Month: April 2026

First, I can repeat what I said 32 days ago: the war the US and Israel are waging on Iran is both just and necessary. This assessment doesn’t change depending on how you look at it.

Morally, Iran’s regime is evil. The on-going war thus makes an unimpeachable moral statement: contrary to what our pacifist Pope says, any war that punishes and defangs evil is just.

(Biblical and patristic references provided on request, better and more appropriate ones than the quote His Holiness used.)

Strategically, Iran is one of the major exporters of evil in the world. The ayatollahs are doctrinally committed to the annihilation of Israel and another holocaust of Jews. Their hatred is long-range, extending to Israel’s real or perceived allies.

This group includes all Western and other democracies, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, all the countries around the Persian Gulf and so forth.

Iran’s allies are the world’s other evil powers, mainly Russia and China, but also assorted small fry. Basically, any enemy of the West is Iran’s friend.

Geopolitically, Iran, largely acting as China’s proxy, seeks domination over the entire Middle East. The hatred sputtered by that evil regime hits its neighbours in the shape of missiles and drones, most aimed at civilian infrastructure.

And of course, the regime has been developing nuclear weapons, which it simply can’t be allowed to have. It wouldn’t take many hydrogen bombs to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, a prospect that makes every anti-Semite rejoice but every decent person cringe.

Moreover, even if Iran doesn’t use nuclear weapons to attack Israel, the very fact that such weapons existed would change the balance of power in the region, indeed the whole world.

Even legally, the war is justified – whatever Starmer and his casuistic friends are saying. It was Iran that opened hostilities, by creating, funding, training and encouraging terrorist organisations, such as Hamas and Hezbollah. They are the evil children of an evil regime, and Iran is complicit in every terrorist act those ghouls perpetrate.

Unfortunately, people who criticise, correctly, the conduct of the war conflate it, regrettably, with the reason for the war. This is definitely a good war, if not necessarily conducted in a good way. And we all have a vested interest in victory – when Starmer mutters “it’s not our war”, he commits treason to the Western alliance, setting a bad example for Trump to follow.

No war can ever succeed in the absence of clear and achievable objectives. Unfortunately, Trump, as is his wont, has been moving the goalposts back and forth until they’ve ended up in Row Z.

When the war started, the enunciated objective was regime change – this is no longer mooted. Then another aim was announced: the removal of Iran’s stores of enriched uranium. That doesn’t seem to be on the agenda any longer either.

Trump is only saying that those stores are buried deep under the rubble left by American missiles. Even if true, which it probably isn’t, clearing out the rubble is purely a technical task, one Iran can well perform with a little help from her Chinese friends.

Unlike Kipling, Trump doesn’t seem to know what would constitute triumph or disaster at the end of the hostilities. And when a commander-in-chief has no clear sense of purpose, a disaster looms larger than a triumph. (This has given rise to another acronym in America, TACO – Trump Always Chickens Out.)

This isn’t to underestimate the maddening complexity of the task before the US and Israel, something that unfortunately many critics of Trump tend to do. Such critics instantly turn into cracker-barrel military experts, liberally dispensing strategic and tactical advice.

Unlike them, I can claim no expertise in matters martial. But I can offer a simple definition of what would constitute victory or defeat in my opinion. Then I’d let people with stars on their epaulettes decide on the tactical and technical matters.

Thus, to me, a triumph would be an elimination of Iran as a threat to Israel, the West, the Middle East and peace in general. This may be achieved by changing the regime or by simply ensuring its lasting good behaviour.

As part of that triumph, the bottleneck of the Strait of Hormuz must be opened and kept opened in perpetuity. Iran must have no ability to blackmail the world either with nuclear weapons or with throttling the supply of oil.

As I said, I’m in no position to teach military men how such objectives can be achieved: with or without a ground invasion. History shows that no lasting victory has ever been achieved without those proverbial boots on the ground, but there always can be a first time.

A disaster is just as easy to define: failure to achieve all of the above. If Trump declares bogus victory, ups sticks and goes home, leaving Iran’s offensive potential in place, that would spell a never-ending calamity.

