SOME GOOD POINTS from Simon Heffer in today's Daily Mail relating to Thursday's victory for the BNP. The solution to Britain's asylum problem and to it's "far-right" problem, he suggests, is the same - solve the former and the latter goes with it. Judging by the small margins by which the party keeps picking up council seats, I am sure it is true that, deprived of its anti-asylum rhetoric, the BNP would not be able to pick up the support it is currently achieving. ®

REMEMBER HOW FOR a few months, the Left's hero was the American former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter? He told them assuredly that Saddam had disarmed all weapons of mass destruction, and was given TV time and many column inches of coverage. In a recent book "Endgame", he made a long, detailed case against war on Iraq.

His credibility was diminished dramatically in September when he address Iraq's "parliament", but still some used this traitor's testimonies as evidence.

Well, to rub some salt into the wound, he has now been exposed as a paedophile! The Left will surely now quietly bury Ritter and all mention of him. I only hope that the way the paper is going, this doesn't get the treacherous pervert a Telegraph column. ®

THE NEO-NAZI BRITISH NATIONAL PARTY has won a fifth council seat in this country, this time in Yorkshire. Thugs and former criminals some of the leading lights of the BNP may be, but it is clear that many are not. Clearer still is that they know what they are doing, and that they are developing a formidable electoral machine given their extreme policies and unsavoury ideology. They know where to target for campaigning, and they hit the place hard, doing all they can to win the seat. Could it be that in a few years the BNP will have dozens of council seats across the country? I don't know how anyone can, with any confidence, say for sure any more that they won't. ®

The BNP's reaction to their victory

SO ANGRY IS Baroness Williams at the introduction of university top up fees, that she decided to drop out in protest. With Bill Clinton already gone, this thankfully removes two extremely undeserving names. Thatcher assassin Michael Heseltine remains a name mentioned, and drug dealer Howard Marks has already - absurdly - made clear his interest in the position. It seems every time one unpalatable potential candidate is eliminated, another steps in to take his place. ®

I AM NOT UPSET by the news that it costs £9,000 per week to house an asylum seeker in the government's new secure reception centre. Already, some are being bought luxury hotel rooms, so this is hardly a total absurdity. More to the point, it will save money in the long term. If, as in Germany, a bogus asylum seeker knows he will be detained until he is denied asylum, then he will have much less to gain by coming here, so long as he is sent back as soon as his claim that he is being persecuted is proven bogus.

Genuine refugees fleeing persecution are glad only that they are alive, and that they are granted safety by any country. They do not come for the benefits, the freedom of movement before the claim is granted, or the hotel rooms. But these things all do attract the other 90% of aslyum seekers, whose claims are lies and who come here not to flee persecution, but as economic migrants to abuse the asylum system. Once we can deter enough of the bogus asylum seekers by ending all the needless privileges of the system, the cost to the taxpayer will fall and the proper attention deserved by every innocent refugee can be granted.

TORY MP JULIAN BRAZIER kicks Barbara Amiel's "cultural imperialism" argument for laxer child pornography laws firmly into touch in a short letter of response detailing just how vile the trade is.

The plight of child sex slaves in the Third World today is even worse than it appears. I supported the original private member's legislation designed to curb sex tourism (a euphemism for the practice whereby Western citizens, mostly from Britain and America, travel to Third World countries to sexually assault small children).

During the original debate, we heard testimony about a child brothel that had burnt down, revealing the skeletons of children chained to the beds. In many countries, the traffickers who serve this industry top up the supply of children provided by willing parents with a programme of kidnapping.

