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N R Baines comments, Thursday, August 2, 2007, on a remark by David Irving in the witness box that struck home: "Sometimes I wish I could go Heathrow Airport and get on a '747 and take a ten hour flight and land back in England as it was, as it used to be. "

Photo right: arriving at Court  

Getting away from it all

I REMEMBER hearing that you once made the comment, if it were possible to board a plane and go back to 1950s England, then you would gladly do so! At the time I thought that you were maybe just having a bit of a crack at the black people in London, but as time goes by I think I can see more and more what you meant.

The other day I was in the little county town where I grew up as a kid, and it occurred to me that the whole place has just changed radically within the space of a few years. Everywhere, EVERYWHERE it is crawling of Poles! All of the traditional little English shops that I remember visiting with my late grandmother are gone. In some cases there are even Polish shops sprung up in their place to cater for the new inhabitants of the town!

Obviously, I don't have anything against Poles as a people - but I just don't see why they should ALL come to OUR country!? And no doubt they will soon be joined by millions of Bulgarians, Serbs, Turks, and so on.

So I think you were absolutely right - if only one could wind back the clock! (Although in my case it would be to the 70s not the 50s!)

I heard somewhere that hundreds of thousands of English people are also leaving every year and heading for Spain. I would join them if only I could. . .

N.RBaines

David Irving answers:

YES, but at least the Poles are, eh, a bit more like us. (Hard workers, I mean. Whatever else could I have meant: Gotta be careful not to break any new laws in England now.) I expressed the view you refer to during the Lipstadt trial (February 3, 2000) when the defence counsel asked me what I meant by patriotism.

Here is the full passage concerned, Day 15 of the long trial (page 13 onwards). I had been on the witness stand for several days by then.

IRVING: What do you mean, where did the Irvings come from? How far back are we going to go?

RAMPTON: That is the point, is it not? How far back do you have to go? Does it matter, Mr Irving?

IRVING: It does. [. . . For] somebody born in England of 1938, with all the values that I grew up in, grew to respect and admire and love, I regret what has happened to our country now. Sometimes I wish I could go Heathrow Airport and get on a '747 and take a ten hour flight and land back in England as it was, as it used to be. That is what this paragraph is saying.

RAMPTON: Yes, it is. It is saying that England has changed in this regrettable respect, that now we have all these Black people in England.

IRVING: One wonderful thing about England, Mr Rampton, you may disprove of it, is that privately you are allowed to have your own private thoughts about the way things go, what you would call a state of mind, and my state of mind is that I regret what has happened to the England I grew up in.

RAMPTON: That, I am afraid, Mr Irving, is characteristic of people that one may properly and legitimately call racist, is it not?

IRVING: Or patriotic. Patriotism is literally respecting the country that has been handed to you by your forefathers, by your parents. . . I do not think there is anything despicable or disreputable about patriotism. You wish to call it racism, that is your choice. I call it patriotism. Respect and love of the country that I grew up, the England I was born into.

 

[. . .]

 

RAMPTON: You would like it to be the position, would you not, as with the National Alliance, that this country was a pure white Aryan race of people who went back at least as far as Robert the Bruce, for what difference it makes, would you not?

IRVING: Well, you heard what I said about taking off in that '747 and landing back in England as it was, the England of The Blue Lamp and Jack Warner, and when there was no chewing gum on the pavements, and all the rest of it.

RAMPTON: I will just finish.

IRVING: It is just an old fashioned attitude, I think. You will probably find that ninety per cent of Englishmen born at the same time as me think the same. That is what democracy is about.

Our dossier on The Lipstadt trial

 

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