Beauty salon for children creates a stink

"A beauty parlour has become the first in Britain to offer makeovers, fake tans and facials exclusively for children and toddlers, it has emerged," says everybody's favourite Conservative broadsheet The Daily Telegraph before going to list the services available at the salon, Trendy Monkeys of Brentwood, including "fruit smoothie facials, mini pedicures, manicures or make-up application, hair “up-dos” and haircuts." And all this in the same week as the Government's new proposals to combat the sexualisation of children! Keen eyes will note that brazilians and vajazzles do not appear.

Trendy Monkeys. Doesn't look all that sexual, does it? Unless monkeys in tutus do it for you. They probably do for some people, but we'd prefer not to Google anything like that just in case we see images.

Apparently, girls as young as one year old can be treated to ""Princess pamper parties", which costs several hundred pounds" which begin with them and up to five friends being "picked up in a pink limousine" and taken to the salon, where doting parents "can pay for extra services including spray tans while having a photographer follow them around."

Professor Judy Hutchings of the Centre for Evidence Based Early Intervention told the paper that the salon represents "not just the sexualisation but the commercialisation of children." We dislike the sexualisation of children as much as any other normal adult, but the commercialisation bit is stretching things a bit far. The same could be said about The Beano, Ladybird books, Dinky cars and all the other kiddies' products that were with us in that delightful bit of the 1950s with the rosy glow around it, when children were innocent creatures of joy and light and went around with scabby knees saying "brilliant!" and drinking lashings and lashings of ginger beer. Precisely the same thing is going on in the half-timbered cottages of the Black Forest where Geppetto hand carves toys for sale to tourists, in the Tridias shops that were so beloved among the upper middle classes for their traditional toys and lack of the latest kill-em-up videogames, and everywhere else that toys or anything else marketed at and for children has ever been sold.

Tellingly, the Toryrag points out early on in the story that the salon, which opened last weekend, "is located in an area featured in the ITV reality television show The Only Way Is Essex." Two members of the cast were in fact at the opening of the salon, as revealed by The Daily Mail which, predictably, takes a similar line to the broadsheet and has a picture of the celebs in question in Marbella ("Marbella? How vulgar!"). Which rather begs the question: what do we have here? A story which raises legitimate concerns over the way children are being raised in modern society or an opportunity for the newspaper's readers to enjoy a spot of "haw haw, look how tasteless the working classes like the ones in that dreadful programme (which none of us watched, of course, because we're much too highbrow) are, aren't we so much better than them?"-style upper middle class snobbish solidarity over their breakfast coffee this morning?

Jewish BNP candidate stands in Epping

The Jewish Chronicle's article "Election 2010:Jewish candidates await the results" includes a list of "other key Jewish constituencies to watch" - one of which is Epping in Essex.

A very brief bit of research reveals that candidate Patricia Feldman Richardson is - apparently - ethnically Jewish, though she does not practise the faith.

The BNP's Jewish candidate Pat Richardson

Image from Hope Not Hate.

Now, we sincerely hope that Jewish readers of Acid Rabbi are not the types to vote for someone simply because they're Jewish. However, politicians are well aware that there are people out there who pick which candidate's going to get their X on the ballot paper according to such criteria as how attractive the candidate is, whether or not they dress well and, indeed, their religious and/or ethnic background. What politicians won't admit - because it'd make them look elitist and lose votes - but we will is, basically, quite a high percentage of the population are not all that bright. In fact, we'd even go so far as to say quite a lot of people are thick as shit.

With that in mind, anyone from Epping tempted to vote for Ms. Richardson simply on account of her ethnoreligious status should think carefully before doing so, as a quick look at the ballot paper will reveal she's standing for the extreme right British National Party - and the BNP who are certainly no friends to us Jews, no matter how often party leader Nick Griffin claims to no longer deny the Holocaust. Nor, for that matter, how many times Ms. Richardson says the party is neither antisemitic nor racist.

Since 2009, Richardson has been leader of the BNP on Epping's council and during that time the group has campaigned against Muslim prayer groups. Jews, throughout the millennia that we have existed, have been subject many times to attempts to prevent us practising our faith and so it is our duty to protect other people's right to practise their own.

The BNP are a group so hungry for power that they will say just about anything if they think they might get a few votes out of it. In Britain today, that means claiming not to be racist - "racism" is a dirty word, and even those who admit to such beliefs are frequently apologetic when doing so ("Well, I'm sorry but I do think they're just over here to claim benefits..." "I know I shouldn't say this, but if I see a black man in the street at night..."). However, "Islamophobia" is not - following the terrorist attacks in New York, London and other places, British Muslims have been demonised in very much the same way that we were at various times in our history and the BNP are taking advantage of that by using people's fears to advance their racist ideology by stealth.

Remember Pastor Martin Niemöller's famous poem about the inactivity of German intellectuals allowing the Nazis to rise to power?

THEY CAME FIRST 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 me
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

It still rings true today - the only difference being we've moved a few notches up the scale as the fascists have identified new enemies.

THEY CAME FIRST for the Muslims,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Muslim.

THEN THEY CAME for the Poles,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Pole.

THEN THEY CAME for the Africans,
and I didn't speak up because I was not an African.

You can be certain that, if the BNP achieved power and removed Islam from Britain, they'd pretty soon move onto their next target. It might be Poles, or it could be Africans, or it could be homosexuals. However, sooner or later - no matter how many other groups were targeted first - it'd be our turn, because the ultimate aim of the BNP is and has always been a Britain populated solely by white, Anglo-Saxon BNP supporters.

Pat Richardson may be ethnically Jewish, but that's no guarantee that her party is not antisemitic. Her membership and position on the party, in fact, seems a calculated attempt by the group's leadership to prove that the BNP is not antisemitic - she may be convinced the BNP is not antisemitic but would they retain her, do you think, if antisemitism was as widespread among the general population to whom the party is trying to appeal as it is among its members? Poor Ms. Richardson is yet another victim of the cynical BNP's lies.

Make sure you don't fall for them too - and if you live in Epping, don't vote for Pat Richardson even if a candidate's ethnicity is the best reason you can think of to vote for them. There are far, far better reasons to vote against her.

Tory peer claims £100K + expenses

No time to write about Lord Hanningfield now, but you can read all about his adventures at the tax-payers' expense courtesy of the Independent. We're sure you'll come to the same conclusion as us - ie; he's yet another greedy scam artist. Put it this way - he lives less than 50 miles from Westminster, but claimed that amount so he could avoid commuting. Dodgy? The police think so too.