Sunday, March 21, 2010


Riot by Leftist street thugs in England

Despite their misleading name, The UAF are lineal descendants of Hitler's brownshirts. They deliberately converged on a patriotic demonstration with the aim of breaking it up. The arrests tell the story. Some of the patriots hit back, of course. Predictably, a common headline in news outlets was: "Riot police break up right wing protest". A more accurate headline would be: "Police fail to stop attack on patriotic rally"

At least 67 people have been arrested and several injured in violent clashes between right-wing and anti-fascist extremists and UK police during a town center demonstration in England. Controversial right-wing group The English Defence League (EDL) organised the rally in Victoria Square, Bolton, in England's north. A counter-demonstration by Unite Against Fascism (UAF) was also being held, and hundreds of police officers battled to keep control of the rival groups.

About 4000 protesters descended on the town, with roughly equal numbers in both camps. "This is not a peaceful protest and we are facing a lot of hostility. We will take swift action when confronted with disorder. "The number of arrests already made is a clear indication that this is not a peaceful protest and some demonstrators are determined to cause trouble. "The actions of some demonstrators is resulting in injuries to others. This is not acceptable."

Riot police and mounted officers armed with batons tried to keep the crowds in check in front of the town hall. Police dogs were deployed in a bid to control the crowds and a police helicopter was also dispatched. At least 55 of those arrested are from the UAF and nine are from the EDL, according to Greater Manchester Police.

Weyman Bennett, the UAF joint secretary who organised the rally, was arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit violent disorder, police said.

Several protesters were taken to the hospital for treatment to minor injuries, police said. Two members of the public were also injured by protesters and taken to a nearby shop for treatment. Most of the protesters, from both groups, later left the square.

Officers frogmarched EDL demonstrators back towards the railway and bus stations, while they continued to chant: "We want our country back." UAF members left the square, chanting "Whose streets? Our streets." The EDL describes itself as a peaceful, non-political group campaigning against "militant Islam." But ugly scenes also marked one of their protests in Manchester last year, with 44 arrests and 10 injuries.

The two factions were meant to stay within two designated areas in the square, separated by steel barriers. But a large number of protesters "intent on causing disorder" broke away from the protest site, police said. Assistant Chief Constable Garry Shewan, from Greater Manchester Police, said earlier: "There have been unwarranted attacks on police lines that have resulted in injuries.

SOURCE (More pix and commentary here)



Hate-filled British Leftists close down under-fives' art club because children are 'too middle-class'

A children's centre set up by Labour to provide care for local youngsters has been forced to close... because the families using it were judged too middle-class. Paint Pots Arts Club was established in 2000 under the Government’s flagship £7billion Sure Start scheme, with the aim of teaching under-fives to paint, draw and sing. It is one of the busiest of Britain’s 3,500 Sure Start centres and caters for 500 children of all backgrounds who live within a two-mile radius. But despite its popularity, council bosses withdrew the club’s funding after deciding its users were too affluent.

Just last week Schools Secretary Ed Balls defended Sure Start, claiming that the Conservatives planned to slash £200million from the service, and declared that the scheme meant that ‘every parent of a young child will get help and advice on parenting, childcare, health and employment’.

However the education department of Labour-controlled Hackney Council in East London – known as The Learning Trust – was concerned the Paint Pots Art Club was not being used by enough poor people and pulled the plug on it. The area covered by Paint Pots is one of the most diverse in the country, including deprived council estates and houses worth £1million.

Paint Pots director Ella Ritches said the Learning Trust, which runs 19 childcare centres on behalf of the Government, ordered her to target more deprived families in 2008. She and her co-director leafleted nearby estates and organised numerous meetings with leaders in the local Turkish and Kurdish communities to try to spark interest. But in January this year, Mrs Ritches was called to a meeting with officials from the Ann Tayler Children’s Centre, a larger Sure Start programme which the Learning Trust used to fund Paint Pots. She discovered that the Learning Trust had scanned the postcodes of all parents using the centre and decided the home addresses indicated users were not sufficiently ‘vulnerable’.

She said: ‘Sure Start services are supposed to be available to everyone. Middle-class mothers struggle with work, sleep deprivation and post-natal depression just like any other mother. 'But the Learning Trust officials concluded that 68 per cent of all users were white. I told them that just because they are white does not mean they are middle-class. But they said you could work out their properties’ value from the postcodes.’

Mrs Ritches then received a letter from the Ann Tayler Children’s Centre, dated February 3, which said: ‘I am currently reconfiguring the budget for the next financial year to ensure that we can support vulnerable families and link play services to their needs. ‘Based on our monitoring information, the Art Club is not reaching the families who have the most difficult needs. Accordingly, I have to advise you that the contract for the Art Club will end on March 31.’

Ms Ritches added: ‘For two years we tried to involve “hard-to-reach” families from the Turkish community and the council estates but most were not interested in attending. ‘This decision penalises the middle-classes for being good parents.’

Regular Paint Pots user Eva Hawkins, 32, who worked in television before giving birth to her daughter Olive 18 months ago, said: ‘I live in a one-bedroom flat with no garden, so I need to come somewhere where there is space for Olive to let off steam. It’s a disaster it is closing.’

A Learning Trust spokesman said: ‘According to data collected by the centre, 54 per cent of the children who use Paint Pots regularly live outside its catchment area. ‘In light of this information and an increase in the number of vulnerable families requiring additional support within the centre’s catchment area, a decision was made to divert funding into direct support for these families.’

