The Society of Qualified Archivists

Seeing is believing

2011-09-12T22:37:00.034+01:00

SQA has previously enquired into the undermining of history as a subject at school and the decline in the numbers of historical researchers and in the standard of their critical analysis. One such instance was our blog on Professor Frank Furedi's article, Where have all the intellectuals gone?

We have also noted the dumbing-down of captions and interpretation in archives, museums and exhibitions (see here and here). Consequently, our attention was drawn to the strange development of the UK government including the official version of the events of 11 September 2001 in the school curriculum, specifically and openly to contradict and confound so-called conspiracy theorists. In view of our professional interests in promoting a future generation of well educated students and adult researchers and our own entirely separate concern with the centrality and value of evidence in the form of archives, and research skills, SQA has looked into the events of that day, to ascertain whether the doubters really are conspiracy theorists or whether the authorities in attributing the events to terrorists, have an ulterior motive.

Boris Johnson: supports the official US Government conspiracy theory

If the latter, we may need to be concerned for the survival of our documentary heritage in the face of an organised international conspiracy to subvert evidence of any kind. If the so-called conspiracy theorists are wrong, we still need to be concerned at suppression of dissent which as an expression of advanced critical faculties in any society, especially a democracy, is something to be developed rather than suppressed......unless people in high places have something to hide.

We conclude our preamble with a quotation from our previous blog:

Political correctness. The name given to the first of the four stages of the long term Soviet/Leninist ideological subversion of the world's nation states (the national revolutionary subversion process) leading to world communist government: demoralisation, destabilisation, crisis and normalisation. The first stage, demoralisation, comprises ideological attacks on orthodox Christianity, education, the media and culture leading to charismania (worship of false heroes and role models), Luciferian fog, ignorance of history, addictive fads, groupthink, acceptance of lies and the emergence of the common mind.

The so-called conspiracy theorists, who prefer to call themselves the Truth Movement or Truthers, can trace their origins to the controversy aroused by the Waco massacre in Texas in 1993 and the early broadcasts of Alex Jones from Austin, Texas in 1999.

The Truth Movement received a boost in 2007 when the former Italian president, Francisco Cossiga, stated in the Corriere della Serra newspaper, that according to his sources in Italian intelligence agencies, the 9/11 attacks were carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Mossad. Here is the original text from the edition of 30 November that year:

Da ambienti vicini a Palazzo Chigi, centro nevralgico di direzione dell'intelligence italiana, si fa notare che la non autenticità del video è testimoniata dal fatto che Osama Bin Laden in esso 'confessa' che Al Qaeda sarebbe stato l'autore dell'attentato dell'11 settembre alle due torri in New York, mentre tutti gli ambienti democratici d'America e d'Europa, con in prima linea quelli del centrosinistra italiano, sanno ormai bene che il disastroso attentato è stato pianificato e realizzato dalla Cia americana e dal Mossad con l'aiuto del mondo sionista per mettere sotto accusa i Paesi arabi e per indurre le potenze occidentali ad intervenire sia in Iraq sia in Afghanistan».

In translation:

From circles around Palazzo Chigi, nerve centre of the directing of Italian intelligence, it is noted that the non-authenticity of the video is testified from the fact that Osama bin Laden in it 'confessed' that Al Qaeda was the author of the attack of the 11 September on the Twin Towers in New York, while all of the democratic circles of America and of Europe, in the front lines being those of the Italian centre-left, now know well that the disastrous attack was planned and realized by the American CIA and Mossad with the help of the Zionist world to put under accusation the Arabic Countries and to persuade the Western powers to intervene in Iraq and Afghanistan.

(Translation courtesy RumormillNews, edited by SQA)

(The video he refers to is the fake CIA video of Osama Bin Laden's confession to the 9/11 attacks.)

No credible western government source has effectively contradicted Cossiga.

Before looking at the events of 9/11, it is worth recalling the policy document compiled by the think tank Project for the New American Century, entitled Rebuilding American Defences (p.51), in which the authors state:

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor

The reference to Pearl Harbor is not just a reference to how that event reversed the United States policy of isolationism and drew it into the Second World War. The reference instead hints that some future event of similar proportions would be necessary to serve as the pretext for a change in US foreign and domestic policy and the undermining of the Constitution. It would be no good awaiting a convenient accident of history. Pearl Harbor was planned, not accidental. Thus a new Pearl Harbor type event is one that will also need to be planned, so that in turn the desired outcomes can be achieved without public or international resistance.

Note: many of the hit figures for the YouTube videos below have been reduced by Google (owners of YouTube) in connection with the tenth anniversary of the attacks. For more information on this pro-NWO tactic of Google, see Alex Jones and here

The World Trade Centre, New York 1993

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) attempts to blow up the WTC, video clip courtesy The Corbett Report

The events of September 11 2001

World Trade Centre, New York

Building No.2, the South Tower was struck at 09.03 supposedly by United Airlines Flight 175 and collapsed at 09.59

Faked smoke plume

Famous live TV footage of "nose in, nose out" 'plane impact, deleted from later broadcasts

Conflicting videos of second aircraft flight path

The same supposed aircraft Flight 175 is shown approaching on a level course; and by a different camera making a steep descent.

Building No.1, the North Tower was struck at 08.46 supposedly by American Airlines Flight 11 and collapsed at 10.28

Landing gear planted

Unmanned aerial vehicles

Seismic graph confirms use of high-speed military demolition explosives after aircraft impact and prior to collapse

CNN affiliate's WABC live coverage of aftermath of attack on first tower containing slip of tongue by Vince Cellini, CNN sports anchor (and presumed CIA media operative) who in interviewing witness, begins to say "missile" before correcting himself, at 6:33 into this video (and see subsequent interviews of witnesses reporting missile attack)

Fox TV studio anchor (presumed CIA media operative) panics and makes live request for a Grade 9 CIA operative on board helicopter 5 to respond at 4:35 in this video

Building No.7 collapsed at 17.20

The BBC reports the collapse of Building No.7 (the "Saloman Brothers"' building) while it is still standing

Secondary explosions

George W. Bush claims to have seen the first 'plane impact on live TV although it was only shown later in the day

7 of the 19 alleged terrorists did not die on 9/11

Video by Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth (AE911truth)

Danish TV news interview with Niels Harrit on unreacted thermite found in WTC dust

Dr. Harrit and collaborators' paper in The Open Chemical Physics Journal, 2009, 2, 7-31

Mossad agents arrested in New York after celebrating the WTC attack and expelled for spying, admit their purpose was to record the event

Pentagon, Virginia, struck supposedly by American Airlines Flight 77 at 09.38

Yahoo says:

A report issued by the American Society of Civil Engineers [ASCE] revealed that this damage was consistent with the 124ft wingspan of the airliner, as the wings would have not directly blasted through the Pentagon structure. The ASCE found that one of Flight 77’s wings hit the floor before impact while the other was broken off by the Pentagon’s load bearing columns – debunking the theory that the Pentagon was hit by a missile or smaller government jet.

So where are the wings and skidmarks?

Undamaged lawn at the Pentagon

US Government own-goal video clip, probably accidentally released, shows cruise missile striking the Pentagon click here (courtesy Veterans Today)

Close-up of same clip click here

Commentary on new clip by Gordon Duff of Veterans Today click here

Video by Pilots for 911 Truth debunking the official version of events

Shanksville, Pennsylvania, supposed crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 at 10.06

Eyewitness Susan McElwain describes seeing a cruise missile, see here and here

Aerial photograph of 1994 in local studies library shows "wing scar" was already present

Mobile (cell) 'phone calls made were not possible over 8000'

Further reading and viewing

Interview of Former Senior BBC Mideast Correspondent Alan Hart who says on air that Israeli Mossad did 9/11, The Kevin Barrett Show 25 May 2010

Evidence of facial "morphing" or faking of photographs of 911 victims or so-called vicsims video 9/11 VicSims: The Memorials courtesy YouTube (one vicsim photo contains the metadata can someone fix this photo so that there is no line running down his face, confirming photos were altered

September Clues

Flights 11 and 77 were not scheduled flights

A video documentary by Dave vonKleist: In Plane Sight

Invisible Empire: A New World Order Defined

Endgame

Terrorstorm

The Obama Deception

Video on mysterious deaths suffered by 911 witnesses and activists

One Nation Under Siege video

We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries."

David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission, in an address to a meeting of The Trilateral Commission, in June, 1991

One more nail in the coffin

2011-07-20T22:37:00.009+01:00

The Common Purpose inspired assault on heritage, including and especially archives, continues unabated. SQA has watched and reported on this process for seven years now.

The latest victim (with question marks still hanging over several local government record offices) is West Sussex County Record Office. This office has been stripped of staff despite its increasing stock and the record office's potential to contribute to learning for all ages and sections of the community but is now set to lose the post of County Archivist. It is undergoing a merger with the West Sussex Coroner and County Council's Registration Service, both of which teams will be co-located with the record office.

Retiring: County Archivist Richard Childs

The effect of this is not only to curtail the activities and functions of the record office but to blur the function of archives in the public mind and of course ultimately in the social engineers' plan to divert those intellectually curious, investigative and analytical members of the public away from their documentary heritage. This is because documentary heritage constitutes evidence of how our ancestors arrived at the democratic systems of our immediate past. By detaching the public from their heritage, in the broadest sense of the term, it becomes possible to mould a new mentality more accepting of the European Union and the New World Order (NWO).

While to those unititiated in the dark arts of the NWO this may seem far-fetched, the evidence is available on the Internet (at least until it becomes subject to fully-fledged censorship), * in abundance. SQA has previously noted this very same process at work in Iraq and elsewhere.

The strategy was first revealed to the popular English speaking audience by Dr. Richard Drayton, senior lecturer in history at Cambridge University, writing in The Guardian of 28 December 2005, in an article entitled "Shock, awe and Hobbes have backfired on America's neocons". We quote Drayton from our earlier blog: "it has been usual to explain the chaos and looting in Baghdad, the destruction of infrastructure, ministries, museums and the national library and archives, as caused by a failure of Rumsfeld's planning." But the German newspaper [Suddeutsche Zeitungquotes] quotes US soldiers as saying to looters "go in Ali Baba, it's all yours!" and Drayton explains this was a deliberate part of the US strategy which he says was "at least in part a mask for the destruction of the collective memory and modern state of a key Arab nation....to create a hunger for the occupier's supervision." Thus regime change is only a small part of the changes being enforced on Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and Libya. The end game is total subservience to the NWO.

The contributor of a valedictory letter in the Chichester Observer, Kim Leslie, West Sussex Record Office Education Officer 1970-2007, suggests West Sussex County Council is making these changes "so the grading and level of the [County Archivist] post fits neatly into new management structures being implemented throughout West Sussex County Council". Clearly he hasn't been reading SQA's previous reports. When yet another county council downgrades the post of chief archivist, reduces staff and blurs the boundaries between different services and in doing so simply repeats a process that has now cut a swathe across England, it doesn't take a genius to work out there is a national or even an international force at work.

This is not just a local internal reorganisation. This is made abundantly clear by virtue of the similarities between changes made in widely geographically separated authorities and can be glimpsed by even a cursory reference to Archon, the National Archives' online directory of record offices which includes job titles. Examples of such far flung offices are Kent, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.

It would also appear the office's reliance on or appreciation of its worthy volunteers is not understood in the same context as the deliberate erosion of heritage. While West Sussex Record Office's volunteers no doubt significantly pre-date the so-called Big Society, it needs to be understood that the Big Society which many archivists now invoke to their advantage, is part and parcel of localism and progression towards the dismantlement of democratric society.

Saul Alinsky

In their introductory notes to the policy document Building a Big Society, the Conservatives state:

"The new policies announced as part of the Big Society plan include: Neighbourhood army of 5,000 full-time, professional community organisers who will be trained with the skills they need to identify local community leaders, bring communities together, help people start their own neighbourhood groups, and give communities the help they need to take control and tackle their problems. This plan is directly based on the successful community organising movement established by Saul Alinsky in the United States and has successfully trained generations of community organisers, including President Obama." The policy document itself states: "In the US, the community organising endowment established by Saul Alinsky has trained generations of community organisers, including President Obama" (p.2) and again "In the US, generations of community organisers have been trained by Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation, which trained Barack Obama as a community organiser in Chicago" (p.6)

As if the words organisers, army, community, communities, leaders and control and the name President Obama don't give the game away, the mere mention of the name Saul Alinsky which is given such prominence as the inspiration of the policy, should do, although SQA supposes the great majority of the Conservative rank and file are clueless as to who he is. Well, SQA can guide them.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph of 1 April 2010 (and no, it's not an April Fool's joke) Gerald Warner blows the cover of Cameron's policy and exposes his inspiration as a paganistic, amoral revolutionary. He states: "What is going on here? Who is running the Cameronian Party – Common Purpose? How is it conceivable that even the most bland, politically correct, centre-right “conservative” party could derive its flagship policy from the thinking of Alinsky, whose seminal work Rules for Radicals was dedicated to Lucifer? If, as one suspects, this is the brainchild of Oliver Letwin, he needs to be escorted expeditiously to the seclusion of a padded boudoir."

And you thought local government was now operating in a difficult and dangerous financial climate and that county record offices need to contribute their share towards savings? (Even though local authorities still recruit politically correct jobsworths? Even though public sector spending is increasing and set to increase further?) Well think again. In fact, we have come full circle: the present financial situation is known to have been engineered by the global financial elite so as to bring forward their plans for world government. The argument that the need to make savings is the reason behind reorganisation is bogus. The object of the debt crisis is to provide a pretext for reorganisation, for political ends.

* For uncensored video of the common law arrest by the UK Independence Party of a judge acting outside his oath of office, see here and here

There never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the "end of time," or of commanding for ever how the world shall be governed, or who shall govern it; and therefore all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void.

Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. The Parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period, had no more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind or to control them in any shape whatever, than the parliament or the people of the present day have to dispose of, bind or control those who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence. Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require.

It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accommodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how its government shall be organised, or how administered.

Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, 1791-1792

TNA, the New World Order and the Internet of Things

2011-01-03T18:48:00.018Z

To countless historical researchers, many of them family historians and genealogists, to suggest a connection between the UK's National Archives and the New World Order (NWO) would seem far-fetched, even outlandish, always assuming they had even heard of the NWO. However, such a connection does exist and the disbelievers can now be challenged and informed.

Global warming hits the British Isles (2 Dec 2010)

The connection has been appearing over several years and SQA has blogged it at intervals. We have observed the influence of the EU's Malvine Project, TNA’s dabblings in Iraq, opaque organisational changes at TNA including a reduction in opening hours and TNA’s advocacy of fewer record offices and their replacement by regional offices. More recently TNA has associated itself with the NWO’s global warmism ideology, although this has been debunked by the revelations of Climategate.

Add to this the dumbing-down of history and teaching noted by Professor Frank Furedi, sustained and condescending attacks on Britain’s achievements, illustrated most recently by Prime Minister David Cameron’s apparently deliberate comment that Britain was a junior partner to the USA in 1940 despite the fact the USA only joined the Second World War in December 1941, we have a combination of propaganda, disinformation, lies, manipulation and deception on the one hand and cultural vandalism on the other.

An important part of the complex NWO strategy requires the EU (a regional part of the NWO), the puppet UK government and all NWO national agencies including TNA, to undermine national identity and people’s ability to analyse and critique historical and cultural evidence (and therefore understand their identity), through dumbing-down. The outcome of this is that the general public can be socially engineered to accept the NWO. It is very sad that as a promoter of Who Do You Think You Are, TNA is simultaneously working against national identity.

The latest cause for concern is the involvement of TNA in plans for governments throughout the world to turn the World Wide Web into a global database delving into all of our electronic transactions and each and every use of equipment, machinery and "objects" or "things" generally, hence the "Internet of Things", whether these "things" are vacuum cleaners, cars, computers or trees, linked to the Internet. TNA is given as the UK representative organisation on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), acting through the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI).

OPSI states “we want all data in one place, but we also want it to be decentralised” i.e. they aim that data should be controlled centrally by NWO but in such a way it can be drawn-down from the NWO Internet of Things for intrusive and monitoring use. Thus TNA is fully participating in the creation of a global database and Internet of Things which will enable monitoring of all human activities and active, interventionist control of all aspects of human activity.

It is sad and alarming that archives preservation, even digital preservation, now amounts to an active intervention in the dismantling of accountable government and parliamentary government. What would Sir Hilary Jenkinson make of this?

Further reading

MLA web site on Fewer, Bigger, Better: the government's consultation on future archives provision

Linking data using Semantic Web technology, John Sheridan, OPSI, March 2009 click here

Internet of Things — An action plan for Europe (Access to European Law) 2009 click here

Internet of Things, Europa Summaries of EU Legislation click here

Explanation of Climategate for Dummies by Alex Jones click here

The Internet of Things courtesy PrisonPlanet and YouTube and here

Dr. Tim Ball on the hacked CRU emails courtesy of YouTube click here

UN security staff suppress debate on Climategate courtesy of YouTube see here

Lord Monckton's blog in full, Science and Public Policy Institute web site click here

The objective is greatly to empower and still more greatly to enrich the international classe politique at the expense of the peoples of the West, using the climate as a pretext, so as to copy the European Union by installing in perpetuity what some delegates here are calling “transnational perma-Socialism” beyond the reach or recall of any electorate.

Lord Monckton of UKIP, Cancun Conference, 2010

Ignorance Indeed

2009-12-19T20:18:00.023Z

SQA is intrigued to learn that the sole character in the recently broadcast BBC4 Storyville drama set in 2055 and starring Pete Postlethwaite, The Age of Stupid, is an archivist. Intriguing, because he seems to have no archives despite manning the "Global Archive", yet another instance of the term archive coming to mean heritage collection generally. Books, films and scientific reports are referred to but not manuscripts or documentary heritage. Presumably so far into the future the Malvine Project has seen to that. However, we are confident he would qualify for membership of the Society of Archivists [sic]

Lord Monckton

In proceeding to review events leading up to 2010 (Copenhagen) and beyond, the Archivist fails to mention opposing evidence and the theme rapidly becomes the goal of redistributing western wealth to Third World countries, through the equally unmentioned New World Order. Few viewers will realise they are watching the blueprint for the ending of freedom and democracy and the means of generating wealth in the first place.

An emphasis is placed on India early in the film, observing the progress of Mr Jeh Wadia in establishing a new airline, Go Air. This culminates in a baffling and ambiguous conclusion that seems to endorse his polluting business, presumably an indication that India as one of the poorest countries in the world per capita, is entitled to expand while the west contracts. A YouTube video (see below) throws more light on this anomaly.

Antarctic ice shelves are referred to as collapsing but evidence so far shows they are stable (Cryosphere Today). How convenient that the British family featured have poor French and even the subtitles translate their pigeon French, it's almost as though the average British viewer could identify with them in handling the language of a nation so unpopular in Britain. In this, they are impliedly compared to the African villagers whose English is correspondingly patchy. Hurricane Katrina is dredged up despite a reduced collective intensity in storms and hurricanes in recent years (see Lord Monckton's video below). The crude evidence for Global Warming in the programme relies on the twin frailties of short term human memory and overwhelming anecdote, entirely from unqualified persons, with continuous reliance on news presenters and personalities and scant scientists. The producers and editors have clearly decided that earthy language will help the public relate to the subject. The foul language used throughout also panders to the lowest common denominator in ingratiating and persuasive techniques.

And there's a sub theme: while we're at it, let's bash the British Empire as well! And let's forget the slaves taken to north America and the West Indies were already enslaved and that slavery was not just associated with white empires but black African empires too. There are even three derisory cartoon features depicting Americans as fat, surely coming close to racism. This leads on to the programme's questionable arguments on matching world population to resources (which tie in with NWO depopulation plans, see Endgame below) despite increasing agricultural productivity and the advent of GM foods, which we have long been assured will feed the starving masses. The programme's theme is openly anti-capitalist despite demanding that first world countries transfer wealth to poorer countries under Copenhagen, leaving us to ask: where does the money come from once the capitalist countries have been bankrupted? Nowhere of course, it's a communist plan to reduce the world to a friable and manipulative condition.

FEMA coffins for opponents of Global Warmism

There is ironic reference to the collapse of society if Global Warming is not tackled, but this is precisely what Global Warmism is trying to achieve. Ideologies tending towards world domination are quickly passed over (we are asked to accept the failure of democracy it seems) but with no reference to the World World Order take-over. The usual communist ploy of associating social evils with capitalism is developed. The British man interviewed regrets the Holocaust along with man-made carbon emissions despite the fact the British and democratic society weren't responsible for the Holocaust and fought to defeat Germans, the actual perpetrators. How despicable to blame the British for the Holocaust.

The arrogant confidence of the programme makers extends to admitting "a total re-ordering of western society" is planned. Why? They are of course referring to the NWO. Reference to wind turbines is developed the "great wind resource", a commonly used lie, but see Christopher Booker on the subject, (Windfarms: one of the great deceptions of our time). The opposition to Global Warmism is apparently simply based on "bollocks". Compare this with the online petition signed by 31,000 scientists which rather contradicts the programme's strapline "the future climate events portrayed in this film are based on mainstream scientific projections."

We learn that the higher purpose is to eradicate poverty, thus revealed as the main purpose of the Warmists' agenda, not saving the planet.

There is no mention of the price we must pay. So what will really be achieved by Global Warmism? Higher taxes for the middle classes, more expensive fuel bills for the middle classes and the bankrupting of the western nations. Carbon rationing. The Communist dream will have come true! "Equal rights to the earth's resources" the programme promises us despite offering us nothing. There is more emphasis on this ideology than the science of global warming.

A playback of news commentary is included in the soundtrack: "it is confirmed: for the first time scientists confirm the link between Global Warming and the weather": Ho Ho Ho haven't they heard of Climategate (see Russian analysis below)? Floods in Bedfordshire are treated as a new phenomenon and are puerilely attributed to global warming but there is no mention of building increasingly on floodplains and consequent difficulties in surface water drainage.

The archivist of the Global Archive signs off by saying his work is "for who or whatever finds this recording" but actually seems to refer rather to his broadcast than his collection and no connection is made between his broadcast and the physical collection. Pity the finder who is denied access to the counter-argument; not a very good advertisement for archivists who are supposed to be neutral and objective.

We asked Benedict Crumplethorne, SQA's principal spokesman, for a comment.

Subservient supporters of the NWO and Global Warmism should take heed. The bottom is falling out of the Warmists' campaign as Copehagen has shown. Furthermore, the UK National Archives, which has endorsed Global Warming and man-made Climate Change theory, must be very uncomfortable following the recent so-called Climategate scandal, in view of their previous trumpetings about the University of East Anglia Hadley Research Centre's use of their holdings which will now forever be tainted with the latter's fraudulent distortion of data.

Professor Phil Jones's sentence I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline will live forever. After all, TNA must prefer to be associated with reputable research and researchers. Sadly, as Lindsay Jenkins notes in a previous blog, this is less often the case nowadays. TNA must also be feeling uneasy that one of their board of management is Mark Addison, concurrently a non-executive director at Salix Finance, an independent company funded by the Carbon Trust to work with the public sector to reduce carbon emissions.

Further reading and viewing

Video of Lord Monckton of the UK Independence Party trashing Greepeace in Copenhagen view (but isn't she gorgeous)

Lord Monckton exposes the New World Order agenda behind the Copenhagen treaty on US TV view

Videos on US FEMA NWO concentration camps view and view

More than 500,000 plastic coffins for opponents of the NWO in Georgia USA view

The Obama Deception view

Endgame view

Jose Manuel Barroso rebukes Paul Nuttall MEP for revealing the link between Rajendra Pachouri, head of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change and also head of the Tata Foundation of India, to which British steel production is transferring under the EU carbon credits scheme view

Analysis of the University of East Anglia conspiracy to provide fraudulent data supporting man-made climate change by Andrei Illarionov, President of the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis read

Watt's Up With That coverage of Climategate

Open Europe press release on fraud in the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme

NASA photograph taken from space showing ice and snow coverage in north America and north-west Europe on 23 December 2009 (click to zoom)

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Pastor Martin Niemöller

The Malvine Project is alive and well

2009-12-14T14:37:00.015Z

Sir Hilary Jenkinson

The Archivist is not and ought not to be an Historian. He will need of course, some knowledge of History and may be interested in it personally, just as he may be interested in Metallurgy or any other science: but his duty is to his Archives, independently of any of the Research subjects (of which at present History is the most prominent) which make use of Archives for their own ends; and therefore an interest in any of these subjects, since it might give him a prepossession in favour not only of a subject but also perhaps of a school of opinion within that subject, might be more than inconvenient or inappropriate, it might be positively dangerous.

(Sir Hilary Jenkinson, Deputy Keeper of the Public Records and founder of the British archives profession in A Manual of Archive Administration, 1922.)

In previous blogs SQA looked at the underlying motive of the Malvine Project, an EU project underpinning much archival thinking and one that seeks to reward archival institutions for participating in selecting collections identified as capable of supporting research into and justifying European integration and the fabled common European heritage. The EU achieves this by making available funds for conservation of and facilitating access to such favoured collections and repositories, with, impliedly, all those other collections and custodial archival institutions not deemed as being relevant to the European project languishing to the point they are conveniently disaggregated or decay. This is similar to the tactic well known to generations of planning officers in respect of achieving the otherwise difficult outcome of demolishing listed buildings lying in the way of brave new developments such as petrol stations, multi-storey car parks and housing estates. In this blog we look at how the Malvine Project is progressing.

The Daily Telegraph reports that an exhibition in the museum of the UK National Archives at Kew has aroused controversy by misrepresenting not only its own exhibits including photographs in galleries entitled Empire and Colonisation and The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, but also the contributions of the Royal Navy, government policy, anti-slavery organisations and prominent anti-slavery campaigners like William Wilberforce in suppressing slavery. That TNA’s museum ignores British imperial achievements in education, commerce, law, religion, government, defence and human rights almost goes without saying. We have previously lamented that TNA has ignored Commonwealth Day (formerly Empire Day) and generally complained about the iconoclastic view of British history taken by those charged with preserving the documentary, artistic and physical evidence of our heritage.

Unlike other commentators, heritage organisations and the national press, SQA has clearly understood and stated the reasons for this and it is necessary to once again remind ourselves of these. In doing so, we also reveal the complicated geopolitics of the European Union and the New World Order of whose development the great majority of people, even in the developed world, are wholly ignorant.

We should begin with political correctness whose origins are associated with the expounding of the principles of Leninism, explored in a previous SQA blog. Crucial to Leninism, which is the means by which Communism or its watered down version, Communitarianism, is to become the global system of government, is the undermining of the western Imperial powers including and especially Britain and by extension the USA and the Old Commonwealth countries. Associated with the destruction of western Imperial powers is the fomenting of racial hatred which it is believed will lead to civil unrest and even civil war in multi-racial societies like Britain and thereby, most importantly, through the enactment of repressive legislation to the imposition of authoritarian rule. The incitement of racial hatred, not as is so often contended an object of the political Right, is actually one of several tactics used to prepare the way for social unrest by the political Left.

Far-fetched though this may seem, the government plan to engender racial unrest through uncontrolled immigration has recently been confirmed by Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Jack Straw during the latter's Home Secretaryship.

Political correctness and multi-culturalism have been in turn adopted as the doctrine of the UK Civil Service, local government, the EU, United Nations and the New World Order. For the archivist, historian and the general public, the consequences of political correctness for archives are, step by step, the distortion of historical truth to suit the political agenda, the disaggregation of archives and ultimately the destruction of archives, to prevent contradiction of the new political system. SQA judges that at the present moment in the development of the Communitarian state, EU and New World Order, the status of archives lies somewhere between distortion and disaggregation. Destruction is perhaps 20-30 years down the road. However, if rumours about a National Archives project, TNA Project 2020 are true, the destruction of archives may be closer than we realise.

Project TNA2020 reportedly focuses on plans to convert TNA to a purely digital service and we may speculate that this will entail the destruction of its holdings. Would this be legal? Interestingly, there seems not to be a statutory obligation on TNA to physically preserve its collections permanently. Instead, the legislative and Common Law framework that defines the work of TNA permits the selection of government records and puts in place arrangements for their transfer to TNA, storage at TNA or at their outstore in Wales and researcher access but SQA is not aware that the collections are subject to a legal compulsion for them to be permanently physically preserved. This contrasts with arrangements for the physical preservation of the built heritage in the form of listed buildings and scheduled ancient mounments. Assisted by a general public lulled into a false sense of security about the safety of all physical heritage on the precedent of buildings, TNA may be using a loophole in the statutory framework to plan a digital future. A digital future of course opens the way for much easier digital distortion of the truth.

Lindsay Jenkins

The National Archives are the documentary ‘soul’ of the nation. Their
Keeper, now called a chief executive, was always of proven high academic ability and experience.

Sadly that is not the case today. That is the problem. Labour party politics has intervened.

To cut experienced staff, substantially reduce opening hours and deny
researchers easy access or even access at all to important national documents
is to cut the link with the heart of our nation, what we are as a nation. It is a blow against freedom.

The National Archives are not another museum, an offshoot of a BBC genealogical programme. They cannot be reduced merely to mass entry by the coach load, however welcome that interest undoubtedly is.

So while the National Archives long-standing digital programme to the particular benefit of schools and universities is extremely welcome that should not now be used as an excuse to reduce access.

Lindsay Jenkins, author.

