (Sun, 21 ii) than the semi-literate products of Labour's comprehensive schools. Such and similar efforts had led England to top the charts for births to under-18s in Europe, with 2% of such teenage girls giving birth annually (and another 2% having abortions that could largely have been avoided if girls had more confidence in the experience and earning power of the father).


MANIFEST MARCHING MORONS

A London correspondent supplied a succinct analysis of NuLabour (and old Major) treachery to the young in higher `education':
As I have pointed out many times before, the absurd increase in undergraduate numbers is simply a trick by government to disguise unemployment amongst the young, as is the plan to make all children remain in education or training until they are 18.

A cruel trick has been played on those who have taken degrees since the abolition of grants and the imposition of tuition fees. They have been told that the average degree was worth 450k pounds in additional pay over a liftime's work (the 450 was later reduced to 150k) when the calculation of the 450k was made on earnings when graduates were scarce.

Once they became numerous the laws of supply and demand made a degree worth less and less. At the same time degrees were devalued by both the need to reduce the quality of degrees generally to accommodate the less able (a problem exacerbated by the need to reduce the difficulty of school exams) and by the introduction of degrees of dubious quality such as media studies and tourism.

The conversion of the polytechnics into universities completed the disaster by making the quality of degrees vary so widely throughout the British higher
education system as to make any meaningful comparison from one university to another virtually impossible.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

EUROPEAN FREE SPEECH TO END IN STYLE

After two weeks of being neglected by Britain's media, Holland's heroic anti-Islamofascist parliamentarian Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Freedom & Democracy Party, announced he would attempt to come to Westminster on 12th February for a showing of his film `Fitna' (illustrating Islamic hostility and violence to non-Muslims) at the House of Lords being arranged by the peers Malcolm Pearson and Caroline Cox* (Reuters, 11 ii).

Banned from Britain by fat Home Secretary Jacqui Smith (herself in trouble over greedy expense claims) and facing prosecution in the Netherlands, Wilders looked all set to create a memorable storm - reminding Edinburghians at least of the 16 month battle which I gave E.LU., the Anti-Nazi League and PeeCee in general in 1996/7.

For his struggle, Wilders (even though he probably gone a little far in wanting the Koran banned) found himself supported by the Telegraph's Daniel Hannan (11 ii), gay leader Peter Tatchell (11 ii - though Tatchell was chiefly cross that Smith had not banned a violently anti-yag Jamaican reggae music group), Europe News (11 ii - `No Tolerance for Intolerance'), Index on Censorship (11ii) and the 28,000 people (including myself) who signed the pro-Wilders online petition.

* Under whose chairmanship I worked for several years on the Council for National Academic Awards - an attractive and great lady!


BRITAIN'S ROLE IN THE AMERICAN DREAM (aka SUBPRIME MULTICULTURALISM)

A London correspondent writes:

A truly disgusting event took place in Parliament on 10 February when past executive directors of the RBS [Royal Bank of Scotland] and the HBOS [Halifax / Bank of Scotland] appeared before the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee. Sir Fred Goodwinformebutnottheenglishtaxpayer and Sir Tom McPillock (both ex-RBS) shamelessly attempted to pretend that the scandal of the banking shysterism was "nae tur dae wi' me. Naebudy kenned whit wuz happening", while Andy Horbytrainloadsamoney and Lord Stevenson of Conandsham (both ex-HBOS) feigned innocence with "It was nothing to do with me, old chap. Like everyone else in banking I hadn't a clue what was going on."

The best moment came when each of the four directors on show was asked to detail their formal banking qualifications. All four had to admit that they had none.


EUGENICS RESPEC'

It emerged that, showing unusual respect for eugenic principles, South Africa's ANC leaders were following the advice of William McDougall and myself and practising polygamy and babe-bagging on an industrial scale (National Post [Toronto], 6 ii, R. W. Johnson) - so busy, indeed, that they had not got round to changing South Africa's laws to legalize their merry ways.

In Virginia, USA, bull-necked Black police chief William Fuller was charged, after a `sting' operation, with soliciting sex by computer with a correspondent whom he took to be a 14-year-old girl.


SCHOOL STREAMING SUPPORTED

The Government was giving far too little attention to `prioritizing' gifted and talented children said Sir Cyril Taylor, the architect of NuLabour's (largely useless) `academies' programme, in a surprise attack on Labour leftwingers and loony LEA-employed educationists who had frustrated his plans (Daily Telegraph, 9 ii).

{A strong attack - almost as if he might have got round to reading The g Factor!}

EMPIRE STRIKES BACK



The students of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, announced that their annual ball, in June, would have a British Empire theme and especially encourage fancy dress outfits harking back to the year 1899. Needless to say, socialist workers and kindred pampered misfits expressed outrage (Daily Telegraph, 10 ii).