Internet pornography is now the major marketing arm of the world's most sickening trade, and recent measures to take tough action against it, however belated, should surely be welcomed by all those who care about children, here and abroad.®

IN THESE DAYS when being unpopular and having controversial views puts one in the greatest danger one could have faced in this country in living memory, Anthony Browne is a truly brave man. The centrist Times journalist is moderate and ordinary in his politics, except on the issue of immigration. On this issue, he dares to be sceptical, asking just what people already living here - of all races - have to gain by further increasing our population at a time of overcrowding, considerable unemployment and cultural vacuum. Individuals like him, and groups like Migration Watch UK, are finally proving that people deeply committed to racial equality can still support limiting immigration, for reasons economic and cultural, not racial.

His article for the Spectator this week tackles another aspect of immigration, one almost too sensitive to report at all, but which clearly matters - the extent to which immigration increases the incidence of serious disease in this country. It is difficult to imagine a clearer example of damage to the host population than that of Britons dying as a consequence of immigration policy.

New Labour has made it official policy that carrying a lethal contagious disease is grounds for immigrants being allowed to remain in Britain once they are through immigration. By applying its beloved Human Rights Act to everyone who sets foot in Britain, the Labour government has decided that if treatment is unavailable in their home country, anyone with a life-threatening condition, such as HIV infection, hepatitis B or TB, has a right to stay in the UK and be treated on the NHS —even if they are here on a tourist visa, or illegally. In fact, all the 28 million HIV-positive people in Africa have to do to save their lives is get into Britain. We are now witnessing significant health migration, with seriously sick people coming to Britain on tourist and student visas and then using legal-aid-funded immigration lawyers to apply under the Human Rights Act to get lifelong treatment in Britain. HIV charities even have immigration departments to help them do it.

... Since the government insists that it is unfair to deny people the right to come to Britain to work or study just because they carry lethal diseases, the outcome of its mass-immigration programme from the world’s most diseased countries is inevitable. Britain is, in some respects, rapidly becoming one of the world’s most diseased countries. Last year, African immigration overtook gay sex as the main cause of HIV in Britain, and a quarter of all those being treated by the NHS for HIV are now African immigrants. Government figures show that more than 2,000 HIV infections were imported last year, which could cost the NHS £1 billion. The fact that those lives will be saved is wonderful, but the government’s policy of tackling the African Aids holocaust by giving NHS treatment to those who can afford the plane ticket to Britain is totally irrational. Spending these vast sums in Africa itself would save millions of lives, not just thousands.

Effective HIV policies kept the number of new HIV cases in Britain steady at about 2,600 a year before Labour was elected in 1997, but the government has succeeded in doubling it to about 5,000 last year.®

IT'S SURPRISING HOW little coverage the national press gives to the Scottish Parliament and its actions, especially by contrast with the London Assembly, which just happens to be based in the same city as all the main newspapers. Anyway, this is somewhat rectified by a terrifying article in yesterday's Telegraph on the new Scottish Land Reform Bill, which seems quite literally to abolish the notion that a man should be able to decide for himself who is and is not permitted on his property.

Peter de Savary, owner of the £600-a-night Skibo Castle hotel in Sutherland, says that celebrities such as Madonna, who chose the hotel for her wedding, will now stay away, as the hotel can no longer guarantee seclusion because its grounds will not be private.

Scottish ministers deny this will be the case, but other hoteliers say the same. Jack Stewart-Clark's Dundas House at South Queensferry currently attracts posh Edinburgh weddings, but these will stay away if they cannot be guaranteed privacy in the hotel's leafy acres.

Part of the problem seems to be the common Tory method of opposition these days: virtually accept a bill on principled grounds, yet oppose it in practice because of some impractical measure or other. But this 'moderate' method has the difficulty of neither being as convincing about the horrors of what is being proposed, nor as consistent about what is so bad about them. As David Farrer puts it, by refusing to oppose the bill on principle that it denies landowners the basic right to choose who may and may not access their property, Scottish Conservatives deny the very principle of private property, a principle without which there is no liberty.

