THE EU

In a recent article, Daniel Hannan MEP has pointed out that despite the rejection of the proposed EU constitution in the Dutch and French referendums, that:

‘Formal ratification by all 25 states is regarded in Brussels as a technicality. To all intents and purposes, the EU is carrying on as though the constitution were already in force. Most of the institutions that it would have authorised are either up and running already, or in the process of being established. My
researches have produced the following non-exhaustive list:

•• The European Space Programme

•• The EU criminal code

•• The European Defence Agency

•• The common asylum policy

•• The mutual defence clause, which replicates Nato's Article Five

•• The External Border Agency

•• The Fundamental Rights Agency (néée Monitoring Centre for Racism and
Xenophobia)

•• Autonomous politico-military command structures

•• The European External Action Service (that is, the EU diplomatic corps)

•• The EU prosecuting magistracy
•• The Union Foreign Minister - that silky socialist, Javier Solana

•• The Charter of Fundamental Rights’

Mr Hannan concludes that:

‘"They weren't really voting against the constitution," I am told. "They were voting against Chirac. Or against Turkey. Or possibly against Anglo-Saxon liberalism". Against anything, apparently, except the proposition actually on the ballot paper.

Then again, the EU has never been especially interested in public opinion. The ruling ideology - peace in Europe through political integration - is thought to be too important to be left to the ballot box. If a plebiscite elicits the wrong response from the plebs, they must be suffering from what Marxists used to call "false consciousness". They misunderstand their true interests. They need better information, more education. And, in the meantime, the project goes on.

It is in this context that we should understand Mr Juncker's considered view - cheered to the echo by MEPs - that "the French and Dutch did not really vote 'No to the European Constitution". We may regard such comments as an entertaining hallucination. We may view the whole Carry On film in Brussels as hilarious. But, when the laughing stops, the constitution will be in place.’

It is to be noted that when the people vote in favour of the constitution, it is because they support it, apparently, yet when they vote against it, it is alleged that they really did not mean to do so and they were voting for all sorts of other reasons.

This merely goes to expose the sham of Tony Blair’s recent spin about responding to peoples’ concerns about the EU.

We need our own referendum on the EU sooner rather than later. It is wholly unacceptable that Labour are prepared to impose the new constitution by the back door irrespective of peoples’ wishes or the national interest.

THE WAR ON TERROR

Despite the talk of a political dimension to the present crisis, Labour has no intention of stopping mass immigration into the UK. This is critical.

In February 2001, 6 months before 9/11 and in the run up to the general election of that year, Jack Straw (the then Home Secretary) openly admitted that the government had lost control of so-called asylum system and that organised crime rackets now controlled who entered the UK.

Jack Straw particularly identified the Chinese ‘Snakeheads’ crime syndicates as dominating UK border controls. Mr Straw said of the asylum system:

‘It’s a system which everyone has to recognise has drifted out of the control of governments and into the control of criminal gangs. It is simply not rational to allow decisions on who’s allowed in to be determined effectively by criminal racketeers - that’s the truth of it...These arrivals (of so-called asylum seekers) are far from spontaneous. Young men and sometimes young women who are taking part in this are economic migrants. I don’t happen to believe that if there’s a need for that kind of economic migration, we should hand it over to criminal gangs.’

Since then, Labour has done little to stop organised crime from controlling UK borders, or abusing the asylum system. Labour has of course issued huge amounts of work permits in an attempt to reclassify asylum seekers as legitimate immigrants, but that abuse of the work permit system has not stopped the influx of so-called asylum seekers from across the globe.

It is impossible to conduct a war on terror when the government is prepared to allow organised crime to control immigration. Such crime rackets will not only arrange the immigration of terrorists into the UK, but will also invest their substantial profits in order to maximise the number of immigrants, and hence their profits, and also to expand all of their other activities (eg gun running, drug smuggling, etc).

It is England that the overwhelming majority of so-called asylum seekers are settling in. The profits the Snakeheads and other crime rackets are making is of course, either directly or indirectly, English taxpayers money, given that the immigrants are paying to be smuggled here in anticipation of the income they will receive once they have reached England.

Given the present crisis, has Labour finally resolved to deal with this and stop mass immigration? No, not a bit of it. As far as Labour is concerned it is business as usual.

