Far from what the gloomsters proffer, the UK’s car industry looks like it’s shifting into top gear as Britain speeds towards the Brexit finishing line
October 16, 2019 at 2:20 pm
Far from what the gloomsters proffer, the UK’s car industry looks like it’s shifting into top gear as Britain speeds towards the Brexit finishing line; with the announcement by Jaguar Land Rover of a new three million-square-foot distribution centre in Leicestershire, supplying to 80 markets worldwide. Fueling confidence in global Britain…
The new campus is expecting to create a sizable number of new jobs in the area and shows Jaguar Land Rover plan on having a stake in Britain’s sizable car industry for many more years to come. Remainers must be quite exhausted and tired of making wrong predictions, Guido doesn’t think they’ll give us a brake any time soon…
The attack in Halle was a reminder of the persistent threat to Germany's Jews.
SABINE BEPPLER-SPAHL GERMANY CORRESPONDENT
16th October 2019
On Wednesday, a heavily armed 27-year-old man tried to enter a synagogue in the east German city of Halle, while the congregation had gathered to celebrate Yom Kippur. His intention, as he made clear in a recording uploaded online, was to kill Jews.
Unable to force open the heavily secured door of the synagogue, he shot dead a 40-year-old woman who happened to be passing near the synagogue. He then drove off in his car, which was filled with home-made explosives, to a nearby kebab shop, where he killed a 20-year-old man. After several hours, his rampage eventually came to a halt as he crashed his car. He was then overwhelmed by the police. The suspect has since been identified as Stefan B.
These are the facts. But it did not take long for them to be cast aside and for the blame to be attributed to wider forces. Predictably, the first recriminations were directed at the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland. Bavaria’s interior minister Joachim Herrmann said it wasn’t just the perpetrator, but also his ‘supporters in spirit’ in the AfD, who needed to be considered responsible. Matthias Döpfner, head of Axel Springer SE, Germany’s biggest publishing house, spoke of a ‘system failure within Germany’s open society’, and blamed the government for fanning the flames of racism. A commentator in Der Spiegel went so far as to claim that Germany was a country in which hatred of others could effortlessly pass from the election booth to the street. Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the Left Party said ‘the fact that an act is committed by one person alone does not mean that there is only one perpetrator’.
There is no doubt that Wednesday’s attack was horrific and could have taken many more lives. It is a worrying reminder of the risks faced by Germany’s Jewish community. Anti-Semitism continues to be a sad fact of everyday life. For decades, German-Jewish institutions have been under police special protection. Why there were no police outside the Halle synagogue on such an important day of worship is a question that needs answering. It is one that clearly worried Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, who said after the violent rampage that ‘in all synagogues that I know from personal experience, it is normal practice, if unfortunate, that there is police protection during services’.
It would be wrong to downplay this attack and its consequences for German Jews. But it would be equally wrong – and potentially dangerous – to make it look more significant than it was. That would run the risk of giving this warped and vile individual more power than he deserves. Despite what commentators say, Stefan B was the only perpetrator in this crime. Several security experts, the police, his lawyer and even his family have confirmed that he was a socially isolated individual who had planned the attack alone. He produced his weapons using a 3D printer at home, where he lived with his mother.
The one thing this nihilist hoped for was fame. But, as many commentators have pointed out, that hardly makes him special. In the words of security expert Rolf Clemens: ‘These perpetrators seek recognition. They want to make the headlines. Christchurch was an example of how to do that. That’s what [Stefan B] wanted, too.’ Or as Frank Furedi argued recently on spiked, it is likely that such homicidal narcissists spend as much time on their media strategy as on the assault itself.
It is also absurd to excuse him for his actions by blaming others, such as the AfD, the German public or the government. He alone is responsible.
What we do need to take seriously is what Germany’s Jewish community has long warned of – namely, a rise in anti-Semitism. This racism has persisted in postwar Germany, despite the official Holocaust commemorations, the frequent pronouncements of Never Again, and the strict laws forbidding neo-Nazi propaganda. And it has also frequently taken a direct, violent form.
The first major anti-Semitic attack in postwar Germany took place on 9 November 1969. During a ceremony commemorating the 30th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a bomb was left in a synagogue community centre in West Berlin. Due to a fault, it didn’t explode. The attackers – left-wing terrorists – distributed leaflets that said: ‘The Jews expelled by fascism have themselves become fascists who want to wipe out the Palestinian people in collaboration with American capital.’
