Lowles edges closer to admitting HnH culpability in child grooming scandal

A revealing blog post by Hope not Hate director Nick Lowles has edged closer to admitting his
organisation's culpability in driving the culture of fear over being labelled a racist which helped sexual offenders hide their crimes.

In an article posted this afternoon (Friday) entitled 'Whose side are we on?', he argues that Hope not Hate activists should not oppose a march allegedly organised by the EDL to protest against child grooming, and goes on to explain how his own organisation's approach to past grooming scandals lead to the perpetrators of such crimes escaping justice.

"There will be some who will be tempted to organise a counter-protest, which will amount to little more than standing behind a line of police chanting 'Nazi scum off our street'.
While I understand the desire to show opposition to the EDL, I believe that this approach is futile and counter-productive.
In the autumn of 2012, an EDL demo against grooming attracted a coach load of people (mainly men) from the former pit village of Maltby. These people weren't fascists and most weren't racist; in fact many were decent union men who had stood loyally with their union during the year-long miners’ strike and, more recently, had even leafleted with us against the BNP.
What they were, however, was angry.
They were angry because some of their daughters had been sexually abused and they were angry because the Labour Party - for so long their party – had, at best, ignored the problem or, at worst, connived to keep it under wraps. The EDL, on the other hand, gave them an outlet for their anger.
But as they filed through Rotherham town centre that day they were genuinely horrified to be called racists and fascists by those protesting against the march and rather than dissuade them against joining up with the EDL this name-calling only pushed them closer into the pack."

Which is all very well, but fails to address the wider issue: that there are some crimes which have a cultural or ethnic bias, and yet the motivation behind organisations such as Hope not Hate and UAF is to ignore this in the broader interests suppressing opposition to multi-cultural harmony through fear. In fact, Lowles goes on to admit that the combined actions of his organisation, their trades union financers and the Labour Party prevented an earlier investigation of similar offences in Keighley and Bradford by dismissing the claims of victims as 'BNP propaganda':

"We found this out, to our cost, in Bradford and Keighley in 2004, when there was a consensus to dismiss BNP claims of grooming in Keighley as racist propaganda. The BNP won four council seats and just missed out in several more.
Grooming was occurring in Keighley and everyone there knew it. In fact, nine Muslim men were sent to prison and as many as 65 young girls were believed to have been abused."

To 'our' cost? It didn't cost the left anything - that price was paid not by Lowles and his fellow travellers, but by 65 young girls. We already know that Hope not Hate is far from being a grass-roots organisation, and has few if any feet on the ground in terms of genuine activists. But still, we find it amazing that none of their Labour Party or trades union supporters on the ground in Keighley thought it worth mentioning if 'everyone there knew it'. It demonstrates one of two things: either the distance between their supporters and the genuine working class which Labour used to pretend to represent is so vast that they genuinely weren't aware that this was going on, or more worryingly - not to mention cynically - they were perfectly well aware of it, but after it was raised as an issue by their political opponents there was a conscious decision to conceal its existence and to use their media muscle to shovel it all under the carpet simply to prevent the BNP from using it as an issue. We tend to agree here that the latter is more likely, and there is something deeply, deeply sinister about it if that is the case.

Part of the reason for this wilful ignorance - which Lowles describes as 'a consensus' - is the entire modus operandi of HnH - it doesn't matter how obvious a problem is, if their political enemies annunciate it then it must be rubbished. This is particularly true of any issues which touch on immigration: we need only look at their denial of recent crime figures which show the scale of Romanian organised crime in the capital and elsewhere. The problem for Lowles is that if they cease doing this, then what is the point of their organisation? This is something which Lowles acknowledges without providing any solutions when he says,

"We need to have something tangible and meaningful to say about Grooming; we need to be genuine in our condemnation of this evil and, fundamentally, we need to have some answers to prevent it happening again."