If the party would explain that it is just wrong that someone can march onto your land or field when you have chosen to deny them access, in the same way as it would be wrong for you to walk into someone's back garden without the owner's permission, then they have a simple principle to defend of private property being the owner's to do with as he wishes and grant access as he wishes. Concede this principle because it means defending the "toffs" (like hotel owners struggling to make ends meet) and your practical objections no longer mean anything. If you think that someone has no right to deny another access to their land, then it no longer seems ridiculous that land-owners can be sued by those who injure themselves walking on it without any access being granted in the first place, or that private hotel managers can no longer even give couples on their honeymoon privacy in their gardens from ramblers and teenage louts.

I remember the first Mayday riots, I think in 1999. Anarchist and Socialist Worker scum vandalised much of the city centre, directing their violence at merchant banks and McDonalds alike. There was no justification for this criminality, mostly committed by middle-class student mobs against ordinary people only trying to earn a living. Yet some Tories still managed to fudge a moral principle as absolute as this. The Question Time that followed, Decca Aitkenhead, a hard-left Guardian journalist who shamelessly writes of her promiscuity at university and her total lack of guilt about her abortion in those days, congratulated the hooligans for giving the bankers a good kicking. Yet the panel's Tory, Nicholas Soames, the true toff's toff, didn't oppose what happened on the simple grounds that whatever wealth or status someone might achieve, their right to go unbeaten and unassaulted by political mobs remained. He simply denied that the people on the receiving end of the adolescent aggression were wealthy. This was of course true - the victims were immigrants earning a few quid an hour serving burgers in McDonalds or working class security guards trying to defend their companies. But that isn't the point. Even if the violence had been directed solely at yuppies and the landed gentry, it would have been equally wrong and equally unjust.

Compromise has its benefits, most obviously on issues where Conservative ideology is far out of step with public opinion on major issues. But convictions can help a party, too. They give inspiring, philosophical reasons to believe in something, they give consistency of approach, and they give a much more powerful argument for opposing the measure in question. The Tories need to remember the merits of both.

I MUST SAY it is hard to fault The Guardian's sarcastic analysis of John Reid's absurd claim that Nye Bevan was the father of New Labour. It's as silly as saying that Iain Macleod was father of Thatcherism. Bevan would probably have been appalled at New Labour's libertine social attitudes and certainly at its market-based economic policies, however much the party chips away at what makes free economies work.

I WAS FLIPPING through an old book of the Sunday Express columns of John Junor I bought second hand, and I came across this old gem from 29 April 1979. A quarter-century later, now that we know how right he was, I think it is a particularly wonderful little piece.

Late on the Saturday night of Orthodox Easter, there was a glittering and almost unprecedented attraction for the glamour-starved young on Russian TV - a special disco programme featuring Abba and packed full of gorgeous girls in scanty clothing.

It was, of course, an attempt to keep the young Russians away from the churches.

The attempt failed. As always at Easter the churches throughout Russia were crammed.

In life there are not many things of which I am certain. But of this I am sure.

No matter how long it takes. No matter what hardships still be in store. In the end in Russia it is the Church not Communism that will prevail.

THE ADAM SMITH INSTITUTE sends out a monthly email of interesting stuff on economics, markets and politics. This month's has a depressing selection of "sad statistics", a few of which are well worth quoting here as a signal of the way things are going under Labour.

• The fastest-growing sector of the British economy is the state sector, which now employs seven million people. This means a quarter of the total workforce now rely on the taxpayer for their jobs and wages.
• The number of young people claiming incapacity benefit is up 25 percent (whether in a year or two years etc. was not made clear).
• 1,500,000 working days were lost due to strikes in 2001, the highest number for twelve years.
• Schools continue to sell off playing fields at the rate of almost one per week despite a government pledge to end the process.
• The compensation culture costs this country £10 billion a year, say actuaries.

LIAM FOX IS clever and right in promising that health spending as a proportion of national income will not fall under the Conservatives. Clever, because this sort of pledge helps alleviate misplaced concerns about Tory cuts, and right, because he made clear that he was referring to total health expenditure, not state spending, and that private spending could make up the difference.