A year later, in February 1970, an arson attack against a Jewish nursing home killed seven residents, all of them Holocaust survivors. In 1994, and again in 1995, there were arson attacks against a synagogue in Lübeck. And in July 2000, a pipe bomb (similar to the ones used in Halle) killed 10 people, six of them Jewish, in a railway station in Düsseldorf.
Just last month, a 23-year-old Arab man managed to bypass the police and run into a synagogue in Berlin shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ and swinging a knife. He was quickly arrested.
The problem of anti-Semitism in Germany manifests itself in other ways, too. There is of course the continued existence of far-right propaganda. But in recent years anti-Semitism has informed crusades against circumcision, calls to ban the kosher slaughtering of animals, and the growth of an increasingly aggressive and one-sided criticism of Israel.
The different forms that anti-Semitism now takes show how difficult it is to attempt to contain this racism through bans and censorship. Not that we should be trying simply to suppress anti-Semitism. Rather, we need to be openly challenging it. Because it is only by engaging in open and honest debate about anti-Semitism that life can become safer again for Jews living in Germany.
The Spanish authorities and Britain’s Remainer elite have a shared contempt for democracy.
BRENDAN O'NEILL EDITOR
15th October 2019
A referendum on independence denounced as a criminal enterprise. A public vote written off as immoral and illegal. Political figures threatened with imprisonment if they even dream of pursuing the public’s desire for a clean break from old political arrangements.
But that’s enough about the outlook of Britain’s Remainer elites – let’s now look at what is happening in Catalonia.
Spain’s authoritarian assault on the Catalan politicians who organised 2017’s unofficial independence referendum is deeply disturbing. You don’t have to be a supporter of independence for Catalonia to see that handing these politicians prison sentences of between nine and 13 years is profoundly illiberal and anti-democratic.
It is utterly clueless, too. It will backfire terribly for the Spanish authorities. It already is, in fact. Yesterday’s huge and rowdy protests in Barcelona confirm that people do not take kindly to seeing their political representatives being treated in such a tyrannical way. If Spain’s establishment thought that making political prisoners of the organisers of the Catalan referendum would put a lid on the Catalonia question, it is in for a rude and difficult shock.
The events in Catalonia feel shocking. (Not to Brussels, though, which seems quite relaxed about this authoritarian behaviour in one of its own member states, just as it has been chilled out, and even supportive, of President Macron’s relentless year-long assault on the gilets jaunes.) And yet they feel familiar, too. The authorities’ insistence that a referendum was wicked, dangerous and fundamentally criminal – haven’t we heard that before?
Yes, we have. From Britain’s own Remainer establishment and Remainer chattering classes. For three years now, these arch anti-democrats have been denouncing the EU referendum as a corrupted event, even as a criminal event.
From Carole Cadwalladr’s conspiracy theories about Brexit being a ‘criminal enterprise’ to mainstream politicians insisting the referendum result is illegitimate because the whole thing was hijacked by evil Russians or dodgy businessmen, there has been a palpable effort within the elite to depict Brexit as a crime.
Indeed, Leave campaigners were reported not only to the Electoral Commission but also the National Crime Agency. The NCA’s investigation of aspects of a Leave group’s funding got the Remainer elites very excited. They were sorely disappointed when it ruled that no crimes had been committed. Because, like Spain’s authoritarians, they wanted this independence referendum to be judged a criminal act.
Remainers even fantasise about imprisoning those who pursue a clean-break Brexit. Witness the glee with which they inform Boris Johnson and others that they could end up in the slammer if they act against the Benn Bill that forbids a No Deal Brexit without parliament’s approval. As the Guardianput it, ‘Legal experts have warned that Boris Johnson could face prison if he refuses to abide by the bill’. The anti-democratic activist Femi Oluwole has fantasised about Boris being jailed for 20 years.
The Spanish authorities’ jailing of Catalan independence campaigners is horrendous. All democrats should oppose it. But here’s a disturbing truth: the Spanish elite has only done to independence campaigners in Catalonia what British Remainers fantasise about doing to us Brexiteers.