Quite what those answers would be is difficult to guess. The fundamental problem with this type of grooming is that it is committed by groups of men who are immigrants and who are Muslim. It would also appear to be relatively widespread, and to affect significant numbers of victims. The nature of such offences leads inevitably to wider questions about certain types of Islam, and immigration from certain countries. While Hope not Hate have been happy to pay lip service to supporting sexual equality and gay rights, they have always shied away from tackling the difficult questions that certain strains of Islam raise and which spring from fundamental cultural differences which are diametrically opposed to the values of a secular western democracy: homophobia, misogyny, vote rigging and electoral violence spring to mind. Far from having Lowles 'answers to prevent it happening again', Hope not Hate has so far offered a mechanism to ensure it is kept out of sight by condemning all who raise any of these issues as 'racist'. Does anybody outside of Lowles closed circle really believe that all of a sudden his organisation will welcome free and open debate on issues relating to race and religion, particularly Islam?

"The people of Rotherham have every right to be angry about what has happened but unless we intervene in a constructive way then we become complicit – through our actions or our silence – in pushing them into the hands of right wing groups"

The problem with Lowles self-righteous sentiments is that there are 1,400 young girls in Rotherham, 65 in Keighley and God only knows how many across the rest of the country who are already paying the price in suffering for his attempts to stifle genuine, legitimate concerns. Lowles has nothing constructive to say - if he did, he would have said it already. He is already complicit, because his organisation is largely responsible for the conspiracy of silence which has infected mainly Labour authorities and which was brought about by a fear of being labelled 'racist', something the left views as worse even than the rape of a child.

So how sorry is Lowles? Apart from his failure to openly acknowledge his own responsibility, there is also the lack of any concrete suggestions as to how to proceed. His caution against calling people who are genuinely concerned about the issue 'racists' and 'fascists' has all the hallmarks of a stopgap measure designed to last until the heat is off: after all, how will they campaign on behalf of Labour against UKIP if they can't return to the tried and trusted (if discredited) tactic of calling any mention of immigration, race, culture, ethnicity or religion as 'neo-nazism'. If he was serious in his intentions to deal with the issue, he'd forget the Labour antipathy towards Respect and sing from the rooftops the details of Imam Alyas Kharmani's 'Together Against Grooming' campaign, which is based in Bradford - precisely where Lowles let down 65 young girls in the interests of political gamesmanship. Instead, his silence about this excellent campaign demonstrates that his statement - apart from being an unintentional admission of culpability - is nothing more than cynical, self-serving temporising designed to ensure that Hope not Hate continues to be a hobby horse for his own ambitions.

Dan Hodges - an apology for underestimating his venality

A few weeks ago we published an article criticising Dan Hodges, son of Labour MP Glenda Jackson, for coining it by taking money from two paymasters - Hope not Hate and the Daily Telegraph - to attack UKIP: Dan Hodges: 1 cheque from the Telegraph, 1 cheque from Hope not Hate

We would wish to apologise to our readers for inadvertently missing out other cheques Hodges receives for the same articles, not least from the Migration Matters Trust, which also employs him to point his finger at UKIP and scream 'racism' loudly.

We apologise sincerely that we may have mislead readers into believing that Hodges had more principles than might have first been surmised from our original article, but in our defence we did not know at that time that he was being paid by merchant bankers and the largest corporates in the UK to defend their right to drive down prices in the labour market while simultaneously cashing in on the housing shortage caused by 200,000 people a year arriving in the UK.

We wish to make clear that at the time we were not fully aware of the extent to which Hodges derived his income from the richest 1% of the UK population, nor that he was in receipt of taxpayer's funds from the Corporation of London in addition to the cheques from the Daily Telegraph and Hope not Hate.

We accept absolutely that until the demise of his multi-millionaire mother, Hodges must do everything he can to protect migrant labour which is pushing up profits for Britain's richest companies and pushing down wages and the general standard of living for the poorest in society. We accept that Hodges, like his mother, sees immigrants as 'potato diggers and strawberry pickers', and now wholly accept that he has never had any experience of the working class except when they are doing low paid jobs for him or the companies which fund him. Kerchiiing.

