28/05/2008

Blame the Immigrants

I thought I'd do something a little more constructive than snigger behind my hand and swear about Richard Barnbrook's space to rant at the Telegraph, so I've taken the time to reply to 'Blame the Immigrants'. Since the reply's a little long and looks a bit like one of my blog posts, I've reproduced it below the fold. Lucky you, eh?

What a lot of utter dreck

Wow. Is this really the best the BNP can do?

I can't say I've ever read such a confused, rambling screed in my life. Oh, I've heard them - shouted by dribbly drunks on the tube as they stagger into people's seats and slop Kestrel Super out of the top of the can - but can't say I've actually seen one written down. Maybe we have Boris's ban on public transport boozing to thank for it. Perhaps that bloke who trolls around the Victoria Line blessing everyone will start his own Telegraph blog soon.

It's difficult to know where to start. Probably with the bit in the 'About me' section that says 'I will make sure that he spends your tax on all Londoners and not minorities.' What about the Londoners who are minorities? Or can minorities not be Londoners? Are the minority of people who voted for you not actually Londoners - or do you mean something other than 'minority' by the word 'minority'? If that's the case, what sort of Politically Correct madness are you engaging in? Speak your brains, man.

You open by telling us to blame the immigrants, but you don't really tell us what for. 'Yes....it is the immigrants', apparently. You did tell us what 'is the immigrants' in an earlier version of this post (http://tinyurl.com/5bzn4r), when you said "Most of it [real crime, which is done on the streets, as opposed to fake crime, which presumably goes on in buildings and forests] is being done by immigrants or by the sons of immigrants who have been protected by a despicable government desperate for the Ethnic Block-Vote." but that's gone now. Maybe that's because you realised the person arrested for the crime you go on to talk about is probably not actually an immigrant, but maybe the Telegraph removed it because the claim is clearly rubbish. Most crime is not committed by immigrants. Even the estimates of the not-very-immigrant friendly Daily Mail puts the figure of crime committed by immigrants at one in five. If you have any other actual evidence to back that claim up, let's see it, eh?

In between telling us to blame the immigrants and what we should blame them for, you claim that the police should "not follow orders to boost statistics by criminalising motorists". That is, frankly, a bizarre claim to make, since the police are usually accused of fiddling statistics to send them *downward* rather than upward. Are you actually contradicting yourself here by claiming the police are exaggerating crime figures (you know, the ones they say are falling) and crime is actually even lower than they're telling us? That would be a bizarre premise to base what looks like a call for Martial Law on.

But anyway, I'm digressing. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer the idea of blaming the people *actually responsible for committing crimes* for crime. Not some randomly selected group they might or might not belong to. Most violent crime is carried out by men, and that's definitely verifiable. Why isn't this post titled 'Blame the Men'? You could then even tie it in with the football trouble last Wednesday. Still, you might have a follow-up post about football violence in the pipeline with the title 'Blame the Londoners' lined up that would be ruined by that approach.

Incidentally, in the lead up to the election, you made much of your feelings for the children of Simone Clarke, who are the children of an immigrant. Are you saying we should blame them for street crime?

Your proposed solution is at odds with your claim of wanting a free society. You propose that the police, like a great big crowd of Dirty Harrys, ignore their orders (that I suspect you made up in the first place - unless you can demonstrate with actual evidence of how they've been ordered to exaggerate crime statistics by criminalising motorists) and...and...well, that's not clear, since you want to send the army to take weapons off the streets. That's fantastic, by the way. Reduce the number of weapons on the streets by sending in blokes with machine guns and tanks. Of course, you don't make it clear whose orders the army would be following, since the police have to ignore theirs. Are you talking about a military coup? That's not much of a free society.

Presumably, since any knife you take from someone on the street can be replaced by going to the nearest kitchen drawer, you're advocating the army being permanently on the streets stopping and searching people for weapons. And presumably, since you're urging us to blame the immigrants, we could expect raids on 'Walkabout' bars across the capital and a heavy presence in Earl's Court to cover the Australians. This would be in addition to random searches on, well, everybody really, since you can't tell who's an immigrant or the son of an immigrant by looking at them or listening to their accent. Unless of course you propose people 'show their papers' on demand, or that immigrants and their descendants wear some sort of badge to identify themselves.

Finally, you call for young people to accompany you on a march into the Mayor's office and...well, you don't actually make that clear. Would you demand for him to send the army out on the streets?

