The Sunday Ishmael: 25/06/2023: Boating News

  Get your fresh, hot bollocks today.

Now that we've agreed that the Russian coup was nothing of the sort, let us turn our attention to matters domestic. Should you ever fall into the error of believing everything Wiki tells you, this entry about Windrush Day should re-balance your credulity: 

"Windrush Day is observed annually on 22 June in the United Kingdom...  introduced in June 2018 on the 70th anniversary of the Windrush migration....On 22 June 1948, 492 Caribbean people were brought to Tilbury Docks, Essex, in the UK, on the Empire Windrush ship..... After World War II, the United Kingdom's economy needed to be repaired. To do so, the British government recruited Afro-Caribbean migrants and offered them jobs. These jobs included the production of steel, coal, iron, and food, and also jobs in the service sector, such as running public transport and staffing the new National Health Service in the United Kingdom.

The first African-Caribbean immigrants in the United Kingdom were faced with extreme intolerance from many in the white population. Although African-Caribbean migrants were encouraged to settle in the United Kingdom and take up employment to relieve the labour market by the authorities, many early immigrants were denied access to private employment and accommodation because of the colour of their skin."

This entry is almost complete nonsense, but is widely believed as truth, rather than an origin myth - a myth, moreover, in which black people = good, white people = bad.

Here's more of the bollocks - sorry, canon:

The Windrush Poem
                                                Tracy Osei-Berko
Dear Britain,
When invited
They came for you
After war broke your country
They helped see you through
But then, you held all the power
So, they never really had a choice
Colonised and subdued
They were a people without a voice
So, to help rebuild
They arrived on your shores
To become your manufacturers
And assistants in stores
Their usefulness and very presence
Became a never-ending debate
And they were constantly subjected
To animosity and hate.......

It goes on and on, but I couldn't bear any more of either the doggerel or the propaganda. Here's an extract from another one, by Laura Serrant:

YOU CALLED ………..AND WE CAME.

You called…and we came.

In ships bigger than anything we had seen,

dwarfing our islands and covering them

in the shadows of smoke and noise.

Crowded, excited voices filled the air,

traveling to the ‘motherland’

– over weeks, over oceans that threatened to engulf us.

Driven by a wish, a call to save, to rebuild

and support efforts to establish ‘health for all’

in the aftermath of war.

You called….and we came.

It, too, goes on and on. However, the mythologised narrative is significantly different from the truth of the events in May and June 1948. The British Government was alarmed by the news that the Windrush was en route to Britain, carrying  531 West Indian men, who had taken advantage of fares heavily discounted by the Windrush's operator to offset losses because the ship was under capacity, on the final leg of her journey back to Britain.  A Privy Council memo sent to the Colonial Office on 15 June stated that the government should not help the migrants: ‘Otherwise there might be a real danger that successful efforts to secure adequate conditions of these men on arrival might actually encourage a further influx.’  Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones replied: ‘These people have British passports and they must be allowed to land.’ But, he added confidently: ‘They won’t last one winter in England.’ Indeed, Britain had recently endured some very harsh winters.

London, Winter 1947

The Ministry of Labour was also unhappy about the arrival of the Jamaican men, minister George Isaacs warning that if they attempted to find work in areas of serious unemployment ‘there will be trouble eventually’. He said: ‘The arrival of these substantial numbers of men under no organised arrangement is bound to result in considerable difficulty and disappointment. I hope no encouragement will be given to others to follow their example.’ HMS Sheffield was deployed to monitor the Windrush, with orders to send it back if any passengers made trouble.

Soon afterwards, 11 concerned Labour MPs wrote to Prime Minister Clement Attlee stating that the government should ‘by legislation if necessary, control immigration in the political, social, economic and fiscal interests of our people… In our opinion such legislation or administration action would be almost universally approved by our people.’ The letter was sent on 22 June; that same day the Windrush arrived at Tilbury.

Fearing mass migration from the Caribbean into Britain, civil servants from the Colonial Office were dispatched to the Caribbean to orchestrate campaigns explaining that jobs in the UK were scarce, conditions were poor, with rationing remaining in place until 1954 for food, furniture, fuel and clothing, and immigrants could not be guaranteed employment or housing. There was a chronic shortage of housing in consequence of Hitler's slum clearance campaign, and the wartime coalition government under Churchill proposed to address the need for an anticipated 200,000 shortfall in post-war housing stock, by building 500,000 prefabricated houses, with a planned life of up to 10 years, within five years of the end of the Second World War. The Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act 1944 aimed to deliver 300,000 units within 10 years, within a budget of £150 million.

There wasn't a post-war labour shortage, either, but a labour surplus. Between 1946 and 1960 almost 2 million people left the country, emigration encouraged by the government with subsided travel to Australia – at £10, a third of what the Windrush passengers paid. Even with mass emigration, unemployment rates remained stable. Fewer jobs than people.

Stripped of the mythologising, the single West Indian men aboard the Empire Windrush were economic migrants, come to Britain to make better life. They were not "sent for", nor were they "called". Their presence made demands on an entirely inadequate infrastructure for jobs, homes, food and clothes. Further, they were the spear head of mass migration into a country that did not have the infrastructure to support such an influx. Unsurprisingly, their presence was resented, as they constituted competition for the available resources and they were very visible as being neither native here, nor to the manor born. Mass migration to Britain continued between 1947 and 1962, latterly known as the "Windrush years", although these economic migrants were not transported on the Empire Windrush, which was used as a troopship until March  1954, when she caught fire and sank in the Mediterranean Sea with the loss of four crewmen. Legislation was eventually passed to strengthen immigration controls; the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1968, for instance, stipulated that only those who were born in Britain or who had one parent or grandparent born there had right of entry. 