Using Iran as a blunt weapon, China and Russia would be able to blackmail the world with a series of energy crises. Moreover, they, especially China, could rebuilt Iran’s destroyed industry, nuclear and other, much more quickly than experts estimate.

Iran’s regime would emerge as even more hostile and aggressive, obsessed with revenge. Terrorist cells all over the West could be activated to wreak chaos and destruction. And of course no country in the Middle East would have a moment’s peace.

The overarching outcome would be the sum total of evil in the world getting greater, keeping decent countries on edge and making a cataclysmic war ever likelier.

Once again, the war waged by America and Israel is both just and necessary. I hope European NATO members realise this before it’s too late and do what they can to guarantee victory. Because defeat is just too awful to contemplate.

And let’s pray that, for once, Trump will act out of character, show a sense of purpose – and stop alienating America’s friends. His steady stream of insults encourages them to abandon the just cause of this war — and all future wars NATO members must be ready to fight together shoulder to shoulder.

If Starmer actually believes what he says about Brexit, he is even dumber than I thought. And if he doesn’t believe it but still says it, he is even viler than I thought.

In his zeal to drag Britain back into the EU by hook or by crook, Starmer makes a defence case and an economic one. Both are offensively false, but what’s even more offensive is that he thinks we are too stupid to see through his lies.

I shan’t cover the same ground I covered yesterday when commenting on Starmer’s specious claim that Britain’s defence depends on our re-joining the EU, or as near as damn.

Essentially, the blindingly obvious fact is that it’s not necessary for a country to abandon its sovereignty to form a military alliance with other countries. For example, in the Second World War Britain was closely allied with the US without becoming an American state.

We possess no viable deterrent not because we are out of the EU, but because successive governments have been criminally negligent about investing in defence. And we can acquire such a deterrent not by re-joining the EU but by starting a massive rearmament programme.

The economic case is just as groundless, but, since the EU is indeed an economic entity, Starmer’s case can’t be dismissed in one sentence. But it can still be dismissed – by showing that everything he says about Brexit is either an ignorant falsehood or a pernicious lie.

Brexit, says Starmer, “did deep damage to our economy” and “the opportunities to strengthen our security and cut the cost of living… are simply too big to ignore”.

First, reducing the issue of British sovereignty to bean counting is spurious. Britons voted to leave the EU not because they wanted to become richer but because they wanted to become freer.

The outcome of the 2016 referendum showed that people at large have a surer grasp of the country’s constitution than Starmer does. They voted Leave because they wanted to be governed by their ancient Parliament in London, not by a cabal of socialist bureaucrats in Brussels.

However, Starmer and his ilk, the Europhile establishment, set out to sabotage Brexit from the very beginning. They’ve largely succeeded: Parliament had little role to play in over 60 per cent of UK legislation. Those laws have been either influenced or mandated by the EU.

The remaining 40 per cent are a constant burr under Starmer’s blanket, with Britain still falling short of his ideal of becoming a province of the EU. Achieving that worthy goal, however, would require a change of heart on the part of the British, and, as an intuitive Marxist, Starmer believes in the all-conquering persuasiveness of the economic argument.

Britons, he is sure, will be ready to do an Esau and sell their soul for a pot of economic message, no matter how rancid.

But his case is non-existent. It’s true that Brexit somewhat complicated Britain’s access to European markets. But it set the country free to seek new opportunities in the larger markets of America and Asia.

The remaining tethers of EU legislation have prevented Britain from exploiting those opportunities fully. But the main fault lies with our successive governments.

Leaving the EU enabled them to make their own decisions. But it didn’t guarantee they’d make sound decisions. Freedom of choice, after all, also means freedom of making bad choices, and our post-Brexit governments took full advantage of that opportunity.

From the effeminate socialism of Cameron to the intuitive Marxism of Starmer, they’ve been doing everything historically known to undermine the economy, while doing nothing known to boost it.

Having kept most of the EU shackles in place, they added their own trillion’s worth by systematically strangulating the economy with extortionist taxation and stifling regulations. The insane drive towards net zero alone would have been sufficient to do damage, but that was only one prong in the systematic assault on wealth generation.