`GASTRONOMIC RACISM'

While tens of thousands of British workers in the energy industry were told by HMG that the laws of the E.U. required complete mobility of labour and thus allowed firms to pick the cheapest workers, e.g. from Portugal, if they wished, Italian towns and the city of Milan, in the control of the centre-right, seemed to have little difficulty banning kebabs and kindred `ethnic' food - except of course being (pretty fairly) labelled as engaging in `culinary ethnic cleansing' and facing philosophical and legal arguments after which foods were `ethnic' (apparently pasta was originally introduced by Marco Polo from China..) (Times, 31 i).

{Italy had for several years been moving `right' in response to floods of immigrants from North Africa and rapes by Romanian gypsies - encouraged to leave Romania by that country's impressive noble elite, young members of which had once helped create twenty years ago in my Edinburgh flat one of the most dazzlingly intellectual parties I ever threw..}


HOLY WAR TECHNIQUES

While President Osambo laboured to end interrogation of Muesli fighters by `waterboarding' (spraying faces with water), though could not see a way to end `rendition' (snatching suspects and sending them for interrogation in Romania), the Sun revealed how Mueslis treated each other: repeatedly raping youngsters of both sexes till they were so ashamed that becoming a suicide bomber seemed preferable to sodomization (4 ii).


ECONOMIC GROWTH LINKED TO NATIONAL IQ

It was learned that the heroic Leipzig scholar, Volkmar Weiss, who once stood up to the Stasi, had published new calculations showing that national economic growth was substantially related to adolescent levels of IQ (as assessed in the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment*). In particular, he found the growth of gross domestic product per capita can be derived as a linear function of the percentage of people with an IQ above 105 and its underlying frequency of a hypothetical major gene of intelligence (Mankind Quarterly 49, 129-164).

Volkmar's paper concluded: "There are three types of men (Weiss and Weiss, 2003): Men (with IQ above 123), who invent machines, men (with IQ above 104), who repair machines, and men, who use machines. In a country where there are not enough men to construct and to repair a bridge, sooner or later traffic by railroad will break down (Malloy, 2008). Now, for example, Angola needs Chinese engineers to repair railroads and bridges."

* PISA assesses how far students near the end of compulsory education have acquired some of the knowledge and skills that are essential for full participation in society. In all cycles, the domains of reading, mathematical and scientific literacy are covered not merely in terms of mastery of the school curriculum, but in terms of important knowledge and skills needed in adult life.


FREE SPEECH DEFENDED

As PeeCee reached new heights, top Times columnist Matthew Parris denounced the BBC as "illogical" for sacking* Carol Thatcher (Lady Thatcher's daughter) for using the term `golliwog'** over drinks in a good-humoured private conversation (referring to a gifted young French mixed-race tennis player having notoriously wild hair) (Guardian, 4 ii; BBC News 24, 4 ii); and, as the Pope, responding to criticism from Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, demanded a traditionalist bishop `unequivocally recant' his reported Holocaust denial, the Pope's brother (himself a priest) stepped forward to denounce Ms Merkel as "irrational" (Times, 4 ii).

The Telegraph's Charles Moore joined in 5 ii in Carol Thatcher's defence, especially accusing the BBC of showing contempt for its licence fee payers and proposing the setting up of a Golliwog Club. Conservative peer Lord Tebbit (who had served under Carol's mother) and actor Andrew Sachs (who had been gratuitously insulted on air by the BBC's 6Mp.a.-earning lewd star turn Jonathan Ross) also weighed in to accuse the BBC of over-reaction (Sky News, 5 ii). Within a day, the BBC said it had received 2,245 phone calls criticizing its decision (and 60 supporting it) (Guardian, 5 ii). Melanie Phillips used her Mail column 5 ii to claim Britain had become a "Stasi State" governed by a politically correct elite whose citizens are too scared to utter even in private what they might think twice about saying in public.

Thatcher, 55, had used the g------- word twice (once calling the Frenchie a "half-golliwog"), insisting before her `shocked' interlocutors that it was not racist; tempers had then flared, with obese leftist comedienne Jo Brand storming out. She had also called the French tennis player, quite correctly, a "half-golliwog" - thereby apparently upsetting the player's mother (Times, 6 ii). But support for her poured into the BBC at a rate of 300-1 (BBC, 6 ii);

London's mayor Boris Johnson insisted that sacking for private insensitivity was far too severe; in the Mail, Edward Heathcoat-Amory pointed to Carol's real failure, that she had not conceded to the BBC's demand that she essentially admit `racism' (6 ii); and at the Telegraph, Carol was stoutly defended by columnist George Pitcher (who like Melanie Phillips warned of Britain becoming a Stasi State), by 6 ii blogger Gerald Warner (who pointed out that ritual humiliation of dissidents had been the favourite method of Mao's Cultural Revolution), in a leader (which called the BBC sanctimonious, smug and sinister, and in letters which ran 8-1 in Carol's favour (and one complained expressly of the `sneaky' behaviour of reporting to the Beeb's high heidjuns an off-screen conversation with drinks served [in `the Green Room,' said cognoscenti] which all participants understood to involve privacy). Carol's twin brother, Mark, defended her - which was not entirely predictable; and Labour loyalists like lickle Hazel Blears denounced her - as was predictable.