Every poll indicates that the majority is willing to pay more in exchange for better healthcare and education. As any reasonable person can now see, especially given the experience of Scotland, paying more and more money direct through taxation won't significantly improve anything. Private spending on the other hand, especially if backed up by a voucher system, will make a huge difference to the quality of healthcare and education for millions, protecting the health of our older citizens and giving much greater opportunity to our young. None of this is incompatable with rising health spending, and Conservatives should make clear that if someone really is keen to pay more in exchange for better healthcare, they will be perfectly free to do so under us. Under us, it will ultimately be their decision, not the government's.

IN REFUSING TO RULE OUT the use of nuclear weapons in the Second Gulf War, the Prime Minister has done the right thing, and certainly not to any political gain. Of course this refusal will be interpreted as bloodthirsty war-mongering, but it is exactly the right message to send out to Saddam Hussein.

As the Gulf Crisis of 1990 heated up, and war became inevitable, Margaret Thatcher instructed her generals to go to nuclear attack should Saddam kill British troops with chemical or biological weapons. President Bush adopted the same policy with regard to American troops, and on the eve of the First Gulf War, he and John Major made clear to Saddam how grave the consequences would be, should this happen.

When Saddam decided to use scud missiles against Israel, the Iraqis chose to use no chemical weapons at all. It was later revealed that this was far from an act of compassion for the Jews, and entirely down to fear of that a chemical attack would invite a nuclear response.

Now the point of this historical lesson is that even a man as evil as Saddam Hussein is not stupid, and can be forced to act as we would wish if he feels threatened enough. Clearly, nuclear deterrence is effective, and the threat of nuclear attack can have benign consequences. I think that if necessary, nuclear weapons should be used in such circumstances, if only because the alternative is that our threats of serious force and attempts to deter would become a sick joke, no longer taken at all seriously. But even if Tony Blair could under no circumstances bear the thought of using nuclear weapons, he would still be stupid to say so. A mere idle threat can deter monstrous evils, but ruling out the use of nuclear weapons achieves nothing. As the left must learn, the threat of force is moral and essential if one wants to gain anything in the world. This is especially true in the case of the most deadly force. If we never want to have to use nuclear weapons, the best way to avoid a situation where we may have to consider it is to convince aggressors we are ready to use them at any time. ®

SEEING A BIG CHUNK of text about care home pay, I must admit I skipped right past Natalie Solent's post upon first seeing it. Only after John Ray linked to it did I decide I would read it after all. I am very glad I did, and I hope you will too. In great - though necessary - detail, the answer is given to all those rhetorical questions about miserable, difficult, caring jobs which happen not to be paid too well. Why must this be? Surely this is unjust and deserves correction? Natalie Solent says not in a fantastically comprehensive and persuasive post.

FOR SOME TIME, I have been meaning to read more into the political histories of certain countries. If anyone can link me to pages covering the post-war history of Germany, France, Australia, Canada or Japan, I would be very grateful. I basically want to know more about the different parties that have ruled since 1945, the sorts of policies they implemented and so on. It's surprising how hard it is to find any good web sites on the subject, at least in the way the way I go about looking for one.

AND TO THINK that some seriously believe only these guys have the moral authority to make a war just. ®

AS THE UNITED STATES celebrates Martin Luther King day, I think it is worth examining a few of his most famous utterances, and reflecting on how far from these views the modern left is, despite their determination to hold the man up as their hero, even as they trample on all he held most dear.

Against affirmative action and racial quotas:
"I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Against those who claim that opposition to the existence of Israel is not anti-semitic:
"The Negro people, my friend, know what it is to suffer the torment of tyranny under rulers not of our choosing. Our brothers in Africa have begged, pleaded, requested - demanded the recognition and realization of our inborn right to live in peace under our own sovereignty in our own country.