Rather than producing a balanced budget or at least keeping the deficit down, both Tory and Labour governments have been borrowing with blithe disregard for the future — or indeed for the present.   

Our gross national debt rose from 87.6 per cent of GDP in 2016 to 95 per cent in 2026. Combined with higher interest rates, the cost of servicing this debt has quadrupled in the past five years to £114 billion a year (twice the size of our defence budget).

For all that, our national debt is still somewhat lower than that of France, one of the two principal powers in the EU. I struggle to think how re-entering a single market with that economic basket case would improve our fortunes, but Starmer has his reasons that reason knows not of.

Actually, incredible as it sounds, the UK economy is predicted to be 8.8 per cent larger in 2029 than it was in 2024, compared to 5.7 and 8.3 per cent for Germany and France respectively.

Where Britain trails both Germany and France is in labour productivity, but that gap was even wider when Britain was an EU member. Then as now, France had roughly the same GDP as Britain even though the French worked on average 25 per cent fewer hours annually.

Also, German workers typically produce in four days what British workers take five days to complete. This is largely due to higher capital investment, stronger vocational training and better management practices.

Without getting bogged down in details, let’s just say that our political establishment has squandered the opportunities provided by Brexit. They could have turned Britain into the hub of free trade in the Eastern Hemisphere, rolling up the red tape to release the dormant spirit of British enterprise and attracting foreign investment with low taxation and mild regulations.

Instead, they’ve done exactly the opposite. A concerted, ideologically inspired assault on productive classes has driven thousands of British entrepreneurs — and their companies — into exile. And a constantly rising cost of doing business has slammed the door into the face of foreign companies willing to invest billions.

Every economic measure introduced by Starmer’s government has fired a salvo in its Marxist war on wealth creation. But he and his accomplices are still not satisfied: they want to add the EU’s socialist tyranny to their own. That way they’ll be able to spread coarse salt on Britain’s economic earth, making sure that nothing will grow in it ever again.

And now Starmer has the gall to say: “I’m ambitious that we can do more in relation to the single market, because I think that’s hugely in our economic interests.”

What’s hugely in our economic interests, sir, is to get rid of you and your gang of Marxist saboteurs, letting Britain be Britain again. The country still has left some of the spirit that created the Industrial Revolution, but it takes wise governance to bring it out.

What it emphatically doesn’t take is surrendering what’s still extant of Britain’s sovereignty and paying billions into the EU’s coffers for the privilege. Adam Smith was right: economics is really a branch of moral philosophy. If only we had a moral government to remind us of that fact.

P.S. Every now and then I mention my attempts to improve my English by listening to football commentators.

It’s thanks to those savants that I’ve enlarged my vocabulary by adding words like ‘melodramatic’ to mean ‘dramatic’, ‘decorative’ to mean ‘beautiful’, ‘lacksadaisical’ to mean ‘lackadaisical’, ‘amount’ to mean ‘number’, ‘willy-nilly’ to mean ‘at will’, ‘fortuitous’ to mean ‘fortunate’, ‘vociferous’ to mean ‘full-blooded’ and so on.

But those scholars aren’t the only source of new knowledge: The Times’s general knowledge crossword is also a valuable tutor. Thus the other day a clue was ‘vis-à-vis’, to which the required answer was ‘à propos’. Just to think how many years I’ve wasted thinking the two expressions meant entirely different things.

Please let me know if The Times offers an on-line course in Franglais.  

All he wants, for starters, is to accept all the obligations of membership, but with none of the privileges.

There we are, glad we’ve straightened this out. Now let’s delve a little deeper.

In common with all socialist apparatchiks, Starmer has a visceral loathing of governmental accountability. Since a revolution looks unlikely for the time being, the best way of making a national government less accountable is to vest decision-making into a supranational body beyond the electorate’s reach.

In 2016, Cameron, the Tory answer to Starmer intellectually, morally and – more or less – ideologically, tried to chisel Britain’s EU membership in eternal stone by putting it to a vote in a referendum.