As for our MPs, they have just gone off on their summer hols. They are not due back until 10 October.

THE WAR ON TERROR

The extent of British tolerance and even promotion of Muslim extremism is typified by the looming visit of Tariq Ramadam to the UK.

He is yet another of those who has been endorsing/excusing suicide bombings and terrorism. When asked if car bombings against US forces in Iraq were justified, he replied: ‘Iraq was colonised by the Americans. Resistance against the army is just’.

When asked if killing civilians was justified, he replied: ‘In Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, there is a situation of oppression, repression and dictatorship. It is legitimate for Muslims to resist fascism that kills the innocent’.

Ramadan has been banned from both the USA and France. Nevertheless, not only is he being allowed into the UK, but his visit is being funded by a £9,000 grant from the Metropolitan police and the Association of Chief Police Officers.

Presumably, this is a case of the police celebrating diversity. The thing is they are supposed to be conducting a war on terror.

NATIONHOOD AND NATIONALITY

There has been much criticism of the term ‘discrimination’, as if it is something wicked to be despised. But it is a prerequisite of nationhood that a country can discriminate between its own and foreign nationals.

The EU is of course trying to undermine this in the new constitution, which Labour is so enamoured with, and which remains alive following the recent Luxembourg referendum, when the constitution received the majority vote.

The definition of nationality is more problematic, and has particularly affected the UK. Up until the 1980s, when the Thatcher government changed the law, all those who lived in what had formally been the British Empire were legally regarded as British subjects. This meant that a quarter of the world’s population was supposedly British.

To this day, Commonwealth citizens are treated more favourably than other foreign nationals in the UK. The EU is further trying to establish its own citizenship and this is set out in the new constitution. Foreigners from other EU countries have almost unrestricted access into the UK and have preferential treatment compared with non-EU foreign nationals.

But what is the definition of nationality? There are several factors which need to be considered:

1. In the past, nationality was defined primarily by blood. It was the shared bloodline that differentiated a nation. This is also reflected in ethnicity. The term British originally referred to the union of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. These peoples are the ethnic British, or Britons (obviously this has changed with the break away of Eire). With the British Empire, the term British was adapted to include all those living in the British empire. The third world immigrants to the UK are not ‘blood British’, although the majority of the population of, for example, New Zealand and Australia are clearly related by blood. The English are an ethnic group. They are descended from the Angles and Saxons who conquered England and intermarried with the Celtic Britons. There remain Celtic fringes in the UK, such as Cornwall, but the difference is too slight to be significant. It is a matter of fact that, unless they are from countries such as Australia or are ex-patriots returning home, immigrants are not ethnic English.

2. Then there is the legal definition of nationality. Is someone entitled to a British passport? This legal definition can be changed, as it has in the past, and many who have immigrated to the UK retain their own nationality in addition to acquiring a British passport. Such people have dual nationality. Currently, British passports are being dished out like confetti by Labour, and previous Tory governments have also been carefree in the distribution of British passports, which is how, for example, Abu Hamza has acquired one. Currently, there is no such thing as an English passport.

3. Then there is the issue of where someone was born. If someone is born in a country than that is an indicator of his nationality. But it is not definitive, as someone might be born abroad. At the height of the empire large numbers of Britons were born abroad as so many British people were involved in the administration in the colonies.

4. Then there is the cultural dimension. Does the person share the culture of the nation? There might be religious, political and other cultural differences which prohibit someone from integrating and being a part of a nation. The differences might be so great that to describe two people with totally incompatible cultures as being of one nation, is meaningless.

5. Does the nation as a whole regard someone as being of the same nation as them? Someone may not be accepted as being a part of the nation for any number of reasons. This may be hurtful to someone who wishes to integrate, but it is a fact nonetheless.

6. Does the person consider himself to be a part of a nation? If he does not then it is clearly difficult for the nation to insist that he is something that he denies he is. Those who emigrated from Britain to the empire retained their British customs and sense of British nationhood. This applied to many who had been born of British parents abroad and had never set foot in Britain until later in their lives. They did not consider themselves to be Zulus or Aborigines, for example.

Some of these factors are more telling than others and also need to be considered as a whole.

The relevance of all this is in assessing the present crisis in the UK.