Further reading

Lindsay Jenkins, SQA patron, discourses on the origins of the EU view video

A Hero for Europe view video

Jamie Oliveoil's recipe for Fudge view video

Daniel Hannan Conservative MEP and Dr. Lee Rotherham blow away the myths about leaving the EU

Ruth Wilcock's letter on TNA Project 2020 in The Daily Telegraph 25 September 2009

In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American... There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag.... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.

Theodore Roosevelt, 1907

Fewer, Bigger, Better

2009-11-13T17:03:00.013Z

User groups are lobbying Plymouth City Council for a pledge to safeguard Plymouth and West Devon Record Office. A consortium led by David Holman, chairman of the National Federation of Family History Societies, Dr. Tod Gray, chairman of the Friends of Devon’s Archives and Maureen Selley, chairman of Devon Family History Society argues in a recent press release that the future of the record office and its collections is at risk through years of neglect by the council, with the disaggregation of collections looking possible.

Vivien Pengelly

At a public meeting, the leader of the Plymouth City Council Vivien Pengelly stated that a replacement building or History Centre was the second priority of the council, after a so-called Life Centre.

SQA examined the record office’s score in the 2008 self-assessment exercise carried out by the National Archives. The scores (row 84) are highly creditable, except for buildings, security and environment which score 37% (*). The other scores are governance and resources 59.5 (**), documentation of collections 67.5 (***), access 51.5 (**), preservation and conservation 60% (**) and overall 52.5 (**)

In terms of its status for holding Public Records, the record office is not recognised as an Approved Repository by the National Archives under the Public Records Act 1958 but instead has Place of Deposit status for local classes of Public Records. These constitute only a minority of the record office’s collections and include such records of local branches of central government as magistrates’ court records. The council’s own records together with deposited and donated unofficial, parish, business and charity collections, etc., are not necessarily affected as they are not Public Records but withdrawal of Place of Deposit status in 2013 as reported would entail loss of prestige for the city council such that it would be hard for it to justify continuing the service at all, thus in fact endangering all other collections.

We asked outspoken Ellison Millinocket, SQA’s chief spokesman on conservation and security, based in nearby Taunton, Somerset, to assess the situation.

It’s typical really, the authority has the makings of being a responsible parent authority capable of running a full spec BS5454 record office. It is clear they have benefited from good staff who have not lost the opportunity to advance the service as far as they can within their governance limitations. It comes down to under-investment in the premises in this case. If the council can grasp the nettle, by achieving the same standards in buildings as in archival professionalism, they could end up with a high calibre record office. However, even high professional standards are threatened in future if the proposed service name comes about, “History Centre”. This is yet another instance of blurring archives by changing an easily recognised service name like Record Office. Perhaps too there will be a blurring of the role of chief archivist. Will there even be a qualified, professional archivist in charge?

Next we asked Benedict Crumplethorne, principal spokesman for SQA, to put developments in the wider context.

Reading the consortium’s press release and the local newspaper articles, the whole issue might seem to be a storm in a tea cup, especially as the press garble the National Archives’ official line. However, there are considerable forces at work which are not even hinted at by the press and consortium.

Firstly, we should look at the National Archives (TNA)’s consultation on a revised government policy on archives, entitled Archives for the 21st. Century. This envisages “fewer, bigger, better” local government record offices thus implying the closure of record offices and the creation of regional offices. It is therefore quite plausible that TNA is using Approval and Place of Deposit status as the catalyst for part of this process, a process by which some observers are anticipating regional record offices in place of county record offices. It will therefore be entirely down to the people of Plymouth and West Devon to campaign for the survival of their own local office. In doing so, they will be making a stand for the status quo nationally. SQA has been vocal for several years in alerting users to the impending closure of record offices and the disaggregation of collections, which now looks like it’s beginning. It is possible their collections could be relocated to the regional capital at Taunton, Somerset.

It is rather interesting that TNA is reportedly willing to take back the local classes of Public Records, because previous off the record comments by TNA senior staff have warned that in such circumstances, Public Records would be burned rather than taken back. This is quite an important point upon which the consortium quite apart form Plymouth City Council should obtain definite clarification.

I am very interested that Plymouth and West Devon Record Office is the first office to fall victim to this tortuous process but not surprised. You see, it was in Plymouth City Council that the threat of Common Purpose first became public, as revealed by the investigations of a retired naval officer and local businessman, Brian Gerrish, whose online documentary videos you will find both fascinating and alarming, if you have the time. So it seems the New World Order-Communitarian-Common Purpose-Fabian agenda against archives as documentary evidence of the making of our Common Law and democratic society is finally coming to fruit, along with other plans at the national level, as reported in our previous blogs about TNA and the National Archives of Ireland.

One final point. I notice that Councillor Glenn Jordan, the Plymouth City Council cabinet member for culture, leisure and sport has described the collections as a 'sub-regional' asset, but one for which Plymouth was forced to bear the entire cost. Perhaps I should explain this regional terminology for the benefit of readers not familiar with EU structures. Under EU arrangements, the nation states will be disbanded, to be replaced by regions controlled direct from Brussels. Plymouth is in the EU South West Region of the UK. The regions break down into sub regions and sub sub regions. A sub region is a group of counties usually, while sub sub regions are unitary authorities, into which all areas throughout the UK are gradually and furtively being divided. Plymouth is a unitary authority and therefore a sub sub region. When Cllr. Jordan describes the collections as having sub regional status, he presumably means they are a significant research asset in the context of Plymouth and West Devon and Administrative Devon and possibly as far afield as Cornwall and Somerset. One assumes that when Plymouth and West Devon became unitary, those lobbying for unitary status lobbied also for a separate local archive service rather than a continuation of Devon branch status. If they did, they must assume full responsibility for maintaining their archive service.

We thanked Ellison and Benedict for their contributions.

Further reading

Museums, Libraries and archives press release

Archives for the 21st. Century (courtesy MLA)

This is Exeter 28 November 2008

This is Plymouth 12 January 2009

CPExposed offering videos on CP

Stop Common Purpose

Brian Gerrish, courtesy YouTube

Shoot-out over Cornish pasties

Devon Record Office in bed with Global Warmists

Nuts 2 us All

At the funeral of Jean Monnet in 1979, one of the founding fathers of the EU, Edmond Rothschild was quoted as saying "The Europe of Jean Monnet is a Europe in which there would no longer be any states but only federated regions. We shall no longer say that we are French, German or British but we shall say 'I am a European and a Bavarian or I am a European and a Scotsman'.

Who controls the past, ran the Party slogan, controls the future

2009-07-26T17:58:00.032+01:00

SQA reacts with despondency to recent expressions of outrage following the UK National Archives' announcement of closing its public areas on Mondays and the shedding of expert staff. The merits of such a policy decision by TNA, such it would appear to be (rather than a need to make savings) can be debated but the inadequacy of user groups' response is almost conspiratorial. It is as though all our efforts in alerting the world of archives, professionals and researchers alike, over the last few years, have been wasted (see our previous post Common Purpose) However, the optimists we are, we will persevere in explaining developments in a more strategic context, so lacking in all other analyses of this and other related events.

The UK National Archives

Let us begin by reminding ourselves of the function of the National Archives, formerly the Public Record Office, established in 1838 and originally situated in Chancery Lane, London but which completed its move to Kew in 2004. Their web site states:

The National Archives (TNA) is the UK government's official archive, containing almost 1,000 years of history, with records ranging from parchment and paper scrolls through to digital files and archived websites.

We give detailed guidance to government departments and the public sector on information management, in order to ensure the survival of records, and advise others throughout the public and private sectors about the care of historical archives. We also publish all UK legislation and advise upon and encourage the re-use of public sector information.

Note archives as evidence is not mentioned. Information and evidence are not the same thing.

TNA is distinct from the pattern of local government record offices throughout England and business, financial, university and charity archives, not to mention the National Archives of Scotland and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. The archives held by TNA are known as Public Records and the TNA's activities and collections are defined by the Public Records Act and other legislation.

Opening hours are currently Monday and Friday 09.00-17.00, Tuesday and Thursday 09.00-19.00, Wednesday 10.00-17.00 and Saturday 09.30-17.00. The new opening hours represent a 16% reduction on the current ones.

Righteous indignation abounds. Protestors include Saul David, Antony Beevor, Professor Jane Ridley, Jonathan Foyle, A.N. Wilson and Nick Barratt. Professor David is quoted in The Independent on Sunday on 19 July 2009 as saying "the future history of our country is at stake". Presumably he means access to archives as evidence is at stake as there is no stated limitation on the nature of independent historical research leading to the publication of new history text books. It is uncertain whether this is intended irony on his part or whether like all other commentators it is through ignorance of the agenda behind the changes.

The newspaper goes on to slavishly quote TNA briefing notes which typically of modern newspapers lacks the investigative and critical analysis skills to go beyond them: "the changes come as part of an ongoing drive to digitalise [sic] records so that they can be accessed directly online." The critics of TNA's proposals have questioned either the maths or efficacy of the proposed changes. No-one so far appears to have looked behind them for an agenda. SQA understands this agenda all to well.

Nick Barratt, a former employee of TNA and well known as a consultant on the BBC TV series Who Do You Think You Are?, makes his views felt in a letter to The Times and in the Action4Archives web site, see below.

A humbler researcher, Ruth Wilcock of Brentwood, Essex, writing to The Daily Telegraph, offers a savings argument to explain TNA's proposed changes even though making savings is not actually given by TNA as their reason, and states "in the current economic climate, it is inevitable that some cuts will be necessary," a superb example of how the recent economic downturn, believed by some to have been part engineered by Common Purpose and the Communitarian inspired government, can be used to justify change in policy. TNA's own statements make it plain the changes are not brought about by Government imposed cuts, they are entirely self-directed and have been given the nod by the relevant Government minister. This is an important point, one we shall come back to.

So much for setting the scene.

We asked Garth Bland, benighted County Archivist of Loamshire for his analysis of the situation, honed by decades of work in the archives sector.

I think we should for a moment look above the fog of war that is already obscuring the landscape. The teaching of history beyond Year 3 has been discontinued so will there be a constituency of historical researchers in future years and if so, how big and how well trained? Latin has already fallen by the wayside. The National Archives of Ireland is merging with the National Library of Ireland. Throughout the UK, archivists are seeing fewer academic historians and students in their searchrooms. The EU backs only cross-border projects, in the form of Interreg, to bolster support for a fabled Common European Heritage. The Heritage Lottery Fund will not support the cataloguing of archive collections and in any case their resources are being siphoned off to support the London Olympics. Local Government archive services are not included among the National Indicators in the Government's Local Area Agreements

Multiculturalism continues to undermine and embarrass the indigenous population in its striving for self expression and the preservation of its cultural identity. National archives legislation has not appeared. Three archives organisations, the Society of Archivists [sic], National Council on Archives and the Association of Chief Archivists in Local Government are proposing to merge. Politicians mislead the general public by manipulating history. The Community Archives Project challenges the collecting policies of local government record offices. Do you think these simultaneous developments are accidental, or could there be an agenda?

In the local govenment archives sector we note the obvious contrast between TNA's revised opening hours and the importance attached to our own, as measured in their annual or biennial survey of our services. As some wags have remarked, by their own benchmark TNA has now become a three star service thus presumably repudiating any pretension to leading the wider archives sector, which could indeed be part of the plan. This will be seen as an undermining of a collective approach to archives but few will understand why.

We asked Benedict Crumplethorne, principal spokesman for SQA, to develop Garth's suggestion that there is a hidden agenda.

Yes, indeed there is an agenda. It's called Communitarianism and it's often found to be associated with graduates of the crypto-Communist management training organisation Common Purpose. These so-called graduates are either trained in post or move from one post to another after graduating. In returning to their existing posts or taking up new ones, the Communitarian agenda can be more thoroughly established in the public sector, in readiness for the imposition of EU compliant government in what is now commonly termed the post-democratic age.

In layman's terms, Communitarianism is a diluted form of Communism, but not much diluted. Crucial Communist features are present most obviously totalitarian government, lack of accountability, manipulation of the economy and corruption, achieved through an elite high echelon of management and employees' uncritical acceptance of political correctness. A critical part of this process is control of elected politicians by civil servants associated with the merging of the policies of the main political parties.

Common Purpose makes clear its goal:

we develop leaders who can lead beyond their authority, beyond their direct circle of control.

TNA represents a huge threat to this Communitarian goal by supplying source material evidencing parliamentary democracy and has been identified as a target. More is to come. Replacing hands-on access to archives by digitisation ensures database oriented researchers are enabled only to navigate archives randomly without learning to apply academic research techniques, especially those involved in correlating different classes or series. The absence of staff and researchers skilled in navigating finding aids and hierarchies of archives will be a feature of the future, with inexpert researchers floundering around databases unable to unlock, relate and analyse evidence. Intuition will be insufficient.

While family historians figure prominently in the present discussion, it is the academic users who are the actual target. And by the way, please can we know what TNA personal visit statistics are for recent years? Have they really fallen enough to justify an emphasis on digitisation?

We thanked Benedict for his contribution.

We next asked Ellison Millinocket, SQA technical adviser and consultant conservator and repairer to comment on TNA's variable car parking fees, based on engine size.

This is the usual Government ruse to mobilise public opinion behind the case for Global Warming, which the alarmists say is caused by carbon emissions. In fact, while carbon emissions are increasing, there is no evidence to connect carbon emissions with global warming, apart from which we have been experiencing global cooling since 2001. If there is global warming, whether long term or short term, it could be caused by fluctuations in sun spots or ocean currents. The warmists are believed to be pursuing their agenda, along with the second strategy of a global war against a barely existent terrorist threat, in order to promote world government. The idea being that people, once suitably propagandised, will accept both draconian legislation on the one hand and regional or world government on the other. Regrettably therefore TNA has stooped to playing the Warmist card. This development provides an insight into how the different strands of the New World Order agenda are combining and converging in practice.

Further reading or viewing

Action4Archives

Common Purpose Exposed: a video courtesy of YouTube

Robert Peston denies undermining Northern Rock BBC News

Robert Peston denies undermining Northern Rock in an interview, video courtesy YouTube

Nigel Farage MEP, Leader of the UK Independence Party, takes apart Gordon Brown, UK Prime Minister, for selling the UK Gold Reserve at less than its market value, courtesy YouTube (another video you haven't seen!)

Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?

National Archives of Ireland falls victim to the Euro

Demos and David Cameron

Video on the Iluminati, courtesy YouTube

Archivists Against Global Warmism

The Madeleine Foundation [see also WikiLeaks below]

What Really Happened to Madeleine McCann: 60 Reasons which suggest she was not abducted , courtesy WikiLeaks

Miserable curs

Posted on Britannia Radio - Cameron on Lisbon and no referendum

This is the consequence of the all the hot air which has been created by all those groups who claim to be opposed to being incorporated in the EU. At no time, other than the proposed action of A Few has there been anything other than hot air - all talk and no do! If this country finishes as a province of the authoritarian Franco/German Empire it is entirely because there is no will among the people of this country to be and remain part of a sovereign and independent democratic Britain. It means the end of our 1000 year history of independence. It will go down in history as the destruction of the most remarkable and productive nation which has ever existed on this earth. It will be recorded as the history of a Junk Generation of no good layabouts and degenerates who are in no way worthy of their illustrious ancestors. The suffering which will be visited on the future population of this country will be terrible but wholly deserved. Those who cannot determine their own fate are completely in the hands of others and history amply describes the excesses which follow. Worse this nation has been amply warned of its fate by those who have written to warn them of the future most particularly by the works of George Orwell.
I am a Canadian - you suckers who are British deserve all that will happen to you. You are a nation of miserable curs. I fought for your freedom. My friends died for that freedom you do not value.
In utter disgust.

Hugh Jones.

National Archives of Ireland falls victim to the Euro

2009-03-18T19:22:00.013Z

When Michael Collins excused his forces' destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland at the Four Courts in Dublin in 1922 by saying better a state with no archives than an archives with no state, it is doubtful that he anticipated current developments in the Republic of Ireland, now suffering under the thumb of European Union.

The Irish government has announced plans to merge the National Archives of Ireland in Bishop Street, Dublin with the National Library of Ireland.

For the Irish state to be overseeing the disbandment of a national institution is doubly ironic: that the national archives should again be disinvented when there is no obvious threat to Irish statehood and for it to be done by the political successors to the founding fathers of the Irish state.

The mining of the Public Record Office, Dublin, 1922

Observers of Irish archival provision will be both bitterly disappointed and bemused. The present National Archives was a much heralded step forward for a service once split between the Public Record Office of Ireland and the State Paper Office at Dublin Castle. It also means the Republic of Ireland falls behind the example of Scotland whose National Archives of Scotland, formerly the General Register House, even preceded the establishment of devolved government there. Thus the Republic of Ireland, a fully independent state (except for being a member of the EU) has no national archives while Scotland, a minor part of the United Kingdom, producing 20% of the UK's GDP, does have a national archives.

The National Archives of Ireland, Bishop Street, Dublin

So what has brought this sorry state of affairs into being?

In the words of the Bruges Group:

The Bruges Group’s detailed examination of the severe strains facing the Single Currency .... finds that the entirely ‘man made’ problems that confront the eurozone today have their origins in the fatally flawed notion that one exchange rate and one interest rate are appropriate for economies with very different and disparate histories, structures, performances and sovereign governments.

The euro was meant to bring convergence to the economies of the European Union. Yet it has caused even greater divergence.

This much applies to all of the Euro Zone. What about Ireland? Writing in The Daily Telegraph of 28 February 2009, Gordon Rayner says:

Irish government bonds are rated as the riskiest in the EU and there has been panicky talk of Ireland being the next Iceland. On the streets, there is a whiff of revolution, with 120,000 people staging Dublin's biggest mass rally in 30 years ... to protest at the government's handling of the economy and its decision to impose what amounted to a pay cut on public sector workers.

Businesses in the north of the Republic are on their knees because competitors in Northern Ireland are undecutting them by as much as half. Thousands of workers who have lost their jobs in other sectors have been allowed to set up as cabbies, meaning that Dublin now has 16,000 licensed taxis. New York, with a population 17 times as large, has 13,000.

Crucially, the Irish government is powerless to act because, as a member of the eurozone, it has no control over interest rates or currency devaluation.

Further reading

Could the EU invade Ireland?

Archives and the state

Anyone give a damn?

O Minister, Minister! wherefore art thou Minister?

New EU working laws will be disaster for NHS The Sunday Telegraph 18 January 2009

Ditching the euro could boost our failing economy Independent.ie

John Black, president of the Royal College of Surgeons has issued a dramatic warning that the National Health Service will not be able to cope with the effects of the controversial European Working Time Directive.

Mr Black is meeting Alan Johnson, the Health Secretary, in February to propose a "speciality opt-out" and an upper limit on surgeons ' hours of 65 to 70 hours a week.

"I have no doubt we will be told that it is impossible to alter or bypass the European law. I do not believe this. All manner of EC law must have been bent or ignored in nationalising a bank in 24 hours. The Government can do it if it has the political will," Mr Black said.

Sleep you stinking cowards

2009-02-27T21:00:00.004Z

Philip Pullman
Are such things done on Albion's shore?

The image of this nation that haunts me most powerfully is that of
the sleeping giant Albion in William Blake's prophetic books. Sleep,
profound and inveterate slumber: that is the condition of Britain today.

We do not know what is happening to us. In the world outside, great
events take place, great figures move and act, great matters unfold,
and this nation of Albion murmurs and stirs while malevolent voices
whisper in the darkness - the voices of the new laws that are
silently strangling the old freedoms the nation still dreams it enjoys.

We are so fast asleep that we don't know who we are any more. Are we
English? Scottish? Welsh? British? More than one of them? One but not
another? Are we a Christian nation - after all we have an Established
Church - or are we something post-Christian? Are we a secular state?
Are we a multifaith state? Are we anything we can all agree on and
feel proud of?

The new laws whisper:

You don't know who you are

You're mistaken about yourself

We know better than you do what you consist of, what labels apply to
you, which facts about you are important and which are worthless

We do not believe you can be trusted to know these things, so we
shall know them for you

And if we take against you, we shall remove from your possession the
only proof we shall allow to be recognised

The sleeping nation dreams it has the freedom to speak its mind. It
fantasises about making tyrants cringe with the bluff bold vigour of
its ancient right to express its opinions in the street. This is what
the new laws say about that:

Expressing an opinion is a dangerous activity

Whatever your opinions are, we don't want to hear them

So if you threaten us or our friends with your opinions we shall
treat you like the rabble you are

And we do not want to hear you arguing about it

So hold your tongue and forget about protesting

What we want from you is acquiescence

The nation dreams it is a democratic state where the laws were made
by freely elected representatives who were answerable to the people.
It used to be such a nation once, it dreams, so it must be that
nation still. It is a sweet dream.

You are not to be trusted with laws

So we shall put ourselves out of your reach

We shall put ourselves beyond your amendment or abolition

You do not need to argue about any changes we make, or to debate
them, or to send your representatives to vote against them

You do not need to hold us to account

You think you will get what you want from an inquiry?

Who do you think you are?

What sort of fools do you think we are?

The nation's dreams are troubled, sometimes; dim rumours reach our
sleeping ears, rumours that all is not well in the administration of
justice; but an ancient spell murmurs through our somnolence, and we
remember that the courts are bound to seek the truth, the whole
truth, and nothing but the truth, and we turn over and sleep soundly again.

And the new laws whisper:

We do not want to hear you talking about truth

Truth is a friend of yours, not a friend of ours

We have a better friend called hearsay, who is a witness we can always rely
on

We do not want to hear you talking about innocence

Innocent means guilty of things not yet done

We do not want to hear you talking about the right to silence

You need to be told what silence means: it means guilt

We do not want to hear you talking about justice

Justice is whatever we want to do to you

And nothing else

Are we conscious of being watched, as we sleep? Are we aware of an
ever-open eye at the corner of every street, of a watching presence
in the very keyboards we type our messages on? The new laws don't
mind if we are. They don't think we care about it.

We want to watch you day and night

We think you are abject enough to feel safe when we watch you

We can see you have lost all sense of what is proper to a free people

We can see you have abandoned modesty

Some of our friends have seen to that

They have arranged for you to find modesty contemptible

In a thousand ways they have led you to think that whoever does not
want to be watched must have something shameful to hide

We want you to feel that solitude is frightening and unnatural

We want you to feel that being watched is the natural state of things

One of the pleasant fantasies that consoles us in our sleep is that
we are a sovereign nation, and safe within our borders. This is what
the new laws say about that:

We know who our friends are

And when our friends want to have words with one of you

We shall make it easy for them to take you away to a country where
you will learn that you have more fingernails than you need

It will be no use bleating that you know of no offence you have
committed under British law

It is for us to know what your offence is

Angering our friends is an offence

It is inconceivable to me that a waking nation in the full
consciousness of its freedom would have allowed its government to
pass such laws as the Protection from Harassment Act (1997), the
Crime and Disorder Act (1998), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers
Act (2000), the Terrorism Act (2000), the Criminal Justice and Police
Act (2001), the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001), the
Regulation of Investigatory Powers Extension Act (2002), the Criminal
Justice Act (2003), the Extradition Act (2003), the Anti-Social
Behaviour Act (2003), the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act
(2004), the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), the Prevention of
Terrorism Act (2005), the Inquiries Act (2005), the Serious Organised
Crime and Police Act (2005), not to mention a host of pending
legislation such as the Identity Cards Bill, the Coroners and Justice
Bill, and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

Inconceivable.

And those laws say:

Sleep, you stinking cowards

Sweating as you dream of rights and freedoms

Freedom is too hard for you

We shall decide what freedom is

Sleep, you vermin

Sleep, you scum.

From an article to mark the Convention on Modern Liberty, published on and then pulled from Times Online

Further reading click here

A new twist to multiculturalism

2009-01-27T20:18:00.012Z

Farhad Hakimzadeh, a wealthy Iranian businessman who went on trial in November 2008 for stealing and mutilating manuscripts at the British Library, London and Bodleian Library, Oxford, has been imprisoned for two years. Mr. Hakimzadeh had a special interest in western European experiences of travel and colonisation in the Middle East from the 16th to 18th. Centuries.

Rather like another thief of archives convicted recently, Oliver Fallon, Hakimzadeh had the cover of a reputable organisation, in his case the Iranian Heritage Foundation of which he was founder and director.

Iranians in Britain have mixed reactions to their fellow countryman's activities, some seeing his criminal activities in the context of conflict between Islam and the West, others a conflict between the Persian and non-Persian sections of Iranian society.

Farhad Hakimzadeh

However, of concern to SQA is the ease with which Hakimzadeh committed his theft and vandalism, over the lengthy period of 1997-2005 or 1998-2006, according to different reports.

We asked Benedict Crumplethorne, principal spokesman of SQA, to offer his thoughts on the episode.

It seems the national institutions are not quite on the ball as regards security procedures, exemplified in this instance by the British Library. It is axiomatic in the heritage professions that no matter how trusted researchers are, the same standards of security should apply as for the general public. This is common sense, of course. I tend to suspect that the heavier presence of academic types among the curatorial staff of such institutions causes them to lack the same orthodoxy of qualified archivists, who are almost certainly not to be found at the upper levels of British Library management. Instead, they empathise with their fellow researchers.

The founder of our profession, Sir Hilary Jenkinson for whom the physical security of archives was the paramount objective, would be turning in his grave. In referring to Jenkinson, I am reminded of his injunction that archivists' judgment should not be clouded by engaging in their own original research.

I must next address some of the odd statements made by the British Library and the police. Firstly, I quote a British Library spokesman:

Theft from the British Library is an extremely rare occurrence. Because we are a research library, not a museum, we are committed to making our collections available in the interests of scholarship and research: to facilitate this an element of trust is necessary. Hakimzadeh fundamentally betrayed this trust.

I don't quite see how being a research library makes security issues different to those in a museum...say the British Museum. Do museums not make their collections available for research? Is the BL saying museums don't have security arrangements? Are they also saying they recognise different tiers of researcher, all ostensibly card carrying readers, but some more equal than others? In any case, all archive repositories exist to make their material available for research. However, the crucial sentence is the second last sentence. This seems to suggest BL staff took a calculated decision to favour Hakimzadeh, or to trust him as they put it. This policy is at best mysterious and at worst negligent.

Secondly, I refer to a comment made by Detective Chief Inspector Dave Cobb of the Metropolitan Police, that:

It is extremely difficult to detect the absence of these pages as Hakimzadeh took care to select material that only an expert would be able to identify, as early printed books are unique. The original owner might have commissioned additional illustrations, or pages might have been missing when the libraries acquired them.

This carries forward the mysteriousness of the BL's own statement and indicates careful briefing of the police by the them. All archives are unique and the material stolen or damaged in this case is no different from archives at a county record office, insurance archive, business archive or university archive. That is to say, archives are descriptively listed so as to securely identify them precisely so the documents can be identified by a researcher. Quite often these descriptions are published in the form of online databases. Unwittingly, Mr. Cobb is acting as the BL's apologist. Any use of archives requires more mental capacity than taking a lending or reference book down from the shelf in your local library, assuming they still have such things as books.

We then turned to Ellison Millinocket, our security and conservation spokesman, based in Taunton, Somerset, for some practical insights.

Documents are retrieved from secure storage areas by staff rather than taken down from the shelf, as might happen with an open access book in a local library, and should then be inspected prior to being handed over to researchers and inspected again on return by issuing staff. There is no harm in repository staff also checking material, in the repository, we all have a responsibility. In the case of bundles of loose papers, these should be counted out prior to issue and counted back by issuing staff. I query whether this happened at the BL. The process of counting out documents and then counting them back in also allows searchroom or issuing staff to visually inspect the contents and intactness of the material. Some offices weigh documents, which even allowing for absorption of water from the atmosphere, is remarkably accurate, quite apart from being effective as a deterrent.

I note The Daily Telegraph states

British Library staff believe he smuggled a scalpel into the building and positioned himself out of the sight of security cameras to commit his crimes.

I am flabbergasted that Hakimzadeh perpetrated his crimes out of sight of CCTV cameras. No part of a searchroom should be uncovered by camera or the human eye or at any rate such researchers should be required to sit in clear view of at least one camera.

We thanked Benedict and Ellison for their contributions.

Further reading

The Daily Telegraph 21 November 2008

British Library press release 16 January 2009

The Daily Telegraph 16 January 2009

The Daily Telegraph: 8000 items go missing from British Library 28 February 2005

The Daily Mail 16 January 2009

The Daily Telegraph 21 January 2009

The Guardian 21 November 2008

What drives people to steal precious books Financial Times 6 March 2009

Long-lost manuscript available to historians Derby Evening Telegraph 5 March 2009

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know

Donald Rumsfeld February 2002

Archivists Against Global Warmism

2009-01-19T20:47:00.009Z

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph of 9 January 2009, John McGibbon of Cambridge advises anyone unable to heat his home properly during the present cold snap

to spend a day at their local council offices, perhaps researching their ancestors. As the temperature holds a sultry 75F, be prepared to strip down to not much more than underwear in order to blend in with the staff.

We asked Benedict Crumplethorne, principal spokesman for SQA, to comment on this apparent suggestion that local government record offices' public searchrooms are not only swelteringly hot but staffed by women wearing only bras and nickers.

You hint that the majority of local government record office staff are women. This is indeed the case, so we may deduce that the office Mr. McGibbon has visited to obtain this impression is typical of the trend, confirmed in various national surveys. As to a public searchroom being 75F, this gives very great cause for concern. We expect temperature and humidity in searchrooms to be controlled in broad conformity with BS5454 to ensure that documents temporarily relocated for research purposes from the strongroom to the searchroom will not be subjected to widely varying atmospheric conditions.

