Boring and political

A lot of fuss has been made over the last few days about an opinion poll conducted by the Telegraph newspaper seeming to show that the BNP are gaining ground in certain areas. I loath and detest the BNP with a passion, I always have, but speaking as someone with an Asian wife and a mixed race child, I have to say they actually scare me too. The BNP seeks to create a white, Anglo Saxon Britain, and the manifesto, which I have actually read, is full of promises to send non-British poeple back to their countries of origin. A truely frightening philosophy.

Saturday's Telegraph included a number of letters on the subject, some of which were interesting. One that caught my eye simply said something like, "Until the major political parties form policies to sort out the problem of uncontrolled immigration, the BNP will continue to gain ground". This is very true. Most British people have no problem with immigration as long as it is under control. What no one wants is a situation where anyone can come to Britain, claim asylum, and live off the state. In many people's eyes, that is what is happening now. Also, no one wants to see a situation where non native cultures become so ubiquitous, that native culture is swamped. The current obsession with political correctness has succeeded in exactly this.

Ex Tory MP Norman Tebbit made a strange comment last week claiming that he had read the BNP manifesto and found nothing particularly "right wing" in there. I'm not sure what Tebbit was intending by this remark. He could have been attempting to distance the BNP from the traditionally right wing image of his old party (Tebbit is a right winger himself). Or he could have been trying to paint the BNP in a more acceptable light. His comment prompted a number of comments on the Telegraph letters page including one that pointed out that BNP policies could easliy be compared to the right wing policies of Hitler's NAZI party. I agree that the policies are comparible, but I would disagree that the NAZI party was right wing. Perhaps this was what Tebbit was trying to get across. The NAZI party was a socialist party with more in common with contempary Chinese administrations than what I would consider today's right wing capitalist parties.

I worked for many years as an immigrant in a foreign country. For more than two years I worked in a translation house with people from every continent on the planet. I used to sit next to a Hindu from Bombay on one side, and a Christian from Madras on the other. Both these people remain very good friends of mine. My project manager was invariably Bhuddist and oriental, my boss was a white American agnostic. I worked with Japanese, Chinese, Malaysian, Thai, Indonesian, European, Australian, and African people. And at the end of the week we used to go out to the pub together, hit a few golf balls, or eat at one of the local restaurants, and I never once remember a cross word between any of us about religion, race, culture, or even politics, despite the enormous range of views and backgrounds. This was possible because there was no evil trouble-maker like Nick Griffin trying to stir things up. That office was badly managed, the pay was low, the stress was high, and the hours were bad. Despite all that, it was the happiest office in which I have ever worked, and I will go to my grave with happy memories of it.

The Home Office is launching a new agency to tackle the problem of internet child pornography. On the face of it this would seem to be a worthwhile idea. If children have been abused to produce material that appears on the internet, then that material should be removed and the abusers should be dealt with. Few would disagree with that. This new agency, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), however is to offer quite a number of services of which I most certainly do not approve.

Among the many functions of the CEOP, a 24-hour hotline for people to report suspicious behaviour is perhaps the most disturbing. Already the search for paedophiles has become a witch hunt; so much so that I believe innocent lives are being ruined by simply finger pointing already. The last thing we need is a new method of acusing people anonymously. CEOP staff are also planning to pose as children in chat rooms in an effort to discover groomers. I can't see how this would have any purpose. I'm quite sure no conviction could be brought upon people that have been entrapped in this way. I'm not sure how one would go about trying to convict anyone even if they actaully had chatted inappropriately to a child, unless it went further and they arranged a meeting or something. They are also intending to set up fake web sites hoping to lure the perverts into giving credit card details so that they can be traced. Again, this sounds like entrapment to me and I can't see that a conviction would be possible.

The thing that occurs to me is that this CEOP organisation is targetting the people who look at images. And while I agree that scraping the bottom of the internet barrel for pictures of naked children is fairly foul, it's not harming anyone. The people producing the images are the ones who need to be found. I've said it before, but I'll say it again, charging the people who look at the images is like trying to charge people for reading graffiti.

I've already visited the CEOP website and the first thing that struck me was the barrage of meaningless statistics. CEOP claims "More than 100,000 websites offer indecent images of children". Does "indecent" mean "illegal" here? "Almost 60% of internet users have come into contact with indecent images", does that include adults and children, tasteful nudes, naturist sites, wet t-shirt contests? "Over 10% (4.2 million) of all websites contain indecent images of adults or children. According to the Internet Systems Consortium, that figure of 4.2 million is out by a factor of about 10 unless I have misunderstood the stats.

I can't see how an organisation like this can do any good. It will just swallow up huge amounts of public money and make life more difficult for innocent poeple.

Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt is in very deep smeg indeed this morning over National Health Service disasters which include thousands of job losses and a £600 million deficit. According to Ms Hewitt however, the NHS is having its best ever year! That sounds a bit like Dick Chaeney still claiming that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.