But why let history get in the way of a good origin myth?

Which brings us to the next part of the boating news - no, not the influx of illegal economic migrants in small rubber boats that Rishi Sunak is utterly failing to control, but yet another Scottish (best part of England) story.

See this? That's Scotland, that is. And all the little bits in the blue that look like dog droppings, they are islands. Rather a lot of them. Scotland is slowly rising, gradually recovering from the great weight of the ice sheet in the late Devensian glaciation about 22,000 years ago, which carved out the land between all those islands. The icesheet covered the whole of Scotland and Northern England. These islands - they are the tops of mountains and as Scotland rises from the sea, you'll be able to walk between the mainland and the islands. But that will take a very, very long time and another glacial period will probably come along before then, unless humans buckle down and create significantly more global warming to offset the forthcoming ice age.

So, we Scottish Islanders continue to rely on boats to get between the islands and the mainland and between the isles. The SNP administration steadfastly refuses to create permanent links,

Faroese Undersea roundabout

unlike the approach of the Faroese government, and equally steadfastly refuses to fund the replacement of the rust buckets that chug between the islands, regularly breaking down, stranding islanders and delaying fresh food. It also made an utter bollocks of the Ferguson Marine deal.

Pro-Scottish Independence tycoon, Jim McColl, bought Ferguson in 2014. He won the contract for building two ferries, which would be used by CalMac on the Western Isles routes. The procurement process has been dogged by allegations of fraud, currently under investigation by a leading lawyer, Barry Smith. Ferguson Marine was nationalised in 2019 by the SNP after it collapsed into administration following years of delays and over-spend on the two ferries. SNP Ministers have repeatedly defended the nationalisation decision on the basis that it saved jobs. Now Ferguson is actively considering job losses - a hundred, it is rumoured; a third of the jobs at the shipyard. When asked about these rumours, Ferguson Marine chief executive David Tydeman said: "We are currently considering a number of strategies to enhance the future commercial prospects of Ferguson Marine and to ensure the shipyard has the right mix of skills and capabilities among the whole workforce. At the right time, we will engage and consult with individuals, employee groups, unions, and wider stakeholders on the best way forward.”

The two ferries - the Glen Sannox and hull 802 - are more than five years late and at least three times over their original £97 million budget. In May, SNP economy secretary Neil Gray issued an exceptionally rare ministerial direction for an additional £72m to be poured into Ferguson Marine to help fund the completion of the two vessels. We are told that the Glen Sannox (remember her? Disgraced former First Minister Sturgeon launched her in November 2017 with no windows on her bridge. What appear to be windows is actually black paint. The painted-on windows were a clever ruse to disguise the fact that the ferry was not finished).

Anyway, because the Glen Sannox is not due to be reporting for duty until the end of this year, and her sister ship is so unfinished she doesn't even have a name but may be launched by the end of next year, CalMac and the islanders it serves have a problem. Which appeared to be solved by leasing from Orkney's Pentland Ferries the Pentolina car ferry. Unfortunately, the Pentolina, having been tied up in the Kirkwall harbour for years, ever since its replacement by the Arthur, failed to pass its seaworthiness tests. Desperate not to lose the lucrative leasing contract, the owner of Pentland Ferries, Andrew Banks, offered Cal Mac the use of the Arthur instead, at a fee of one million Great British pounds a month. Every month. Every single month. One million quid. A month. Remember the Arthur? The inquiry by the Marine Accident Investigation Branch into why it ran aground on Swona in July 2022 is continuing. So Mr. Banks needed to use the Pentolina instead - as Pentland Ferries were booked solid for the summer, with people, cars, trucks, removal vans, caravans, Tesco lorries. First outing, the 29th April, the Pentolina ran aground just after leaving its home port of St Margaret's Hope, with smoke and flames belching out of the engine room. It was under repair for April, May and a bit of June. Orkney's holiday accommodation businesses suffered badly, with multiple cancellations.

Just another Scottish tale of greed and incompetence.

Talking of which, Disgraced Former First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, who hasnae done anything wrong, was arrested and interviewed for 7 hours as part of the inquiry into the SNP finances - more than £600,000 has gone missing, but a £100,000 camper van turned up on her mother-in-law's driveway. She was questioned, it seems, because she was one of the three signatories to the SNP party accounts, (being a signatory means you've read them and approved them as honest, legal and transparent), the other signatories being the then treasurer, Colin Beattie, and her husband, Peter Murrell. Murrell is being interviewed by Police Scotland again to discover what he knew about Jordan Linden, who quit last July as leader of North Lanarkshire Council following allegations that he had sexually harassed a teenager at a party in 2017. A further five men have come forward with allegations that Linden assaulted, harassed and behaved sexually inappropriately towards them, dating back to 2015. He says he hasnae done anything wrong.

Considering that the SNP has been sheltered and funded by the Westminster Government ever since gaining a majority in Holyrood, and has managed to make an absolute bollocks of everything it has done, how bloody dare First Monster Humza Useless announce that they will use the next general election as a mandate to request from Westminster another independence referendum. Just what sort of pig's ear would they make of running an independent country?

In more Boating News, the cruise liner parked up at Edinburgh to house Ukrainian refugees will be used instead for illegal migrants. Seems nobody is very keen on this, least of all the Ukrainian ladies who are having their cruising privileges revoked.

The three volumes of mr ishmael's Collected Works, selected, edited and anthologised by mr verge, the House Filthster, are now available.

Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack and Ishmael’s Blues are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.

Ishmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps :

please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.

Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr

Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux

At checkout, try WELCOME15 in the coupon box, which (for the moment) takes 15% off the price before postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.

With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.