Devon Record Office: in bed with the Met Office

We also asked Ellison Millinocket, conservation spokesman for SQA, based in Taunton, Somerset to comment on the technical implications of searchrooms being heated to 75F.

Benedict is quite right. And may I say how heart-warming it is to see Fahrenheit used, instead of the fiendish metric Celcius system. Most British people prefer Fahrenheit, despite Met Office bullying. I would prefer a searchroom to be air conditioned so as to ensure documents are less subjected to microscopic mechanical wear through hydrolysis. There are other threats of course including photo-degradation but fluctuation or variation in temperature and humidity between or in document storage areas and searchrooms is something to avoid. And finally, may I enquire where these scantily dressed women archivists and archive assistants are to be found, I find I am free for the next few days and would like to pay them a visit....

We thanked Benedict and Ellison for their contributions.

However, still curious as to why a letter writer to a national newspaper should seem to want to grouse about the temperature in a local government record office searchroom, we invited Dr. Pochin Sturge of Wigston, Leicestershire, honorary consultant anthropologist to SQA, to offer some explanation.

Well, I rather regret this current obsession with global warming is behind the criticism. Local government has nailed its colours to the mast on this one, slavishly implementing EU directives on waste disposal and fining miscreants, so that any council is bound to be associated with the global warming phenomenon and become a target for disgruntled members of the public.

Even the national Archives has swallowed the bait. Their web site states Projects will soon be underway to understand the issues surrounding the impact of climate change on local environments in The National Archives, and archival collections globally. Existing models such as life-cycle costing, risk assessment and predictive modelling protocols will be applied to evaluate and define sustainable energy solutions and to optimise current preservation practices.....A climate mapping exercise has been carried out in all storage areas. The results will be used to develop The National Archives´ environmental monitoring programme as well as to improve the hardware and the Building Management System.

The significance of this for the tax-payer is that it may all be unnecessary.

The great shame is that there is no such thing as global warming. The evidence is that temperatures are cooling rather than warming and the ice caps are expanding. I have studied the origins of warmism and have deduced that the theory has been developed by the United Nations and its collaborators as a means of establishing world communist government. I am particularly fascinated by the tendency for Warmism to replace religion, especially Roman Catholicism, as being subject to inflexible doctrine and for anti-Warmists to be treated as heretics.

So you see, there is a very complicated social and scientific background to a brief and facetious comment in a daily newspaper. But whichever record office is in question, I wouldn't mind betting their visitor statistics are up at this time of year, hey what?

Further reading

Global Warming Petition Project

Glen Beck interviews the founder of the Weather Channel click here

WattsUpWithThat

2008 was the year man made global warming was disproved

Great Global warming Swindle

Blizzard of mad proposals descends

Wind Energy The Truth

More Hot Air From the Met Office

BBC Devon News

Taxpayers' Alliance

Customer care training for women archivists and archive assistants click here

National Archives

Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism.

Karl Marx, 1867

Take Note

2008-08-05T23:07:00.001+01:00

We believe some colleagues in the archives profession will be chastened to read the following notice published in the British Weights and Measures Association annual report for 1907. The information is perhaps still as relevant now in the computer age as it was then.

Most progressive people now-a-days use card indexes of some sort or other, and with these obtain the necessary drawers, etc, for filing them. The standard sizes of these cards are 3 x 5, 4 x 6, and 5 x 8 — cabinets being sold to fit. We would warn all our members to make sure in purchasing these cabinets that the drawers will fit these sizes of cards. There are some cabinets on the market at present with drawers presumably of the standard size, but on looking closely at the circular or catalogue describing them, you will find the word “approximately”. These cabinets are not made in England, and are made to take cards according to millimetre sizes, which are incommensurable with British sizes.

If you should unfortunately get this make of cabinets in your office you will find yourself tied to obtain your future supplies of cards from the firm, or pay extra if you go elsewhere, as a drawer 75 x 125 millimetres will not take a 3 x 5in standard card. The difference is slight but just enough to tie you to one firm for supplies at their prices. We don’t want tied houses in the stationery trade, neither do we want confusion introducing into our sizes, which are based on the Imperial standard inch. There are excellent makers who supply cabinets to British standard sizes, and our members should insist on having these sizes.

Further reading

British Weights and Measures Association

The Treaty of Lisbon exposed

2008-05-10T09:21:00.015+01:00

Readers may recall our recent report of a hidden agenda within the Church of England in support of European integration, a policy that extends to divesting itself of its own bibliographical and documentary heritage in order to remove any sense of national identity and a record of centuries of achievement. It seems this has stimulated a discussion between our patron Lindsay Jenkins and a mildly Eurosceptic vicar.

We reproduce their email correspondence below.

Lindsay Jenkins

29 April 2008

Dear Mr. Knight,

Thank you for taking an interest in my posting.

I am very sorry to hear that both Archbishop Temple and Bishop Bell are today revered in the Church of England. Indeed I am surprised but no doubt you are in touch with a broad grouping.

Archbishop Temple

My own family tell me that Archbishop Temple was very far from universally revered while he was alive; many were appalled – even at a time when some were thoroughly hoodwinked by Stalin.

What was thought through in 1940 (and the thinking started a lot earlier than that) is what we now see in the Lisbon treaty – the EU in all its intrusiveness.

The end of the nation state was exactly what Archbishop Temple and others were working towards. He was not proposing a cosy federation of friends.

The aim was political union and that was exemplified by the first serious attempt with the help of a beneficial crisis in June 1940 – Anglo-Franco Union.

An Oxford lawyer, Professor Zimmern, wrote a detailed constitution of the proposed combination of France and the UK into one country and it had been agreed with sympathetic French in Paris in 1939. But it was stopped by the French government - cowering in Vichy and selling out to the Germans. You may remember the exchange:

General Weygand leading the defeatists said, ‘In three weeks England will have her neck rung like a chicken.’ (Churchill later replied, ‘Some chicken - some neck!’). Jean Ybarnegaray exclaimed, ‘Better be a Nazi province. At least we know what that means’.

An even more comprehensive constitution (similar to the treaty of Lisbon) to include most of Europe was written by an Australian solicitor, Ronald Mackay, who had settled in Britain in 1934, building on constitutional work begun by Lionel Curtis, and the American lawyer, Professor A H Goodhart of University College, Oxford.

That constitution was presented to a 1940 conference in Oxford organised by the Fabian Society with which Archbishop Temple was most closely associated.

On the World Council of Churches (WCC), if you have not already read it I found the Memoirs of the Rev Dr. Willem Visser ‘t Hooft illuminating: he was the first Secretary-General.

Many people over the last decades have not realised what was creeping up, because generations of politicians have either not read the texts (Ken Clarke), not believed them or have deliberately lied.

Should you be interested I have written a book on who has created the EU and why called Britain Held Hostage, The Coming Euro-Dictatorship.

With kind regards

Lindsay Jenkins

www.lindsayjenkins.com

From Rev. R. Knight
Subject: Re: THE CHURCH & ITS SUPPORT FOR THE EU - Another Letter to Bishop of Chichester
29 April 2008

Dear All,

I’m glad you are all vigilant about misrepresentations of what is going on with the Lisbon Treaty. I was dismayed to read a letter in the “Times” which seemed to imply that the Church of England supported Lisbon.

That cannot be so for the reasons I included in my letter to the Bishop of St Alban’s.

I must say, however, that I do not at all agree with Lindsay Jenkins and, as a clergyman in the Church of England, I must suggest that it would be
counterproductive to use his letter as a template. William Temple and George Bell were good men - no doubt flawed in some respects like all of us - and are revered in the modern Church of England. Any decent person would want to ensure that nothing like the two world wars could never happen again and it is not unreasonable to explore the possibility that leagues or federations of nations might be an answer. Bell and Temple ought not to demonised for trying. Neither can they be held responsible for the EU’s development into a superstate which wants to intrude into every area of our lives. No-one would have foreseen this in the late 1940s. Indeed, part of the case for a referendum now is that most people did not foresee how the EU would turn out even as late as the 1970s. I’ll paste in my letter to the Bishop of St Alban’s to offer alternative arguments to use with the bishops.

Roger Knight

The Bishop of St. Albans

Letter from Rev. R. Knight to Rt. Rev. Christopher Herbert, Bishop of St. Albans
2 March 2008

Dear Bishop Christopher,

I was dismayed to read your letter in today’s “Times” suggesting that the Church of England supports the Lisbon Treaty. I should be very surprised if the Church of England has an official view on this subject or if there is any one view of the Lisbon Treaty to which Anglican Christians might be expected to subscribe.

In fact, I believe, there are two issues. Is the Lisbon Treaty a good thing? Ought there to be a referendum in the UK on the Lisbon Treaty?

The answer to the latter question is obvious. Nearly every MP at present in the House of Commons was elected on a manifesto promise to hold a referendum on the European Constitution. Virtually everybody, who has any expertise, in the matter agrees that the Lisbon Treaty is effectively the same thing as the constitution. MPs have broken a promise in refusing a referendum. Christians must condemn that (Psalm 15).

There ought, therefore, to be a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. If we were given a referendum, I am sure that sincere Christians could with a good conscience vote either way. There is a strong case to be made for the EU and for strengthening its organisation and administration and you have made an important contribution to that case in today’s “Times”. One can also argue, of course, that the EU is a club of rich western nations which harms poorer parts of the world by its trade policies. One can argue that it is too intrusive into the life of its citizens. One can argue that there is a considerable democratic deficit in the EU. And one can also argue, that, while any decent person cannot but rejoice in the fact that nations which were deadly enemies twice in C20 are now allies and partners, it is wrong to overlook the fact that our membership of the EU has been to the disadvantage of Commonwealth countries and others who supported us in the fight against German expansionism under the Kaiser and the horrors of Nazism and Fascism. Christians are 100% committed to the reconciliation of enemies, but there is absolutely nothing in the Gospel that allows us to betray our former friends.

So, Christians, including Anglican Christians, should continue to demand a referendum on Lisbon and could vote either way in such a referendum without doing an injustice to their Christian conscience.

Roger Knight,

Rector of Cuxton and Halling,

Diocese of Rochester

John Hind, Bishop of Chichester

28 April 2008
Rt Rev John Hind
Bishop of Chichester
c/o House of Lords
London
SW1A 0PW

My Lord Bishop,

In your recent speech in the House of Lords supporting the Lisbon Treaty, you described one of your predecessors, Bishop Bell, as 'one of the greatest Europeans of the last century'.

Bishop Bell

Bishop Bell was indeed of that inner group which was seminal in creating what is now the European Union. But I am not sure that Bishop Bell's views are worthy of the eulogy, which you gave him in the House of Lords; unless that is you are either a Communist or a Communist sympathiser and that I doubt very much.

As you may know, Bishop Bell was very close to Archbishop Temple, widely known throughout most of his adult life as a 'radical Bolshevik' and fervent admirer of the USSR. Bell joined Temple in many political ventures including the founding of Federal Trust in 1940 by an inner group of the Fabian Society.

Bell, when Dean of Canterbury, also helped Temple (then Archbishop of York) to launch the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1937. Temple had for many years campaigned and manoeuvred to lead the Protestant Churches away from a spiritual role to a much more political one, and a very left wing one at that, and achieved it with the WCC.

I quote from one of my own books :

"Thirty-five clergymen attended the 1937 meeting at Westfield College, London University and Temple hoodwinked most of them. Only two bishops voted against the motion to set up the WCC because they guessed its purpose was political, not spiritual. It was: Temple and Bell had deliberately manipulated the meeting."

Both Bishop Bell and Archbishop Temple were no friends of the nation state and believed that nations cause war and should be totally subsumed into a federal Europe, a federal Europe that would echo the USSR.

I am sorry that you have apparently so misunderstood the nature of the European Union not only to praise it, but also to praise your own predecessor, Bishop Bell, who wished to hijack the Church of England for political ends, ends which many then and now find deeply distasteful and who worked to end the independent sovereignty of the United Kingdom.

Your present position, like that of Bishop Bell, does of course leave the role of the Church of England in a no-mans-land: no England, no Church.

I do hope that you will review the nature of the European Union and support not only the Church of England but also the independence of the United Kingdom.

Lindsay Jenkins

Further reading

Anything but ordinary

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Ummm

2008-05-09T12:05:00.005+01:00

The light-fingered brigade has been at it again, exposing deficiencies in the security aspects of several major UK archive repositories.

Last year we learned that a series of major thefts of archives from the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) had taken place. The thief had targeted the Jersey Collection there and had stolen documents including letters from Queen Victoria and the first Duke of Wellington. The Islington Tribune was informed by the LMA’s parent authority, the City of London, that a security review was taking place and that Detective Inspector Joe Lock of Islington CID was asking for further information.

We await further news on the recovery of these stolen documents and the identity of the thief.

Scottish Catholic Archives

Meanwhile, in Scotland we hear the Scottish Catholic Archives has been raided by Oliver Fallon, better known internationally as a Sanskrit scholar, who has recently been convicted by a court in Edinburgh. 300 documents with a market value of £26,000 were stolen during five visits he made to that office in July 2006. Fallon adopted the normal technique of the archives thief, that of cutting or tearing off parts of pages or secreting smaller documents on his person. 132 documents are still missing and damaged documents require repairs costed at nearly £5000. The Edinburgh court learned from Fallon’s solicitor John Mulholland that he was already serving time in England for similar, apparently unreported thefts south of the border. SQA is unaware of any official connection between the LMA thefts and the Edinburgh thefts at this stage.

Oliver Fallon

Several sources place emphasis on Fallon’s story he was a postgraduate student, as though to say the Scottish Catholic Archives or its apologists need defend giving access to their archives to anyone. The issue in this instance is that Fallon was left unsupervised while he consulted the documents. It is unlikely in the extreme the public searchroom at LMA was unsupervised.

The Scottish Catholic Archives have also stressed researchers are not allowed to remove documents from the premises and must use pencils only, which is rather beside the point.

The Herald reports Fallon had also obtained documents by deception from the Catholic Archives in London although we are not aware of such a repository.

In an unrelated breach of security of a different kind, 29 forged documents have been inserted into 12 government files at the UK National Archives by Martin Allen, an enthusiast of Hitler’s Germany, in order to support spurious or unsubstantiatable claims. At least one forged letter was written on a blank page from an old book, a classic forger’s trick. The Times quotes Sir Max Hastings as saying it is hard to imagine actions more damaging to the cause of preserving the nation’s heritage than wilfully forging documents designed to alter our historical record and John Fox states how on earth were these documents slipped in? This is something that the National Archives has to answer. Whoever got these documents in must have done it in a very clever, sneaky way, so you can’t entirely blame the security. But maybe there are questions with the security.

The National Archives is reported as saying new security procedures had been put in place.

We asked Ellison Millinocket of Taunton, Somerset, the outspoken security and conservation spokesman for SQA, to offer some comments.

It really beggars belief. A searchroom left unsupervised? Have the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland no concept of security? I notice their entry in British Archives, 4th. Edition, states they allow access to bona fide researchers. It is all very well asking for a letter of reference but all researchers should be invigilated by trained staff when original and irreplaceable documents are being consulted. It tends to be the case archival material has high market value because it is unique and may bear valuable postmarks, autographs and stamps. The Standard for Record Repositories states:

When in use the study area should be constantly supervised by sufficient staff to provide an effective level of invigilation of the whole area, under the direction of a professionally qualified archivist (section 4.9)

I am not aware if the Scottish Catholic Archives employs a qualified, professional archivist. This would make a huge difference. The Standard also states:

Beyond the very smallest, record repositories accordingly require the services of one or more professionally qualified archivists with training or experience relevant to the kind of records held (2.2 (a))

and

In the case of a small repository where no appropriately qualified professional staff can be employed, the governing body should formally seek regular advice on such matters as acquisition, storage, conservation and cataloguing from a professionally qualified archivist in another repository or from The National Archives (which provides guidance on both public and private records) or, in Scotland, from the National Archives of Scotland and in Northern Ireland from the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (2.3)

Thus it would appear several national institutions are implicated. My final advice is always bear in mind the heritage professionals’ axiom, that thieves tend to be the most trusted of our users. There is no such thing as a bona fide researcher and the strictest invigilation is required at all times.

We thanked Ellison for his comments and next asked Dr. Pochin Sturge of Wigston Hall, Leicester, consultant anthropologist to SQA, to explain what makes individuals such as Fallon and Allen tick.

Actually, these behaviours are relatively common in modern western society, which has confused cultural heritage and cultural icons with economic wealth, through the mass media impact of the auction trade, Ebay and popular television programmes like the Antiques Roadshow on the one hand, and the substitution of economic status with privileged access to and interpretation of our cultural inheritance on the other. Knowledge is power, so to speak.

The thief of archival documents achieves several ends; he acquires economic betterment based on his discernment, he relocates cultural material to a more deserving custodianship justified by intellectual elitism and overcomes an irrational jealousy associated with the academic mentality by obviating the need to consult vital primary source material by going through an intermediary.

As for the forger, whether in dealing with the superior or inferior academic mentality, there is a tendency to abuse the legitimate custody of archives not by theft or vandalism but through the more subtle and perverse frustration that official archives do not contain evidence supportive of a thesis. By putting the cart before the horse, this inconvenience can be overcome and a new reality can be created. If the documents don’t exist, they jolly well ought to. Finally, in this regard, the deviant mind can be reassured by having other researchers fall into the trap of accepting his forgeries as evidence, through the creation of a supportive network of the like-minded people. Society thus rectified can be more habitable for the forger and those with similar behavioural abnormalities.

You have my hearty sympathies that such cultural behaviours affect your most worthy profession. Please be on your guard.

We thanked Dr. Sturge for his analyses.

In a sequel to the thefts from Scottish Catholic Archives, we learn in a new report that the collections may be transferred to Aberdeen University. It is telling that a Scottish Roman Catholic spokesman has stated the material could be better preserved at the university.

Further reading

The Times

Standard for Record Repositories

BBC News

The Scotsman

The Herald

Edinburgh Evening News 19 May 2008

Press Association

Glasgow Daily Record 20 May 2008

Advaita Vedanta Research Center

Letter to The Guardian by Prof. Philip Murphy, University of Reading, 7 May 2008

The Convention brought together a self selected group of the European political elite, many of whom have their eyes on a career at a European level, which is dependent on more and more integration, and who see national parliaments and governments as an obstacle ... Not once in the sixteen months I spent on the Convention did representatives question whether deeper integration is what the people of Europe want, whether it serves their best interests or whether it provides the best basis for a sustainable structure for an expanding Union. The debates focused solely on where we could do more at European Union level... None of the existing policies were questioned... Consensus was achieved among those who were deemed to matter and those deemed to matter made it plain that the rest would not be allowed to wreck the final agreement.

Gisela Stuart MP, British Labour Party representative on the EU. ‘The Making of Europe's Constitution’ Fabian Society, London, 2003

Rogue employers, well almost

2008-04-29T16:54:00.003+01:00

Following up previous posts on unsatisfactory salaries or person specifications at Durham, Bromley and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), we return again to Bromley where it seems a previous advertisement for the post of archivist at Bromley Central Library is being re-run.

Bromley Central Library

The salary offered is £25,440 to £27,009 which suggests a slight move in the right direction. The advertisement also states the successful candidate will be a qualified archivist. However, we asked Garth Bland, County Archivist of Loamshire, to comment on the Bromley situation.

I think we are dealing with quite a common situation, one not at all beneficial to the cause and promotion of archives. Many local government archive services are beholden to library services even to the extent they are physically contained within a library building. It goes without saying the building is branded as a library and the archivist reports to a librarian. Usually in this context, the archivist is seen as a specialist, almost as a specialist librarian. Indeed, I have seen many advertisements for hybrid archivist/librarians. Unless such post-holders are qualified archivists and librarians, and there are some such beasts, this is an appalling cheek and damaging to our profession.

We continue to fight a battle for the equipping of stand-alone archive repositories headed by qualified, professional archivists employed at the same level as chief librarians and museum curators. Municipal traditions are hard to overcome, as is the strong position library services are in when it comes to competing for funding and access to decision makers. University libraries are much the same. This gives rise to difficulties based on the more specialised needs of archive services and representing such to committees, quite apart from the wider public and politicians.

I tend to think archives authorities should respect the spirit of the National Archives’ Standard for Record Repositories, which states that

Beyond the very smallest, record repositories accordingly require the services of
(a) one or more professionally qualified archivists with training or experience relevant to the kind
of records held
(b) one or more professionally qualified conservators
(c) one or more non-professional archivist or records assistants, and appropriate clerical staff
(d) support staff, who may include word processor/keyboard operator(s), porter(s) and cleaner(s).

(section 2.2)

We thanked Garth for his contribution.

A scorpion and a frog met on the bank of a stream and the scorpion asked the frog to carry him across on its back. The frog asked, "How do I know you won't sting me?" The scorpion said, "Because if I do, I will die too." The frog was satisfied, and they set out, but in midstream, the scorpion stung the frog. As they both began to sink, the frog had just enough time to ask "Why?" And the scorpion replied: "Because it is my nature..."

Do you still not understand the nature of the EU?

The Church of England’s hidden agenda

2008-04-28T11:18:00.006+01:00

For those observant and critical enough, the signs of the Church of England’s tendency to support European integration have been there for some time. We recall the letter from the Dean and Chapter of Coventry to a national newspaper in which they collectively stated their support for European integration.

We recall the Bishop of Exeter’s exclusion of the UK Independence Party’s representatives from the regional forum for the South-West Constitutional Convention. We recall the new Prayer Book which includes a prayer for European Institutions. We recall the appointment of a bishop of Europe. We recall the CofE’s involvement in the Council of European Churches and the Soul for Europe programme.

The latest activities of the Church of England to come to our attention are the disposal of numerous cathedral libraries, we assume as part of an act of self-censorship for removing inconvenient printed evidence of the rise of the Protestant based British Empire. The Church has not gone so far as to burn its books in the style of the Nazi Germany in the 1930s but the abandonment of its printed heritage amounts to a most useful act of self-imposed Europhile collaborationism, suited to supporting the gradual dismantlement of the national institutions of the most hated and democratic country in Europe.

The Frauenkirche after restoration

After all, was it not Protestant Britain that stood in the way of Spanish, French and Papal attempts at achieving European or world dominance? The Protestant-based constitution of Britain also undermined later German attempts at defeating Britain in two world wars. The modern European and German domination of Britain is symbolised by the officially sanctioned abandonment of the ruined medieval Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by German bombing and the recent rebuilding of the Frauenkirche in Dresden, after destruction by RAF and USAF bombing.

So what prompts SQA’s latest concerns?

A Bible sold by Truro Cathedral

In 2005 Pusey House, Oxford sold most of its pre-Tractarian library; Truro Cathedral sold Bishop Philpott’s Library; and writing in The Church Times, Professor Jonathan Clark in an article entitled The C of E is losing its own history reports the sale of cathedral libraries from Bangor, Canterbury, Ely, Lincoln, Llandaff, Lichfield, Exeter, St. Asaph and Wells on AbeBooks. Manuscript items are included in these various sales.

The critics of these actions mainly express concern about the Church’s financial incompetence. The Truro sale, described by one eminent librarian as a disaster, raised £36,000 for stock eventually sold on for half a millon pounds. However, to SQA it looks rather more like self-imposed asset-stripping allied to Europhile tendencies.

We asked Benedict Crumplethorne, principal spokesman for SQA, to offer comment.

Two things come out of this, the Church’s naivety in relation to book dealers and the Church’s naivety in relation to politics. Somewhere hidden away in the Church’s institutions is also a rabid pro-Integrationist agenda which sits very easily with self-imposed asset stripping. European integrationism sits well in turn with ecumenism. And ecumenism sits well with Roman Catholicism, as the EU is clearly modelled on the Holy Roman Empire and is founded on the Treaty of Rome. If the EU are to be our new political masters, then so must the Roman Catholics in religion. In short, the CofE has seen which way the wind is blowing.

Our Lady of Europe, Strasbourg Cathedral

My own pet theory is that many clergy and laity support European integration because they believe regional integration conforms to and paves the way for a divinely ordained progression towards unified world government. The only trouble is that such regional or world government is ordained by man not God and the evidence of the EU’s tendencies is that they are totalitarian, not humane and liberal. However, even on this point, many Christians will still support totalitarian rule because they see neither democracy nor dictatorship as a suitable substitute for theocracy.

So with a few Europhile clerics leading the way, the sheep follow, blissfully unaware they are being led away to the slaughter.

And thank goodness for the Parochial Registers and Records Measure!

We thanked Benedict for his insights.

Further reading

The Dresden Frauenkirche

The Times

Philobiblos

ThinkingAnglicans

Paul Oestreicher in The Guardian

The Church Times

The Holy European Empire

Treasures of the English Church 30 May - 12 July 2008, Goldsmiths' Hall, London

In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me.

The Rev. Martin Niemoeller, on being released from Dachau in 1945

Anything but ordinary

2008-04-21T16:38:00.018+01:00

As inveterate readers of SQA’s pages are aware we keep an eagle eye on job advertisements in the sector, identifying rogue employers offering unsatisfactory salaries and those not requiring applicants for archives posts to be professionally qualified.

The PRONI logo

On this occasion an advertisement by the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) has been drawn to our attention. It is for the post of Director of the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), in Belfast.

We are informed The post-holder will be an expert in archival and records management matters although as there is no mention of the successful applicant having to possess the postgraduate diploma in archive administration, conveniently available from University College Dublin, the NICS clearly envisages the possibility of finding such an expert who is not qualified. For its part, SQA is mystified that such a species can be considered to exist.

At £56,100 - £78,540 the salary is certainly not an issue: the devil looks after his own and while the rest of the profession laments the absence of national archives legislation which might regularise gradings at least in the public sector, civil servants sit pretty.

SQA has previously blogged its concern at similar developments elsewhere at national governmental level, particularly the appointment of Natalie Ceeney to head the UK National Archives.

We asked Benedict Crumplethorne, principal spokesman for SQA, to comment.

I heartily sympathise with SQA’s position. However, the trend in central government (if I may term the Euro Regional government of Northern Ireland such) is for non-qualified persons to be appointed to these senior positions. However laudable the retention of their original title (the Scottish Record Office, Edinburgh and Public Record Office, London having changed their titles to the National Archives of Scotland and The National Archives respectively), PRONI is clearly still dedicated to dyed in the wool civil service officialese.

And meritocracy? I note the advertisement states ALL APPLICATIONS FOR EMPLOYMENT ARE CONSIDERED STRICTLY ON THE BASIS OF MERIT. Well, clearly qualified archivists are not recognised as meritorious by the meritocrats!

Intrigued by the situation in Northern Ireland, we asked Garth Bland, County Archivist of Loamshire to offer some comments on the constitutional position north of the border.

Very deceptive and messy, actually. Northern Ireland is a Euro Region exactly like London, Wales or Eastern England. The creation of devolved government there has always been viewed in the context of the Troubles but actually it would have come anyway and is merely a forerunner of planned EU regional governments throughout England and the rest of the UK. Nationalism in Ireland, Scotland and Wales has played into the integrationists’ hands perfectly.

Current elitist thinking concerning Northern Ireland is that by a process of national governments gradually relinquishing power to the EU, the devolution of power from Westminster to Belfast will make sectarian divisions irrelevant. Once the process is complete, the nationalist community will be unable to unite to the Republic of Ireland and the Loyalists will not be able to unite with, or remain united to Great Britain, because under the Treaty of Lisbon the process of the creation of the EU superstate will become complete and both states will cease to exist. The future EU is one of regions with no national governments or legislatures worthy of the name. It is not surprising Sinn Fein is campaigning against ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon.

It is hardly an issue now whether British troops will remain in Northern Ireland. British troops are just as likely to patrol southern Ireland under the Treaty of Lisbon. With a common foreign policy and common defence policy in place, German, French, Dutch or who knows one day Turkish troops are just as likely to be garrisoned in Ireland, along with the stationing there of former British and French nuclear weapons. No more neutrality, no more nuclear free zones!

Our Lady of Europe, Strasbourg Cathedral

Finally, I note applications from Roman Catholics are being especially sought. This will please the nationalist community but the appointment of a Protestant won't benefit the Loyalists in any case. The EU is predominantly Roman Catholic and the chapel of the EU is in Strasbourg Cathedral, a Roman Catholic church whose stained glass window proclaims the sovereignty of Our Lady of Europe. The image of Mary, wearing the hexagonal crown of the Holy Roman Empire, is surmounted by the EU's ring of stars.

Who said the EU was secularist?

Further reading

END OF NATIONS - EU Takeover & the Lisbon Treaty (Irish anti-Lisbon Treaty video)

The Balkanisation of Britain

Archives and the State

Tomorrow's World

Europe's Unholy Empire

Sir- We, being most concerned about matters of sovereignty arising from the signing of the Lisbon Treaty, held an informal conference in Guernsey this week. In the context of this treaty, currently being debated in Westminster, there are uncertainties as to the constitutional position of the Crown dependencies, which remain outside the European Union, as Britain cedes further powers to Brussels.
We consider it of vital importance that our people are fully informed about the implications of any constitutional changes that may arise from this treaty.

We would therefore urge Her Majesty’s Government to adopt a position of openness and honesty regarding this treaty, which affects not just the people of Britain, but also the citizens of the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man.