As for the Migration Matters Trust (which Hodges today describes as 'his' in the Telegraph) a true reflection of its aims can be seen by reading this interview with its notional leader Barbara Roche taken from an interview with the New Statesman in 2000 -

"So just what is Barbara Roche proposing? She shies away from giving even a vague figure on the numbers of immigrants she is envisaging. But it is clear that she has in mind not only ... highly qualified, well-educated migrants.....So, who is to decide who comes in and who does not? Roche's idea is to let business, the trade unions, academics, the general public (Not UKIP - Ed.) have their say. She is aware of pressure from business for more immigration"

Peter Mandelson would be proud of the art form Labour have made of protecting the richest in society while driving down incomes. And all while pretending they still care about the working class.

Immigration - the partial truth Hope not Hate want to sell

We've published this before here, but it is worth a slight edit just to drive home the point!

 

Brits in EU countries: 2.2m. Foreign born residents of the UK: 7.54m. HnH distorting figures again.

Hope not Hate this morning posted a graphic from the IPPR showing the number of British citizens - ie emigrants - who live in other EU countries. The figure was 2.2m.

What they failed to show were the corresponding figures for immigration to the UK. The 2011 census - available from the Office of National Statistics - showed that as of 2011 there were 7,354,000 foreign born residents of the UK, or 9.1% of the population, against an EU average figure of only 8.6%. Of these, 4,760,000 were born outside the European Union, and 2,240,000 were born within the European Union (these figures are rounded off, hence the total not equalling the 7.354m).

Since the census, there are figures for a further 2 years: in the year to October 2012, net immigration was 152,000, while in the year to October 2013 a further net increase of 183,000 was recorded for a total net immigration figure of a further 335,000 people. By comparison, the Leicester metropolitan area has a population of 330,574.

Some other interesting facts from their 'favourite infographic'.

The Foreign Office estimates that of the 1,000,000 British citizens resident in Spain, as many as 800,000 are retirees living on either their pensions or their savings. British residents under pensionable age have no free access to the Spanish healthcare system following a change in the law in 2006.

Of the 330,000 British citizens resident in France, the Foreign Office estimates that 250,000 are retirees or early retirees. In 2007, the French government withdrew free access to the French healthcare system for retirees under the age of 65: 100,000 people were affected.

Of the 107,000 British citizens resident in Germany, over 40,000 are servicemen, families of servicemen, or otherwise employed in British Forces Germany, formerly the British Army of the Rhine.

Of the 31,000 British citizens living in Belgium, up to 15,000 are employees of either the European Parliament, the European Commission or SHAPE/SHAFE.

The list goes on. Needless to say, their infographic is not what it appears to be. Why are we not surprised?

Goodwin's left-tinted spectacles can't see the wood for the trees

Hope not Hate yesterday passed on an article which appeared in the 'New Statesman' magazine written by academic and self-proclaimed expert on the far-right Matthew Goodwin.

In it, Goodwin recycles some of his pet theories, liberally sprinkled with all sorts of errors. Take this for instance, where he attacks Tory MEP Daniel Hannan for claiming the BNP is a far-left group:

"The latter is a common mistake by right-wingers who overlook the fact that while far right groups often advocate left-wing economic policies, they only do so to protect the native racial group, not a social class. Race and ancestry are paramount; everything else is secondary."

Is Goodwin really suggesting that racism and socialism are mutually exclusive? Such simplistic dismissals sound convincing until one thinks of the racism inherent in Stalin's Russia - against Jews, against Cossacks and against Ukrainians - or the effects of a National Socialist Workers Party on Germany. Or perhaps killing off foreigners is acceptable to Nottingham Trent University so long as it in the interests of class solidarity?

Goodwin goes on to say, "But it is also a deliberate ploy by some on the centre-right to distance themselves from their more extreme ideological cousins who live two doors down, on the same street. In this respect, Hannan follows the likes of Charles Moore who claimed the EDL is non-violent, and Andrew Gilligan who, after Woolwich, tried to dismiss a documented rise in attacks against Muslims following the attack. Both were proved wrong."