Is it the case that someone like Abu Hamza is as much a Briton as someone born in the UK and is blood British? To say otherwise is currently condemned as discriminatory and racist. Nevertheless, the English Rights Campaign does not hold the view that he is a Briton at all, and takes a similar view of all those of a similar ilk. He is not English. He and his fellow zealots have dual nationality and should have their British passports revoked and be required to return to their own countries.

The English Rights Campaign blog entry for the 5 March 2005 relates to the extremist Hizb ut-Tahrir organisation, one of whose members stated:

‘I think Muslims in this country need to take a long, hard look at themselves and decide what is their identity. Are they British or are they Muslim? I am a Muslim. Where I live, is irrelevant.’

The question therefore arises as to how do the British react to this? Do they insist that those who deny they are British are in fact so? And what purpose would that serve? And if they are not British, then how should they be treated given their open hostility to our country?

Then there are the interests of the English. We are a nation, yet are being denied control of our own country. England is the country of the English. We are not immigrants, do not have dual nationality, and have nowhere else to go. Irrespective of what the views of the Muslim minority are, why are our views and interests being ignored? It is England which is bearing the brunt of mass immigration, it was the capital of England which was targeted by the terrorists and has been targeted again. Never mind the Muslim Council of Britain, which seems to represent few other than its own council members. We, the English, are entitled to be consulted and yet we are not.

We need an English parliament to represent English interests.

THE BRITISH INQUISITION

Four constables who had been sent a text message joke by mobile have lost their jobs with the Greater Manchester Police. The constables had then circulated the message.

The joke contained the word ‘nigger’, and an inspector who had been shown it reported the matter to superiors. This led to a 10 month enquiry which resulted in a disciplinary hearing which sacked the man.

Meanwhile there are allegations of double standards, with more senior police officers being cautioned rather than sacked for behaviour which has also been criticised as being racist. One had joked about setting up machine guns to keep Muslims out of the city during a religious festival.

This comes shortly after a the Chief Constable told his 11,000 staff that racist homophobic or discriminatory behaviour would be treated as a sacking offence.

A spokesman for the police said: ‘The four officers, all men, admitted the incident. The incident came to light on 16 September 2004 when one of the officers showed the message to colleagues who reported it’.

THE WAR ON TERROR

Tony Blair made a speech on Saturday setting out the need for a global struggle for the ‘battle of ideas’ in the fight against ‘an evil ideology’. Apparently, from the depths of the Amazon rain forest to the frozen wilds of Siberia, and even to the bushmen of the Kalahari, we are all involved in this global struggle.

This is all very well and Mr Blair has made some good points. There is indeed a political and ideological dimension. This crisis is not solely about security measures or security lapses.

But Mr Blair is a proficient political showman, and his speech is as important for what it excludes as much as for what it includes. In particular, Mr Blair does not deal with political correctness, or the political pressure from Labour for mass immigration. Both of these political issues are central to the situation in this country, and talk of global action should not be an excuse for inaction at home.

Nor should Labour be allowed to skewer the debate away from their own policies and the inevitable consequences of those policies. Simply spouting inane cliches such as: ‘the prejudices of the past are put behind us, where our diversity is our strength’, is simply to adhere to the politically correct nonsense that has contributed to the tolerance, if not promotion, of Muslim extremism. Labour is primarily responsible for this.

We need to see the abandonment of the British Inquisition and of race war politics. We need to see an end to mass immigration. Mr Blair has no intention at all of making such policy changes.

There is also a misunderstanding of what political correctness actually is. There has been some criticism that we have been too fearful of being politically incorrect, too wary of being called racist, and that certain state entities have allowed political correctness to distract them from their proper functions (eg the Metropolitan Police who have actually been funding Muslim extremists to visit the UK rather than tracking down the terrorists).

This is all true, but it is not the complete picture. The ideology we now know as political correctness always had at its heart the aim of dividing western society and destroying it from within. In that sense, political correctness is an ally of Muslim extremism.

Political Correctness is an evil, neo-communist ideology and it too needs to be confronted and destroyed.

G8

The terrorist bombings in London have tended to overshadow the outcome of the G8 summit and its effect for Africa.