Deputy Paul Le Clair (Jersey)
Deputy Robert du Hamel (Jersey)
Constable Simon Crowcroft (Jersey)
Deputy David Jones (Guernsey)
Peter Karran, Member of the House of Keys (Isle of Man)
Roger Knapman MEP*
Thomas Wise MEP Guernsey*

Letter to The Daily Telegraph 27 January 2008

* Editor’s note: the European Commission has grouped the Channel Islands with the UK South-Western Euro Region, although in point of fact, unknown to most Channel Islanders, they actually come under the French Lower Normandy Euro Region.

The Genocide Convention

2008-04-19T09:22:00.006+01:00

We must congratulate our patron Ashley Mote MEP for drawing attention to the European Union’s genocidal war against the British people. This is something SQA has expressed concern about previously in our blog The Natives are Revolting, in which we examined the implications of the UN General Assembly’s adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Ashley Mote MEP

This useful development has been reinforced by the Genocide Convention. Mr. Mote has asked the European Commission the following question:

Given that Malta appears to be the only nation state in the European Union that has failed to sign the Genocide Convention of 1948, can it be assumed the European Union considers itself a party to it? If and when the Lisbon Treaty is ratified, will the EU sign the Genocide Convention?

In which case, can the Commission explain how it will then defend its present activities and immigration policy in the light of Article II, and specifically sub-section (c)?

To save the Commissioner looking them up, I can remind him that the relevant words are:

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such...(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

As the Commissioner will have seen in my recent pamphlet J ' Accuse...! the effect of present EU migration policy has been systematically to destroy national identity in the UK, and - for that matter - in most other nation states. Given that the Genocide Convention makes specific and separate references to "national", "ethnical", "racial" and "religious" groups being threatened, (implicitly either in isolation or in combination) is it not obvious that the uncontrolled influx of economic migrants and the mass influx of Muslims to the UK represent real and present dangers which fall within the Convention ' s definition of genocide?

If not, why not?

We look forward to their reply.

Mr. Mote has correctly understood that the current large scale immigration Britain is experiencing is not the result of something conveniently called Globalisation, it is deliberate policy aimed at dismantling British society and national identity and forms an essential Leninist plank for Communist world government.

Against such large scale immigration and anti-British policies and viewed as an obstacle to Europeanisation, the guaranteed preservation of British archives, which enshrine our identity and rights, becomes highly questionable.

We asked Dr. Pochin Sturge, honorary consultant anthropologist to SQA, to comment.

I suppose the principal effect of mass immigration is to undermine social cohesion. Islam in particular challenges the existing legal as well as religious and political status quo in the UK. In other societies, similar developments are taking place, this is not unique to our ancient culture. I must congratulate Alethea on including a video supportive of Islam in her reading list. Balance is of the essence and in a way the defining characteristic of a healthy society. However, I must point out one glaring error in Dr. Sultan's diatribe. She states the Jews are responsible for most of the world's inventions. According to a recent Japanese government survey, I quote several web sites which quote their findings:

In electronic computing, the biggest new industry to arise in the last half-century, British brainpower provided the ideas, foreign industry reaped the profits. And that's not only true of computing. The Japanese Ministry of Trade has recently worked out that of all the commercially viable inventions in the world since the Second World War, 50% have been British. The next most innovative country, the U.S.A., with five times Britain's population and vastly more wealth and resources, was only responsible for half the number of inventions - just 25% of the total. The Japanese, who have who have the world's second richest economy, only came up with a miserable 5% of the inventions. The Japanese Government study concluded that if British inventions had been put into production in Britain it would have added a stunning £156,000 million to Britain's Gross Domestic Product. With last year's GDP being £1,317,000 million, that would have made us 12% better off - or an extra £2,836per person or about £10,000 per family (source) and

A Japanese government report advised that since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, c1780, 70% of innovations and inventions sucessfully used commercially by Japan originated in Britain; 55% since 1945 originated in the UK. The British Department of Trade reckons that this continued inability to exploit our own superior technological intellect costs Britain £165 billion annually (source)
We thanked Dr. Sturge for his insights.

Further reading

Immigration Gumballs: video on the impact of immigration on the USA

MigrationWatchUK

Ashley Mote MEP's web site

Video against Islamisation feauring Dr. Wafa Sultan Clash of Civilizations ? Islam and the West

Video in favour of Islam featuring Faisal al-Qassem Islam. Wafa Sultan Refuted

Each has won a glorious grave - not that sepulchre of earth wherein they lie, but the living tomb of everlasting remembrance wherein their glory is enshrined. For the whole earth is the sepulchre of heroes. Monuments may rise and tablets be set upto them in their own land, but on far-off shores there is an abiding memorial that no pen or chisel has traced. It is graven not on stone or brass, but on the living hearts of humanity. Take these men for your example. Like them, remember that prosperity can only be for the free, that freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it.

Pericles' oration to the Athenian war dead

Rewriting History

2008-02-02T12:36:00.000Z

Members of SQA’s south east, eastern and north-east Euro Regions have been approached by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) to assist in the trialling of MLA London Euro Region’s Revisiting Archive Collections toolkit, part of a process of expanding the project outwards from London to the rest of the UK.

MLA informs us:

The Revisiting Archive Collections toolkit takes collection managers through the process of opening up their records to external scrutiny and comment and capturing new information and understanding in their core collection description and cataloguing systems. The purpose is to help archivists to attract and serve non-traditional audiences and people wanting to access the material from non-traditional perspectives.

Also:

Participating archives will be trained and supported to use the toolkit by a team of consultants with expertise in both archival cataloguing and description and in facilitating community participation.

This development almost certainly stems from recognition of the huge potential arising from the publication of electronic archival finding aids on the web. Online finding aids stand to benefit researchers who will be alerted to the existence of many relevant collections and documents for the first time. This all seems very harmless and indeed beneficial, but only when viewed from the standpoint of archivists unversed in current political trends.

To the Leninist however, the advent of online finding aids to historical source material, available alongside contemporary socio-political web sites through search engines such as Google, has prompted the appalling realisation that objective archival description of documentary evidence of the development of the world’s most influential state, England, and its empire, laws, customs, accountable government, rule of law, presumption of innocence, habeas corpus, etc., will undermine their surreptitious scheme for Communist world government. The MLA web site reveals some clues as to their real motives:

The Revisiting Archive Collections toolkit takes collection managers through the process of opening up their records for external scrutiny and comment and capturing new information and understanding in their core collection description and cataloguing systems. The purpose is to help archivists to attract and serve non-traditional audiences and people wanting to access the material from non-traditional perspectives.

It is at this point the whole devious plan is exposed. What the metropolitan elite are proposing is that archival descriptive lists are written or re-written on advice from persons who are not necessarily objective, qualified archivists, so as to conform to the Leninist world view. Based on our prior knowledge of the Malvine Project, which seeks to “harmonise” the archives of the EU member states alongside the accompanying dumbing down of history, we knew it wouldn’t be long before EU collaborators got to grips with the bread and butter work of archivists, descriptive listing, which clearly forms the first stage in access to and interpretation of archives.

As if it’s not good enough for qualified, professional archivists, who are already expertly trained in identifying and describing material of socio- historical value, to be effectively retrained on the job, archivists will now be suitably politically indoctrinated and politically re-educated by MLA commissars who are not identified at this stage and whose credentials therefore cannot be checked by the wider profession.

Academic research is already heavily funded by the EU and the BBC is now also being indirectly funded by the EU. The outcome will therefore be a seamless conveyer belt of carefully slanted archival description leading to approved historical research, interpretation and educational propaganda, both feeding into a biased media presentation of heritage, all issues SQA has warned of previously.

We asked Garth Bland, county archivist of Loamshire, to describe his office’s experience of working with MLA’s commissars.

The Duke of Wellington, saviour of Europe

We were visited by Jacinta Sprout-Davies * and the whole experience proved very traumatic. Jacinta criticised our descriptive lists as being reactionary, Fascist and politically incorrect. Staff were hurt and offended. Until Jacinta’s visit we were proud of our high standard of descriptive listing. To give you an example of how some of our descriptive lists had to change, I will compare our original description of a letter from the Duke of Wellington to Jacinta’s revised version.

Letter from Sir Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, Apsley House, London to Sir Lionel Scratchrace MP, Bloggsbridge, Loamshire, describing the Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815) and its consequences. Wellington describes Napoleon as a tyrant and ogre, the French as stinking of garlic and thanks God the peace of Europe has been assured for generations to come, the Code Napoleon denied imposition on England and the British Empire and its numerous good works preserved as a beacon of justice for all civilisation.

Following Jacinta’s revision, the description now reads:

Letter from Sir Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, Apsley House, London to Sir Lionel Scratchrace MP, Bloggsbridge, Loamshire, in which he makes racist and chauvinistic remarks about the French people, criticises Napoleon’s enlightened social and political theories and objects to the fulfilment of European Union, the harmonisation of legal systems, a single currency and imposition of post-democratic governance, instead favouring reactionary forms of government, populism disguised as democracy and the upholding of Anglo-Saxon world dominance.

I just can’t see what's wrong with our original description!
We thanked Garth for his contribution.

For a final view of the whole sorry business, we approached Benedict Crumplethorne, principal spokesman for SQA.

Obviously MLA is getting carried away with the EU's success in imposing the revived European constitution on member states even to the extent they are anticipating its formal implementation. The UK represents the biggest cultural and political threat to the European project, not just because our instincts are so anti-EU but because our institutions, traditions and cultural heritage are quite simply not European. We are British and identify much more with the Americans and Commonwealth, with which we should have a true free trade area instead. This is Big Brother entering the world of British archives for the first time. And they are only just warming up!

We thanked Benedict for his valuable insights.

[* Editor’s note: readers may recall Jacinta is Assistant Archivist at Norrey Record Office (Priscilla Dyke, county archivist). Jacinta is a qualified archivist and previously worked for the European Commission. She is a graduate in sociology, holds the Diploma in Advanced Political Correctness from the Institute of Political Correctness in London and during her student vacations obtained valuable experience of dealing with the general public at McDonald's]

Further reading

MLA Revisiting Archives Collections

MLA Guidance

MLA gauleiters in action

BBC Bias

The Fabian Society

Dumbing down history

Common Purpose

The Malvine Project

It wasn't worth creating a negative commotion with the British. I rewrote my text with the word federal replaced by communautaire, which means exactly the same thing.

Valery Giscard d'Estaing, Wall Street Journal Europe, 7 July 2003

It's Queer up North

2008-01-14T13:56:00.000Z

Rogue Employers Update

Our members continue to cast their eyes over job advertisements in the archives sector in order to help maintain professional standards.

The latest to come to our attention is that of County Archivist of County Durham, based at County Hall, Durham. The post is advertised at £28,919-£31,606 and is currently subject to a job evaluation exercise which means it could go down or up.

SQA believes the advertised level of remuneration is unsatisfactory. However, of even greater concern to us is the failure of Durham County Council to stipulate the postgraduate diploma in archive administration is an essential qualification.

Instead, they require a degree and a further degree or post-graduate qualification in archive administration. Thus, while Durham County Council is aware of the existence of the professional qualification, they recognise it as merely an option and will accept another postgraduate qualification instead. This is a disgraceful.

The unsatisfactoriness of the Durham County Council position is compounded by their requirement for the successful candidate to undertake to obtain the NVQ Level 4 in Management within 3 years of appointment. No similar stipulation is made as regards obtaining the University of Wales archives diploma or the University of Dundee MLitt in Archives and Records Management by distance learning.

We asked Benedict Crumplethorne, principal spokesman for SQA, for his observations on the Durham situation.

This is rather similar to developments we have observed elsewhere, e.g. Cambridgeshire. Increasingly, we are witnessing the downgrading of the senior professional role in repositories, with the highest professionally qualified staff operating at assistant archivist level. This cannot be conducive to promotion of or advocacy for an archives service beyond an archive service or within the community. It relegates the most experienced staff to a more junior level and prevents the correct level of influence from being exerted on policy makers.

We are certainly seeing the politically correct trend towards dumbing-down the management of highly specialised professions, with the emphasis instead being placed on management skills. This is a mistake of course as the management issues around archives are rather too specialist for pure manager types to grasp and develop. Employers are now beholden to the cult of managerialism, by which it is deemed all services and professions can be competently managed by any Tom, Dick or Harry.

We should also take into account the possibility that more senior departmental managers overseeing archive services such as County Durham’s are genuinely unaware of the range of skills involved in managing such a specialised operation.

A local government chief archivist is responsible for prioritising the listing and conservation of collections, ensuring their correct arrangement and documentation, observance of the relevant standards and compliance with professional ethics, guiding colleagues and researchers in the specialised use of archives and above all, perhaps, he is expected to be sufficiently professionally expert in palaeography and administrative history to be able to give the right quality of lead to his service especially when representing it to the wider community.

These skills are all the more important for an authority shortly to become unitary*, with added responsibilities for the archives of the former district councils, stemming from their separate functions. A record office serving an authority inheriting district level as well as county functions must become intimately acquainted with such functions. The skills of a chief archivist in such an environment will be tested. County record offices working in the two-tier system tend not to have a very close involvement in district council records and therefore have little or no knowledge of such records or district council functions. Hence our concern with administrative historical expertise and knowledge on the part of such a postholder.

In short, a local government chief archivist post is not suitable for a cardboard cut-out who merely boasts abstract management skills.

What really irks me however is that the job title is County Archivist. This gives rise to the expectation on the part of depositors, researchers, council colleagues, elected members of the council and the media that the postholder is a qualified archivist but in the event a non-qualified person is appointed, this amounts to a gross deception. This is a tremendous insult to the wider archives profession. We will continue to expose employers who take this line.

We thanked Benedict for his insights.

*Editor's note. Unitary authorities are being introduced as part of the process of dividing the UK into Euro Regions, by which groups of counties form a Euro Region, a group of unitary authorities a Sub-Region and a single unitary authority a Sub-Sub-Region, eventually to be controlled direct from Brussels. Traditional counties play no part in this system as they represent age old traditional local loyalties which present the EU with a diametrically opposed cultural threat.

Further reading

Durham Record Office

Nuts to us all

The Balkanisation of Britain

RegionalAssemblies.co.uk

Norman and Saxon by Rudyard Kipling

“MY SON,” said the Norman Baron, “I am dying, and you will be heir
To all the broad acres in England that William gave me for my share
When we conquered the Saxon at Hastings , and a nice little handful it is.
But before you go over to rule it I want you to understand this:—

“The Saxon is not like us Normans, His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, ‘This isn’t fair dealings,’ my son, leave the Saxon alone.

“You can horsewhip your Gascony archers, or torture your Picardy spears,
But don’t try that game on the Saxon; you’ll have the whole brood round your ears.
From the richest old Thane in the county to the poorest chained serf in the field,
They’ll be at you and on you like hornets, and, if you are wise, you will yield.

“But first you must master their language, their dialect, proverbs and songs.
Don’t trust any clerk to interpret when they come with the tale of their wrongs.
Let them know that you know what they’re saying; let them feel that you know what to say.
Yes, even when you want to go hunting, hear ’em out if it takes you all day.

“They’ll drink every hour of the daylight and poach every hour of the dark,
It’s the sport not the rabbits they’re after (we’ve plenty of game in the park).
Don’t hang them or cut off their fingers. That’s wasteful as well as unkind,
For a hard-bitten, South-country poacher makes the best man-at-arms you can find.

“Appear with your wife and the children at their weddings and funerals and feasts.
Be polite but not friendly to Bishops; be good to all poor parish priests.
Say ‘we,’ ‘us’ and ‘ours’ when you’re talking instead of ‘you fellows’ and ‘I.’
Don’t ride over seeds; keep your temper; and never you tell ’em a lie!”

Stress in Wales

2007-11-30T20:47:00.002Z

SQA turns its attention to Wales in this report, having previously focused on stress in Loamshire. It appears a former county archivist of Flintshire has been entangled in a dispute with his former employer, Flintshire County Council, in a spat of the kind we would normally associate with the benighted Garth Bland, county archivist of Loamshire.

According to Gareth Hughes writing in the North Wales Daily Post under the headline “Unfairly sacked...now he must wait for payout", Paul Sillitoe, county archivist of Flintshire, was dismissed by the county council in 2006 for gross misconduct.

Mr Sillitoe joined the council in 2003 after managing archives in Wolverhampton, Oldham and the Waterways Trust, but went off with work-related stress in 2004 after complaining about his workload. The dispute began after he returned to work.

Mr. Hughes informs us the dismissal followed an internal disciplinary tribunal at which allegations of bullying and harrassment by an administrative assistant, Ms Helen Davison were upheld. The bullying and harrassment is described by Mr. Hughes as having consisted of instructing the junior colleague to ask permission to leave the office even before going to the toilet.

Mr. Sillitoe admitted he was task-focused but explained telephones had to be answered and he needed to be kept informed as to Ms Davison’s whereabouts. Ms Davison found his style of management generally to be “rude and abrupt” although at one point Mr. Sillitoe appears to have been misled about the true extent of Ms Davison’s complaints.

Julia Lorkin

Mr. Sillitoe was dismissed the employ of Flintshire County Council for gross misconduct in March 2006 following a disciplinary hearing chaired by Julia Lorkin, Director of Corporate Strategy. In June 2007 an employment tribunal ruled Mr. Sillitoe had been dismissed unfairly. A subsequent tribunal took place on 23 November 2007 to consider compensation for Mr. Sillitoe but reserved its judgement.

The tribunal chairman, Mary Cocks, is damning in her findings. She said it was right for allegations of bullying to be taken seriously and fully investigated but because of the potential consequences for the employee the conclusions had to be based on clear findings from the evidence.

“The respondent in this case fully investigated but then went on to draw conclusions about the seriousness of the claimant’s conduct which could not be sustained.....by the evidence,” she stated.

In the interim Mr. Sillitoe had tried to earn a living as a proof-reader and editor and was now fortunate, he said, to have been awarded funding to study at Liverpool University for a doctorate in archive studies.

We asked Garth Bland to comment.

Sadly, many local government disciplinary hearings involve an over-reaction, either motivated by personality issues or political correctness. I have even known panel chairmen falsify the minutes of disciplinary proceedings and meet with complainants outside the official disciplinary procedure to do a stitch up. I am not saying this occurred in this instance, however.

I am curious to know whether at any point expert witnesses from the National Archives’ National Advisory Services, the Association of Chief Archivists in Local Government or the Society of Archivists [sic] were called upon to give evidence in Mr. Sillitoe’s favour, at either the disciplinary hearing or the tribunals.

The issue of staff cover is important and might be overlooked by the layman. Public searchooms, the areas in record offices where archival material is consulted, must be supervised continuously to ensure documents are not stolen. The documents, besides being unique documentary heritage, are someone's property, either the council's or a private owner's. When in use by the researching public ducuments are sadly at risk of theft by a minority of unscrupulous autograph, stamp, postmark or document collectors. Additionally, the storage area or strongroom from which documents are produced into the public searchroom needs to be guarded against unauthorised access. The recent Data Protection Act has reinforced this need. Record offices hold sensitive information as well as historically or financially valuable records.

Sadly disciplinary hearings seem to not conform to the same Common Law principles as tribunals and full-blown court cases, rather in the same way many court summonses disallow representation for defendants. This is bound to mean Common Law principles such as presumption of innocence are ridden over roughshod. The consequence is that employees must sometimes resort to employment tribunals.

We should also give some attention to what constitutes “gross misconduct”. There is an accepted hierarchy of disciplinary misdemeanours, misdemeanour, misconduct and gross misconduct. Moreover, local authorities’ personnel or human resources staff should follow the guidelines laid down by the National Joint Council for Local Government Services in their Green Book, but you would be surprised how widely it is interpreted. Usually gross misconduct is reserved for alleged serious criminal offences such as rape, assault, theft and criminal damage. It is alarming to discover that a line manager’s verbal comments can be construed as serious enough to warrant dismissal.

We asked Garth to say a little more about the stress in managing a local government record office.

I can certainly sympathise with a fellow county archivist who has to deal with an excessive workload. Such a workload stems from the supposed non-statutory status of local government archive services, which permits local authorities to under-staff and under-fund their archive services. This means staff have to be highly motivated and work under-grade in order to make up for service deficiencies. Quite often also, in contravention of the National Archives’ Standard for Record Repositories, the chief archivist of a repository has no access to the council’s governing body. This can easily lead to inter-service rivalry and being briefed against. We should remember that without archives legislation, cultural philistines in local authorities can run amock with archives services.

We should bear in mind that archives stock is always increasing through additional deposits, creating an increasing ratio between unlisted collections and available archives staff. Many authorities also operate modern records services to internal clients. Thanks to TV series such as Who Do You Think You Are, many offices have seen an increase in researcher numbers, often attributable to novices taking up family history and placing extra workload on staff. This creates an increasing ratio between public and staff. Against this background we have set response times for answering telephone calls, compliance with government initiatives, CIPFA and TNA questionnaires, Freedom of Information requests and all the usual administrative workload associated with a local government service of any kind.

It is against this background of operating a direct public service at a typical local authority record office that staff must deal with the general public, which at times can be vexing, although this shouldn't be the case. Archivists are especially at risk of suffering psycho-social stress.

Finally, I am glad Mr. Sillitoe’s reputation has been salvaged and wish him well for the future.

We thanked Garth for his contribution.

Further reading

Tips for Employers
Stress in Loamshire
Career Guidance
The strange case of Andrew Allerton

Europe's power is easy to miss. Like an 'invisible hand', it operates through the shell of traditional structures. The British House of Commons, the law courts are still here, but they have all become agents of the European Union implementing European law. This is no accident. By creating common standards that are implemented through national institutions, Europe can take over countries without necessarily becoming a target for hostility.

(Mark Leonard of the Centre for European Reform in Europe's Transformative Power, Centre for European Reform, Bulletin 40, February/March 2005.)

Food for thought

2007-11-24T12:12:00.000Z

Our regular readers by now will be familiar with SQA's hatred of blockbuster exhibitions. Of course we refer to our previous blog Is Nothing Sacred?

We are pleased to report on a sequel to the first story, which concentrated on the British Library's exhibition Sacred.

Jonathan Jones

This time the exhibition is Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, mounted at the British Museum. Jonathan Jones dismembers it in an article entitled Tomb Raiders in The Guardian of 15 November 2007.

It is refreshing to note our national institutions' blockbuster exhibitions are establishing such a critical following. However, there is something else that catches our eye in the article.

Jones states:

It may be that you live in dread of your child growing up to be an archaeologist, stuck in an underpaid job at a local museum surrounded by dusty pots. If that's your nightmare, then by all means take your children to see this exhibition. It will put them off Egyptology - and may put them off history, art and the entire education system.

We at SQA find this most amusing. Of course we see a parallel straight away between archaeology and museum curatorship on the one hand and archives on the other. For dusty pots, read dusty parchments. For local museum, read local archives. Everything else is the same including and especially the pay.

While some archival bodies attempt to raise the profile of archives, few including the rival Society of Archivists [sic] seriously attempt to raise the profile and status of archives as a true professional elite worthy of practitioners who have spent at least four years at universities. For graduates holding a postgraduate diploma in archives administration, the Society of Archivists recommends a starting salary of £20,895. The average reader and many graduates may think this is adequate. The catch is, salaries and career progression mean many archivists remain on little above this figure for most of their career. The post recently vacated by the long serving, experienced and respected Elizabeth Silverthorne, Archivist of Bromley Borough Council, was advertised at £25,000, a figure that devalues the employer as well as the profession.

Sensing some deep social malaise must be at the heart of this problem, we asked Dr. Pochin Sturge, consultant anthropologist to SQA and an eminent Darwinian, to offer an explanation of the underpaid role of the archivist in society.

The position is relatively simple (oh, and may I say how delighted I am to be called upon occasionally to comment on what is a most intriguing profession, whose members' behaviour is most worthy of anthropological investigation. And so close to home as well; I am more used to investigating the culture of Alpine and Mediterranean Europeans, but I digress.....) you are caught in what my students have flatteringly called the Sturgian Cycle.

What is the Sturgian Cycle you ask? The Sturgian Cycle theory is founded upon the very unpopular premise that humans are by nature cannibalistic. In our natural state, without a modern economy and such fragile and controversial social assets as out of town shopping centres, we are perilously vulnerable to events such as total war and natural disasters such as earthquake, inundation, famine and drought. In consequence of such extreme circumstances many would inevitably be reduced to cannibalism.

Brazilian cannibals tucking in

Now here lies the rub. In our modern society in which we are encouraged to take the view the sexes are equal, it is hard to grasp how society might exist in the conditions I describe. However, this is not a matter for speculation as ancient societies and early anthropologists have left sufficient record. Indeed, I refer among others to the work of that great man Charles Darwin who during the voyage of the Beagle in the 1830s was privileged to meet and question the cannibals of Tierra del Fuego who for much of the time merely subsisted. In their society, there was little discretion and no lottery when it came to deciding who should be eaten. Oh no, you see, they had a harsh method enforced by need. This was to eat only the women, who were considered expendable at such times. The men and boys were considered essential for hunting; even the dogs were spared for the same reason. And no doubt cannibals the world over from the dawn of time have conformed to this natural law. The only exception to this I should say is ritualistic cannibalism which however is not true cannibalism and merely stems from it as society takes steps towards a slightly more advanced stage.

HMS Beagle in Tierra del Fuego

Now my theory proceeds thus. Society, even modern society, must in nature's view, always position itself for disaster and it is then the tendency towards cannibalism emerges. Lying not so far below the surface as to discourage our social institutions from fully accepting women into equal roles, the cannibalistic tendency dictates a re-emergence of the function of the female as a food source.

Do you see the connection? Over the generations women's social and economic status has been decided by this largely unknown and unrecognised instinct or imperative. So you see, if a profession is underpaid, those persons most likely to be eaten in times of famine will fill it, in other words women. The solution is to encourage those members of society most likely not to be eaten in times of natural or man-made disaster to join the profession by raising salaries, in other words men. I should add your profession is not alone, the same can be said of primary school teachers.

I trust my contribution has been acceptable.

Indeed is has been and we thanked Pochin.

Further reading

Lancashire girl made into kebabs

Career Guidance

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

- Joseph Goebbels

Anarchy in the Archives

2007-11-22T22:06:00.000Z

It's official. Archives are now a hotbed of anarchy, revolutionism and terrorism. Hard to believe?

The Daily Telegraph (15 November 2007) reports the government is to launch a hearts and minds campaign to root out terrorist extremism. It is not clear quite who the target audience is (whose minds? whose hearts?) although we are informed the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) is to agree a common approach to inflammatory and extremist material held in or propagated by museums, libraries and archives, no doubt to be implemented through its gauleiters in the Euro Regions.

We observe that normally hearts and minds operations are aimed at indigenous populations, for example the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, Chinese and Malays during the Emergency in Malaya, Afghans since 2001 and the Iraqis since 2003. If this new campaign nearer to home is true to form, the indigenous British population will bear the brunt of this propaganda and censorship, even to the extent the government is prepared to politicise archives. This is reminiscent of developments in Iraq, where the Iraqi National Archives were reportedly ransacked with US and British collusion in order to impoverish indigenous cultural evidence and thereby create a thirst for the occupiers' agenda.

So it seems the government is not going to stop at identifying printed matter in pursuing its Leninist inspired EU agenda. This time, unusually in the history of political paranoia and fear of criticism and the written word, archives have been identified as a threat, perhaps an unintended consequence of the Archives Awareness Campaign whose theme this year ironically is Freedom and Liberty.

It is rather trite to say SQA is aware of the dangers of religious hatred and racism. However, we are clever enough to understand that first of all the government's policy is not concerned with improving relations between religions and secondly that what constitutes inflammatory and extremist material is a matter of interpretation and political context. The object is to gain ever more control over the unwashed masses, many of whom still cling to inconvenient ideas of accountable government.

We asked Benedict Crumplethorne, principal spokesman of SQA to discourse on this thorny subject.

Italian President, Giorgio Napolitano, seen here with HM The Queen. He has described critics of the EU as terrorists.

It is possible to form a pretty shrewd idea of the way the wind is blowing thanks to our subjugation to EU law and the European Arrest Warrant. Under EU law terrorists include eco-warriors, protesters and anarchists. Furthermore, the Italian President, Giorgio Napolitano has stated
those who are anti EU are terrorists.....It is psychological terrorism to suggest the spectre of a European superstate
(quoted by the Daily Express Monday June 18, 2007)

We also know how the EU deals with whistleblowers and its critics from the experience of Bernard Connolly and Marta Andreasen.

Many of us can remember the decades of IRA terrorism and how lax the UK government was in its response. We now face a miniscule threat from Muslim extremists by comparison but we are being indoctrinated to believe such a small threat justifies massive suppression of civil liberties, won over centuries. It is clear that what SQA has foretold over the last three years is coming true: archives as evidence of accountable government are to be hidden, destroyed, discouraged, removed from the National Curriculum, dumbed-down or re-interpreted.

Prof. David Coleman

The government is clearly anticipating what Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali, Pakistani-born Bishop of Rochester believes, that in several decades England and the UK will have ceased to Christian or Protestant. Indeed, according to Professor David Coleman of MigrationWatchUK, by 2050 1/3 of the UK's population will be non-white. Most of this non-white section of the population will be Muslim. By around the same time, Holland may be mainly Muslim. One can understand why many people in the UK and the rest of the EU fear the Islamisation of the UK and Europe. The Israelis share this concern.