All his friends on both sides of the aisle were sure of a Remain vote. That would have put paid to British sovereignty for ever, all nice and democratic. However, if any proof was needed of how far out of touch that lot were with the people, it was swiftly provided. More Britons voted Leave than had ever voted for anything else.

Direct assault having failed, the bipartisan clique closed ranks and began working in perfidious ways to get around the popular wish so unequivocally expressed. At first, they attempted to sabotage the actual exit. Since after a couple of years that was no longer possible, they tried to make the exit strictly a formality.

The idea was to give the EU so many concessions and accept so many of its laws as was possible without formally re-joining. The Tories did that rather well, but they had certain in-built restraints.

First, the party’s grassroots were solidly in favour of Leave, and they had the power of local and general elections to punish perfidy. Second, even the Tory hierarchy weren’t unanimous on the subject.

Starmer doesn’t have similar limitations. His cabinet colleagues are even more Europhiliac than he is, so is the Labour faction in Parliament, so are the party’s grassroots.

Still, the rest of the country can’t be completely ignored – nor especially seen to be ignored. Hence a pretext was needed to embark on a full-scale betrayal of public will.

Trump was happy to oblige. He too had his idée fixe, and he too needed a pretext to act on it. His obsession was with NATO, an organisation solely committed, in his primitive mind, to taking America for a ride.

I’m not going to indulge any conspiracy theories involving Trump and the KGB. But – purely coincidentally of course – when he returned from his first trip to Russia, in 1987, Trump took out full-page ads in the top American papers to deliver a diatribe against NATO and America’s membership in it.

The language was remarkably similar to his on-going rants forty years on. NATO members wouldn’t pay for their own defence, instead relying on the US to protect them against Russia. They were scroungers, leeches on America’s body.

America didn’t need NATO with its extended hand. We’d be better off out, was the clear implication. Yet either at that time or even during his first presidential term, Trump couldn’t yet act on his innermost feelings.

These, by the way, have become more complex. He clearly sees fellow NATO members as unfit not only to belong to the same bloc as America, but even to have a grown-up conversation with her. The only leaders rating that honour are Putin and Xi, who may be dictators, but they are Trump’s kind of dictators.

Now he feels sufficiently empowered, Trump has begun to attack NATO with venom. NATO is a ‘paper tiger’. It’s obsolete. It refuses to pay its way. It’s disgusting. You don’t pay, NATO, you don’t make any decisions.

And what does paying mean, Mr President? Why, five per cent of GDP spent on defence, that’s what. Anything less, and you are excluded. Since no NATO member spends that proportion, none deserves to be a member. Neither does the US for that matter – she only spends 3.5 per cent of GDP on defence, but let’s not talk about this out loud.

Worst of all, when Trump decided to attack Iran, he snapped his fingers, but fellow NATO members didn’t come to heel. What more proof does one need?

Before snapping his fingers, Trump hadn’t consulted his allies, asked their opinion, laid out war aims, suggested coordinated action. But so what? They showed disrespect.

And by the way, Trump added most bizarrely, he didn’t need their help anyway. That war was won in the first 24 hours, and in fact he only started the war to test their loyalty. They failed that rather expensive test, so it’s good-bye NATO. Would you consider leaving the alliance, Mr President? Damn right I would. Wouldn’t you?

Meanwhile the denizens of America’s Middle Eastern allies are wondering if this is what victory looks like. Iran continues to attack them with missiles and drones, causing billions’ worth of damage and beggaring them by making it hard for them to sell their oil.

If war was won in the first 24 hours, how come they are still dying a month later? Didn’t America anticipate Iran’s response? America probably did, but Trump didn’t. He was sure that once Iran was bombed flat and all the ayatollahs were killed, Iranians would come crawling.

Instead they are sending drones to reduce the Middle East to impoverished wasteland, and there’s little America can do to stop them. There are only so many multi-million-dollar rockets one can fire to stop drones that are tuppence a bucket.