How easy it should be, for anyone who holds dear this inalienable right of all mankind, to understand and support the right of the Jewish People to live in their ancient Land of Israel. All men of good will exult in the fulfilment of God's promise, that his People should return in joy to rebuild their plundered land.

This is Zionism, nothing more, nothing less.

And what is anti-Zionist? It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly claim for the people of Africa and freely accord all other nations of the Globe. It is discrimination against Jews, my friend, because they are Jews. In short, it is antisemitism.

The antisemite rejoices at any opportunity to vent his malice. The times have made it unpopular, in the West, to proclaim openly a hatred of the Jews. This being the case, the antisemite must constantly seek new forms and forums for his poison. How he must revel in the new masquerade! He does not hate the Jews, he is just 'anti-Zionist'!

My friend, I do not accuse you of deliberate antisemitism. I know you feel, as I do, a deep love of truth and justice and a revulsion for racism, prejudice, and discrimination. But I know you have been misled--as others have been--into thinking you can be 'anti-Zionist' and yet remain true to these heartfelt principles that you and I share."

If he'd lived today, the left would have dismissed his ideas as those of a right-wing kook.

DAVID FRUM LOOKS in his diary at some of America's most controversial Supreme Court decisions, from Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 to FDR's 1938 New Deal legislation. Thirty years later, almost no one denied that they were constitutional, and there was certainly no great controversy that is in any way comparable to that surrounding Roe vs. Wade, which is thirty years old this month. He goes on:

It’s a good bet that if a court decision cannot get itself accepted in three decades, it will never get itself accepted.

Which is pretty ironic, since the main defense that legal philosophers make of highly activist decisions like Roe is that even if they are not justified by the text of the Constitution, they somehow express society’s emerging moral consensus. But what if that moral consensus fails to emerge? Isn’t the inability of a society to digest a highly activist judicial decision in itself a powerful indicator that the decision must be wrong?

It is certainly an encouraging analysis, and one I believe will be proved true in fifty years or so, if - God forbid - the Court's ruling still stands after all that time. I think this is the case for the obvious reason that it is a total fiction to pretend that the US Constitution prevents states banning abortion, defensible only by those who think judges should make the law, rather then interpret laws made by elected representatives. ®

TODAY'S TELEGRAPH HAS an interesting argument in favour of leniency towards child pornography. Sadly, these aren't the words of some nutty relativist, nor of George Monbiot, Polly Toynbee or Julie Burchill. They come from Conrad Black's wife, Barbara Amiel.

Child porn may well be made in less developed countries where child labour laws and economic circumstances are very different from our own, but it strikes me as the worst kind of cultural imperialism for us to determine the choices made by families and children where the choice may well be between that work and hunger. If there is no coercion and a child's guardian puts the child in such work, whether for economic reasons or because of a difference in cultural norms or a combination of both, this is a matter for them, distasteful though such a decision may be to us.

Yes, indeed. Who are we to believe that parochial, repressive cultural values like not having sex with children and photographing it for money should apply to poorer countries? If you can't even molest and photograph a naked 5 year old without a witch-hunt starting, what can you do? ®

A TRUE MONSTER of our times is slowly seeing the consequences of his wickedness. 40 year old Richard Browning, a photography lecturer, allowed one of his pupils to bring a toy gun into class so she could take pictures of it. He was, of course, rightly sacked for this. The villain laughably defends himself by protesting that he checked the gun was a toy which could fire no missiles, and ensured that she kept it in her locker at all times. What an evil world we live in, in which we are filling our jails with murderers and child-molestors (and thankfully not burglars!), but we cannot make the space to incarcerate this vile fiend, creator of a new gun culture and violator of health and safety regulations than didn't actually apply to replicas and toys. ®

THE GOVERNMENT IS making new efforts to tackle the very real problem of family break-up in Britain, through a scheme advertising relationship therapy. The campaign is to challenge the supposed belief among black Britons that such therapy is solely a white thing. I am wary of supporting any government programme that makes a distinction between people of different races, perpetuating the notion that skin colour is anything more than skin deep. More to the point, it is clear that family breakup is also a substantial and growing problem among whites. The racial basis of the campaign is therefore doubly mistaken. But despite these reservations, I am pleased this is happening. If the campaign prevents more children growing up outside the stable, married family, the best existing inculcator of civilised values and selfless morals, then it is £120,000 well spent, certainly by contrast with almost any other state-funded programme.

