Julie Bindel reports in The Sunday Times today of the disinterest shown by the local Police and political authorities concerning the pimping of underage white girls by black and Asian gangs.  Apparently, cracking down upon such blatant criminality is seen as “contentious”, involving as it does, minority groups.  Says Aravinda Kosaraju, a researcher for the Coalition for the Removal of Pimping (Crop),

“What we are dealing with is gross criminality that should be confronted whatever the race of the perpetrator.”

According to Julie Bindel,

“A number of families affected by Pakistani pimping gangs have said that Police inaction and the refusal of white liberals to acknowledge the problem has resulted in more girls being at risk than ever before” (My emphasis.)

Says Ms Kosaraju,

“We are battling to get recognition that what we are dealing with is organised crime against children.”

There is a word for treating one group (in this instance white girls) differently from another purely on racial grounds.  Racism.

Most seasoned commentators believe that Gordon Brown had intended to review whether to call a General Election no earlier than the spring of 2008.  It is most probable that he had always planned to tease the Conservatives with the faintest hint of an even earlier poll just to wrong foot them and probe their weaknesses.

In recent weeks, the teasing has gone too far with everyone outside the political world anticipating an early, autumn election.  Mr Brown has overplayed his hand.  If he now resorts to his original, carefully considered and planned timetable, he will look indecisive, but if he “goes for it”, he will find that his lead in the opinion polls is soft and he might well receive a bloody nose, securing a small majority vulnerable to a just a handful of by-election losses.

Far too much emphasis and reliance has been placed upon mere opinion polls  and too little upon real election results. Professor Colin Rallings, the Director of Plymouth University’s Elections Centre, has already drawn attention to the fact that in thirty-five council by-elections since Gordon Brown’s succession to the premiership, the Conservatives have recorded a nine percentage point lead over Labour.

One way or another, Gordon Brown is going to rue the day he allowed the “will-he-won’t-he-game” slip out of his control.

Quit stalling and call election, says David Cameron

It suits this Government to boast that our citizenry has easy access to free or low cost legal advice.  Unfortunately, it does not want to pay for it.  However, rather than adopting the honest course of explaining that because of budget constraints it is either legal aid or the NHS (or defence, or education) the Government always seeks to blame greedy lawyers for the expense of the legal aid scheme.  Legal aid practitioners undertaking routine family work are paid a little more than a third of the private, high street rate.  Criminal legal aid lawyers are paid a little over a quarter of the going private rate.  The new costs regime being introduced by the Government’s quango, the Legal Services Commission, will result in legal aid practitioners receiving a pay cut.  The propaganda peddled by the Government, to the effect that legal aid lawyers are well paid and will be even more handsomely remunerated by way of the new costs regime, is worthy of Dr Joseph Goebbels.

The comprehensive legal aid system that we have in this country is the envy of the world, but if the Government doesn’t want to pay for it then it should say so and desist from attacking underpaid legal aid practitioners who have been the backbone of the system these past thirty years or more.

Legal aid bill 'highest in world'

“The polls have been volatile this year. Pollsters and political professionals who swore in the spring that Brown's numbers were so ghastly that the best he could hope for was to cling to office and pray David Cameron was run over by Zac Goldsmith driving an eco-friendly hybrid car, now see no possibility other than a walk-over for Brown.”

 

Iain Martin

A surprisingly large number of political analysts, commentators and pundits appear to have forgotten that “a week is a long time in politics”.  They suffer the affliction of a “group-think” mentality, slavishly following the accepted consensus, until very belatedly something snaps them out of it.  I doubt that they know or understand any more than the electorate they seek to convince.

All the more reason not to pay much attention to anything they might say.

Don't panic! How the Tories can survive

Commenting upon developments in the Madeleine McCann case in Saturday’s edition of The Times, Professor David Cantor opines,

“It appears that the Portuguese police may have fallen into the trap of having first formed a view of who the guilty party is, then seeking out the evidence to support it. It is rare for people untrained in science deliberately to attempt to refute their own hypotheses: instead we tend to reinterpret anything that happens to fit in with the notion to which we have become increasingly committed.”

Lest the Portuguese Police take the rap all on their own, in all fairness it should be pointed out that this is a common failing of many Police investigations the world over, including those conducted by our own law enforcement agencies.

Why patterns of the past point to abduction by a stranger as most likely explanation

"The political atmosphere is that of a gathering storm: the current level of tension cannot be sustained for much longer. The combined weight of opinion polls and public expectation could force Mr Brown to go to the country earlier than he had intended. Like the Kaiser in 1914, he may not find it easy to demobilise a force that has been brought to a peak of readiness."

The Daily Telegraph

And we all know what happened to the Kaiser.

Should a General Election be called now, David Cameron and his Conservatives are destined for another crushing defeat, opine many Media soothsayers.  This prediction relies upon an ICM Poll published in The Guardian on 19^th September 2007, one of a number of polls showing an indifferent Conservative performance in the face of the “Brown Bounce”.  Inter alia, the poll indicates that amongst voters support for the Conservatives has fallen to 32%, whilst support for Labour has risen to 40%.

That such opinion poll results should cause such excitement amongst Labour supporters and fellow travellers in the media, whilst causing those of a Conservative persuasion much angst, is curious.  It is not as if we haven’t been here before.  In fact since 2005, we have been here no less than three times.

In the weekend before the General Election that took place on 5^th May 2005, an ICM poll published in The Sunday Telegraph put support for the Conservatives at 31% and for Labour at 38%.  A few days earlier, another ICM poll commissioned by The Guardian had indicated that support for Labour had reached as high as 40%.  On the day of the real McCoy, whilst the Conservatives achieved a relatively indifferent 32.3% of the national vote, Labour achieved only 35.3%, in other words between 2.7 to 4.7 percentage points less than predicted.  The ICM poll commissioned for and published by The Guardian immediately prior to the local elections in May 2006 showed support for the Conservatives at 34% and Labour at 32%.  Lest we forget, the result of the elections was 39%¹ of the vote for the Conservatives and a paltry 26% for Labour.  Similarly, for May 2007 the ICM poll published in the week immediately preceding the elections predicted support form the Conservatives at 38% and for Labour at 29%.  The actual result was 40% and 26%², respectively.  All of the pollsters have been off the mark, not just ICM.  In recent years, opinion polls have consistently and to a significant degree understated support for the Conservatives whereas Labour’s predicted share of the vote has been overgenerous, sometimes by a wide margin.

Each of the main parties needs to take a reality check.  In all likelihood, as matters stand at this very moment, the Labour Government is nowhere near as popular as it would like to believe and the Conservatives not so far adrift as their detractors would like us to think.

¹ Or 40% depending upon which psephologist’s analysis you prefer.

²  Or 27%, ditto.

"It is one of the wonders of the Brown "bounce" that no one any longer sees fit to point out the infamy of the West Lothian problem. We have a Scottish MP Prime Minister, promulgating measures on health and education and other matters that have no effect on his own constituents, and while Scottish MPs are able to vote on English schools and hospitals, English MPs have no corresponding say in Scotland."

 

Boris Johnson

It is not only the matter of the West Lothian Question.  Since Gordon Brown's accession to the Premiership, a large section of our supine, craven, fawning Media no longer sees fit to point out that he is missing various other pieces of attire or worse still, tries to draw our gaze from the spectacle.  Reality however, like Truth, will always out and this time around the electorate is not going to be so patient or forgiving.

End of Belgium should be a warning to Gordon