I hate to spoil Guido's story (post on his site yesterday) but Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has just emailed me to deny she has been interviewed by Inspector Yates. Here's what she says...Your fellow bloggers have started up a rumour about me being questioned by police on the peerages row. Here are the facts for you. I was asked months back by the police if I had anything to add to the evidence I gave the Public Admin Select Committee when they were looking at the honours system. My evidence to the Committee is on record. I told the Police I had no further infomation nor anything further. That was that. Nothing more since.
As you might remember from THIS article back in January, I rather like Yasmin, even though we disagree about almost everything. I'm delighted that she and I will be regular sparring partners on the Saturday night newspaper review on News 24 during August and September.
You rather like Yasmin? God, I hope that's the birthday Champagne talking!
ReplyDeleteMs Brown is infamous among the internet community. She detests the English in particular and is on records with quotes like these -
ReplyDelete"Once, as a rabid anti-imperialist (which I still am), I would have applauded anybody who publicly humiliated the English. If it was done cleverly and with panache it was even more satisfying. Like other nationals who had been subjugated for so long, these small affronts were liberating, a way of confronting that arrogance of Englanders"
"My hopes of progress are turning to ashes. If the cricket is won, many more white Britons will give up on Britain and take refuge in England...But this is more than just cricket I sense. It is the agony and ecstasy of Englishness, today in resurgence after years of confusion and surliness. From Orwell to Tebbitt, cricket has been used as a metaphor for English nationalism."
Her vitriolic anti-English racism is only outdone by her own, bloated arrogance -
"My English is superior to many of those who are 'truly' English and I am a talented columnist - that is why eight newspapers currently run my work including the Daily Mail Yasmin A-B "
And threatening, too -
"Like it or not my daughter is half Englsh and she and her sort will come a calling whatever you say and they will change the attitudes you represent Y-A-B "
Anything she says should be taken with a very large pinch of salt. She is clearly not a well woman in the mental health department.
In fairness Ian it ought to be said that Guido actually said that police wanted to speak to her about the evidence she gave before the select committee, and in reality Yasmin has just confirmed the story.
ReplyDeleteGood luck to you, Iain. I find Ms Brown's relentless attacks on the English tiring in the extreme. Here is a woman who has elected herself spokesperson for all immigrants - saying that they are more comfortable with a "British" than an "English" civic identity. She then goes on and on and on about the British Empire as though it was simply an English project.
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't. The Scots were disproportionately involved for a start. But Ms Brown will not attack Scotland and Wales because they have nationally representative bodies who will answer her back.
I think that her view of life is seriously wonky and her view of England and the English extremely bigoted. But Ms Brown is blind to her own faults. She only likes to pick fault with us - because nobody in power will answer her back!
Could you imagine Mr Blair doing so?!
Yates probably collapsed thinking about all the hassle and collateral damage.
ReplyDeleteIt must be incredibly tiring for her, being so permanently agitated and angry about *everything*.
anyway, that email was probably just her alibhai...
ReplyDeleteYasmin says: "Your fellow bloggers have started up a rumour about me being questioned by police on the peerages row."
ReplyDeleteRighteo.
But then she says: "I was asked months back by the police if I had anything to add to the evidence I gave the Public Admin Select Committee when they were looking at the honours system."
I take it in Yasmin world being "asked" something is not a question?
Judging by the oral evidence given to the committee from Guido's site I suspect Yates may be making a return visit or her answer to the Knackers was somewhat more fulsome than the one given here.
Since the world is huge, why does she live here if she doesn't like England or the English? This is a free country, she can leave if she likes and find somewhere more conducive to her requirements, whatever they may be.
ReplyDeleteDarcus Howe meets Ester Rantzen. I gave up buying the Eve. Stan. cos of her.
ReplyDeleteIain is endearingly generous in his support of the unsupportable. Most people of a conservative bent will feel vaguely unwell if Yasmin Ali-Baba or Hazel Blears appear on their radar.
ReplyDeleteIain, on the other hand, finds them amusing, their essential dopiness putting them in the "camp" category.
Sorry, Iain, but I find Ms Ali-Baba as funny as a dose of crabs. She has umpteen journalistic outlets simply because she's a female and a muslim. She'd gain a little more respect and interest if she could write about something other than being female and a muslim.
"It is difficult to list the activities of this busy bee; more interesting to speculate why it is that she occupies the position that she does. For that, there is only one possible answer: she is Asian and she is a woman"
ReplyDeleteMelanie McDonagh - spot on.
Ed, yes you're right.
ReplyDeleteYasmin really does stir you lot up, doesn't she?!
She may kid herself that she's a talented columnist, but her writing is drab, uninspired and incredibly predictable. Plus she is filled with bile. In fact, she is a one-person yawn-o-rama. As others have said, she owes her blind good luck to being a woman, an Asian and a Muslim who hates her host nation. Three in one. Saved them the expense of hiring three separate people.
ReplyDeleteBTW, Yasmin, if you're reading this, the British Empire was a glorious - on the whole - undertaking in which we passed infrastructure, technology like railways, and the grandeur of English Common Law to less developed peoples.
We are the only rulers of an empire in the history of the world to go voluntarily, negotiating with our former colonies to continue to belong to our family in the form of the British Commonwealth.
Whether whiney ol' Yasmin likes it or not, that is a staggering achievement.
