Oh, please let this be true...

From yesterday's Daily Mirror:

BNP leader Nick Griffin could lose Euro seat as party faces bankruptcy... He is among top officials thought to be personally liable for the racist group's £700,000 debts - which it admits it cannot pay.

The BNP's money woes were laid bare by ex-chief fundraiser James Dowson in a letter seen by the Mirror. Mr Dowson told North-East printers who produced its newsletter that the finances were like "a shipwreck.. Cash is in very short supply... [it is] impossible for the BNP and persons associated with it to pay outstanding bills in anything like a normal timescale, if indeed at all." The "very grave" crisis meant it could only pay 20% of what it owed, he added.

Its money problems have been made worse by having to settle a legal row after illegally using Marmite in an ad and the cost of fighting the Equality and Human Rights Commission over its whites-only admission rules. Meanwhile, electoral chiefs are still probing its 2008 accounts as they contain gaps that breach the law...

This one will run and run ...

We all had a fulsome chuckle back in June when the EHRC threatened the BNP with an injunction unless it changed its rules to allow non-white members. My view being, whatever the rights and wrongs of this are, how many non-whites would want to join the BNP anyway?

It appears that the ECHR have no sense of logic or even irony and are determined to go ahead with this attempt to make utter idiots of themselves and guarantee the BNP loads more free publicity/sympathy.

PS, UKIPWebmaster alerts us to this fine article on Action 4 Employment Limited.

Pots, kettles

From the BBC:

"One hundred public figures have joined a pressure group's campaign for a High Pay Commission to curb "excessive" pay, amid concern over high City salaries.

Politicians, as well as unions and academics, are backing the centre-left Compass group's campaign for steps such as maximum wage ratios and bonus taxes. Chancellor Alistair Darling said he was ready to curb bonuses if necessary.

Media reports suggested Barclays was seeking to hire five JP Morgan bankers with bonus deals totalling £30m. Seperately, the Times on Monday said Barclays paid million of pounds to its head of Barclaycard, Anthony Jenkins, for a role that never came to fruition. Barclays declined to comment on both reports.

Barclays has not benefitted unduly from the taxpayer-funded bail-outs, so I'd suggest that their pay structures are none of the government's business. As to the bonuses paid by government-backed banks, I'd suggest that the problem is the government backing, not the bonuses.

The group urging for control over pay issued a joint statement, which said the "unjust rewards" of a few hundred "masters of the universe" exacerbated the risks to which the British economy was exposed. The campaign's backers include Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Vince Cable and Labour MP Jon Cruddas, who argue that high levels of pay and bonuses led to the financial crisis.

The campaign compared the wage levels of the highly-remunerated to those of employees who worked a 40-hour week earning the minimum wage. It argued someone earning the minimum wage would have to work for about 226 years to receive the same annual pay as a FTSE 100 boss.

Tee hee! And how many years does that person have to work to earn as much as MPs can claim each year as Second Home Allowance? About two?

If we are to focus on those people who earn high salaries at the taxpayer's expense, shouldn't we be looking at MPs, all the heads of quangos, Town Hall fat cats and organisations like the BBC?

If they repeat a lie often enough ... I still won't believe it

From The BBC:

There is no evidence that new arrivals in the UK are able to jump council housing queues, an Equality and Human Rights Commission report says.

I duly followed the links all the way to the 68 page report (pdf). Apart from rehashing the same old stats that suggest that one-in-ten units of social housing are given to "recent arrivals" (primarily successful asylum seekers), I find this fine summary on pages 25 to 26 (reproduced below).

Doesn't this all exactly confirm what we suspected? Agreed, the BNP has vastly exaggerated this, but they are no more guilty of distorting the statistics than the EHRC.
---------------------------------------------------------------
"Only four country-of-birth groups have higher proportions of persons living in social housing than the UK-born population. These are the Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Jamaica and Somalia-born populations. Over 95 per cent of the Somalia born population lives in rental accommodation and of this group, nearly 80 per cent are in social housing. However, these groups are numerically small in relation to the total of social tenants in the UK.

The overall size of the Somalia-born population is small - an estimated 92,200 persons in Quarter Three of 2007, of which 72,800 were social tenants, compared with 8.4 million UK-born social tenants. An LFS analysis estimates that 73 per cent Afghanistan-born persons were social tenants, amounting to just 19,200 people.

A number of factors account for the over-representation as social tenants of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Jamaica and Somalia-born populations. These include:
• Lower household income, thus an inability to purchase property (for Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Somalia-born populations).
• Larger family size, with many families being unable to afford suitable properties (for Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Somalia-born populations).
• A preference for settlement in London, where property prices are higher and greater proportions of all country-of-birth groups are social tenants (for all four groups and UK-born populations).
• High proportions of new arrivals among the population, with new arrivals least likely to have accumulated the savings needed to purchase property (for Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Somalia-born populations).

Thus for each foreign-born group, a number of factors cause particular patterns of housing tenure. Three examples are given below.
• The India-born population has a low uptake of social housing. It is predominantly a long-settled community in the UK, whose average income is higher than the UK mean. Newer arrivals are largely highly-skilled work visa holders or students who have no entitlement to social housing. The factors that account for a low uptake of social housing are high-income levels and immigration status.
• The Polish-born population has a low uptake of social housing. Most of the community has migrated since 2002 and its average income is lower than the UK mean. Poland-born migrants are largely childless and many Poles aspire to return home. Some Poles are also living in tied accommodation. The factors that account for a low uptake of social housing comprise alternative forms of accommodation and family characteristics; as most Polish migrants have no children they would not be prioritised for social housing.
• The Somalia-born population has a high uptake of social housing. Most Somalia-born persons living in the UK have secured refugee status, settled status or UK or EEA citizenship thus qualifying them for social housing. Many Somalis migrated as family groups with their children and family size is much larger than the UK mean. The Somaliaborn population includes many people who are economically inactive or unemployed. Those in work have an average income much lower than the UK mean. The factors that account for a high uptake of social housing comprise low household incomes, large family size and immigration status."

Immigrants and social housing

Trevor Phillips* and his crew have come up with this meaningless statistic:

"...90 per cent of people living in social housing were born in the UK"

Er, yeah ... out of the UK population as a whole, how many % were born in the UK? As at 2001, it was about 91.7 per cent, so given the mass immigration in the last ten years, on the face of it, that looks 'fair'...

"The study found that more than 60 per cent of people who have come to the UK in the last five years live in private rented accommodation".

In plain English ... "... nearly 40 per cent of people who have come to the UK in the last five years are in social housing**"

* A totally devious, corrupt, two-faced, lying shit, as it happens.

** Minus those who are owner-occupiers, of course. Possibly more relevant is that a lot of the 60 per cent in private rented accommodation might be claiming Housing Benefit.

Update: Madasafish lays into sloppy use of statistics here.