In fact, Remainers’ fantasies – if they ever came true – would be even worse than what Spain has done. Spain heavy-handedly clamped down on the organisers of an unofficial referendum – Remainers want to criminalise and overturn an entirely legitimate, entirely democratic referendum. That’s how far these people have gone down the road of authoritarianism.
THE arrogance of the BBC’s Nick Robinson knows no bounds. He has chosen to liken Boris Johnson’s ‘People’s PMQs’ via social media to ‘propaganda used by dictators down the ages‘. His reasoning is that it is not subject to scrutiny by journalists such as him, their substantial salaries courtesy of the British licence fee-payer, and to whom no independent complaints procedure applies.
At the Cheltenham Literary Festival, Robinson complained that the Prime Minister’s use of Facebook and Twitter to communicate his messages was not democratic, and that there was no opportunity to hold him to account on the platforms. In other words, governments should speak to the public only through a broadcaster’s Left-liberal filter. Robinson said furthermore that the BBC’s duty to get to the truth trumps balancing opinions as to what that truth might be; that impartiality is not a matter of different opinions being fairly represented. This from a man who in 2017 said there was no bias against Brexit because, he, Nick Robinson, said so, and that those who thought the Corporation was biased against Brexit were wrong. The referendum was over, so there was no longer a need to strike a balance between the two sides. How very convenient.
His latest remarks will astonish voters, not least those who voted to leave and expected the political, media and judicial classes to respect that verdict, and did not expect it to be suffocated, attacked and reversed by any means, legal and illegal, under the guise of scrutiny.
Did the BBC send investigative reporters to Brussels to get at the truth of the secret Bercow-EU alliance and plots to stop Brexit? Has it ever subjected the various Project Fears, for which it acted as campaigner-in-chief, to real scrutiny? Not in any way that has been obvious to me. BBC scrutiny is very selective indeed.
Has the BBC yet subjected the Supreme Court’s ruling judgment on the Prime Minister’s prorogation of Parliament to the scrutiny that it has been subjected to elsewhere as here, here or as here?
Has the BBC been remotely concerned that the Supreme Court’s judgment was a legal innovation that allowed a de facto seizure by a Remain Parliament of the executive? Did the BBC question this Blairite bloc’s political decision (dressed up as law) to give it power to curb the government’s attempts to get a Brexit deal by killing the possibility of ‘no deal’, which would have been a key card to play in the ‘negotiations’? Not to my knowledge. Likewise has there been any proper scrutiny of that chief Remainer backroom boy, the creator of the Supreme Court, the former PM Tony Blair, or of his machinations for a second referendum? I think not.
Robinson is blind, willingly or otherwise, to the fact that the BBC is part of a vast media network of Remainer propaganda when it comes to Brexit. Sky has added its seal of approval in the person of its political editor, Beth Rigby, upheld by her forerunner Adam Boulton, to the idea that Parliament ‘should’ get rid of the PM. The veil has been dropped, though it was barely there before.
As to the scrutiny Robinson deems so important, Andrew Marr’s trawl through Nigel Farage’s past statements in an interview earlier this year is a classic example. This time he got more than he bargained for. It was, as Farage blasted back at him, ridiculous and ludicrous:
With more time, Farage might have pointed that his interrogator’s past words bear rather less scrutiny than his own. A 1999 editorial in the Independent, of which Marr was political editor, can still be found. Read it and gasp at his tirade at politicians such as Norman Tebbit – words which Marr himself might have to describe as hate speech.
No, it does not take much digging to reach the former BBC political editor’s authoritarian and hard Left stance. Maybe Nick Robinson would like to ask him on our behalf whether he still believes in ‘the vigorous use of state power to coerce and repress’, or whether his Presbyterian background still leads him to believe that ‘repression can be a great, civilising instrument for good’ or that he still advocates: ‘Stamp hard on certain “natural” beliefs for long enough and you can almost kill them off’.
While we remain trapped in their Remainer media world, surely in covenant with Tony Blair and his conviction that blocking any kind of Brexit is the ‘rational’ and reasonable ‘centre ground’, they are unlikely to be held accountable.
But the freedom the social media gives to the rest of us ‘extremists’, and to the ‘affront to democracy’ they claim we pose, disrupts all that. Time is not on their side. No wonder Boris taking to Twitter is making Nick so cross.