Were they? By whom? Hope not Hate - who are currently flogging Goodwin's latest tract on their website (foreword by Nick Lowles) even though it is available free elsewhere - certainly disagreed, but they are hardly independent arbiters. The figures of course were provided by TellMAMA, who subsequently lost their central government funding because they were found to have fiddled their figures. The whole tone of his denial of left-wing racism is not an argument: it is simply contradiction designed to turn the argument back on those who made it while overlooking an inconvenient truth - that an organisation with which he sympathises was found to have lied and distorted the truth, and he failed to notice.

Goodwin goes on to defend himself from those who dare denigrate his research and suggest he is a rabidly Marxist anti-fascist - "Moreover, fanatical anti-fascists would find it difficult if not impossible to survive in higher education, where our papers and grant applications are routinely reviewed by other academics and research councils, all of whom have little time for anything other than objective, independent and rigorous research."

Which all sounds lovely and even handed to anyone without experience of academia, particularly academia centred on social sciences, where the world is viewed through left-tinted spectacles. Indeed, Goodwin's own university, Nottingham Trent, has a chair founded and funded by the European Commission - a Jean Monnet position - whose continued funding is contingent upon research proving the need for 'ever closer union' and 'more Europe'. Such is the academic rigour applied to those who espouse the causes of the new left.

Goodwin is of course wheeled out on a regular basis to make objective, academic comments which mainly focus on attempting to link UKIP and the BNP. His prediction earlier this year - during a 

debate with Guido Fawkes on Twitter - about the number of seats UKIP would gain in local council elections was as laughably inaccurate as his predictions ahead of European Elections that UKIP was about to collapse - in 2003, and again in 2009.

We have no doubt about Goodwin's qualifications, nor the sincerity of his beliefs, and yet it would seem that he is destined to go through his entire career without understanding the general populace. All of his research hinges essentially on his mystification about why people would vote for parties which he - and the establishment and political elite - would describe variously as either populist or 'far-right' as he admits in the New Statesman article:

"One question that guides some of my research is why, despite European history, do some people continue to support the far-right, which is particularly puzzling in Britain where citizens often list opposition to fascism as a defining characteristic of their national identity."

Goodwin may never have been a member of the Labour Party or of an anti-fascist organisation, but it is inescapable that his politics are not only notably 'left-centric', but tinged by the sort of wooly thinking that affects academics whose jobs have never been seriously threatened by immigration. Journalists, TV news anchors, academic researchers, lawyers, accountants, politicians - they are immune to its effects, because immigrants tend not to be any of these things or, if they are, English is generally not a first language for them, which severely limits their impact. Because of his own lack of personal contact with immigrants, he makes the assumption that the effects of immigration are spread evenly across all layers of society when in fact it is bottom heavy in jobs and trades where language is not a prime consideration: the blue-collar work of tradesmen, shop, bar and restaurant work, care work etc. Such thinking is a much more solid indicator of his class than his upper-middle class occupation: no true member of the proletariat would make such a fundamental error, for it is down here at the bottom of the social scale where we pay the bill for successive government's trendy, inclusive open borders policy.

It is not Goodwin's fault, of course. Like most nice, middle class lads of his type, he has been comfortably insulated from the reality of life in the UK for many years, beavering away in his analyses of what he terms the 'far-right', attempting to link them to UKIP, and mixing almost exclusively with the Nick Lowles of this world. In such achingly trendy and politically correct circles, life centres around dreaming up ever more anodyne phrases to pigeonhole people by colour. BME, or Black/Ethnic Minority, is the current favourite - woe betide anyone who simply says 'black', while those who utter the word 'coloured' - as an octogenarian UKIP councillor discovered last month - are immediately strung Mussolini-like from the nearest lamp-post.

There is something really rather sad about an academic with so tenuous a grasp on what life is like outside his cloistered halls. As my long departed grandmother would have said of Mr Goodwin, "Plenty of book sense, but no common sense".