But we need not fear, the problems of Africa have been solved. One can do no more than to quote Tony Blair:

‘It is not the end of poverty in Africa, but it is the hope that it can be ended...If we implement this plan it will make poverty history and we will save millions of lives.’

So there we have it. Poverty is in the process of being abolished. G8 have approved a plan to that effect.

It is a very great pity that Zimbabwe was not mentioned, or pressure applied to neighbouring countries either to stop supporting Mugabe or to stop sending asylum seekers to the UK. If these countries want our money then they should at least have the integrity to house Africa’s own asylum seekers.

QUOTE OF THE MONTH

'There could be no grosser misconception of the realities that is entertained by those who vociferously demand legislation as they call it "against discrimination", whether they be leader writers of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it, or archbishops who live in palaces, faring delicately with the bedclothes pulled right up over their heads. They have got it exactly and diametrically wrong. The discrimination and the deprivation, the sense of alarm and of resentment, lies not with the immigrant population but with those among whom they have come and are still coming.'

'The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word "integration" . To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members. Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last 15 years many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction. But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.

We are on the verge here of a change. Hitherto it has been force of circumstance and of background which has rendered the very idea of integration inaccessible to the greater part of the immigrant population - that they never conceived or intended such a thing, and that their numbers and physical concentration meant the pressures towards integration which normally bear upon any small minority did not operate. Now we are seeing the growth of positive forces acting against integration, of vested interests in the preservation and sharpening of racial and religious differences, with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population. The cloud no bigger than a man's hand, that can so rapidly overcast the sky, has been visible recently in Wolverhampton and has shown signs of spreading quickly.'

Enoch Powell, speaking in 1968.

At the time when Enoch Powell made this speech, he was complaining of a Commonwealth immigration rate of around 50,000 per annum. Total immigration is now roughly ten times that figure (in 2003, according to the Office of National Statistics 512,000 immigrated to the UK with the stated intention of staying for more than one year, of whom 105,000 were British citizens returning from abroad - then there is illegal immigration).

Labour has completely abandoned immigration controls.

Enoch Powell was right. He predicted exactly the problems we now face. The scale of immigration into the UK is such that the immigrant communities do not need to integrate and do not wish to do so. Instead, they can concentrate in and take over an area.

The Muslim population has the further barrier that their religion brings. This has been exacerbated by fundamentalism and the growth of the support for extremism, including support for Al Qaeda.

The ethnic minorities are forecast to form a majority of the population in England in roughly 50 years.

It is impossible to deal with the present crisis without ending mass immigration.

RACE WAR POLITICS

Evil can take many forms. Sometimes it is open and obvious, such as the recent terrorist bombings in London. Sometimes it is more insidious.

In an article for the Daily Mail this last Monday Trevor Philips, the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), set out his stall for a continuation of the British Inquisition and race war politics.

He started off with a denunciation of the terrorist bombings: ‘The murderers who attacked London are serial killers’.

This is fair enough. But he soon showed his communist convictions:

‘There are no bonds of solidarity against oppression, no common fight against racism or Islamophobia that can justify turning a blind eye to evidence that could help to catch the perpetrators of these acts. Indeed, we should never imagine that the bombers gave a second’s thought to the suffering of minority Londoners’.

This is just the sort of race war diatribe that has contributed to the present crisis. This is the UK and not apartheid South Africa (which, incidentally, also had an immigration problem despite apartheid). He fixes it in peoples’ minds that there is widespread racism and Islamophobia and that minorities are ‘suffering’.

This is phony, hysterical bunkum.

But he continued:

‘Our victory will be to achieve...an integrated society. But it won’t happen without some positive effort. Already the Commission for Racial Equality has received reports of incidents which to most of us might seem trivial, but which to our experts are early signs of a dangerous division. For example, a noisy Tube carriage falls silent when a young man with a rucksack and a copy of the Koran boards a train; a bus driver refuses to stop for a lone Asian woman waiting at her regular stop. None of these incidents is a major act of prejudice. Indeed, in the light of last week, the fears behind them are understandable. But hundreds of such incidents are the fuel for suspicion, which left to themselves fester into bigotry and harden into prejudice’.

When he refers to ‘our experts’, he does of course mean race zealots who are employed by the state and whose jobs depend on there being allegations of racism. One should not forget Parkinson’s Law, which states that the amount of work to do will increase to employ the numbers employed to do it. The more race ‘experts’ there are, the more racism they will allege there is.