For archives, the implication is that the documentary heritage of a mainly indigenous population will either become irrelevant or endangered. You see, with such a burgeoning Muslim population, we will see renewed and more effective calls for the introduction of Sharia Law. Not only that, but the government of the day, if the present one is anything to go by, will be even more drastic in its policies towards indigenous thought and culture.

I can think of several archives that might already be at risk: Keele, the International Institute of Social History and University College London. These no doubt will soon reverberate to the jackboot of the EU thought police.

Now if you will excuse me, I must dash in case the EUSSR thought police arrest me for spreading anti-EU smears.

We thanked Benedict for his contribution.

Further reading

Report by 24 Hour Museum

Our previous blog on Archives and the Terrorist

Sources for anarchist history on the web MathabaNet

The Natives are Revolting

2007-11-08T13:27:00.000Z

SQA welcomes the United Nations General Assembly's adoption of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on 7 September 2007.

At last we feel the archival heritage of the British and English peoples have a safeguard against the tyranny of the European Union and the consequential cultural impact of EU membership, a UK government dominated by Scots, enforced mass immigration and metrification.

Typical indigenous inhabitants of Britain

The Declaration contains several clauses useful to the British and English resistance movements. Of particular interest and relevance is Article 8:

1. Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their culture.
2. States shall provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for:
(a) Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities;
(b) Any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources;
(c) Any form of forced population transfer which has the aim or effect of violating or undermining any of their rights;
(d) Any form of forced assimilation or integration;
(e) Any form of propaganda designed to promote or incite racial or ethnic discrimination directed against them.

We take "states" to mean either the UK or the EU, the latter gradually acquiring sovereignty in all areas of state with UK defence and foreign policy set to follow within the next ten years according to recent EU statements.

Forced cultural assimilation in the form of the one-sided case for a common European heritage, metrification and the forced population transfer of EU and non-EU migrants into the UK especially the south east England are governmental and supra-national governmental actions bringing the UK government and EU into conflict with the Declaration. England is now the only part of the UK under direct UK government rule.

Article 9 evokes memories of the Metric Martyrs, convicted under still binding UK legislation despite European Commission statements that they do not expect English customary weights and measures to be suppressed:

Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right to belong to an indigenous community or nation, in accordance with the traditions and customs of the community or nation concerned. No discrimination of any kind may arise from the exercise of such a right.

Leading on from the Metric Martyrs' case in which EU was held to supersede UK law, we feel UK statute law and Common law are also upheld by the Declaration, article 27 of which states:

States shall establish and implement, in conjunction with indigenous peoples concerned, a fair, independent, impartial, open and transparent process, giving due recognition to indigenous peoples’ laws, traditions, customs and land tenure systems.

Article 11, clause 1 clearly includes archival heritage and weights and measures in its purview:

Indigenous peoples have the right to practise and revitalize their cultural traditions and customs. This includes the right to maintain, protect and develop the past, present and future manifestations of their cultures, such as archaeological and historical sites, artefacts, designs, ceremonies, technologies and visual and performing arts and literature.

Article 12, clause 1 seems also to protect indegenous weights and measures:

Indigenous peoples have the right to manifest, practice, develop and teach their spiritual and religious traditions, customs and ceremonies; the right to maintain, protect, and have access in privacy to their religious and cultural sites; the right to the use and control of their ceremonial objects; and the right to the repatriation of their human remains.

Article 13, clause is the most potentially useful to resisters:

Indigenous peoples have the right to revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future generations their histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems and literatures, and to designate and retain their own names for communities, places and persons.

Article 31 continues the theme of indigenous people being able to safeguard their culture:

Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies and cultures...They also have the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their intellectual property over such cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions.

We asked Benedict Crumplethorne, principal spokesman of SQA, to comment.

I couldn't be more delighted. This declaration is a refreshing development in the battle against political correctness and I look forward to it being used in favour of the English and British peoples in their campaign for cultural survival, in particular in defence of archivists who oppose anachronistic metric units in archival description.

We also invited Dr. Pochin Sturge, founder of the Institute for the Study of Mass Social and Foreign Behaviour (STUMSFOB) at Wigston Magna, Leicestershire, consultant anthropologist to SQA, to give his views.

Like Benedict, I am delighted. I have no doubt in anthropological terms the English and British qualify as indigenous peoples and are therefore covered by the new declaration. We should be most grateful to the UK government for supporting it. The genetic record indicates the non-immigrant portion of the UK's population is ancient indeed. Even the English are largely descended from the ancient British but as the people who have given their name to England, the Mother of Parliaments, the English are doubly assured their status as an indigenous people.

No doubt those who framed the Declaration had in mind such peoples as the Australian Aborigines, American Indians, Pygmies, the headhunters of Borneo, Montagnards of Vietnam and Maoris of New Zealand. This is interesting thinking but it shows the limitations of the mindset of the New World and post-colonial countries whose intellectual elite are inclined to think of indigenous peoples as being those in former white peoples' colonies. This is therefore a typical illustration of the way in which English and British history tends to confound foreigners.

The distinction between indigenous Britons and immigrants is not only highlighted by current mass immigration but by the tendency for second and third generation immigrants to apply for the citizenship of their forebears' country of origin, which rather indicates how they view themselves. Impliedly, the Declaration has created a most useful way of differentiating indigenous Britons from immigrants, just at a time when our rulers are obsessed with integration. There appears to be a conflict between Foreign Office and Home Office aspirations here, or at least in the legal advice they are receiving.

As to race, well, a people in anthropological terms is not necessarily a race so we do not have to prove we are a race apart, merely that we are anciently settled here "time out of mind" as it says in your musty old charters, hey, wot!

We thanked Benedict and Pochin for their contributions.

Further reading

International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs: text of Declaration

Save our Cultural Heritage

A common cultural heritage?

A figment of our imagination

There are some in this country who fear that in going into Europe we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty. These fears, I need hardly say, are completely unjustified

(Edward Heath, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1973)

Is nothing sacred?

2007-09-22T17:46:00.001+01:00

Senior members of SQA had been looking forward to a quiet time of year. Unfortunately, they had established this expectation without taking into account the activities of the society’s energetic conservation spokesman, Ellison Millinocket. Ellison had been alerted to a cause for concern in one of our great national institutions.

Unbeknown to the rest of us, he had taken the train from Taunton to London one sunny day in early September to visit the Sacred exhibition at the British Library. And what a tale of woe he brought back to the committee.

A sacred Muslim manuscript

He explained now horrified he had been at the scrummage in the exhibition gallery as people elbowed each other out of the way, obscured interpretation panels by leaning on them (in apparent obliviousness to the presence of other visitors) and stood or leaned in the way of the exhibits. As for the exhibits, some had curled in increased humidity, and light levels were so low (to prevent UV and lux damage rather than create ambience we assume) that it was often impossible to read the interpretation panels, let alone appreciate the exhibits.

On top of this Ellison was spitting blood at the British Library’s practice of using the new chronological terms BCE (Before Common Era) instead of BC (Before Christ) and CE (Common Era) instead of AD (Anno Domini) in interpretation panels.

We asked Benedict Crumplethorne, principal spokesman of SQA, to comment on this practice.

Well I’m afraid it would have Cheney turning in his grave. For an institution committed to preserving continuity in the historical record and a national institution housing documentary as well as printed heritage, they seem instead to be committed to causing confusion and undermining the integrity of British archival chronology. And as for sacred, you have to be joking. Is taking Christ out of the dating system sacred? Would a Muslim or Jewish museum or library unilaterally convert exclusively to the Christian dating system? Of course not, so much for what we have in common then. It’ll be public beheadings in Trafalgar Square next!

Apart from anything else, the new acronyms use exactly the same dating system as before, the Gregorian Calendar, which rather makes the new system look like hypocritical nonsense. A Muslim or Jew will be just as aware of the Christian basis of the new dating system as previously. The BL is making a fool of itself. And by the way isn’t the BL meant to be British? Don’t foreigners come to Britain to experience or even exploit Britishness? The historical context of our great collections is being deliberately hidden.

Garth Bland, County Archivist of Loamshire fuelled the debate by drawing to our attention Alasdair Palmer’s article entitled The greatest art should not be moving in the Sunday Telegraph of 16 September 2007. In the article Palmer describes a litany of damaged art works and objects. In respect of visitors enjoying exhibits, he shares Ellison’s view, literally. If you went to the Caravaggio exhibition at the National Gallery, or the exhibition of Michelangelo’s drawings at the British Museum, your most potent memory is probably not of the glorious masterpieces on show. It is of being pushed and shoved, and of seeing more of the back of people’s heads than works of art.

Palmer is only scratching at the surface. Little does he know that our heritage is damaged in being exhibited in house, let alone when transported between museums, libraries, galleries and archives. It is axiomatic in the archives profession that any handling of archival material whatsoever results in mechanical wear and tear to documents. Archivists and archival conservators frequently have to deal with crumbling paper, eroded pigment, loose bindings, loose pages and this is without seeing fibre damage under a microscope. This is the reason we microfilm or scan popular collections of series of records. I regret that sooner or later society must grasp the nettle and accept that precious objects, art works, printed books and manuscripts must not be exhibited at all. We must turn our attention to a wholly digital future.

And so we have come full circle! No exhibitions, no squalid fighting for elbow room, no obscured interpretation panels and no curling parchment membranes!

Finally, we asked Dr. J. Pochin Sturge of the Institute for the Study of Mass Social and Foreign Behaviour (STUMSFOB) at Wigston Magna, Leicestershire, consultant anthropologist to SQA, for his explanation of the behaviour witnessed by Ellison and Palmer at the National Gallery, British Museum and British Library.

Palmer’s situation is perhaps the most pertinent as he clearly represents several perspectives rolled into one, those of indigenous Briton, the erudite intellectual desirous of appreciating fine art works, manuscripts, objects and printed books and the taxpayer whom one assumes is contributing to these institutions’ funding under the unmistakenly British misapprehension he can hold Parliament or the institutions it funds to account. For Ellison and Benedict, it is more a matter of professional hypocrisy, not understood by journalists and dilettantes. Allow me to concentrate on the points of mass behavioural interest.

Crucially, we have to analyse the profile of visitors to our national institutions. We find they tend to be foreign and lacking in British behavioural norms which probably contributes to the experience described by Palmer. It is indeed unfortunate these are substantially the same individuals for which exhibitions and the new dating system cater. In the mind of the foreigner we find a state of impulsion to identify with, remember and convey what they perceive as being British (and therefore better) in order to become British or be improved in some way by allowing something that could almost be perceived as a quasi-religious to be brushed off onto them. This attitude of course leads to a sort of miasma descending upon exhibition galleries in which visitors undergo a transition to a sort of trance culminating in total loss of sensory awareness of the presence of other human forms or politically distorted interpretational material. I am glad you have drawn this interesting focus of mass behaviour to my attention.

We thanked Ellison, Benedict, Garth and Pochin for their contributions.

P.C. scholars take Christ out of B.C. click here

Common Purpose

2007-09-17T22:27:00.001+01:00

In previous blogs we have railed at numerous fifth columnists, traitors and collaborationists working towards the goal of subjugating Britain to the European Union in the realm of cultural heritage.

These organisations and individuals include John Prescott, the Fabian Society, regional bodies, national government bodies including QUANGOs and of course the EU itself. However, one organisation or movement to have evaded our attention so far is Common Purpose, founded by Julia Middleton, Head of Personnel under John Prescott, former Deputy Prime Minister.

Julia Middleton

The Common Purpose web site is interesting in that it stresses the importance of its graduates networking with each other and cutting across traditional disciplinary boundaries. CP states we develop leaders who can lead beyond their authority, beyond their direct circle of control. The organisation is a charity and (unavoidably one would have thought) proclaims political neutrality. The closeness of Julia Middleton to New Labour however and their known client base indicate a socialist and collectivist agenda.

Also stressed on the web site is the relevance to democracy of the organisation’s leadership programmes. This is highly significant because many totalitarian states have termed themselves democracies, notably China and East Germany. The United Kingdom is of course a democracy but this is only partly true. It is more specifically a parliamentary democracy and the distinction is important. In a parliamentary democracy, the people hold their government to account, through a democratically elected parliament.

Peter Mandelson

In this regard we begin to see some cause for concern straight away, in that Common Purpose does not respect democracy, it respects authority. In her book Beyond Authority, Middleton argues for a leadership style that enables [Common Purpose graduates] to lead beyond the traditional boundaries and constraints of their organizations. This of course means beyond the constraints of democratic accountability, whether at local or national level. As Peter Mandelson, former Communist and European Commissioner put it in March 1998

it may be that the era of pure representative democracy is slowly coming to an end

We have therefore arrived at the truth: Common Purpose is concerned with something beyond democracy. It is concerned with the so-called post-democratic society and supranational government. In short, Common Purpose is a front for the European Union and the next major step towards Communist world rule. The fact the common purpose of Common Purpose is not actually stated anywhere by the organisation is confirmation of this. It is implied only and only for the elite.

The style of Common Purpose does not actually promote engagement, as the following speech made by Middleton to the South West Regional Development Authority confirms

The other day I was in a meeting in Belfast, I have no idea how I ended up in this meeting. It was a really wonderful meeting with about fifteen people there. When we were really getting going there was this little jerk in the corner, who kept piping out “What is your legitimacy?” and we all said “just shut up” and we kept on going.

She goes on to say

I believe passionately in the definition of civil society of Mr Mandela, who says that civil society is anyone who stands up. Anybody who stops crouching down and stops trying to be taller than everybody else and standing out and who is too embarrassed to be taller than anybody else and actually civil society are anyone who actually stands up and makes things happen.

Presumably this doesn't apply to the jerk!

Critics of Common Purpose are gaining in numbers and concern is spreading that CP is a means of fraud as well as Europhile indoctrination of persons identified as suitable for the leadership of post-democratic society. CP has been compared to the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London (of which it may be a front) and whose language is similarly jargonistic and luciferian (multi-organisational working, cross-boundary working and the global-national-local interface each raise their own set of organisational dynamics which must be surfaced and worked with if collaboration is to be effective. They also raise particular challenges for leadership (and followership). The Institute's approaches to organisational consultancy and leadership development, based on organisational theory and systems psychodynamics are particularly appropriate for helping organisations to address these complex issues) and whose intervention in the public sector appears to share the same objectives.

Other organisational comparisons can be made with the Fabian Society and European Movement, originally funded by the CIA

We asked Benedict Crumplethorne, SQA’s principal spokesman, to comment.

We are actively compiling a list of CP graduates working in the archives and heritage sectors. I am particularly concerned they are influencing the outcome of Designation Status applications and it goes without saying they have plenty of potential for misappropriating public funds in the regional bodies. The South West Euro Region seems to be heavily infiltrated and Sue Underwood, Chief Executive of the North East Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (NEMLAC) is a graduate.

We can take some satisfaction that they are probably mostly unwitting footsloggers for communist world rule. Lenin conceived that there would be different tiers of collaborators worldwide, one tier of which he described as useful idiots, those whose full knowledge of the Communist stratagem was limited but who at least would inadvertently help advance the cause.

We thanked Benedict for his contribution. Ellison Millinocket, SQA spokesman for the South West Euro Region, was too irate to comment.

A sorry tale of Common Purpose networking against true grassroots heritage initiatives in Plymouth is told by Dr. Brian Gerrish on YouTube.

Further reading.

Video: a talk on CP by Brian Gerrish, chaired by Roger Helmer MEP The Public Defender

Shoot out

Designation status

Eutruth

CP takeover of Bradford

Cremation of Care

An interesting sequel

2007-06-18T13:43:00.000+01:00

Our longstanding readers may recall we expressed anxiety about the poor security lying behind the publication of government documents online from our previous blog Hidden Truths. We have pleasure in reporting on a strange new twist to the tale, an accusation that an eminent scientist has been murdered and one which also overlaps with another of our concerns, resistance to compulsory metrication.

Dr. David Kelly

Shocking new details about the death of Dr David Kelly have emerged on the Alex Jones radio show broadcast from Austin, Texas. Kelly was one of the most respected microbiologists in the UK and senior arms inspector in Iraq. Exclusively, in a lengthy interview with Jones, Michael Shrimpton, a leading British barrister, revealed that sources within MI5 and MI6 are `furious' that Kelly was murdered, it is argued, because he was such an effective source for the BBC in exposing UK and US government lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Michael Shrimpton

Many readers will be familiar with Michael Shrimpton as the lawyer who defended the Metric Martyrs and brought to the world's attention the new preposterous, Europhile concept of a hierarchy of Acts of Parliament enunciated by Mr. Justice Laws on the instructions of EU lawyers. Whereas in case law in the past when new legislation conflicted with old, the more recent statute was considered to outrank the older statute on the basis it represented Parliament's most recently expressed will, now we are led to believe, earlier legislation outranks later if it is classed as Constitutional. Thus the Metric Martyrs could be convicted under the European Communities Act 1972 even though it preceded the more recent Weights and Measures Act 1988 which permitted their actions. Constitutional history had been made.

Shrimpton spoke in depth about the details of Kelly's murder on 17 July 2003, offering information subsequently withheld by the British press.

With apparent backing from the organisations whose members he claims to speak for, Shrimpton presented their view that Dr Kelly had been murdered by a team of assassins and the charade of an apparent suicide was then played out to cover this up.

Speaking with impeccable credentials, including contributions to the Journal for International Security Affairs and having previously given a closed-doors confidential briefing to the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Shrimpton exploded the much-reported myth that Dr Kelly had taken his own life.

He spoke of the probable method of Kelly's death, the group which most likely carried out the assassination, who arranged it and finally where the responsibility lies. Additionally, he explained the political context and motive for Kelly's murder.

David Kelly went missing on 17 July 2003 and was found dead on 18th July. In the previous days, Kelly had testified before Parliament's Foreign Affairs Select Committee that he was not the source of a BBC story which had accused the Government of making false claims about Iraq's WMD. When Kelly's body was found, the British press quickly reported it as a suicide, though several analysts had their doubts.

On Jones' show, Shrimpton explained how he had learned that David Kelly was the BBC's source before the BBC disclosed this fact. He went on to explain that his source from within the intelligence community knew David Kelly personally, and did not believe that he had committed suicide. After making their own enquiries, says Shrimpton, this source determined that Dr Kelly had not committed suicide, but rather had been assassinated.

Apparently at ease to discuss these explosive disclosures, Shrimpton explained that there was advance knowledge of Kelly's death in Whitehall, but that the deed itself was most likely carried out by the French external security organisation, DGSE. There was no indication that anybody in MI5 or MI6 had been involved. He went further by suggesting that the hit squad itself was composed of Iraqis from the former regime's Mukhabarat intelligence organisation, recruited from Damascus with the help of Syria's own intelligence apparatus. They were apparently then flown into Corsica, seven days prior to the murder. He doubts that any of the hit-squad are still alive.

Officially, Kelly's body was said to have been found in a copse, in a wood, but the forensic tents were set up in the adjacent field, suggesting, says Shrimpton, that the body was found in the field. This has not been explained to his satisfaction.

The incision in Kelly's wrist was probably to conceal the injection of both Dextroprypoxythene, the active ingredient in Co-Proxamol, and Succinylcholine, a muscle relaxant, rather than as evidence of his bleeding to death, as highlighted by a group of six doctors in letters published in the British press. Shrimpton further agreed with the doctors by pointing out that Kelly only had one Co-Proxamol tablet in his body and that this was not sufficient to kill him.

According to Shrimpton, Kelly was murdered because he had been talking to the press and there was a fear of what else he might discuss with journalists. Furthermore, Kelly was due to return to Iraq and may have learned fresh information on that trip which Whitehall could not afford to trust him with.

Shrimpton's appearance on Jones' show gave him the first public opportunity to bring forward his information, since the story has been effectively censored by the British Press, who according to Shrimpton are concerned about losing the pro-Euro Tony Blair as Prime Minister were they to publish details of Kelly's assassination. Blair's departure, he says, could threaten Britain's proposed adoption of the Euro as the national currency.

Whilst this story begins to circulate in the USA, the coverage in the UK may well remain nil, whilst maneuvering behind the scenes attempts to pre-empt Shrimpton's accusation of government-sanctioned murder of one of its own operatives.

[Kelly was a former Porton Down scientist, a former UNSCOM arms inspector in Iraq, and latterly an adviser to the Ministry of Defence's Director of counter-proliferation and arms control. The Ministry of Defence paid his salary in that capacity but the Foreign Office in turn reimbursed the MoD.]

Infowars recording of Shrimpton's interview

Infowars transcript of Shrimpton's interview

ThoughtCrimeNews

Does history repeat itself?

2007-06-17T21:52:00.000+01:00

We couldn't resist bringing this story from the pen of Sorcha Faal to our reader's attention, especially in view of SQA's obstinate resistance to EU tyranny. We leave judgment to you.

Daughter of Adolph Hitler Vows to Complete European Union

It is with troubling concern that we report today that the Western Nations have announced this week that the ancient German city of Meerholz, Germany has now become the ‘Heart’ of the European Union with the inclusion of the former Soviet block nations of Bulgaria and Romania.

Frederick Barbarossa

The symbolism of this ancient citadel, founded in 1170 by the German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (who was also crowned the Holy Roman Emperor in 1155, and who has been known throughout history as Barbarossa) now being the ‘Heart’ of Europe cannot be lost upon our World of today, particularly when viewed in the light of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s vow today to unite all of Europe under one single constitution, which in effect would wipe out the National Sovereignty of all the countries in the European Union.

Angela Merkel

This vow being made by Angela Merkel to unite the European Continent under one flag cannot be ignored, especially when viewed in the light of still secret, but ‘obtainable’, Soviet KGB archive files which present a terrifying portrait of the present German Chancellor as being the daughter of the former German Nazi Leader, Adolf Hitler.

Adolf Hitler

Though said to be born on July 17, 1954 in the former Soviet controlled German Democratic Republic (East Germany), Angela Merkel’s Stasi GDR file (currently still held in the Soviet KGB archives) states that she was instead born on April 20, 1954, the birth date of her ‘true’ father, Adolph Hitler who was born on April 20, 1889.

The means of Angela Merkel’s birth, as detailed in these documents, was based upon the research of the German Doctor Carl Clauberg, and though classified as one of the worst Nazi ‘Angel of Death’ doctors, and convicted by the Soviet Courts as being a ‘war criminal’, was nevertheless freed by the Soviets as he was recognized as being the ‘Father’ of artificial insemination.

According to these reports, Doctor Clauberg was released by the Soviets after serving only seven years of his sentence in return for turning over to the KGB his hidden files on his Nazi artificial insemination experiments and, more horrifically, the frozen sperm of the former Nazi Dictator, Adolf Hitler.

Upon their receipt of the Nazi files on artificial insemination, along with Hitler’s frozen sperm, the Soviet Politicheskoye Buro (Politburo) authorized the experiments to ‘resurrect’, ‘if possible’, a child bearing the ‘genetic markers’ of Adolph Hitler.

Eva Braun

Doctor Clauberg then brought to the GDR (Communist East Germany) the wife of Adolph Hitler, Eva Braun's, youngest, and most devoted to the Third Reich, sister, Gretl to be the ‘surrogate’ mother for the intended offspring of the Hitler’s frozen sperm. It was ‘reasoned’ that the combining of the genes between Hitler’s sperm and Eva Braun’s closest family would produce for the Soviets a ‘near match’ of what a child of Hitler and Eva Braun would have been, should one have been born.

Eva and Gretl

Upon the birth of Angela Merkel in 1954 it was ‘agreed upon’ by the Soviets, Americans and the Vatican, that she would be ‘placed’ under the ‘control’ of the Catholic Church through its ‘connections’ with the GDR Lutheran Church, and whom she was in fact placed with. Doctor Clauberg, after the birth of Hitler’s Daughter, and upon his return to West Germany was promptly imprisoned and then murdered almost two years later while still in custody of the West German and Americans.

In the, aforementioned, ‘agreement’ between the Soviets, the Western Powers and the Vatican, the ‘ascendancy’ of Hitler’s Daughter to power could not be achieved until the Vatican also brought to power a German Pope, and which was accomplished in 2005 following the death of Pope John Paul I, and which then brought to power the former German Nazi Joseph Ratzinger, and who is now known as Pope Benedict XVI, and who assumed the Leadership of the Roman Church on April 20, 2005 following his election the previous day.

(It goes without mentioning the significance of the present Nazi Pope taking power on the 116th birthday anniversary of Adolph Hitler.)

Quickly following the Nazi German Pope to European power, Hitler’s Daughter was elected as the Chancellor of Germany on November 22, 2005, and which is one of the most significant dates for the World Globalists, as it was on November 22, 1859 that the ‘final assault’ upon Christianity was made with the publishing of Charles Darwin’s "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection", and whose intention of fragmenting the Western Worlds peoples from their truest origins, and meanings, has succeeded beyond their expectations.

Today, the Daughter of Hitler, holding the same office as her father, Chancellor of Germany, is now the most powerful human being on our Earth as she is also the President of the European Union (EU) and the head of the powerful Western Economic Block known as the G-8.

More concerning, however, is that her Father's dream of uniting Europe under German/Vatican control through war is now to be accomplished by his Daughter using deception. For as we have been taught from our ancient past, in the uniting of the Continent begins the destruction of our present World, and which as the New Comet runs, and as Mabus* has died, begins the tribulations of awakening and Final Destruction of the dragons of old.

© January 7, 2007 EU and US all rights reserved.

[* or backwards: Sadum. From Nostradamus, ed.]

A certain Ken Adachi, writing to the editor of EducateYourself.Org offers a note of caution:

Someone sent me yet another 'The Sky is Falling' operetta written by Sorcha Faal ("as reported to her Russian subscribers") which I've re posted below. I'm amazed by the number of people who are sucked in by this rank promoter of doom & gloom anxiety; a fear monger in the fullest sense of the word. Sure, she raises front page concerns and issues, but these "issues" are CREATED and generated by the Illuminati in order to manipulate you into following THEIR scripted agenda-which is to get you to run around in circles in a continuous state of apprehension and insecurity. Don't be mislead by people who attempt to posture themselves as 'fearless reporters', such as Ms. Faal. She and others like her are MINIONS of the Illuminati propaganda apparatus. Use your brains and recognize that these propagandists are trying to sow anxiety, fear, and uncertainty in order to keep you off balance and misdirect you down a rabbit hole brimming with orchestrated terror scenarios, exaggerations, and obfuscations.

We asked Benedict Crumplethorne, SQA's principal spokesman to comment.

This is all rather apolcalyptic and millenarian for my liking and I don't want to compromise my professionalism by commenting in too much detail. Certainly don't expect me to research all the statements! I would say however, that for the new pope to begin his reign (he is ruler of the Papal States) on the birthday of Adolf Hitler is not exactly a triumph of public relations, especially as his apologists have been keen since to emphasise he was an unenthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth.

We thanked Benedict for his contribution on this sensitive subject.

http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index973.htm

The trouble with Ernest Pottergill

2007-06-13T17:06:00.000+01:00

No stranger to political posturings, impassioned views and the interventions of interlopers, Garth Bland, beleaguered county archivist of Loamshire has been wrestling with the latest of the many challenges facing him.

Sir Roger Twit's Almshouse, Bloggsbridge

For some time Loamshire Record Office has been home to the records of the ancient Sir Roger Twit’s Charity, founded in the late 16th. Century by, as one might suppose, Sir Roger Twit. Twit rose to some local prominence as one of Queen Elizabeth I’s minor administrators and in his latter days became disposed to relieve the condition of the paupers of Bloggsbridge, the county town of Loamshire, the legislative efforts of his glorious queen notwithstanding. By his will therefore, he established the charity whose name commemorates him to this day.

The collection had only occasionally been subject to the depradations of the curious, the genealogically inclined and a few chance users who had irritatingly found the Internet version of its list a useful inroad into some otherwise obscure and forgotten technicality of history. Until one day Miss June Piddler, clerk to the trustees, rang him, that is.

Now Garth had had some previous contact with Miss Piddler. She had always made it plain she was irritated at the lack of progress in his office's listing of the unlisted part of the collection. Naturally it would cut no ice with her or the trustees that Garth and his colleagues had a vast backlog of unlisted collections, that they were snowed under with exhibitions on ethnic minorities or that management of the collection was commensurate with the office’s business plan.

She had been approached by that most amenable of freelance archivists, Ernest Pottergill DPhil, who had proposed just the solution. For a suitable fee, he would list not only the unlisted portion of the collection but would re-list the listed portion of the collection too. How kind of him. Would Garth mind letting Dr. Pottergill take the material away to undertake this work? Naturally it would be returned on completion.

The staff room at Loamshire Record Office was buzzing. A freelance archivist touting his services to their depositors behind their backs? A major depositor disregarding their longstanding arrangement with Loamshire County Council? Loamshire Record Office treated as merely a convenient record store at the disposal of freelance archivists? No consultation on such a significant exercise? A complex, large and ancient collection arranged and listed by an unqualified person? How to incorporate the new list, especially the electronic version, into their finding aids and online database? How to avoid anomalies in the numbering? The cheek of it.

Garth considered his best course of action. Dr. Pottergill was not a qualified archivist and as he was not, and could not be a member of SQA, no disciplinary action could be taken against him through SQA. Dr. Pottergill was a member of the rival Society of Archivists [sic] but disciplinary action through that body seemed unlikely and in any case their membership was open to non-archivists. One could sympathise with Miss Piddler for being impressed with Dr. Pottergill’s paper credentials. To the wider public, membership of the Society of Archivists naturally implied all its members were unambiguously archivists, qualified by some means or other to undertake professional archive work. There was no choice in the matter: Garth had to agree to the scheme.