Only one American ally knows how to stop cheap drones cheaply: the Ukraine. She has learned the trick the hard way, and now she is ready to help out the Persian Gulf countries. In fact, the Ukraine has signed an agreement to send experts and some defensive kit over to the area.

When Trump found out, he was incandescent. That action was nothing short of provocative. Its aim was to show that Trump can’t help his allies, but Zelensky can. Who the hell does he think he is?

That was slightly inconsistent. European NATO members are lambasted for withdrawing help; the Ukraine, for providing it. Both will be punished: NATO by being left to its devices; the Ukraine, by losing the last vestiges of American aid. It’s time that annoying obstacle in the way of Donald’s friendship with Vlad was expunged anyway.

Back comes Starmer who has heard all he needs to know. If America pulls out of NATO, NATO is for all intents and purposes defunct. Britain lies bare and virtually unarmed (Trump is right about the state of our defences), so she needs to look for alliances elsewhere.

The Middle East crisis, explained Starmer, shows the need to hug the EU with renewed vigour. The EU-UK summit in the summer will be a good time to intensify the foreplay.

For the time being, Starmer has weakened Britain’s negotiating position by saying we’ll accept ‘free movement’, EU laws and regulations, emission rules, the whole ethos of a single European state. And yes, of course, we’ll be paying into the EU’s budget.

Starmer has found his pretext, and his dream is about to come true. His senior accomplices are jubilant, although they aren’t sure Starmer is going far enough. Deputy PM Lammy and Health Secretary Streeting both want to re-join the customs union, while London mayor Sadiq Khan wants to cut to the chase and re-join the EU.

“It is increasingly clear,” explained Starmer, “that as the world continues down this volatile path, our long-term national interest requires closer partnership with our allies in Europe and with the European Union.”

Now seems to be the time when inadequate leaders compete with one another in making incoherent pronouncements dictated by nefarious urges. If Starmer wants to drag Britain back into the EU come what may, he should say so and proceed within the constitutional framework.

What on earth does the Middle East have to do with it? Britain has disarmed herself because our politicians, the Camerons-Starmers of this world, don’t want to spend money on defence. They want to spend it on bribing increasingly dependent masses to vote for increasingly incompetent politicians.

Our welfare spending is over six times the size of our defence budget – and the situation in the EU, its western part at any rate, is no different.

Instead of talking bilge about some mythical link between the Middle East and EU membership, Starmer should announce a massive rearmament programme. But that’s what a statesman would do, not a spineless socialist nonentity.

And of course we need to maintain a close military cooperation with our European allies. But the EU isn’t a military bloc; it’s a jumped-up trade Zollverein with hopes of creating a single European state.

Military cooperation with the EU can proceed as a bilateral agreement, within NATO, minus the US, or under the aegis of some new bloc. Re-joining the EU would serve no purpose other than fulfilling the wettest dreams of socialist apparatchiks.

It’s not crises that bring civilisations down. They perish when, at a time of crisis, they suffer from a slackening of the national will – and from being led by inept, malevolent and perfidious politicians. Our own civilisation qualifies in spades.  

Do you know what ‘linkup’ means in colloquial usage? No, neither did I, until the papers put the word on their front pages.

It means mobs of feral, utterly dehumanised youngsters running riot through high streets, having organised the fun by ‘linking up’ on social media.

On Saturday and Tuesday hundreds of young humanoids, their minds addled by cannabis and up-to-date advances in electronic communications, created mayhem in Clapham, Birmingham and elsewhere, looting and trashing shops, terrorising the locals, fighting police and one another.

For those unfamiliar with London’s geography, Clapham is an up and coming borough just south of the river, where serious efforts at gentrification started some forty years ago. By the looks of it, the work isn’t quite done yet.

The youngsters had to entertain themselves as best they could during the half-term, what with school playgrounds closed. Not to worry: stores like Marks & Spencer or Sainsbury’s could be easily turned into improvised playgrounds or even battlegrounds.

Police were as helpful as they always are in such situations. They arrested a few hooded youths for old times’ sake, but nostalgia quickly wore off. To reflect the ethos of new times, they advised families either to barricade themselves in or to slip out the back and make themselves scarce.