SOURCE



The Bloomsberries: Spoilt far-Leftist brats of the 1920s and 30s

Not a good augury for the spoilt Leftist brats of today


Standing on top of a statue with an arm and a leg held aloft a naked young woman strikes a pose

The rather provocative young woman in question is artist Dora Carrington, who in the early part of the 20th century was linked with the Bloomsbury Group. Such was their impact on history that one small corner of central London - Bloomsbury - is now indelibly linked with the Bohemian circle of friends, which included Virginia Woolf, EM Forster and critic Lytton Strachey.

Today the Bohemian group of writers, artists and intellectuals are remembered as much for the complicated romantic entanglements that led to them being described as 'artistic lions' who 'lived in squares and loved in triangles'. As these images show, members of the group did not live by more traditional constraints of the time, and were at ease in each other's company - with or without clothes. But perhaps significantly, Woolf is invariable clothed.

The photographs are part of a remakable archive featuring hundreds of intimate letters photographs of the group, which helped define British culture in the inter-war period. Open to the public for the first time, the unique archive comprises of thousands of pages of previously unseen correspondence between Bloomsbury luminaries and 30 albums of photographs, many of them nude shots. The archive, on display at King's College, in Cambridge, is charted through the letters and photographs of two lesser known members of the group - the writers Frances Partridge and Rosamond Lehmann.

But through them it gives a insider's view of pivotal events such as Virginia Woolf's suicide in 1941 and that of of the artist Dora Carrington in 1932. Woolf, author of Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse filled her overcoat pockets with stones and drowned herself at the age of 59.

After her death in spring 1941 her brother-in-law, Clive Bell wrote to Partridge: 'I'm not sure whether The Times will by now have announced that Virginia is missing. 'I'm afraid there is not the slightest doubt that she drowned herself about noon last Friday ... Her stick and footprints were found by the edge of the river. 'For some days, of course, we hoped against hope that she had wandered crazily away and might be discovered in a barn or a village shop. 'But by now all hope is abandoned ... the loss is appalling; but like all unhappiness that come of 'missing', I suspect we shall realise it only bit by bit.'

The archive also offers a glimpse of history in the making. The group started as a circle of intellectuals who had studied at Trinity and King's Colleges, Cambridge, and began meeting at a salon in a house near Bloomsbury Square, central London. Their friendships were to last a lifetime despite the complicated tangle of love affairs between them.

The Bloomsbury group continues to fascinate and in 2002 Nicole Kidman played Virginia Woolf, right, in Stephen Daldry's film The Hours. In the 1995 film 'Carrington' Emma Thompson took the role of Dora Carrington and Jonathan Pryce as the openly homosexual Lytton Strachey with whom she was in love

'Many of them were quite free with sex as a reaction against their Victorian upbringing and seemed to have a very selective conscience,' said archivist Patricia McGuire. 'The letters are very revealing because everyone wrote to Frances Partridge and confided their secrets and intimate thoughts. 'There are also lots of pictures and almost everyone in the group is naked at some point in a least one shot, apart from Virginia Woolf.'

Lehmann and Partridge first became friends at Cambridge University after World War I. Lehmann, a famed beauty, became one of the most celebrated novelists of the 1920s and 1930s. Partridge, once described as having the 'best legs in Bloomsbury', infiltrated one of the group's infamous love triangles. She married Ralph Partridge, who was the ex-husband of artist Dora Carrington. In a bizarre and ultimately tragic triangle, Carrington was besotted with open homosexual Strachey, who in turn was in love with Ralph.

When Strachey died of stomach cancer in 1932 a heartbroken Carrington shot herself two months later. But the bullet missed its mark and she was still alive when her ex-husband and his wife arrived at the house hours later, a 'horror' also documented in one letter in the collection.

Miss McGuire added: 'In a way, these two women belonged to a generation that could only have existed between the wars. 'They had education, training and rights but they also had lots of free time and didn't necessarily have to keep a house. 'They had well-developed points of view, were articulate about their emotions and at the same time struggled with their bohemian lifestyles and the more conservative, older generation.'

SOURCE (More pix at link)



Pope Nazi and his atheist clone

By Andrew Bolt

Final thought on professional atheist Richard Dawkins, who last week called Pope Pius XII “Pope Nazi”. Please tell me the moral difference here. First, here’s the petition Richard Dawkins promotes damning the “Pope Nazi” for not being braver and speaking out more against the fascists of his time:
We ask the Prime Minister to express his disagreement with (Pope Benedict’s) ... decree paving the way for the beatification and sainthood of the war-time Pope, Pius XII, who stands accused of failing to speak out against the Holocaust.
Now here’s Dawkins explaining why he won’t be braver and speak out more against the fascists of his time:
When asked when he would be willing to criticise Islam as he did Christianity, the response was pragmatic. ”I personally believe we shouldn’t go out of our way to do things that will get our heads cut off.” To the Islamist he would make it clear that this reticence is “because I fear you. Don’t think for one moment it’s because I respect you.”
Does that make Dawkins the “Atheist al Qaeda”?

UPDATE

I agree with reader Geccko: "The best I can come up with is this and it doesn’t fall in Dawkins favour: Dawkin’s preocupation is for his personal self preservation. Pope Pius XII was almost certainly concerned about the potential ramifications for others."

SOURCE

*************************

Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here or Email me (John Ray) here. For readers in China or for times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site here.

***************************

1 comment:

Robert said...

Considering the behavior of UAF and its members, a far more appropriate and correct version of what UAF stands for is "United AS Fascism".