Adding to the Beeb's anxiety that an over-the-top display of its peecee Stalinism could in some circumstances lose it its treasured compulsory licence fee (140 pounds annually for every television set in the U.K.), macho Beeb broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson chose the moment to call Britain's "lying" Prime Minister publicly "a one-eyed Scottish idiot," drawing a demand for his dismissal for such handicapism and racism from the Mirror's Anna Smith (6 ii) - but he apologized swiftly before the Beeb's controllers got to him, and instant grovelling is what peecee hysterics chiefly demand (as in my own case in 1996 with E.LU.)

At American Renaissance, Kenelm Digby remarked (5 ii): "Of course, this is the same BBC which broadcast `The Black and White Minstrel Show' (its highest rated show ever), continuously from 1958 to 1978."

* Strictly, they dropped her only from one show; but whether the could subsequently be used on other shows seemed most doubtful.

** Golliwogs (`golly rag dolls') had been on sale at the Queen's gift shop on her Sandringham estate - till withdrawn amidst the latest BBC-led hysteria (Sun, 5 ii).


MONGOLISM AND HYPERACTIVITY NO JOKE

The strains of bringing up a Down's Syndrome child, even with the blessing of the ludicrous British welfare state which encouraged such idealistic endeavours, were cruelly illustrated as a Liverpool bus driver, Robert Bailey, 46, went beserk and stabbed his 39-year-old legal secretary wife of nineteen years to death before causing 20K pounds damage to a neighbour's home and attempting suicide by stabbing himself (Sun, 5 ii; Globe Wirral, 5 ii).

Bailey, who had suffered hyperactivity, had been in treatment for depression but had taken a few days off work because of panic attacks and tried to come off his medication. He claimed to have no recall of murdering his wife - which he nevertheless admitted. He had always been jealous of the attention his wife gave to the couple's seven-year-old Mongol daughter and had had a nervous breakdown in 2006. Sentencing him to at least 20 years imprisonment, Judge Globe said it might never be known how exactly the `immature' Bailey came to snap.

{Nor, doubtless, given socialist Britain's reckless inattention to individual differences, would it ever be known how a man of such immaturity and neurosis and under such stress at home could have been allowed to have such a responsible job as driving a bus.}

Friday, February 06, 2009

MSM BEGINS TO `FESS UP

The Sunday Telegraph got around to mentioning what Steve Sailer had identified by the summer of 2008: that it was Barack Obama himself who had been a key cause of the credit crunch by his campaigning for (`subprime') Blacks to be granted mortgages in the mid-1990s. Funnily enough, by 2005, OSambo qua lawmaker was active in opposing moves to halt Fannie Mae's reckless lending; and the by-then-converted-to-`growth' Fannie Mae made more donations to Osambo than to any other Senator (2 ii, Christopher Booker, `This is the sub-prime house that Barack built').

But Britain's media continued to fail to carry news of Dutch anti-Islamofascist hero Geert Wilders being disinvited by the House of Lords (see January or Brussels Journal, 26 i). This neglect was strange, as was the House of Lords bowing to Lord Ahmed's threats to bring 10K mad Mueslis to besiege Parliament, for the Labour peer was a most newsworthy figure: on 3 ii the Times announced he was awaiting sentence for dangerous driving, having killed a man while driving at 60m.p.h. and simultaneously texting.



WHAT ABOUT THE WORKERS?!

While UK Prime Minister Crash Gordon - with his tie button showing, his mobile phone interrupting him,* dandruff on his suit collar and his out-of-control chin retracting busily as usual - wallowed at Davos in the praises of semi-literate UN Secretary General Wanky Loon for his "dynamic" and "wise" global leadership in the global crisis that he had spent twelve years failing to anticipate from his global perspective in Downing Street, thousands of British energy workers (e.g. in Lincolnshire, Teesside, Cardiff, Swansea, Carrickfergus, Glasgow and Edinburgh) downed tools to ask why so many British jobs were being given to foreigners (in particular, Italians and Portuguese).

The Labour MP for Edinburgh South, Nigel Griffiths, a former construction minister (and student of mine at E.LU.), said he would launch an inquiry to see if the Italian contractor involved in the dispute had broken European law by excluding British workers. The main trade union involved, `Unite,' battled it out with the BNP as to whether the strikes and protests by oil refinery workers were or were not `racist' in nature - Unite insisting race and nationality were not issues.

{Grumpy Gordon's promise of "British Jobs for British Workers" had in fact been entirely illegal under E.U. free-trade laws.}

As the wildcat strikes continued in snowy Britain with no solution in sight, the first serious grumbles emerged that Crash Gordon's self-congratulatory belief that he had "saved the world, er, saved the banks" might be seriously mistaken. In the Financial Times (3 ii), top financial historian Niall Ferguson (of Glasgow, Oxford and Harvard) called for `restructuring' of the banks - in effect, temporary nationalization; and Shadow Chancellor George Osborne made the reasonable-sounding point that the banks should never again be allowed to get so big (Daily Telegraph, 3 ii).

* `The bell tolled for thee,' quipped Speccie editor Matthew d'Ancona.