These allegations Mr Philips refers to are as astonishing as they are petty. The bomb attacks took place on Thursday and Mr Philips’s article is in Monday’s edition of the Daily Mail. Even if he wrote the article on the Sunday and these alleged incidents took place on the Friday, then that does not leave much time for them to be reported back to the CRE, let alone Mr Philips personally. Certainly the Royal Mail would have struggled to turn it around, and it is a surprise that the CRE is open during the weekend to receive allegations of racism.

Is the CRE itself the source of the allegations? Is there a network of race informers ready to text, email or telephone allegations of racism 24 hours a day? Whatever the answer, Mr Philips has had no time to verify such allegations at all.

How the alleged man with a rucksack and waving a copy of the Koran knew that the carriage was noisy before he boarded is not explained. The London underground was badly disrupted, London itself much quieter than usual on the Friday, and those in above-ground train carriages are mostly sat down (often asleep on long journeys) and not looking to see who is entering the train at every stop. Underground carriages are often packed and there is little conversation.

Most Muslims can manage to board a train without a copy of the Koran to brandish at people.

The previous English Rights Campaign blogs of the 19th and 20th June, both quoting from former CRE Asian members who were writing in 2001 (and whose concerns have been proven to be more predictive and more reliable than anything from Mr Philips), set out a very different analysis of the problem of race, and were critical of both the CRE and the whole multicultural experiment. The only reason why Mr Philips’s views prevail, is because he is an unelected quangocrat (on £94,000 per annum for a 4 day week) and the CRE is completely unaccountable.

Mr Philips, who is one of Tony’s cronies, has a long history regarding race. He was chairman of the Runnymede Trust when it produced a report which denounced the term ‘British’ as racist. In 1999 he called for Britain to introduce a South African style Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where police officers and others would be offered immunity from prosecution if they confessed to past racism.

He has further criticised the London Assembly, the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish parliament for being virtually ‘whites-only’ bodies, and he further supported Greg Dyke when the BBC director-general condemned the organisation as being ‘hideously white’.

Since Mr Philips was chosen by Tony Blair in January 2003 to head the CRE in the face of all this, then Mr Blair cannot dodge responsibility for Mr Philips’s actions. Mr Blair knew exactly what he was doing.

Mr Philips is advocating for a continuation of the British Inquisition and of race war politics, both of which are evil. He is still peddling the notion that ethnic minorities are victims of white (ie English) racism and oppression. He believes that the race zealots of the CRE are the ‘experts’ who should be deciding matters, rather than relying upon elected politicians or the disinterested common sense of ordinary people.

As the English Rights Campaign has already pointed out, the sooner the CRE is abolished the better. The need for its abolition is becoming desperate.

THE BBC

In times of national crisis, one can always rely upon the Bolshevik Broadcasting Corporation.

During the Falklands War, the BBC openly declared itself to be strictly neutral. They were not going to pass judgement on the invasion by an Argentine dictatorship of British territory, or the subjugation of British people.

Now, in the wake of the terrorist bombings in London, the BBC has issued an edict that journalists are not refer to the bombers as terrorists! Apparently, this might be seen as ‘inflammatory’. The BBC also wished to avoid making ‘value judgements’. The corporation has not committed the edict to writing in an attempt to hide what they are up to.

The BBC carried out a similar policy in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

In pursuit of this policy, the contents of its website have been altered to remove references to terrorism, and it has also misrepresented comments made by Tony Blair in the House of Commons. On Monday, the prime minister said: ‘It seems probable that the attack was carried out by Islamist extremist terrorists’.

The BBC has reported him as saying: ‘Those responsible...probably Islamic extremists, would be hunted down’.

It is all very well for the BBC to wish to avoid making ‘value judgments’, but we are compelled to fund it through the licence fee. It is time that was changed.

THE WAR ON TERROR

The final sentence of the June bonus ‘Quote of the Month’ reads: ‘This illegitimate Labour government is pouring fuel onto the flames of Islamic extremism’. It is with regret that that comment has been so sadly reinforced by events.