Of course, part of the reason this problem exists is the way the benefits system grants big rewards to those who bring children into the world outside the relationship which can do the most for them. Or equally, the way the tax system discriminates against married couples, especially against married couples in which one parent looks after their own child, rather than goes out to work and hires a babysitter. Does the government propose to correct these perverse incentives, reapplying carrot and stick to the right ends of the horse? Not so far. Currently, they plan instead to extend the few remaining benefits of marriage to couples whose relationship almost by definition precludes the raising of children, and which certainly cannot be as effective in bringing them up. The government may be taking a step forward today, but it has been preceded by dozens of steps back, with every indication being that more backward steps will soon follow. ®

I AM SICK of seeing the arrests of people accused of molesting children and buying child pornography described as a witch-hunt. It is a term used as much in the Telegraph as the Guardian to describe this week's events, and it is extremely inappropriate. The point about a witch-hunt - the reason everyone is opposed to witch-hunts - is that witches do not exist, and so anyone accused must by definition be innocent. Paedophiles clearly do exist, and huge numbers of children are suffering at their hands. Still more are suffering because perverts are willing to pay for them to be molested, which is what buyers of kiddie porn are doing.

As an argument against these arrests, "witch-hunt" ranks about as highly as "First they came for the Jews..." does in explaining why going after murderous terrorists will eventually mean going after innocent people. The difference is that the Jews/terrorists argument was restricted to far-left kooks on the internet. The witch-hunt charge is levelled by serious journalist after serious journalist as if it were remotely logical. It isn't.

MARK STEYN WRITES in the National Post that the Falklands War was the decisive military conflict of the last quarter-century, and should form a model for how the West should act when its interests are threatened: ignore the doom-mongers warning of a quagmire, don't worry about the UN or the stability of the region, dictators are not rational, time is of the essence.

THE UN SEEMS to know as much about fighting off evil as the EU does about creating jobs. Hans Blix, Saddam's most useful idiot, acts as though his job extends not only to bumbling around Iraq searching for Saddam's weapons, but also to determining the foreign policy of sovereign states. The latest find, Iraqi documents proving beyond any doubt Saddam's plans to create nuclear bombs, he has again dismissed. Blix apparently believes that the 27 January date for his report must not be preceded by war no matter what happens, although he claims even this report should not in any way lead to a final decision one way or the other about action.

I wish Bush would just give up trying to hit the moving target that is pleasing the UN. First they say UN endorsement of the Anglo-American strategy is necessary. UN endorsement is actually achieved. Then they say inspections are needed. Inspections go ahead. Then they say we need absolute proof that Saddam has lied in his dossier when he claims he has disarmed all WMDs. The proof is given. Now they say we have to wait until Blix has finished the job, for goodness knows what reason. After that, we have to go back to the UN Security Council for a second UN resolution. No sane person can any more deny the existence of Saddam's vile and dangerous armoury. He has the weapons, as even Hans Blix must now admit. What more do we need? Why even bother continuing inspections? We got what information we needed. That's the end of the matter.

President Bush has to understand that the pacifistic euroweenies will think him a stupid, war-mongering cowboy whatever way he does things. He's not going to win them over by further delays. He's already held this invasion off for a vital year. There has never been a better time to depose Saddam. The UN route is a cul-de-sac of negotiation, endless inspections and stalling until the ideal time to take action has long passed. America needs to turn back and re-embark on the road to a democratic Iraq and a safer world.

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