In the event, Garth met with Dr. Pottergill and Miss Piddler, stated some of his concerns about the lack of prior notice, the benefits of properly scoping such a project and the need for careful planning and collaboration from that point onwards. He tactfully left unstated the ethical issue of a depositor dealing with a third party behind his back and the matter of Dr. Pottergill's lack of training and professional qualification.

And so there the matter rested, if not quite to the satisfaction of all the interested parties.

Turning point

2007-06-12T11:34:00.000+01:00

SQA's concerns about the implications for archives of EU Directive 80/181 have been expressed in these pages several times.

The Directive required the ending of dual Metric/Imperial usage or so-called Supplemental Indications with effect from 1 January 2010 with grave consequences for British literary and archival heritage. SQA was not alone in interpreting the Directive as being applicable to all situations and Christopher Booker echoed our concerns in his Sunday Telegraph features. Booker has stated "it would become a criminal offence to make any written mention of the hated non-metric measures in sales literature, on packaging or anywhere else" (article in full)

Most importantly, archivists were faced with the prospect of having to compile descriptive lists, describe documents and provide exhibition interpretation in metric only, quite anachronistically and more important than that, unhelpfully to a public almost entirely conversant with only Imperial units.

However, the European Commission has stated its intention to allow dual measurements and supplementary indications indefinitely, in keeping with similar arrangements for British road signs and pints.

This startling victory for common sense, British heritage and archival description and interpretation is almost the single-handed achievement of John Gardner, Director of the British Weights and Measures Association who has orchestrated a strong and united response from British and European industry and even the UK government itself, to an EU consultation exercise on changes to weights and measures directives.

This change of mind is apparently the result of industry's clamour against hugely expensive conversion and an unnecessary one at that, driven by the need to trade without penalty with the USA, the world's biggest market place. The USA is steadfastly Imperial and any limited metrication there is being reversed, as exemplified by the Californian State Railways.

Neil Herron, inveterate Metric Martyr

Neil Herron, mastermind of John Prescott's defeat in the North Eastern Euro Region's referendum in connection with the proposed pilot elected regional assembly there and Metric Martyr, has also played an important part. Claims by a Conservative MEP to have influenced the outcome can be discounted as merely an attempt to steal votes from the UK Independence Party.

We close by echoing Christopher Booker's concerns about the general context in which these developments have taken place. The UK remains in the EU and is fully beholden to the European Commission and its directives and the stranglehold of the various EU treaties. There has been no change to our continuing loss of sovereignty and no powers yet surrendured to the EU have been returned. The episode represents a turning point rather than a reversal. However, archivists can continue to use Imperial units in their work.

It now only remains to take the anti-metric campaign to our European neighbours to ensure their road signs and goods labelling is dual for the convenience of British and American visitors. Fair's fair.

Awakening

2007-04-28T10:52:00.000+01:00

SQA has been raising the alarm about the effect of the total cultural, economic and political abolition of Imperial weights and measures (under EU Directive 80/181, which comes into force on 1 January 2010) in the heritage context for more than two years now. It appears our fears are increasingly being shared.

Europhile Dim Leb MPs are looking desperately for ways to neutralise the UK Independence Party whose candidates secured a greater number of votes in the last European Parliamentary elections.

John Hemming MP

On 18 April 2007, Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming (Birmingham, Yardley) tabled the following early day motion:

That this House notes the concerns of model engineers and other heritage engineering workers that they may not be allowed to use imperial measurements subsequent to the EU Directive 80/181; recognises that this could do a considerable amount of damage to the maintenance of imperial heritage engineering and the model engineering sector; and calls for an urgent review by the Government of mechanisms to facilitate the continuation of this aspect of British heritage, which may include a permanent derogation from this aspect of the directive facilitating the reporting of measurements in both imperial and metric units.

The motion is signed by the following MPs: Peter Bottomley, Ann Cryer, Andrew George, Mike Penning, Bob Russell, Bob Spink and David Taylor.

Presumably the other 638 MPs whose names do not appear on this motion do not care about British heritage or were having a lie-in. At least heritage lobbyists and archives lobbyists can gain some indication from this motion which and how many MPs are worth lobbying on heritage issues and archival legislation in future. Not a lot.

It isn't merely a matter of sentiment over heritage. Mr. Hemming and his colleagues in the House of Commons are presumably unaware of the weight of business opinion opposed to compulsory metrification. The British Weights and Measures Association has published details of organisations lobbying the European Commission for a permanent waiver to metric-only usage. It includes the UK government and makes interesting and enlightening reading click here

Thus the resistance movement is much wider than we might think.

Of course SQA is mainly concerned to avoid the anachronistic use of metric units in archival description. The use of metric units out of historical context also amounts to falsification, something archivists must avoid at all costs as a paramount professional ethic. However, we are strategically minded enough to understand our concerns apply equally in other branches of heritage too, more strategically minded than Mr. Hemming whose only myopic concern is the continuation of this aspect of British heritage.

It is so sad museum interpretation panels so often give only metric units.

The preservation of heritage as a political justification in itself, is even recognised in the Aesopian language of the European Union's recent Declaration on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the signature of the Treaties of Rome which proclaims:

We preserve in the European Union the identities and diverse traditions of its Member States. We are enriched by open borders and a lively variety of languages, cultures and regions.

Oh really? Don't British weights and measures come into this?

And by the way, please could one of our many highly educated MPs mention archives sometime? Surely our national documentary heritage extending from the Domesday Book to the 1901 census is as worthy of an early day motion as model engineering?

Further reading

Save Our Cultural Heritage

More EU hypocrisy

2007-04-23T22:37:00.000+01:00

The watchdog Statewatch has lodged two complaints with the European Ombudsman concerning the European Commission’s failure to implement its own regulation on public access to documents (1049/2001)

Nikiforos Diamandouros, European Ombudsman

This is a well intentioned step by Statewatch but merely in keeping with the activities of such truly Eurosceptic (i.e. critical and reformist rather than opposed) organisations which in fact impliedly support the EU and its constituent institutions without coming to the realisation they are terminally corrupt, intentionally unaccountable and permanently unreformable. In short, Statewatch is naïve.

The basis of Statewatch’s complaint is that the European Commission failed to maintain a proper public register of documents with only a fraction of those produced listed and failed to publish its annual report on access to documents for 2005 in the year 2006.

This is rather ironic as the UK and other members states’ Freedom of Information legislation was enforced by the European Commission, not that this is widely known.

The preamble to the regulation makes interesting reading as it contains fundamentally conflicting objects.

The second subparagraph of Article 1 of the Treaty on European Union enshrines the concept of openness, stating that the Treaty marks a new stage in the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen.

Openness enables citizens to participate more closely in the decision-making process and guarantees that the administration enjoys greater legitimacy and is more
effective and more accountable to the citizen in a democratic system. Openness contributes to strengthening the principles of democracy and respect for fundamental
rights as laid down in Article 6 of the EUTreaty and in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.

Openness? Presumably this is the same oppenness proclaimed by Angela Merkel in the recent Declaration on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the signature of the Treaties of Rome.

It is not clear to which state citizenship refers, the EU as a supra-national superstate in the making, the residual member states and what rights appertain. We find the unashamed mention of the ever closer union upon which the British and many other nations have not voted and an Aesopian mention of democracy, which is certainly not of the Parliamentary kind with its notions of the people holding their government accountable through elections. Our government is now the European Commission and it is unaccountable and talk of transparency is merely manipulation and Luciferian fog, while the EC green paper seeks to undermine and reinterpret their own regulations as noted by Statewatch in their briefing notes (click here)

So much for a progressive future under the EU and so much for Statewatch as a pressure group.

Further reading
Freedom of Information in the European Union (Statewatch)

European Parliament’s recommendations

The European Commission’s green paper

The Die is Caste

2007-03-17T10:04:00.000Z

SQA finds it has a strange new bedfellow.

The Indian History Congress has been bemoaning if not campaigning against the tendency of the Indian National Archives not to be headed by a professional.

Indian National Archives

This reminds us of our previous blog Jesuit of capitalism commenting upon the appointment of the current chief executive of the UK’s National Archives (TNA), Natalie Ceeney in which we observed TNA had never been run by an archives professional, quite the contrary of what some commentators like Max Hastings suggested at the time.

Quite what they mean by a professional is another matter but to SQA it can only mean a qualified, professional archivist. Can you be professional without being professionally qualified? Can you be a nurse without being qualified as a nurse? Can you be a doctor without being qualified as a doctor? Can you be a lawyer without being qualified as a lawyer?

It is apparent that one can qualify as an archivist in India so the option is available to the Indian Government.

Let us hope the concern in India and nearer to home one day culminates in a victory for the archives profession.

Further reading

Zee News

Training at the Indian National Archives

BHAR BHARATHIDASAN UNIVERSITY, TIRUCHIRAPPALLIATHIDASAN UNIVERSITY, TIRUCHIRAPPALLI

Six of the Best

2007-03-14T17:10:00.000Z

Readers of SQA’s blogs may recall our earlier blog Ouch in which we reported on the nearest an archives office had come to being rapped by the Information Commissioner.

In a more recent decision notice, the Commissioner turned his attention to the records management service operated for Canterbury City Council by Kent County Council’s staff at Canterbury Cathedral Archives. The enquiries made by the caseworker and the outcomes make fascinating reading as to the procedures other local government modern records services can expect to undergo in due course. It doesn’t make pleasant reading and the Commissioner expresses specific concerns about deletion of emails and other computer records and inconsistency of approach.

Not a world heritage site for electronic records

The complainant had asked for information relating to Oast House Media Ltd or Stevenson Design.

The caseworker began by asking What is the public authority’s records management and retention policy? and If there is no relevant records management policy (for instance there is no policy at all or the policy was introduced after the alleged date of destruction of the record), can the public authority describe the way in which it has handled comparable records of a similar age?

Most intriguingly, the Commissioner found as factual The complainant has copies of correspondence and documents from the public authority that the public authority states it does not hold. He went on to say the authority had not conformed to best practice in deleting emails but two other comments are of interest and no doubt apply to a good many record offices offering modern records functions.

The public authority has some records management problems in that it
has discovered further information relating to the complainant’s companies
on a number of occasions…...

…..and more interestingly

Several searches of the Council’s records revealed more of the requested information on each occasion, despite the existence of a records management policy and disposal schedules. The Commissioner is aware that the Council does not have a corporate electronic records management system and must therefore rely on other methods. He has also been advised of various initiatives underway at the Council to improve its records management. Nevertheless, he believes that the Council would benefit from obtaining further advice and guidance from the
Records Management Advisory Service at The National Archives (see
contact details below). The Commissioner would hope that such advice
will improve the Council’s handling of future requests for information under
the Act.

It would seem Canterbury City Council is typical of many local authorities and other public bodies in not having adopted modern records management or at least to its full potential, including provision for electronic document records management (EDRM).

We asked Ellison Millinocket, SQA’s technical spokesman to offer some comments on the Canterbury fiasco.

Canterbury is a curious authority to have been hauled over the coals. Unlike many district councils, they have a modern records management system in place, operated by KCC staff but it centres on manual modern records and even this has been shown to be deficient. They appear to have no adequate provision for EDRM at all. With the city council’s relationships to KCC and the University of Kent at Canterbury, one would have thought they are ideally positioned to implement EDRM. An outstanding example of compliance is Gloucestershire County Council’s MIDAS system.

Benedict Crumplethorne, SQA’s principal spokesman, drew our attention to the minutes of the Commons Select Committee on Constitutional Affairs in which the chairman asked three representatives from the National Archives Do you think you should be sent in, like the Flying Squad, to have a look where the authority cannot produce a documented record or has destroyed the document?

This seems highly relevant to the Canterbury case. Let us just hope the idea is incorporated into the deferred national archives legislation!

Further reading

Commons Select Committee minutes

The Guardian

TNA FoI update

Canterbury Decision Notice

Canterbury City Council’s Publication Scheme

Archivists in Shackles

2007-02-20T17:39:00.000Z

The benighted county archivist of Loamshire, Garth Bland, dreaded the year 2007 and its anniversaries. Yet another year of anniversaries, this time the abolition of the slave trade in parts of the British Empire.

However, not for Garth the usual, tired communist inspired fad with exhibitions marking the abolition of the African slave trade to the West Indies and some other parts of the Empire. Instead the far-right administration of Loamshire County Council has entered into partnership with the eminent anthropologist Dr. J. Pochin Sturge of Wigston Hall, Leicestershire, to commemorate the barbarities of the white slave trade and the scourge of the Barbary Pirates.

Muslim slave masters savagely beating white slaves

This is not to say Garth had not received blandishments from the socialist or quasi-communist members in the authority to mount an exhibition on the demise of black slavery. It was simply he didn’t have anything on the subject, or quite the subject. Dr. Sturge meanwhile was also making his own more persuasive approaches, based on the plentiful mentions in local parish registers of the seizure of the good people of Loamshire and neighbouring parts by the fiendish Turks and Barbary Pirates, who enslaved them in north Africa. Horrid tales abounded. Families torn asunder, torture, starvation, large ransoms demanded, in some cases actually paid, thanks to the churches organising a collection. Not to mention fair complexioned women ravaged by swarthier races.

And so it came to pass: Setting the Record Straight: the Scourge of White Slavery.

Dr. Sturge was kind enough to draft a press release to mark the launch of the exhibition. He has kindly allowed us to publish it in full.

Loamshire recognises the irrelevance of the current communist inspired commemorations of the abolition of slavery in many parts of the British Empire in 1807. Many of the Africans in Britain are actually recent immigrants direct from the African continent rather than the West Indies. Consequently, they are unlikely to be concerned with the heritage of their lighter skinned relations from the West Indies. The direct African immigrants are descended from the African tribes and chieftains responsible for selling their fellow countrymen into slavery in the first place.

We also feel it is inappropriate to use the anniversary as a sop to West Indian immigrants as they are just as likely to be descended from white slave owners and slave masters as black slaves. Here in Loamshire we gave much consideration instead to commemorating the generations of Britons enslaved by the Romans, the generations of Romano-British enslaved by the English, and the generations of British (or Welsh) and English enslaved by the Normans. However, our hearts went out to the slaves of the Barbary Pirates who, after all, were far from their home island.

Christian clergy negotiating the freeing of white slaves

SQA asked Garth for his own views.

There is something to be said for Sturge’s position. In the past, no-one’s colour defined him as material ripe for enslavement. Nowadays we benefit from a growth in conscience, a luxury associated with the disposable income of modern society. Critics of a so-called perverse British morality who besides conveniently ignoring the achievements of the British Empire, accountable government, the rule of law, the spread of Christianity, tea drinking and technological innovation, fail to recognise the great majority of our own ancestors mainly lived in abject poverty, destitution and lacked the vote.

It is not all about 1807. In 1772 slavery was abolished in England. Lagging a little behind as always, slavery was abolished in Scotland in 1778.

The only very gradual abolition of slavery was surely directly associated with the correspondingly gradual economic and political empowerment of indigenous Britons. Decent people though our ancestors were and though probably they sympathised with tales of barbarity towards African salves and the white slaves of the Barbary Pirates alike, they were first and foremost concerned with the alleviation of their own condition.

We must exercise caution with crypto-Communist intrigues and ensure future generations are alerted to the misleading exclusive association of the darker races with slavery as a tactic in disparaging and undermining the achievements of the British Empire.

Further reading

When Europeans Were Slaves

The Rhodesian perspective click here

Muslim enslavement of Black Africans click here

The Guardian click here

Auntie Beeb click here

When Arabs Enslaved Europeans And Africans click here

Still waiting for an apology from the shores of Tripoli

In the Pink

2007-02-07T16:47:00.000Z

As our readers know, SQA is not averse to venturing into the realms of our kindred professions and wider heritage issues. However, we hold that archives is a pillar, indeed the central pillar of our cultural heritage, flanked by museums, art galleries, archaeological sites, libraries and the built heritage.

And anthropology.

Consequently, it is sometimes necessary to view archives in context or in other words to look at how the disciplines of managing and researching archives can also underpin the disinterested interpretation of other cultural evidence.

And this is without taking into account the huge concern modern archivists, especially those in local government, must have for their majority users, family historians and genealogists, whose ranks have been swelled in recent years by government policy on access and intense media coverage.

What brings us to muse on the place of archives in this wider context of cultural evidence?

Alex Graham

The answer is a certain programme made by Alex Graham’s Wall to Wall production company for Channel 4, entitled 100% English. (Mr. Graham is Scottish)

The programme sought, through several celebrities and ordinary participants who considered themselves, and were no doubt considered by the general public, to be English in the sense of supposedly being of pure English race. By then applying DNA test results supplied by a US company, the outcome was to proclaim on the basis of the very diverse DNA record discovered, that the participants were not English at all with the obvious implication there is no such thing as Englishness or an English people.

Here of course lies the clue to the programme’s deception, as any anthropologist knows: the programme was predicated on the premise that the English are a race rather in the way the Japanese or Chinese constitute races by virtue of being homogonous or indigenous. We can take this predication further by saying the implication is if the English are a race, they are also racially pure. This raises a highly contentious issue, which we will consider below.

We might at this point consider the poetical sense of race, rather as in Churchill’s book The Island Race (an abridgement of The English Speaking Peoples) in which the case is made for the unique character of the British contributing to a distinctive world wide heritage. However, in strict anthropological terms, the English are not a race, never were a race, are probably legally not a nation but most definitely are a people, a term anthropologists carefully use to describe a unified society regardless of whether its components are indigenous or racially homogenous.

Murray’s The Oxford English Dictionary defines a people as a body of persons composing a community, tribe, race or nation. This is rather more useful as a description of the English or British and carries none of the undertones of racial purity suggested by the neo-Nazi producers of 100% English. As for the adjective English, the same lexicographer states the earliest recorded sense is of or belonging to the group of Teutonic peoples collectively known as the Angelcynn i.e. Angle Kin (Bede, 731), comprising the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Friesians, Danes, Franks (Frank-manni), Goths and Alamanni. Beowulf, the eponymous hero of the epic Old English poem, was a Goth. Ethelbert, King of Kent and patron of the earliest recorded English laws and writings was Jutish while his queen, Bertha, was Frankish. Beowulf was fair of complexion while the successors to his domains in northern Jutland, the Danes (from southern Sweden like the Goths) were known to the Irish as the Finn Dubh or Dark Race as distinct from the fairer Norse invaders, the Finn Gaill.

By a process of cultural assimilation, the indigenous British also became English for the most part, including the population of southern Scotland which formed part the English kingdom of Northumbria, part of the English Heptarchy. As Murray puts it the adjective came in the 11th. Century to be applied to all natives of England, whatever their ancestry, the only legal or cultural exception to this being the distinction between the people and their Norman French rulers.

Murray’s definition of an Englishman is a man who is English by descent, birth or naturalization…..one born in England or of English parents.

This leads us to mention Sir Thomas Craig's assertion in On the Union of the British Kingdoms that under the Common Law of Scotland an Englishman became a naturalised Scotsman and that under the Common Law of England a Scotsman became a naturalised Englishman, in each case merely by crossing the border. This was upheld by case law in each country. Craig recounts the story of a Scotsman on trial in the Court of King's Bench for rape in the 16th. Century. The Scotsman demanded dimidietas linguae or that half the jurors should be Scots. Hs request was refused on the gound that a Scotsman had always been held an Englishman and not an alien or foreigner in England, and that the Scottish tongue was not a foreign language but English pure and simple.

The Scotsman was executed forthwith.

We asked Benedict Crumplethorne to crystallise our views.

It is very sad the makers of and advisers to 100% English have pandered to the popular notion of racial purity hitherto represented by the Nazis’ policy of proof or pure Arian ancestry recorded in each SS man’s ehrenpass. They have fostered the erroneous view among the viewing public that the English are racially homogenous, in order to then debunk it, a common technique of political correctness process. This is surely evidence of the kind of social engineering and manipulation of opinion associated with the crucial EU plank of fragmenting England into Euro Regions to be governed direct by Brussels.

We overlap with the Scots, Welsh and Irish and most of our ancestors were indigenous British, confirmed by DNA testing oddly enough, as stated in The Times some time back by Professor David Coleman of MigrationwatchUK who based on his own and others’ research has confirmed the existence of an ancient, indigenous British genotype or race. This discovery is strangely at odds with the programme which has overlooked a common British, rather than English, genetic origin.

Ellison Millinocket, SQA’s technical adviser, was able to offer further comment.

The dating of a person’s DNA components is an inexact science. Consequently, it cannot be said whether a programme participant’s ancestry traced to Africa or Asia occurred prior to or after the English settlement of the British Isles. We already knew Mrs. Thatcher had Irish and Scottish ancestry so why her daughter was presented to the viewing public as a prime candidate for Englishness mystifies me. The first occupants of the British Isles had to come from somewhere. According to the Romans, one British tribe came from Spain. The Romans were also a diverse bunch and would have brought in slaves, soldiers and traders from all over their Empire. They certainly employed Germanic sailors like Carausius and there is no evidence the Romans left Britain in 411. All these people or their descendants became English and contributed to our distinctive English character, as your chap Murray observes.

And what a lot of fun we would have with the Scots, Welsh and Irish!

Ireland was colonised by people from ancient Britain and later Scotland and Wales. Wales was occupied by the Irish between 450 and 550 and settled by Scandinavians and English and Scotland, well, Scotland! The name Scots is the ancient British word for Irish, a reference to the Irish occupation of northern Britain in 843, and southern Scotland is historically English, hence the occurrence there of English placenames like Edinburgh and common English surnames like Brown, Wilson and Smith. Scandinavians also settled Scotland. By the way, please can England have the southern Scottish counties back?

We thanked Benedict and Ellison for their enlightened contributions.

Further reading

Scottish Bollocks

End in sight for county record offices?

2007-01-18T21:24:00.000Z

The government has invited the remaining 34 county councils and their constituent districts to apply for abolition and merger into unitary authorities (actually formally known as county boroughs).

The historic counties

Hitherto, remodelling of local government into unitary authorities was carried out obligatorily in certain areas under the Local Government Act 1992. It is widely believed this act was intended to prepare the way for countrywide unitary local government on a pilot basis, although the government protested unitary authorities would not be suited to all areas. If the sceptics are right, this was a gloss aimed at disguising the true objective in order to conceal the longer-term, gradualist objective.

Our regular readers will have guessed by now where this is leading. As we know from earlier blogs, the EU is nothing if not gradualist in its tendencies. Although the 1992 act was enacted by the previous Conservative government and Ruth Kelly, Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government for the current Labour administration, has criticised the Conservatives for passing on public services and institutions that were run-down, demoralised and starved of cash and resources (see statement) in 1997, Labour (and the Liberal Democrats) take their policy on local government, like much else, from the European Commission.

This much is admitted by independent observers, e.g. Bob Spink of Epolitix who states compulsory unitary local government is a fundamental part of the Labour Government's agenda of transferring power away from local councils to regional chambers or elected regional assemblies (see his online article on Local Government Restructuring). Disregard any propaganda about empowering communities and strengthening local democracy.

This is all very well, you may say. But how does is bear on archives and their users?

Firstly, we should understand that local government archives provision is mainly by county councils, partly as the result of historical accident as the bodies inheriting the records of the clerks of the county quarter sessions (which comprise the historical core collections of any county record office) and partly by design under the Local Government (Records) Act 1962 which created county councils as archives authorities, although this function remains permissive unlike library reference and lending services. A change to this pattern of local government whereby county councils give way to unitary authorities gives rise to the issue of the survival and funding of residual and rather nominal county record offices by the new unitary authorities.

Berkshire provides an example of fragile success; Humberside one of disaster.

Secondly, most consumers of archives are family historians and genealogists whose researches are necessarily historically based on the pre-1974 counties whose county councils inherited from the Quarter Sessions in 1889 the ancient counties. In 1974 the issue was amalgamation, reduction in size or renaming of counties, ostensibly for economy’s sake. The result was unpopular, especially in Rutland and Somerset. However, files released by the National Archives recently confirm the reorganisation was motivated by a longer term European regionalisation scenario, mooted as early as the 1960s concurrently with planning for Common Market entry. The proposed new changes go a step further and will see counties administratively abolished and replaced by unitary authorities, completely eradicating the traditional pattern of county based historical research.

Under this new arrangement, in which we are led to believe two tiers will be replaced by one much more economical tier (itself an argument dismissed by Professor Michael Chisholm of Cambridge University in research for the Local Government Association) there will actually be three tiers of local government: regional government, unitary authorities and neighbourhood councils (see The Daily Telegraph 3 January 2007)

The government has created a rod for its own back in this latter regard, having generated popular enthusiasm for genealogical research through the National Archives and the media. Genealogy being the second biggest presence on the World Wide Web, and probably the most popular leisure pursuit, is liable to trip up policy makers. It is already the case following the 1974 local government reorganisation that genealogical user groups have felt obliged to publish clarification on such matters (see Genuki) The position looks like becoming even more confusing for our main user group, especially those genealogists living abroad.

The ultimate irony in all of this is that despite reorganising UK local government so as to usher in direct rule of the regions and UK by the EU, with the marginalisation of UK central government as an inevitable and planned by-product, academic researchers from EU countries are equally flummoxed by UK local government archives provision as there is no direct correlation between local government systems and archives provision here and in mainland Europe and the situation is worsening.

The strange case of Andrew Allerton

2007-01-13T14:58:00.000Z

The executive committee of SQA met earlier this week to consider its response to the publicity surrounding the 1000 failed attempts of mechanical engineer Andrew Allerton of North Shields to obtain work.

Andrew Allerton

Mr. Allerton, aged 56, was made redundant from Electrak in Consett, County Durham in 2002. Since then he has spent £5000 on applying for jobs as an administrative assistant, bereavement counsellor, chauffer, draughtsman and, you guessed it, archivist.

The hapless job hunter has highly respectable qualifications in the form of an Open University degree in Mathematics and Technology, an HND in computer-aided engineering and a City and Guilds teaching certificate. However, press reports make no mention of his holding the postgraduate diploma in archive administration.

We asked SQA’s principal spokesman, Benedict Crumplethorne, to comment on this case.

Well, actually much depends on whether Mr. Allerton applied for a post requiring candidates to hold the professional qualification. Many employers, e.g. the Church of England National Institutions (see our earlier blog Job watch), appoint non-professionally qualified persons to archivist posts while the general public along with many employers and academics are unaware of the existence of a profession of qualified archivists. Could a qualified archivist be appointed as a mechanical engineer?

I am not clear as to whether Mr. Allerton applied for a post requiring the post holder to be a qualified archivist or whether we are dealing with a situation in which the term is wholly misapplied. If the former, we can understand why he was rejected as being professionally unqualified, if the latter he would have been up against large numbers of equally unqualified applicants.

The moral is that to apply for an archivist post and stand a reasonable chance of being short-listed, it is best to obtain the postgraduate archives qualification first. We must also ask whether Mr. Allerton undertook any voluntary work in a record office before applying for a position as an archivist. Conceivably, this might lead to a successful application subject to his giving an undertaking to enrol on the University of Wales distance-learning course.

This notwithstanding, it is a disgrace that unsuccessful candidates for public sector jobs do not receive a letter. I understand the case for economies but in principle Mr. Allerton has a point and rightly feels unvalued. I am reminded of the case of the unsuccessful candidate out of the two candidates for the post of county archivist of Cornwall in succession to Christine North several years ago. He didn’t receive a letter of rejection either. Silly fool, he should have known! (see also Tips for Employers)

I conclude my remarks by asking Mr. Allerton to email us with information concerning the post he applied for. We may be able to offer him further helpful advice.

The final word has to go to our outspoken member Ellison Millinocket, who is not to be outdone when it comes to controversy.

Benedict recommends voluntary work as a route into the profession. I couldn't agree more. May I suggest Mr. Allerton offers his services to Tyne and Wear Archives? He can assist them in finding Sunderland City Council's lost charter! (See our earlier blog Historic Charter Goes Missing)

Further reading

Metro

This is London

Newcastle Evening Chronicle

The Daily Mail

The Daily Mirror

Job watch

2006-11-28T10:30:00.000Z

As our regular readers will know, SQA monitors job advertisements for evidence of non-compliance with the law, archival professional ethics and relevant standards.

We regret have two further instances of disgraceful non-professional activity to report.

The December 2006 issue of the Archives, Records Management and Conservation job circular published by DP Media for the Society of Archivists [sic] contains an advertisement for the post of assistant archivist for the Church of England’s national institutions based at Bermondsey, London.

The advert is almost a parody of everything wrong with the management of archives at the dawn of the new millennium. Firstly, the successful candidate is required to have no more than an A Level or equivalent. This is an insult and kick in the teeth to qualified, professional archivists anywhere as it suggests archivists are not highly qualified professionals and undermines the reputation of those who are. Furthermore, whoever placed the advert or conceived the job description, is not worthy to employ an archivist.

The publication of the advert in a Society of Archivists publication is confirmation of the lack of professionalism of that so-called professional body. No such advert should ever have been published. There is not even an undertaking on the employer’s part to ensure the successful candidate will obtain a degree and postgraduate diploma in archive administration.

The salary offered is £23,950-£26,950 in other words less than the £27,000 minimum for economic viability (see our previous blog Are You a Waste of Space?)

Finally, the author of the advert misspells focused as focussed.

We asked SQA’s principal spokesman, Benedict Crumplethorne, to comment.