That's not how you do things in a democracy. You have elections, like the one in which you got a measly share of the vote and had to make do with a seat on the Assembly rather than being elected Mayor. You don't march a bunch of rabble into the Mayor's office and demand he sends the army out onto the streets and starts blaming the immigrants. If people wanted that, *they would have voted for you*, that's how it works.

It's kind of a shame that nobody turned up for your lame demonstration at City Hall. Having you carted away by security for trying to barge into the Mayor's office with a gang to demand a military coup would have done even more good for the BNP's attempts at looking like something other than a bunch of rabble-rousing goons than wearing a suit the same colour as Hitler's uniform and authoring rambling blog posts telling us to blame the immigrants.

9 comments:

Anton Vowl said...

Brilliant. Barnbrook is the best thing ever to happen to anyone who hates the BNP. I think his barmy, inane and ill-thought-out views deserve a wider audience than they get. Why don't other newspapers report these pathetic ramblings?

Five Chinese Crackers said...

I'm inclined to agree. The Guardian did report on the blog, but in totally the wrong way. Instead of acting outraged, the paper should totally have gone with the headline 'BNP Assembly Member makes dick of self' and quoted the mad bits about psychotherapists and Lily Allen.

Of course, there may come a day when the BNP have decent PR and can carry themselves without looking like a bunch of twats, but until then let Barnbrook have his blog.

Akela said...

My favourite part is his ramblings about therapists. Rapists apparently.

I'm lost for words.

Where exactly did they produce this guy from?

Cain said...

What I wonder is where the rent-a-crowd sycophantically praising his barely literate musings on My Telegraph came from. My conspiratorial side makes me think they are BNP supporters trying to make it look like Barnbrook has a wide appeal...and my cynical side says that its entirely possible Torygraph readers are stupid enough to be taken in by this.

An excellent answer, by the way. I look forward to more illogical ramblings from Cllr. Barnbrook, if only for the amusing replies they will cause.

mrscribble said...

Love what you're doing with this site - and wow, is Barnbrook a fruit loop or what.

Just wanted to pick up on one of your points about crime statistics. Recorded crime data comes from the police, and they are incentivised through targets to detect and record as much as possible - hence the whining about police targeting 'easy' middle class crime to boost the stats. Total crime, which the police are often unfairly accused of 'fiddling' comes from the the Home Office's British Crime Survey (BCS) which asks about people's experience of crime (most of which isn't detected or recorded by the police). This has been falling substantially for years, but nobody believes it because the media keep running scare stories about crime being out of control, despite the survey participants being the very same people that don't believe crime is falling. So at the moment detected crime is rising (the police are getting better at it) while overall crime has been falling (because less of it is happening). It is therefore (in theory) possible for the police to be fiddling their detection statistics upwards, while the Home Office could be fiddling the overall crime statistics downwards! For what it's worth I don't believe either is happening to any significant degree.

Sorry to be nit-picky (and you may know all this already) but I'd rather not give these idiots a chance to win a point..!

Five Chinese Crackers said...

Hi MrScribble,

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough - but my point was tat even police recorded crime has been dropping since 2003/04. If the police are exaggerating crime to exaggerate the number of crimes reported to them, then 'real' recorded crimes are actually lower than the police's exaggerated numbers, which is hardly grounds for martial law.

Phew.

Five Chinese Crackers said...

Actually - I've just realised that Banry's post may have been even more hat stand than I originally thought. I assumed he was arguing that the police add extra pretend crimes to the figures so they can boost their clean up targets.

He could have actually meant that the police are ignoring stabbings and such in favour of other things. That's even more loony than I thought, so I hadn't considered it.

Yusuf Smith said...

In reply to Cain, I have more than often suspected that there are far-right agitators phoning into radio phone-ins to spout far-right propaganda without mentioning their affiliation. Not to mention the hordes who fill the comment boxes after the online versions of newspaper articles on immigration, or anything to do with Muslim issues like hijab - nearly always anti-foreigner and anti-Muslim. Radio stations should educate their hosts to spot covert agitation (astroturfing) and get rid of the comment boxes as they serve no purpose other than to give the impression of public hostility to immigrants and minorities.

Five Chinese Crackers said...

There are definitely BNP representatives trolling comment sections on other papers. Lickyalips, who has a Telegraph blog of their own to promote the BNP with, has been commenting on other papers for a long time.

And I wonder whether BarnbrookRocks is a sock puppet.