Dee quotes her as writing: ""Like it or not my daughter is half Englsh and she and her sort will come a calling whatever you say and they will change the attitudes you represent Y-A-B "
They won't come calling at my door, I guarantee you.
For one who supposedly despises English elitism YAB has put an awful lot of effort in trying to be a very elite English person.
ReplyDeleteIt started with her forbears who were only too happy to discharge their 'colonial duty' (ie get rich)and do the Asia/Africa flit.
And once Uganda had thrown off the shackles of imperialism, YAB and kin courageously resisted the allure of an independent India and headed for the belly of the intolerant beast...
...where the young YAB enrolled at Oxford. There she discovered she could make quite an impression on the gullible, white lower middle class swots by playing the victim.
YAB soon realised she could make a career hamming it up for the natives. And she's been playing to (and getting her cues from) the naive white liberal gallery ever since.
In the eyes of her legions of doltish admirers she can do no wrong. They overlook her inability to reason and are blind to her cant and hypocrisy (eg sending her son to Eton)
YAB's strategy is to be made a duchess (of Kampala) in the Queen's birthday honours (she actually wanted to keep her last gong - she only sent it back when her friends told her it wasn't the done thing for trendies to accept them) and to make her Lord's entrance in a burka.
If the English were twice as elite and intolerant as YAB makes them out to be she would be Jasmin Brown BA (Essex University) Hillingdon Gazette.
Which is about right...
I'm sorry, I just can't get excited about the stunning Yasmin. She's an incredibly boring and self-centred bint, with precious little real talent or intellectual ability, although I can see that one or two may find her - even her articles - amusing.
ReplyDeleteIn my carefully considered view, of course....
She's still a babe though . . . .
ReplyDelete"I rather like Yasmin, even though we disagree about almost everything. I'm delighted that she and I will be regular sparring partners on the Saturday night newspaper review on News 24 during August and September."
ReplyDeleteRemind us Iain,what it is about this woman that you find so likeable.
While on the same general theme, someone ought to say something about that dreadful article by martin kettle in the Guardian today.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1821063,00.html
Should he not declare his interest?
YAB is a one woman s**t stirrer on the Multiracial subject. I wrote to her to say I thought she was making thinks much much worse by her continual anti English articles but she disagreed. I would hold her partially responsible for the rise the popularity of the BNP. She is a completely stupid old media trollop IMHO.
ReplyDeleteYasmin may be likeable as a mother, wife, neigbour or tea lady but as for her ideas, opinions and prejudices she ranks with Pollyanna as a female fathead. She is not worth fisking. Hope you have a nice day tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteYAB is a sour, sanctimonious windbag with an identity crisis which probably accounts for her constant racist remarks, despite which she's a good each-way bet for almost any NuLab quango dealing with 'community relations', on which subject her objectivity matches la Toynbee's in economics. (Are they by any chance related?) Mind she doesn't turn your wine sour, Iain.
ReplyDeleteAs a working class English man I have, I think, an understandable contempt for ANYONE who was educated at oxford university describing themselves as disadvantaged in any way whatsoever. She very likely had servants washing her smalls when she was a kid. Try building your own profitable manufacturing business from nothing on a 3rd rate state education, and I may be impressed. YAB and her overated intellect can kiss my ass.
ReplyDeleteBTW the British Empire was the greatest thing that ever happened to the world, and most of its current problems are caused by its demise. I did not need a university education to understand this , just common sense and eyes in my head.
Ms Brown ought to be interviewed by the police allright, but regarding about her rabid racist problem. She needs re-educating, New Labour style.
ReplyDeleteWasn't she married ot an Englishman and had a family with him? She may pretend not to like the English, but all the same, she soon laid on her back and thought of England when the Empire came calling.
Idi Amin claimed that one of the reasons he threw Yabs and her mates out of uganda was because of the constant denigration of his people by asians.
ReplyDeleteI have met Fijian Indians who have nothing good to say about the native Fijians too. Iam beginning to see Idi's point of view.
Charming...
ReplyDeleteI offer up this tale from Harry's Place.
ReplyDeleteAny further comment on it would be redundant.
I wonder why this poseur and victim manqué never misses an opportunity to label herself an Asian. I do not go around referring to myself as a Caucasian.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to which, if she wants to use her ancestry as a blunt weapon, why, pray, does she not refer to herself as a Ugandan? Too infra dig? People might think she was black? There's a little chink into the mare's nest that is Yasmin's mind here.
We don't want YAB in Harrogate anyway. We have a peaceful community that doesn't go round finding excuses to make thinly veiled racist attacks on the rest of the population ........... unless they're from Lancashire, naturally.
ReplyDeleteJust noticed this post Iain.
ReplyDeleteI was careful with my wording and never claimed she was interviewed by the police.
"Yasmin Albhai-Brown Talks to the Yard
Some say she has committed many serious crimes against reason, but the police actually wanted to speak to her about the evidence she withheld when she was in front of the Select Committee on Public Administration :
[text from testimony]
Wonder how the police got on with their inquiries? Most interviewers find it difficult to shut her up..."
http://5thnovember.blogspot.com/2006/07/exclusive-yasmin-albhai-brown-talks-to_14.html
Which is in all fairness not at all incompatible with what she said.
Don't want people thinking Guido makes unsubstantiated allegations.