I’m almost lost for words. All I can say is what can you expect when the Church of England’s primate is a Welshman? Please can we have an Englishman next time? An Englishman would understand reputable and fair behaviour and natural justice.

The National Archives’ Standard for Record Repositories requires repositories to employ “one or more professionally qualified archivists with training or experience relevant to the kind of records held.” The advert also states “you will also deal with enquiries from the public.” The Standard states: “when in use the study area should be constantly supervised by sufficient staff to provide an effective level of invigilation of the whole area, under the direction of a professionally qualified archivist.”

Our next concern is an advert placed in The Guardian of 27 November 2006 for a moving image archivist at Yorkshire Film Archive, part of York St. John University.

We asked Garth Bland, county archivist of Loamshire, to comment on this.

The advert asks for candidates “educated to degree level in a relevant discipline.” This is a slightly tricky one. Yet again we have an example of a post described as an archivist for which the employer doesn’t require a qualified archivist. However, film archives aren’t archives anyway. Archives are administrative records including electronic records. These so-called film archives around the country are most worthwhile but they aren’t archives and their need to employ an archivist is not clear, although descriptive listing skills might apply. However, one respect in which these film collections, as I would rather they were called, definitely fails, is in their too wide a geographical base, resulting an inability to correctly identify and therefore describe film content.

We thanked Benedict and Garth for their comments.

Shoot-out

2006-11-27T15:57:00.000Z

We are delighted to report on a recent spat involving two county record offices in the South West Euro Region.

It seems a document found among the municipal archives of Plymouth by Dr. Todd Gray, the chairman of Friends of Devon Record Office, undermines the claim of Cornwall to be the home of the pasty. The document, containing a recipe for a pasty dated to 1510 significantly predates the earliest recorded Cornwall recipe, at Cornwall Record Office, which is dated 1746. To add insult to injury, the earlier Devon recipe includes venison from Mount Edgecombe in Cornwall, probably because the Devonshire venison was of too high a quality to put in pasties, according to the author of Legendary Dartmoor

Courtesy Legendary Dartmoor.

Les Merton, author of the Official Encyclopedia of the Cornish Pasty is defiant, however. He dates the origin of the Cornish pasty to about 8000BC.

We asked the outspoken Ellison Millinocket, SQA’s spokesman for the South West Euro Region based in Taunton, Somerset, to comment on recent events.

Laughable, absolutely laughable. I’ve been watching the Devonians and Cornish trashing each other in the media for years. This is the best one yet. Someone needs to do the Cornish a great favour by telling them Cornwall once extended all the way from Shropshire to Land’s End and its capital was originally Wroxeter, home of the Romano-British Cornovarii family who were given feudal sway over and gave their name to the south-west of Britain, including Wales. The Cornish are therefore no different in origin to the rest of us in the south west.

How then Bernard Deacon, a lecturer at the Institute of Cornish Studies at Exeter University could argue in A Cornish National Minority Report (1999) that the Cornish have a distinct historic identity, with origins that are non-English. There are also a number of constitutional, linguistic and cultural differences is uncertain, especially as all this might also be said of other English counties. (Kent had gavelkind and lathes, the east midlands had wapentakes, and so on.) This is of course a rhetorical question: the explanation is divide and rule, a major plank of EU policy.

Morale among supporters of Cornish independence collapsed when they discovered the EU and UK government's plan is not to create a Cornish regional parliament but rather to retain Cornwall as part of the South West Euro Region based on Taunton and the EU Arc Manche Interreg Region. The irony is that outside the EU, the Cornish might have had a chance in the fulness of time, although their spoken language died more than a century ago with a significant part of its vocuabulary and, as with ancient Greek and Latin, no-one alive actually knows how it was pronounced.

Interestingly, Devon also had a stannary parliament which last met in 1748, in other words about the same time from which Cornwall's own pasty recipe dates.

So much for Cornish differences then! Ellison continued.

As for a recipe going back 8000 years, pull the other one. At that time our ancestors were hunter-gatherers not pastry chefs.

Further reading

Cornwall Record Office's hard-rock mining industry records Designation Status

The Guardian 13 November 2006 click here

Disappearing Britain: The EU and the Death of Local Government by Lindsay Jenkins, 2005

Archival Farm

2006-11-03T17:15:00.000Z

SQA is aware of quiet mutterings of discontent among county archivists, led by a prominent East Anglian county archivist. Low salaries, poor differentials in relation to librarians, failed lottery bids? you ask.

No. It’s all about community archives. The concept of community archives has grown out of European Union directives on regionalisation, although this is not widely known, and the formation of such archives sits alongside such issues as the granting of more power to parish councils to make them into community or neighbourhood councils. The imperative for the transition of the hitherto obscure community into such a being that it has archives or a more powerful local government presence, forms part of the plan for the break up of the country into regions (groups of counties), sub regions and sub sub regions (unitary authorities), with community councils at the bottom. This it is thought by the European Commission, is closer to the mainland European model.

Interested readers can discover more in Lindsay Jenkins’ book Disappearing Britain, The EU and the Death of Local Government

Furthermore, the National Council on Archives defines community archives as:

A broad spectrum of activity that ranges from the outreach and partnership work of mainstream archive services with a wide range of different communities to the grass-roots activity of documenting and recording community heritage, irrespective of the media used. Community archives encompass communities that are defined by geography, culture, or common interest. The uniting factor is that community archives represent a direct participation in the saving of our collective memory.

The question is, whose collective memory? The term collective means different things to different people. For Christopher Story in his book The European Union Collective, Enemy of its Member States: A study in Russian and German Strategy to complete Lenin’s world revolution, collectivism means Communist totalitarianism as being gradually implemented by the EU.

We asked Benedict Crumplethorne, principal spokesman for SQA to offer comment.

The situation is this. Most archivists work in local government record offices and as such, supported by council tax payers and tax payers generally, we are surely already the true community archives. Frustratingly, the scheme has the backing of the National Archives, which unveiled the idea in the first place, and the Community Archives Development Group of the National Council on Archives.

Jonathan Pepler, County Archivist of Cheshire and Chairman of NCA states in his draft annual report:

One of the objects of the Council from its inception has been to ensure that the archives sector speaks with a united voice. In pursuit of this, the officers have begun a dialogue with other bodies in the sector.

So much for speaking with one voice.

So what then are the issues at the chalk face? We asked Garth Bland, county archivist of Loamshire to explain why he is so much in agreement with his East Anglian counterpart.

For a long time this initiative looked like just another of those irksome schemes hatched by national or regional bodies to curry favour with the general public, New Labour and the European Commission. However, what is developing is a move away from depositing and preserving archives in full-spec BS5454 local government record offices towards enabling voluntary bodies, often supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, to retain or collect material normally within our collecting policies (those very same collecting policies the TNA advocates in its Standard for Record Repositories). The tax payer is thus paying twice for an archives service and archives are ending up in local schools, privately run museums and Portacabins when they could benefit from professional custodianship, BS5454 storage conditions and conservation and repair facilities. Apart from that, we are seeing the real meaning and therefore the real usefulness of archives as evidence, blurred.

In support of Garth’s point, we quote Jack Latimer, website editor for CommunityArchives.org.uk, who compounds the problem by promoting a completely erroneous idea of archives, by stating:

The only caveat is that to satisfy the requirement of being an archive, the organisation should have a collection of some sort. This collection should include primary source material such as photos, documents, oral histories etc. (rather than just articles or essays about those source materials). The collection could be either physical or digital - or both.

So that’s what Archives Awareness has come to! Archives are not administrative records but merely sort of archives or collections of anything. At the same time the new blurred definition of archives assists the EU in its dismantling of our concept of our heritage and the dumbing down of archives as evidence.

Further reading:

CommunityArchives.Org.UK

National Archives Community Access to Archives Project

QUANGO-QUACK

2006-10-15T13:44:00.000+01:00

SQA is indebted to Michael Plumbe of the Society for Individual Freedom and the Queen's English Society for the following witty glossary on quasi-autonomous national government organisations (QUANGOS) against which SQA has railed for two years.

The unintended contribution of modern government to culture,
and particularly to the development of language, is often
overlooked and is something for which taxpayers should be
duly grateful. It gives something new for the education
system to study, for instance. Here is one modest example:

Noun: Quangocrat: a member of a Quango
Verb: Quango: I join a Quango
Quangare: it takes two, or a dozen or so, to Quango
Quangavi: I joined a Quango and am now a Sir or a
Lady for my outstanding services to quangodom (qv)
Quangatum: I had a good dinner last night

Abbrev: qc, pronounced `cwook' (to rhyme with `brook') to
avoid confusion with QC, said as `queue-cee' and
used by others who are not cwooks.

Derivatives:
Quango-quack: the language of quangocrats
Quangaloo: mobile collection unit for quango output
Quangarees: down-to-earth clothing for dirty work
Quangarese: quango-quack translation for the public
Quangaroo: a jumped-up official
Quangarule: a quangocourt ruling from which there
is no appeal
Quangazette: confidential quangocratic organ
Quangocourt: unofficial body which enforces regulations
Quangocracy: an ugly word; better, quangodom, qv
Quangocrazy: a useful description for many a quango
Quangocrem: sometimes linked to a quangovac, qv
Quangocreme: the elite
Quangodom: quangocrat heaven; hell for the rest of us
Quangondom: wild-oats curtailment device
Quangomatic: laundering (and sanitising) machine
Quangonomist: one who can't quite live on the pay from
quangos but finds it does rather help
Quangopomposity: the dignity of a quangocrat
Quangompost: rotting pile associated with some quangocrats
Quangopile: a fortune, origin dubious; sitting comfortably
Quangopiles: misfortune; sitting uncomfortably
Quangopoloy: buggins' turn selection; winner gets Whitehall
Quangopops: wind from over-indulgence
Quangorgan: wind-blown publicity device with trumpets
Quangorganic Quangoculture: sustained organic growth,
pesticide resistant, much use of smelly fertilizers
Quangorum: the number of quangocrats who have to gather
together to justify claiming expenses
Quangoscope: rear-view observation device to spot `tails'
Quangoscopy: the operation of such a device
Quangostasis: quangocratic constipation (rare)
Quango-train: all expenses paid
QuangoTV: Orwellian entertainment for the masses
Quangovac: removal device for dead quangocrats
Quangovacation: fraternal official visit, with `partners',
to quangos in nice places abroad
Quangovation: praise; obsequiousness
Quangover: quangocratic celebration-party result
Quangovet: knee-jerk killer of animals suspected of
having foot-and-mouth infection
Quangovision: quangocratic dreams of world-domination
Quangrave: hi-jinks in a quangocratic burial-ground
Quangum-mechanics: skill in becoming a quangocrat by
being married to, sleeping with, or knowing well,
someone high in Government circles
Quank: a crank mainly but may also be user-defined
Quankie: wiper-away of crocodile tears
Quank-you: back-hander to or from a quangocrat
Quantity: page 3 in the Quangazette
Quaint: adjective for the Monarch and for Democracy
Quasi-quango: Local Authority Council (has elections)
Qurauts: foreigners
QIY: make your own quango

Thanks, Britain

2006-10-10T13:36:00.000+01:00

Salman Rushdie, controversial Indian born novelist, has agreed to sell his manuscripts to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Rushdie has been resident in Britain since his boyhood, when he attended Rugby School, Warwickshire, followed by King’s College, Cambridge.

Salman Rushdie

The director of scholarship and collections from the British library, Clive Field said:

I am pleased that Rushdie's papers will be preserved in a publicly accessible institution, but disappointed that we didn't have an opportunity to discuss the acquisition of the archive with him

Perhaps given Rushdie’s scant regard for his host country's sanctuary and the countless man hours its police and intelligence services have given him, it is appropriate his archives should be lodged with those of Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet and terrorist sympathiser.

On 25 July 1992 Britain expelled three Iranian intelligence officers, Mehdi Sayed Sadeghi, Mahmoud Mehdi Soltani and Gassem Vakhshiteh for tracking Rushdie, no doubt in furtherance of the fatwa issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran following the publication of Rushdie’s book Satanic Verses in 1988.

The fatwa begins

In the name of Him, the Highest. There is only one God, to whom we shall all return. I inform all zealous Muslims of the world that the author of the book entitled The Satanic Verses—which has been compiled, printed, and published in opposition to Islam, the Prophet, and the Koran—and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content are sentenced to death

Our outspoken commentator on all matters controversial, Ellison Millinocket, states:

we wonder whether Emory University sought guidance from the US government on the implications of acquiring such a sensitive collection, given the current climate of international Muslim extremism. There is also the issue of US-British co-operation in the war on terror. Come to think of it, said Ellison, do we really want his manuscripts in the British Library anyway?

Further reading

New York Times

Earth Times

The Atlantic Online

Are you a waste of space?

2006-09-13T21:30:00.000+01:00

If you are earning less than £27,000, according to the government, you are not a net contributor to the economy.

“I didn’t join the archives profession to aid the economy”, we hear you say. Quite. Most archivists are women married to higher earning male professionals (see our previous blog Career Guidance) so they are well positioned to tread water. But that’s no excuse, we have it on good authority that archivists must contribute to the economy.

The authority of the National Archives of Scotland (formerly the Scottish Record Office) no less. In an advertisement for a post of archivist placed in The Guardian of 11 September 2006, NAS states they “play an important part in Scotland’s economic and cultural life. The property market depends on our legal services…..”

SQA notes with some concern the salary band within which the successful candidate is to be appointed. You guessed it, £21,292-£27,640.

Thus, despite NAS’s apparently crucial role in supporting Scotland’s economy and property market, we have evidence not only of the understated and down-played role of the archivist but also an inability on the part of employers including the civil service to create cultural heritage posts in accordance with economic conditions.

SQA is confident the majority of archivists are earning below or around £27,000 which is a statement of their perceived relevance to society and government. It would have been useful to see NAS set an example. It is no compensation that NAS states “in the absence of an archive qualification you will be expected to study for one.” In any case we note NAS does not say qualify, merely study.

We also note with some sense of irony that despite NAS contributing to Scotland’s economy and the stated need for an archives qualification at the time of applying or after appointment, there is only one archives training school in Scotland, at Dundee. Even then, this course is by distance only and so much for Scotland supporting its own economy by training archivists. As regards recruiting home-trained (and qualified) archivists it looks like the poor old English tax payer will again be subsidising the Scots though the London and Liverpool courses.

NAS is aided and abetted by the Society of Archivists [sic] which recommends a starting salary of £20,295

Asylum seekers queuing outside Cheshire Record Office

The figure of £27,000 is derived from a report produced in conformity with European Union directives, the Labour Force Survey. We are glad to see the report has backfired on the EU and its puppet government in the UK in that Sir Andrew Green of MigrationWatch immediately noticed the anomaly between the frequent claims made by the Home Office that immigrants were contributing to the economy and the fact that according to the report 80% of immigrants earn less than £27,000 p.a.

Immigrants are therefore net beneficiaries of the state in other words are not contributing to the economy. The MigrationWatch briefing paper Migrants - Do they bring economic benefit? 1.1 can be read here

Consequently archivists may take some cheer from the fact archivists are as much spongers on the economy as immigrants are.

For further reading on archivists’ concerns about immigration, see our earlier blog Save our Cultural Heritage

Earlier blogs

Scottish Bollocks

The McDonaldisation of Archives

2006-09-06T12:41:00.000+01:00

We in SQA thought we had something of a monopoly when it comes to inventing witty and apposite terms to describe events and trends in archives. We were wrong.

Writing in the Education Guardian of 5 September 2006, in an article entitled Preservation hoarders and subtitled An unpromising-looking archive is doing much to save precious material for future generations, John Crace quotes the term McDonaldization as meaning a threat presented by globalisation to minority cultures in Asia, the Pacific area and Africa.

George Ritzer

In fact, the term was coined by George Ritzer in his book The McDonaldization of Society in which he describes a process by which society takes on the characteristics of a fast food restaurant. We are not quite sure Ritzer’s scientific concept applies to this scenario perfectly as McDonald’s and therefore McDonaldisation in the popular view are more usually associated with the popularisation of junk food, litter and protests by animal rights activists, but it will do.

Crace briefly mentions some of the recent calamities that have struck cultural heritage in the Lebanon, the Pacific Rim following the tsunami and the war in Iraq. However, he goes on to paint a picture of accumulating but largely unpublicised damage to archives resulting from political mischief and financial neglect, especially in areas of the world where the source culture is likely to become extinct within the next century.

In order to tackle the long-term threat to minority languages, the Lisbet Rausing Charitable Foundation set up the endangered languages programme at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. It has now gone further and instigated the Endangered Archives Programme (EAP), hosted by the Asia, Pacific and Africa collections at the British Library, in order to preserve written and photographic documents.

Graham Shaw, head of the department, is quoted as saying Unesco's Memory of the World Programme has done some fantastic work in this field. But then duplication of effort is something we in the archives profession know all about (see our earlier blog Bollocks, bullshit and balderdash)

In all of this we feel some sense of irony that the partial destruction of the Iraqi archives seems to have been connived at by British national archives institutions (see our earlier blog Archives and the State) and we continue to express concern at the implications of enforced metrication on British archival finding aids and our printed literary heritage (see our previous blog Save our Cultural Heritage).

Thus while there may indeed be a threat to minority world cultures and archives, there is also a calculated political threat to the cultural heritage and archives of the United Kingdom, the home of the English language, mother of parliaments and founder of the rule of law.

Archives don’t matter, it’s official

2006-07-26T19:13:00.000+01:00

Our readers may be aware of a new campaign called History Matters - Pass it On

It sounds harmless enough and we can hear the usual voices welcoming the campaign as a buttress to the Archives Awareness Campaign, in the vein of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? series.

However, on closer inspection, the campaign shows the usual superficial concern for the obvious, eye-hitting parts of our heritage, i.e. the built heritage, concentration on which has been criticised by SQA previously (see Taking advantage of the London Olympics)

The built heritage obsession is this time indicated by the names of the organisations supporting the campaign: the National Trust, English Heritage, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Council for British Archaeology, Heritage Link, Historic Houses Association and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. There is no mention of the National Archives, National Council on Archives or even the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council.

Adam Hart-Davis

In a letter to The Daily Telegraph on 8 June 2006 signed by among others David Starkey and Adam Hart-Davis, the authors explain they wish to raise public awareness of history and especially the historic environment.

Neither is there any real evidence of networking such as would benefit the world of archivists, archives and their users.

We asked our principal spokesman Benedict Crumplethorne to comment.

I just give up. Not only are archives excluded from people’s awareness despite the efforts of the Archives Awareness Campaign, we are led to believe archives don’t even form part of our environment. Well, I suppose the word environment, introduced to British public life by Michael Heseltine, tends to be associated with buildings, landscapes and planning matters but surely in the fullest meaning of the word archives do form part of our environment.

In any case, the backers of the History Matters Campaign also claim history is what makes us human: it is collective memory and the country that has lost its sense of history has ceased to be itself. In truth, historic buildings are not a collective memory and we are being deceived. We remember nothing because of Stonehenge; we don’t know who built Stonehenge or why. However it can be said of archives that they do represent our collective memory so why aren’t they included?

The answer I am afraid is that archives are inconveniently hidden away, viewed as intelligible only to the erudite and time consuming. And besides, when visiting an archives office you can’t lick away at an ice cream, use your mobile telephone and spread out the tartan car rug and settle down to a picnic. Not even online access can shift opinion, so sooner or later rather than stimulate droves of public into visiting archives offices to do their family history, it will be necessary for archives organisations to recognise reality.

We need to back away from yet more awareness campaigns and concentrate on making archives available to the erudite for a change.

We thanked Benedict for his views.

Tips for employers

2006-05-31T21:34:00.000+01:00

So you want to employ or appoint an archivist, perhaps at a senior level?

You have come to the right place. The Society of Qualified Archivists can help you. We hope the following tips in the form of questions and answers will assist.

Does an archivist or manager of an archives service have to professionally qualified?

Not at all. Feel free to appoint a librarian, academic, amateur historian or any so-called archivist touting for business out there. The National Archives and other national archives institutions employ a mixture of such people. The National Archives is headed by a general manager and Cambridgeshire and Kent County Councils have recently appointed library professionals to run their archive services (not surprising since the interview panels were made up of librarians).

Naturally, we in SQA recommend you appoint a qualified, professional archivist but of course we are biased. We just think qualified archivists can do a better job. Like not mess up your archives. Would you appoint a librarian or failed academic to run your legal section? Of course not.

Is there such a thing as a qualified archivist?

Believe it or not, yes. One can become a qualified archivist by attending one of several university courses or by distance learning. The qualification is normally termed the postgraduate diploma in archive administration. Some qualified archivists also hold masters’ degrees in archive administration although it is the diploma component that counts as the professional qualification.

Should I pay a qualified archivist with the postgraduate diploma in archive administration the same as an archivist with a master’s degree in archive administration?

Not when you can save money. The archivist with the diploma as we have seen is equally qualified but under most employers’ guidelines the archivist with the master’s degree is entitled to an increment. Thus the latter might earn more than the former even where the former has equal or more experience. That should keep your staff on their toes!

Does an archivist have to belong to a professional body?

You jest. In order to practice, archivists unlike doctors, lawyers, teachers, dentists and clergy, do not have to belong to a professional body, be recognised by a professional body or hold a qualification recognised by any professional body. More than this, any person may be styled or style himself an archivist. Always ask if he is a qualified archivist first. Remember, you could be dealing with the office cleaner (eligible to become a member of the Society of Archivists [sic.])

Can I appoint an internal candidate?

Naturally. Why go to the bother and expense of advertising, long listing and short listing? That you might have the chance of appointing a better candidate shouldn’t come into it. In any case, better the devil you know. Many county record offices appoint internal candidates without advertising so you’ll be in good company. Most of us out here only find out there has been a vacancy when we become vaguely aware of new appointments several months later.

Can I downgrade our post of chief archivist?

Why not? It’s happening in most local government authorities. They achieve this by a range of different devices, e.g. by deleting the post of chief archivist from the establishment; creating a new post of County Heritage Manager or Historic Collections Manager; appointing a non-archivist to the new post and nominating the most senior remaining archivist Principal Archivist. Variations of these have recently been tried at Cambridgeshire and Kent. Alternatively, just downgrade your chief archivist. Let’s keep archivists in their place, never mind their extensive and unique collections. You should also bear in mind your chief librarian might feel threatened by appointing a chief archivist on the same level.

Does the law require me to appoint an archivist?

No. This a matter entirely for your own discretion. Much better to leave your archives in the hands of the most junior clerical staff. In any case, do you really want awkward facts emerging as the result of having well-kept archives? Better to ensure your archives are managed by well meaning individuals with few resources. Perhaps you have a retired member of staff whose exasperating past interest in your organisation’s history can now be used fruitfully? He won’t even ask for expenses.

Does the law require me to appoint a records manager?

Tut tut you are being conscientious. Strictly speaking many public bodies like local government authorities must now conform to the Freedom of Information Act, Data Protection Act and Environmental Information Regulations. Government guidance recommends the adoption of a records management system and electronic document records management system. This in theory would necessitate the appointment of a records manager. However, don’t let this trouble you as most organisations simply get by with their existing IT staff and junior clerical staff. Don’t forget, no public body bound by these new laws or regulations has been given any extra money to help it conform.

Must I keep my archives?

Who do you think you are kidding? Think of the storage space you could save. In some cases e.g. the Church of England’s Parochial Registers and Records Measure and Tithe and Manorial Documents Rules there are special statutory provisions for permanent retention as there are at the National Archives under the Public Records Act but this is probably not applicable in your case. Unlike listed buildings and scheduled ancient monuments, you are basically completely free to destroy your documentary heritage.

I’ve already decided which candidate to appoint. How should I proceed?

Carefully. On interview day don’t let your body language indicate which candidate is preferred and if your candidate is internal, don’t assemble the candidates or interview them in the internal candidate’s office or you will give the game away, as happened in Kent recently. Alternatively, if you are unscrupulous, and most interview chairmen are, make sure you give an impassive greeting to all the candidates bar the preferred one, whom you should greet enthusiastically (this technique is recommended by Cornwall County Council). That will ensure the rival candidates, some of whom will already be tired after travelling long distances, are shocked into early submission. Above all, tell the preferred candidate he (or more likely she) has got the job before the interview. That will ensure he or she is more confident and relaxed than the rival candidates and performs better.

Another tip is to let your preference be circulated on the grapevine, especially effective under the new regional arrangements, so that rivals are discouraged from applying or attending for interview.

Crucially, tip off the preferred candidate about the questions and selection procedures and ask different questions of the rival candidates, to ensure only the preferred candidate meets your selection criteria.

I am really desperate not to appoint that so and so from the neighbouring organisation. Can I do anything about it?

Of course, there’s always a way. We recommend you assess the rival candidate’s character and slant your person specifications and questions accordingly. That way you can ensure he doesn’t score highly at all. Better still, appoint an internal candidate, see above.

From whom should I seek further advice on what it takes to be an archivist?

You can try calling any of the chief archivists named in the National Archives’ ARCHON Directory of archive repositories in the British Isles. Find a repository near to you or one similar to your own organisation and ask to speak to the chief archivist. On being put through, ask him (or more likely her) whether he is a qualified archivist.

Related reading.

Rogue employers

Career Guidance in Archives

Знаешь ли ты кто ты?

Understanding the Archival Domain

A glossary of museums, libraries and archives terms

Stress management

Who Do You Think You Are?

Taking advantage of the London Olympics

2006-05-30T12:08:00.000+01:00

As if the National Council on Archives’ Archives Awareness Campaign and BBC TV’s Who Do You Think You Are? were not enough, archivists, especially those in the under-funded local government sector, more than most already suffering under unrealistic government policy initiatives, now have to face the diversion of Heritage Lottery Fund money away from archives to underpin the Olympics in 2012.

Carole Souter, director, HLF

The extent of the threat posed to archives by the Olympics is clearly not understood by the chattering classes, opinion formers and leading journalists, as evidenced by Carole Souter’s article in the BBC magazine Opinion, entitled The 2012 London Olympics are an opportunity, not a threat, for our heritage.

So much then for attempts at lobbying for the archives sector by the great and good of British archives (see our earlier blog Save Our Cultural Heritage) and the Archives Task Force (see Bollocks, Bullshit and Balderdash)

The gist of Miss Souter’s argument is that the Olympics will lead to direct benefit for British cultural heritage by virtue of increased numbers of foreign visitors enjoying a wider appreciation of our heritage. However, her argument is deficient in that she makes no suggestion as to how our under-funded museums, art galleries, libraries and archives can continue to operate without adequate funding in the meantime, especially if HLF funds are diverted to the Olympics.

Moreover, she fails to recognise the real but intangible nature of British heritage, which surely is our legacy of democratic government, the rule of law, the English language, the Common Law, Magna Carta, trial by jury, presumption of innocence and the Bill of Rights. No doubt these along with our customary weights and measures will be casually disregarded.

Instead, Miss Souter favours among our top five cultural and heritage icons Stonehenge, for which no specifications, quantity survey or original architectural drawings survive and whose precise purpose and contribution to our cultural heritage are surely entirely mythical or speculative, and the Royal Festival Hall. She also mentions the Jurassic Coast, formed before the evolution of mankind, let alone before recorded history. These manifestations of our heritage are much more convenient to Europhiles however.

It is crucial to understand the difference between our three dimensional heritage and our cultural heritage. For an artefact or building to be said to have contributed to our culture and therefore to constitute part of our cultural heritage, it must form part of a living and continuous chain of events in recorded history. This view would certainly permit the inclusion of the Royal Festival Hall but not Stonehenge as there is no link between the culture that created it and our present culture.

We wish Miss Souter an enjoyable Olympics year of basic, politically correct enjoyment of simplified British history.

Save our Cultural Heritage

2006-05-15T22:13:00.000+01:00

Following the refreshing recent public opinion polls supporting Imperial weights and measures in the battle against metrification (see our previous blog Metricators Tamed), we are delighted to draw our readers' attention to an open letter to the Prime Minister published in The Times from several leading backers of the British Weights and Measures Association on 21 April 2006.

The letter refers to the draconian European Union Metric Directive 80/181 which comes into force on 1 January 2010.

Jilly Cooper

The letter is signed by among others Sandy Gall, Antony Worrall Thompson, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Sir Patrick Moore, Jules Holland, Christopher Booker, Professor Richard Holmes, Jilly Cooper and Trevor Bailey.

Further comment is available on the BWMA's own web site

While the authors of the letter make brief and valid comments on the political and economic circumstances surrounding the debate, what particularly matters about this letter is the mention, for the first time to SQA's knowledge except in our own web pages, of the true insidious purpose of metrification. We quote:

So it is not enough that all goods must be weighed and priced in metric measures; in less than four years it will be a criminal offence even to mention imperial measures. This is repression purely for its own sake. It is no more than a malicious attack on our cultural heritage as well as on our democracy.

We take some satisfaction from this mention of cultural heritage in the context of weights and measures coming under attack from the EU, as it stems in part from SQA's direct lobbying of and meeting with journalists and pressure groups including the BWMA on the EU's aim of strangulating British cultural heritage in order to create a unified Europe. Another of our early successes lay in briefing Christopher Booker on the silent metrification of the newer English versions of the Bible (see the 10cm of God in The Sunday Telegraph of 18 April 2004), an example of anachronism if ever there was one.

No-one should be in any doubt as to the EU's threat to the survival of archives which perhaps more than our printed literary heritage safeguard our democracy.