Ever wonder where the cops are when we need them? There they are, offering invaluable community advice.

As for the looted and trashed shops, they received their own police advice: close early, wherever you are. With teenagers across the country on half-term, ‘linkups’ may create similar rioting all over the country.

Marks & Sparks, for one, knew good advice when they saw it. The store did close early, wisely wary of having its aisles devastated again. Boots and Waitrose prudently followed that example, having suffered their share of mayhem.

Those slower on the uptake, such as Sainsbury’s and McDonald’s, had to initiate their own emergency procedures. They barricaded their customers in, as balaclava-clad teenagers on half-term were turning the high street into a battle zone. Lord of the Flies reenacted: it was children’s time, and there were no rules.

Multiple videos were shot, with people’s phones obviously at full charge. One such video showed that our youngsters aren’t alien to team work. One teenage girl was filmed running out of a Sainsbury’s, while another covered her retreat by hitting a police officer.

I wonder if any of the yahoos felt uncomfortable acting like that during Holy Week. Do they even know what Holy Week is or what it means? Probably not: their schools stay off the subject for fear of offending Muslims, and their parents probably went to the same schools when they were young.

Anyway, who cares about those outdated relics of our racist, colonial past, when we have social media to fill all the cultural, intellectual and social gaps? Children spend all their time glued to the displays of their phones and laptops. These devices promote social cohesion, bringing people together, turning individuals into a community.

The community thus formed can then come together in the flesh, smoke a spliff or two and then have some innocent fun in high streets. Terrorised pedestrians and employees of trashed and looted shops or fast-food outlets may not think the fun all that innocent, but they are helpless to stop the rampage.

More worrying, so are the police. Just a few decades ago, cops would have arrived in force, ploughing into the feral mobs with truncheons and making multiple arrests. Judges would then have passed stiff sentences, sending dozens of young thugs to the ‘juvie’.

The parents of those still at large would have administered their own punishment, possibly of a corporal nature. All in all, should such ‘linkups’ have happened then, a repeat performance would have been strongly discouraged.

However, now we’ve become so much more sensitive and progressive, the situation has changed. Parents have been turned into an irrelevance and police into an extension of social services and counselling. Old-fashioned policing is reserved for ‘hate crimes’, such as racial slurs (real or imaginary), transphobia, misogyny and so forth, all the way down the list.

And old-fashioned parenting has been replaced by those flickering displays. Children stay out of their busy parents’ hair for hours on end, mastering the art of animalistic, practically non-verbal communications. When they grow up big and strong enough to take swings at cops, they link up and go out on the town.

Even the authorities are aware of the irreversible damage caused by that addiction to social media. Children grow up unable to speak properly, if at all. They don’t read books or even newspapers. They are helpless in social situations (other than cannabis-fuelled linkups). And they are a menace to others even in the most immediate sense, not to mention the long-term danger they present to national survival.

Half-hearted attempts are made to shut the stable door of social media, but the horse of savagery has already bolted. Measures that are likely to be effective aren’t even contemplated anyway, such as making it illegal for anyone under, say, age 18 to own a computer or have access to one.

Even if introduced, such measures probably wouldn’t work. What’s required is a civilisational about-face, but I’m not holding my breath. Such things don’t really happen.

P.S. Every time one cracks a joke about Trump, he throws it back in one’s face.

Just yesterday I wrote: “I wouldn’t put it past Trump to improve Mount Rushmore by adding his gilded bas-relief to those of his presidential inferiors: Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Lincoln.”

And what do you know, I read in today’s paper that stonemasons in South Dakota are already at work, busily carving Trump’s bas-relief next to the other four. The article didn’t make the gilded part clear, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Turns out Trump ordered the work on the first day of his second term. That was an advance on his future – and guaranteed – achievements. Verily I say unto you, the Donald proves yet again that truth is stranger than fiction. Also more insane, I’m tempted to add.

Clinging on to the remnants of optimism, I hope that article is the paper’s idea of an April Fool joke. Reclaiming some realism, I fear it might not be.