Yesterday's terrorist outrage, in which more than 50 people were killed, was unexpected - although we have been continually warned that something like this would happen. But despite that warning, the government has not conducted a war on terror.

Successive Tory and Labour governments have been content not only to allow or even promote mass immigration, but also to allow thousands of known terrorists to enter the UK. The Tories let in so many, that the French referred to London as being ‘Londonistan’.

More recently, despite the so-called war on terror, Ken Livingston invited Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi into the UK (and the Metropolitan Police were involved in the funding of this) even though he was openly advocating terrorism.

Labour is obsessed with so-called ‘Islamophobia’ and is introducing a law to reinforce this obsession.

Still Labour will not stop the tidal wave of so-called asylum seekers being allowed into this country. The numbers of illegal immigrants in the UK remains huge. The government’s estimate is up to 570,000 and this figure totally ignores up to another 772,000 asylum seekers!

It is impossible to conduct any war on terror in such circumstances.

The ordinary British people have shown their usual stoicism, and the politicians are repeating their standard assurances that they will not give in to terrorism. But if the war on terror is to be won then a reversal of government policy is necessary.

The 1951 UN Convention should be unilaterally repealed and the UK should refuse to accept any asylum seekers. There is no neighbouring country which has a government which would give rise to genuine refugees. So-called asylum seekers from other continents are emigrating to the UK through choice. We should concentrate on helping genuine refugees in their own or neighbouring countries.

All illegal immigrants and terrorist sympathisers of foreign origin should be deported.

The supply of funding to organised crime networks should be cut off. That includes not only immigration (eg false ID cards and people trafficking) but also drug smuggling. The tolerance of drugs such as cannabis must end.

The British Inquisition should be shut down and race war politics abandoned. The government should stop telling Muslims that they are victims and that antagonism towards the indigenous host British community is justified.

Thus far, there are no signs of these changes happening. One ex-MI5 officer spoke of having to live with such terrorist events unless there is to be the introduction of more draconian restrictions. This is defeatist nonsense. This new threat, whether it be home grown or not, has been created by fanatics who should be deported or imprisoned. It is not an act of nature like the weather. Terrorist networks can be destroyed.

The people are likely to rally around the government in the short term. But if this is the start of a sustained campaign which the government is unable/unwilling to defeat, then that support will ebb away. People back winners and not losers.

The IRA was bought off by the introduction of a new constitution in Northern Ireland (and also by the prospect of losing a terrorist war with the protestant paramilitaries) which guaranteed them positions in government. That is not possible in England with Al Qaeda. In that sense the government has much less room to manoeuvre.

VOTE RIGGING

Labour’s latest vote rigging antic is to introduce a law making it an offence not to vote. The plans for this were outlined by Geoff Hoon, in a softening up exercise: ‘We need to get people more engaged in political processes, to explain, to take through the argument from the local level. The idea of having a debate about compulsory voting is to get that engagement’.

Mr Hoon expected a ‘modest fine’ for those who did not vote.

The fact that the turnout tends to be lowest in Labour held areas, with Labour voters being most likely not to bother to vote should, to the more cynical, be an indicator of the real reason for this proposal. Labour are already looking forward to the 2009 general election and how they can manipulate the voting process to their own advantage.

If people are not inspired to vote, then they should be allowed not to do so.

THE BRITISH INQUISITION

When pub landlord Ian Briscoe complained to the police about the behaviour of and threats made by a group of travellers, he received no assistance at all. The travellers had even threatened to break his arms after they had become drunk and Mr Briscoe had refused to serve them any more alcohol.

Despite eventually agreeing to leave the pub, the travellers returned again on the next 2 days, the second time after last orders.

Mr Biscoe had been told that the community policeman would call, but he did not.

Consequently, in order to stop the travellers calling again, Mr Briscoe put up a sign saying ‘Sorry, No Travellers’.

Now the police have launched an investigation into alleged racism by Mr Briscoe. A police spokesman said: ‘The local officer will be attending the pub and should we find such a sign we will take action - advising the licensees that displaying this type of material is illegal. If officers are aware of discriminatory or offensive material it is within their powers to confiscate it, and potentially press criminal charges against the owner depending on the situation’.

A spokesman for the Gypsy Council advised ‘local travellers (to) contact a lawyer and the Commission for Racial Equality and take the matter to court’.