The authors' reference to repression and an attack on our cultural heritage is in part a reference to statements by Cornelis Brekelmans, the European Union's Head of Unit, Enterprise Directorate-General when hosting a delegation from the United States' National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Brussels on 2 March 2005:

The Metric Directive is intended to require metric units of measurement to be used in all aspects of life in the European Union.....The Metric Directive is not a labelling directive; rather it applies to all expressions of measurement units wherever they are used in the European Union.

Furthermore, when questioned by NIST as to whether metric applied to books and magazines, the EU's reply was simply yes.

(The invitation to NIST was a last ditch attempt to undermine transatlantic trade in Imperial between the USA and UK. They failed. By way of background, in 1996 EU Commissioner Bangemann, stated Britain is in an anomalous position, as a full partner in the EU but sharing a common system of weights & measures with the USA, thereby enjoying an unfair competitive advantage in transatlantic trade. We are reminded of James C. Bennett's remarks (click here))

To view the NIST report on the meeting click here

Thus archivists in the UK or anywhere in the EU risk breaking EU law by not describing the dimensions of documents in metric, anachronistically, or even by preserving archives with Imperial intellectual content. Presumably foolscap will be disinvented overnight.

However, opinions as to the reality of the threats to our documentary heritage vary. Even among the appointed guardians of our heritage the political landscape can be interpreted differently. Thus we may compare the BWMA's letter to The Times with another letter to the same newspaper of 3 January 2006, this time by the great and good of British archives and captioned Save our Archives. The signatories include Dr. Peter Anderson, chairman of the Society of Archivists [sic], Dr. Christopher Kitching of the Royal Historical Society, Dr. David Robinson, chairman of the British Records Association and Jonathan Pepler, county archivist of Cheshire. Here the emphasis is rather different.

......the archive sector must focus on such areas as online access and engaging new audiences, such as minority ethnic groups and those under 24.

Powerful stuff indeed. (The letter has also been published on the National Council on Archives' web site.)

We asked our outspoken Ellison Millinocket to offer a few comments on the second letter.

Bollocks. Who do they think they are kidding? We have a population that is 90% indigenous and ageing. And what exactly do you do with a searchroom full of Gypsies, Kosovars, Albanians, Nigerians and Poles all under the age of 24? And in the meantime what do we do with our existing customers, tell them to go away? According to MigrationWatch, who are always right, we can expect 300,000 Bulgarians and Romanians after January 2007. Is Jonathan Pepler [county archivist of Cheshire, ed.] volunteering to set up an encampment outside Cheshire Record Office?

We should all realise the need to cater for asylum seekers and ethnic minorities is unnecessary in a democratic context and that it is in any case part and parcel of the same politically correct campaign to disinvent our national identity.

We thanked Ellison for his insights.

Of ornithology and birdshit

2006-04-05T19:28:00.000+01:00

Our regular readers will be familiar with SQA’s interest in natural history and in particular our specialisations in extinct species and animal droppings. Previous blogs on these subjects have included Extinct and Flightless, Nellie Does Another Whoopsie and
Bollocks, Bullshit and Balderdash.

Our interest in this fascinating subject now extends to the dove.

Hands on: the droppings of the Peruvian booby.

We advert of course to the project of that name recently announced by the General Register Office (GRO), part of the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The DoVE project (standing for Digitisation of Vital Events) aims to scan or digitise the Registrar General’s paper based registers of births, marriages and deaths maintained since 1 July 1837 and simultaneously create a new digital index to the records. You can read more on the official GRO DoVE pages.

The project stems from the Government’s White Paper Civil Registration: Vital Change 2002 subsequent Consultation Document 2003 and legislative reforms.

The digital images will be created from microfilm by the Siemens Document Scanning Centre at Beeston in Nottinghamshire and the index created by Siemens’ Business Process Operation Centre in India and thereafter quality checked by ONS in Britain before acceptance.

Budding transcribers?

Hardly controversial, you might think. However, putting aside the introduction of same sex civil partnerships and the ending of bachelor status in favour of single person status, which has caused protest in certain quarters, SQA has particular concerns about the democratic deficit and quality of this project. We recall all too well the controversy generated by the National Archives who in undertaking their 1901 Census Online project used UK prisoners and sweatshops in India and Ceylon with the result the index or metadata is believed to be at least 10% inaccurate.

Genealogist Jeanne Bunting points out: If anyone is researching the name DITTO, there are 39 of them in the index to the 1901 census..... one of them was even born in Ditto Ditto. The Federation of Family History Societies reported initially 85% of the transcribed data failed to meet the (unspecified) accuracy rate required. The accuracy issue followed on from the scandalous suspension of the service once launched and the delay in reinstating it.

The GRO web site and their periodic email circulars make clear the project is intended to directly benefit GRO staff only for the foreseeable future. The GRO states baldly that the project: will not change the current processes for ordering certificates from GRO both during and following the digitisation project. Thus not only will the public not directly benefit from the laying out of public funds in the form of a searchable online imagebase and index but there is likely to be a deficiency in the index searches performed by GRO staff resulting in entries not being found. Much is made of quality checks but the same was said of the 1901 Census Online. The reasoning behind the largely internal benefits of digitisation may therefore be associated with passport processing and national identity cards, in other words shared access by Government departments and intelligence services.

Mark Serwotka

SQA is not the only organisation concerned. Mark Serwotka, General Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) is concerned about the potential for identity theft and accountability and has stated: These are important records charting the births, deaths and marriages of this country's population which should be maintained securely in the UK public sector by people accountable to us all...ministers need to intervene, stopping ONS playing fast and loose with such valuable and sensitive information and ensure that the population’s personal information remains in the hands of the public sector.

Missed by many commentators on DoVE is the issue of Indian sectarianism. The Hindu business community has perceived it will uniquely benefit from Siemens’ work in Chennai [cf. Madras], India (see The Hindu Business Line.)

AEL Data Conversion Services

Further reading: Ancestry.com

Further reading: Ancestry.com

Metricators Tamed

2006-03-30T23:33:00.000+01:00

No-one was more pleasantly surprised than the British Weights and Measures Association, Customary Measures Society and Active Resistance to Metrication recently when a spate of public opinion polls delivered the death knell to the metrication lobby. All the more so since their own polls had suggested support for Imperial weights and measures was running at about 76%; the recent polls were showing nearly 90% or 100% against metric in a development akin to the French and Dutch rejection of the EU constitution and Neil Herron's North East No Campaign's defeat of deputy Prime Minister John Prescott's proposed North East Euro Region elected assembly.

Lord Kinnock

The whole thing blew up when Lord Kinnock, former campaigner for the abolition of the House of Lords and withdrawal from the EU and now also a former member of the Living Dead brotherhood of failed politicians whose twilight existence takes the form of the European Commission, and Lord Howe, patron of the UK Metric Association (UKMA), suggested Britain should metricate in time for the 2012 London Olympics. Presumably their argument was based on the need for foreign competitors to find their way around the various venues. Not that this would have altered the outcome, as most medals are won by our American cousins, who are steadfastly Imperial.

Never has a planned media campaign backfired so spectacularly, although following a discredited UKMA media campaign previously, we should not be surprised in this respect.

So how is this significant for archivists? Well, clearly we are concerned about the Olympics diverting funds from the Heritage Lottery Fund but equally we are committed to preserving cultural heritage, of which Imperial weights and measures form part; also we must ensure the correct interpretation of cultural heritage, for example in describing documents' dimensions in Imperial rather than metric units. Failure to comply with this ethic amounts to falsification and anachronism. In any case surely we can expect intelligent users of archives to understand Imperial, can't we? After all, Imperial is named after the Roman Empire, thus giving other Europeans a cultural affinity with Britain (remember how we were supposed to embrace the European Single Currency because it was supposedly anciently preceded by the single currency of the Roman Empire?!)

Against this background we continue to marvel at the policy of metrification adopted by the UK National Archives. We know of no act of Parliament that compels us to metricate at all, let alone metricate our cultural heritage. Indeed, the Civil Service's own system of weights and measures is a compound system of decimal and Imperial units; The EU's system of weights and measures is also compound rather than metric or decimal (units such as units of time, kilometres per hour, kilowatt hours and joules, contained in both, are either Imperial or compound, not metric or decimal.) It would be useful to know to which system TNA is conforming.

Alarmingly for a supposedly democratic society, TNA is certainly not conforming to the preferences of the British public, as confirmed by the recent opinion polls.

The Teletext Result

So what did the opinion polls say?

The Metro: 79% pro mile

BBC News 86% keep the mile

BBC North West 97% keep the mile

AOL News: 30,000 voted, 82.5% pro-mile, 17.5% pro-kilometre

ITV Teletext p. 347: 1,300 voted 96% pro-mile, 4% pro-kilometre

ÂThis MorningÂ poll 97% pro-mile, 3% pro-kilometre

Daily Express poll, overwhelming support for the mile, said to be 95%-plus

Sky News poll, again overwhelming support for the mile, no precise figures given out

ICM 86% keep the mile

Meanwhile in Brussels, Gunter Verheugen, Commissioner for Enterprise and Industry, said: I am not pressuring the UK to go metric. As long as I am in Brussels, I will not touch the issue. Full stop. I personally have a lot of sympathy for the mile and for the pint in the UK. What is the problem here for the internal market? Really, what is the problem?

UK Government minsters took the same line during the debate on the UKMA proposal.

So far out on a limb, we can only conclude the metropolitan elite, not known for their being in touch, somehow deduced the country was drifting towards metrification.

They deduced wrongly. Senior TNA staff, gearing up to assist the Audit Office in accreditation of archive services, are known to enquire if archivists act on public feedback. SQA will of course observe TNA's own responsiveness to public opinion with interest.

Знаешь ли ты кто ты?

2006-02-20T10:57:00.000Z

Always keen to protect the interests of qualified, professional archivists, wherever they may be, for whichever employer they may work, we were interested to discover that certain individuals employed by the Foreign Office at the UK Embassy in Moscow, rejoice under the un-Jenkinsonian job title of secretary archivist.

This titulature is entirely new to us. We wonder whether they are on secondment from the UK National Archives, perhaps, or are they departmental records officers as defined under the Public Records Act 1958?

Caution: archivists at work

The individuals have been named as Christopher Pirt and Andy Fleming.

Unless by some chance carrying out descriptive listing of collections of archives, or applying palaeographical expertise in the deciphering of secret messages at the embassy, both of which which we find implausible in the extreme, we can't quite fathom what qualified, professional archivists would be doing working for the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, part of the Foreign Office, especially abroad. While it is true Dame Stella Rimington, a qualified and former local government archivist went on to become head of the Home Office's Security Service (MI5) there is no direct connection between archive work and spying.

Archivists are not engaged in intruding on the privacy or activities of any country, organisation or individual. At most, they are the guardians of their employers' confidences, which is not the same thing.

Dame Stella Rimington

Far more likely we have an instance of the civil service playing fast and loose with the term and concept of archivist and demonstrating ignorance of archivists and archives. This interpretation is borne out by our similar concerns expressed in previous blogs Who do you think you are?, Archives and the Terrorist and Yes Sir Humphrey.

The secretary archivists were supposedly communicating with friendly non governmental organisations (NGOs). That the UK government should be allying itself with pressure groups and reformers inside Russia is ironic in the extreme as the EU is preparing the official registration of NGOs for precisely the same reason as Russia, state control of opponents.

We are also concerned about comments made in the media to the effect that the second oldest profession, spying, is alive and well. We in SQA would have you know that spying is not the second oldest profession after prostitution, archives is. This must be the case, because only two professions survive revolutions: prostitutes and archivists, the former because they are biologically easily available, require no resources and serve human lust in all predicaments and the latter because incoming regimes need access to the evidence of their predecessors' actions.

In the meantime, we hope the Foreign Office will consider changing the job title of spies from archivist secretaries to something more appropriate.

On the other hand....

Общеизвестно, профессия архивариуса может быть связана с риском для жизни, если не быть осторожным и прозорливым - достаточно открыть Шварцевского Дракона, чтобы убедиться. Архивариус может слишком много знать и посему представлять реальную опасность для многих. Скорее всего, именно эта характеристика и связывает архивариуса со шпионом, так что должность секретарь-архивариус в Министерстве Инностранных Дел выглядит вполне логичной (хотя и опасной для жизни).

A glossary of museums, libraries and archives terms

2006-02-03T16:49:00.000Z

The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) seems to have taken a leaf out of the book of the Heritage Lottery Fund in using front organisations or web sites to promote the politically correct agenda. By adopting this tactic, they avoid creating controversy likely to contradict their supposedly neutral public service role.

The HLF's front site, clearly aimed at countering the cultural ramifications of the publications and press briefings of Sir Andrew Green's MigrationWatchUK is Heritage and Identity [www.heritageandidentity.org.uk/index.asp, site lapsed, editor]; MLA's political front is Inspiring Learning for All

Contained in the Inspiring Learning for All web site is a glossary of cultural heritage terms useful in adopting their framework.

We in SQA have been inspired by this glossary to publish our own glossary for the benefit of all persons interested in preserving and enjoying British cultural heritage. We propose to update this continuously.

Access. This term describes the current political obession with enabling wider public use of archives. Until this policy was formulated, archives were of course totally inaccessible and the tremendous increase in public usage from the 1970s onwards, associated with the boom in family history research was a figment of our imagination. Formerly, archivists were not concerned to acquire collections, document them or make them available. Archives were strictly for archivists' private
use. It should be noted the policy of access is not accompanied by increased government funding for this non-statutory local government service.

Hot air?

Blue Sky Thinking. This phrase describes the leisurely activity associated with senior, highly-paid, decision-making staff in public bodies charged with the delivery of cultural heritage services by which all concepts of the general public, unwashed masses and voters are dismissed from consideration in favour of a feeling of general well-being, usually fulled by alcohol, rich food and mutual appreciation, at the taxpayers' expense of course. Any ideas produced during these sessions are filtered down to underlings who not being in the same alcohol-induced state of optimism find them impossible to implement. See also Groupthink.

Bollocks. Non-technical term for policy initiatives, guidance issued by governmental bodies and articulate but unsubstantial verbiage on the subject of archives service delivery, archives development and public access to collections, usually if not always published or uttered by quasi-archivists with no experience of the general public. In American English, the equivalent term is bullshit. Further reading: The Bollocksian Theory of Archives and Bollocks, Bullshit and Balderdash

Common Mind This is the state of uncritical acceptance of collectivist and communist world rule, representing the culmination of the fourth stage of the Soviet/Leninist national revolutionary subversion process, normalisation. The common mind is not to be confused with either consensus or unanimity, outcomes associated with democratic processes such as negotation and debate. The common mind should instead be understood in the context of Groupthink in which individual members of an organisation or society are manipulated into accepting a pre-ordained outcome. In the realm of archives, the common mind is to be achieved by stakeholders, partners, regional bodies, elitists and political parties whilst excluding the electorate from debate on policy. There can only be one outcome, the collectivist Leninist world social order.

Community This entity however ill defined replaces the civil and ecclesiastical parishes, rural and urban districts, municipal boroughs and counties of yesteryear, tainted with all those quaint characteristics of civic pride, ratepayers, elections and accountability. Much better to be vague on this point and avoid highly dangerous social cohesiveness, which only leads to grass roots opposition. A prerequisite for communism of course.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD). The means by which already highly qualified senior heritage professionals, ideally placed to train and inform the general public, policy makers and administrators are instead re-educated by these other groupings in such a way as to be brainwashed, manipulated and intimidated into implementing the politically correct agenda. A crucial characteristic of CPD is senior, highly trained professionals undergoing instruction by persons with no experience or qualifications in the relevant field. This constitutes a very important example of the reversal of social norms as advocated by Lenin in his plans for revolution and Communist world rule. Further reading: click here

Consultant. A professional person, often self-employed, no longer working in direct contact with the general public or who has never had experience of working with the general public, contracted to deliver a report, management service or proposal to a client. It is axiomatic of public sector use of consultants that the client, usually a public body e.g. local government authority (a) already employs appropriately and highly qualified professional staff, (b) distrusts its own appropriately and highly qualified professional staff, (c) continues employing its own appropriately and highly qualified professional staff and (d) increases the taxpayers' costs by buying-in a consultant's services when they already employ full-time and highly paid staff capable of at least the same quality of work.

Consultation exercise. A spurious process that supposedly places private citizens and voters on the same level as certain voluntary bodies e.g. The Ramblers, highly paid consultants, partner organisations or stakeholders. Legislation makes consultation by designated public bodies e.g. planning authorities of certain voluntary bodies mandatory. Consultation exercises in central or local government are convenient mechanisms for gradually overriding public opposition as formerly expressed through the ballot box. By implication in each case the general body of voters is excluded partly or in whole by avoiding a controversy at election times. See also groupthink.

Dumbing down. Highly complex archive and museum collections are naturally beyond the comprehension of most members of the public. Actually, quite often highly complex archive and museum collections are beyond the comprehension of museum curators and archivists too. Why therefore go to the trouble of explaining the significance of such important collections? Surely it is much better to interpret museum objects and archives in an artificially simple light. Attempting to explain the significance of objects and MSS will only have the effect of arousing curiosity about the past, how we came to be where we are now (in the EU), strengthening public feeling against authority, lead to awkward questions and rekindle ideas of accountability. Complex metadata and interpretive material might also have the effect of making senior line managers, information professionals and elected members feel inferior. See also Interpretation and Learning. Further reading: Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone?

Engagement. The process by which public bodies seek to involve the general public, stakeholders and partners in planning statutory or non-statutory service provision. Without engagement, civil servants, regional bodies and local government officers are incapable of service delivery, despite being experienced, qualified, in touch, human and in the case of junior local government officers actually living in the same area they are serving. A complete sham of course, masking elitist service planning and hidden agendas but when successfully used capable of overcoming complaints the organisation did not consult. Again, controversies at election time are avoided enabling EU sponsored political parties to develop the EU's agenda unchallenged.

Groupthink. A term coined by psychologist Irving Janis in 1972, groupthink commonly arises in consultation exercises where administrators, regional bodies and quasi-professional bodies such as the Society of Archivists [sic] and CILIP seek to achieve concensus. Professional participants are led by the nose towards pre-ordained policy initiatives, suppressing individual opinion and hindering progress based on common sense, experience and professional ethics. Crucial characteristics of groupthink are the pre-ordained agenda, outcomes from which deviation is strictly discouraged and the misguided belief among participants that they can influence the outcome.

Interpretation. This of course is something the unwashed masses need assistance with. Their judgement is adversely influenced by patriotism and an incapacity to see anything good in European tendencies such as dictatorship, authoritarianism, European integration and revolution. Instead they tend to judge British cultural heritage in terms of the triumph of Christian western democracy over worldwide heathenism and Communism; they see England as the mother of Parliaments and regard the EU as an extension of Nazism or Bonapartism; and worst of all they regard the British Empire as the nearest thing to unifying world rule. It is the solemn duty of all museum curators, archivists, librarians, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, the Society of Archivists [sic], CILIP and the National Archives to challenge these chauvinistic assumptions. All interpretive material, captions and metadata must therefore use the fiendish Metric system, undermine concepts of nationhood and generally leave the public as ignorant as when they started, or better still confused. See also Learning.

Joined-up. Slang expression explaining the newly-found ability of civil servants or local government officers to communicate with each other, across departments, thereby enabling a sensible, effective and accountable system of central or local government devoid of confusion, contradictory guidance and complaints from the general public. In concept joined-up government is the Blair government's proclaimed method for preventing the public from being passed from pillar to post. Critical observers in the heritage professions have noted civil servants are still not communicating with each other or local government officers, complaints from the public are increasing and costs are rising. Critical observers with long memories cannot actually recollect the ability of civil servants to communicate with each other before the invention of joined-up government. Presmably this means that before joined-up government was invented, there was no joined-up government. Further reading: Archives? What Archives?

Learning. Formerly the process by which persons learned independent thought, developed the faculty of criticism and acquired the mental equipment for clerical, professional or academic occupations. In some few cases, learning was also hitherto associated with persons of superior knowledge, intellect, wisdom, sagacity and judgment. Such persons were described as men of learning. Learning is now a form of brainwashing aimed at enforcing acceptance of the status-quo, membership of the European Union and the place of unaccountable elitists at the head of society. One can now be said to have learned something if one accepts doctrine or policy or has conformed to a trend especially if it is ordained to be good or necessary for one's self.

ODPM The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Older readers may recall that in 1979 Margaret Thatcher appointed Willie Whitelaw as her deputy Prime Minister and in doing so was at pains to stress she was not establishing a permanent office of state, instead honouring Lord Whitelaw's personal political contribution to British political life. The present incumbent of the post, John Prescott, can hardly be said to emulate Lord Whitelaw's stamp of intellectual and political authority so we need to consider why the post has been revived. The tale-tale clue lies in the dispersed UK regional government offices: you've got it, the EU. Put simply, the ODPM is the EU's very own UK government department, responsible for enforcing the EU writ throughout the UK. ODMP funds the English Regions Network which works in conjunction with the Local Government Information Unit (funded by the unions) to develop and promote the regional agenda. Thus the theme of ODPM's work is the dismantlement of parliamentary and representative democracy.

Partners. Supposedly friendly, public spirited collaborators in publicly funded projects, partners are actually persons, non governmental organisations or governmental organisations that subsidise high salaries, waste, regional bodies, unnecessary staff e.g. European project officers, twinning and non-statutory services provided by central government and local government in order that centuries old vulnerable, fragile cultural heritage, deserving of proper financial provision, can be saved. Partnerships thus enable proper funding by the taxpayer through informed, cohesive policy making to be circumvented. Also used to describe unmarried couples of opposites sexes, unmarried couples of the same sex, civil partnerships of same sex couples and confusingly also business partners. The blurring of the concept of marriage is crucial to Lenin's principles of revolution and Communist world rule.

Political correctness. The name given to the first of the four stages of the long term Soviet/Leninist ideological subversion of the world's nation states (the national revolutionary subversion process) leading to world communist government: demoralisation, destabilisation, crisis and normalisation. The first stage, demoralisation, comprises ideological attacks on orthodox Christianity, education, the media and culture leading to charismania (worship of false heroes and role models), Luciferian fog, ignorance of history, addictive fads, groupthink, acceptance of lies and the emergence of the common mind. In archives and cultural heritage, the signs of Leninist influence are casualness in safeguarding archives against theft, failure to supervise workmen or other legitimate visitors to archival storage areas, guided public tours of archival storage areas (thereby assisting in historical ignorance by facilitating theft, misplacement or falsification of and damage to records), diversion of funds necessary for the preservation of archives to regional bodies, the advocacy and management of archives by non-qualified archivists, the blurring of traditional professional boundaries, use of archives against inconvenient historical fact, dumbing down interpretational material so as to disempower the general public, the downgrading of the standard of historical research, re-writing history, shunning the Commonwealth, the couching of cultural heritage issues in Aesopian language and the lack of accountability of elitist governmental and quasi-governmental organisations, eventually leading to the destruction of inconvenient archives. Further reading: The European Union Collective: Enemy of its Member States by Christopher Story, 2002. See also: Groupthink, Safe in Our Hands, Security? How do You Mean?, Re-writing history: a critique of a Vision of Britain, Anyone remember St. George?, A figment of our imagination and Happy Empire Day

Ring-fencing. This is the technique by which senior staff of public bodies other than heritage professionals preserve their departments, pet staff, statutory services, services perceived to be statutory services, projects implemented under government policy initiatives and anything deemed to be politically correct at the expense of archive services.

Social exclusion An absolute must for any system ambitious to become fully communistic, the policy of social exclusion enables certain minorities to be identified as lying outside public sector service delivery, leading to social tensions, media hysteria, reprioritising of public funds usually out of all proportion to actual need and antagonisation of the majority of the population. Replaces former policy based on equality under the law for all citizens, get-up-and-go, personal initiative and reliance on those members of society privileged to own bicycles.

Stakeholders. Unelected persons and exclusive organisations otherwise lacking in governmental or constitutional legitimacy that are given privileged input to policy formation in place of citizens and voters. The use of stakeholders along with expensive consultants is a central plank of the dismantlement of accountable, democratic society. Stakeholders are the most powerful component members of the regional EU assemblies despite being outnumbered by the seconded (i.e. indirectly) elected councillor members supplied by local authorities. In the case of the South Eastern England Regional Assembly (SEERA), the majority councillor members recently voted for the disbandment of their assembly only to be out-voted by the minority stakeholders. Further reading, see Lindsay Jenkins' Disappearing Britain: The EU and the Death of Local Government.

Transparency. This term denotes the trend by which public bodies are deemed to be more open and honest in divulging their decision making procedures and costs than hitherto. Before transparency in public bodies was invented they were of course opaque, riddled with Freemasonry, corrupt, devious and profligate. Transparency was preceded in those former days by old-fashioned democractic accountability to the voters. Nowadays under the policy of greater transparency, self-appointed elitists have been able to overcome this tiresome process. Critical observers of transparency in government and many public bodies have noted difficulty in ascertaining the extent of EU and regional funding by local government authorities and Freedom of Information legislation has only led to the thickening of the fog.

Archives and the State

2005-12-29T13:19:00.000Z

On several occasions SQA has had cause to express concern about the fate of various national or state archives including those of Kosovo (see our previous blog Seeing Stars.)

Eamon de Valera

We have been prompted to look at the subject anew following the announcement earlier in 2005 that the archive of Eamon de Valera the Irish rebel and statesman has been listed by University College Dublin's Archives, part of the School of History and Archives.

What particularly caught our eye was the preamble to the press release. This comprises the quotation History is made with documents. Documents are the imprints left of the thoughts and the deeds of the men of former times. For nothing can take the place of documents. No documents, no history from Charles Seignobos' Histoire de la civilisation contemporaine (1920), translated by de Valera in a letter from prison to Kathleen O'Connell, his personal secretary dated 2 February 1924, in which he enjoins her to safeguard his papers.

The Four Courts under Free State artillery bombardment

Our sense or irony immediately springs to the fore and we are reminded of the contrasting events of 28-30 June 1922 when during the Irish Civil War the Four Courts in Dublin, home of the Public Record Office of Ireland, were bombarded and blown up by Michael Collins' pro-treaty Free State Army. To quote Wikipedia the Irish Public Records [sic] Office was the centre of a huge explosion, blowing to pieces one thousand years of Irish state and religious archives. The mushroom cloud resulting from the explosion of the landmine rose to 2000 feet and fragments of medieval records fluttered down over the city. The only archives to survive were those locked in the safe overnight for use the following day. This momentous event resulted in decades of only partially successful national archival reconstruction by the rebuilt Public Record Office, now relocated and renamed the National Archives of Ireland and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.

Michael Collins

At the time, Michael Collins commented with perverse satisfaction better a state with no archives than an archives with no state. So much for consistency in Irish nationalist politics and the views of his ally de Valera.

However, the expedient destruction of state archives can be found closer to our own times. Not only did premature European Union recognition of Croatia in 1992 lead to the break up of Yugoslavia and the destruction of the Kosovo State Archives (see again our previous blog Seeing Stars) but it now appears that the state archives of Iraq were deliberately and expediently placed at the mercy of Iraqi looters by US troops. This sad news was revealed by the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung in May 2003 and came to our notice in an article in The Guardian of 28 December 2005 entitled Shock, awe and Hobbes have backfired on America's neocons by Dr. Richard Drayton, senior lecturer in history at Cambridge University.

Dr. Richard Drayton

Drayton writes it has been usual to explain the chaos and looting in Baghdad, the destruction of infrastructure, ministries, museums and the national library and archives, as caused by a failure of Rumsfeld's planning. But the German newspaper quotes US soldiers as saying to looters go in Ali Baba, it's all yours! Drayton explains this was a deliberate part of the US strategy which he says was at least in part a mask for the destruction of the collective memory and modern state of a key Arab nation....to create a hunger for the occupier's supervision.

Yet again we are reminded of George Orwell's novel 1984 whose significance in the archival context we have blogged several times (see again Seeing Stars, Chaos in Kent and Patrimony or Patriotism? and of Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 also mentioned in Patrimony or Patriotism?)

The sequel to Irish and Iraqi events is disturbing and the ironies of national politics extend from Ireland to Britain. The UK National Archives (TNA) web site reports it is providing assistance to the Iraqi authorities. We quote (abbreviations expanded):

Dr Saad Eskander, Director-General of the Iraq National Library and Archives (INLA), met the Chief Executive of The National Archives on the 13 May 2005. It was agreed that TNA would:

Provide INLA with a microfilm of records relating to Iraq 1921-1933 from series CO 730.
Identify experts for a short training course in Amman for Iraqi archive professionals.
Provide expert advice on specific issues as new legislation is developed.
Under the auspices of the International Council on Archives, offer support to reinforce the remit of INLA.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Museums, Libraries and Archives Council and the British Library noted that they were also involved in developments with Iraq and asked to be kept informed of developments.

So there we have it. The UK government on the one hand gleefully assists US foreign policy and strategy in Iraq to the extent it collaborates with the destruction of Iraqi cultural heritage including archives but on the other hand makes an expedient and symbolic gesture of reconstruction using TNA as a stooge.

TNA is thus participating in a form of social engineering in Iraq which has involved the deliberate destruction of a state archives, reminiscent of Dublin in 1922 or Kosovo in 1999. This provides archivists with reason for cynicism as Designation Status and Blue Shield status start to look shallow and meaningless when faced with overriding geo-political expediencies.

Can we look forward to an expedient EU orchestrated destruction of Britain's highly inconvenient archives as the home of democracy and the English speaking world?