Author: Alexander Boot

The EU is like the intimate portion of canine anatomy: it locks a member in and holds on tight.

Tempting though it may be to expand this simile, I’ll just repeat what I’ve said before. The main problem with the EU isn’t that it’s undemocratic but that it’s evil.

A political structure doesn’t have to murder millions to justify such a description. It’s enough that it should be built on wicked principles and propped up by wicked practices.

Vindicating this observation, the EU, abetted by quislings in the national governments, has so far been able to reverse every referendum that has gone against it. Each time it acted like a stern teacher telling a hapless pupil to think again: “You got it wrong, Johnny. Keep doing it until you get it right.”

As far as the EU is concerned, British voters got it wrong when voting to leave. They must be made to think again, and federasts are banging their heads together to find the best way.

The simplest way would be to repeat for the umpteenth time that referendum results aren’t legally binding. So thank you, Mr Voter. We’ll take your concerns into account when working out an improved arrangement with the EU.

Alas, such a straightforward approach would be politically suicidal, and the idea of killing their own careers is repugnant to our ‘leaders’. More subtlety is required.

Thus we’ve always been told that leaving the EU takes a lot of planning, negotiations, renegotiations, horse trading and whatnot. Those things take time; one can’t rush into decisions headlong.

Fair enough. But how much time? How long before we activate Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty? What are the reasons for not doing so immediately?

Here one is reminded to one’s chagrin that the top two positions in HMG are occupied by Mrs May and Mr Hammond who both supported remaining. It’s not therefore inconceivable that they may be assisting the EU’s efforts to keep Britain locked in its womb.

The noises they’re making add weight to such suspicions. Specifically, we’re told that we must wait until the French and German elections to invoke Article 50. “You can’t negotiate when you don’t know who you’re negotiating with” is the party line.

But this is nonsense. First, since we’re leaving the EU and not France or Germany, their electoral shenanigans shouldn’t make any difference. We’ll be negotiating with EU institutions, mainly the Commission, which isn’t subject to electoral vagaries for the simple reason that it’s unelected in the first place.

Second, invoking Article 50 doesn’t mean a summary exit or immediate negotiations. It only means that HMG is formally notifying the EU of its decision to leave. Negotiations start after that, to be concluded within two years. Since bureaucratic procedures always extend to the outer limit of the time available, should we invoke Article 50 now, we won’t actually leave until autumn, 2018.

This seems to be sufficient time to negotiate the details – and to staff the Whitehall departments set up for this purpose. Such departments don’t have to be at full strength to extend the notification. However, if they’re as desperately understaffed as they claim, I’m hereby offering my pro bono services in drafting the appropriate text:

“Her Majesty’s Government wishes to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, thereby notifying the European Union of the United Kingdom’s intention to withdraw from membership in that organisation.”

Job done. However, a proverbial highly placed source is claiming that: “Ministers are now thinking the [Article 50] trigger could be delayed to autumn 2017. They don’t have the infrastructure for the people they need to hire. They say they don’t even know the right questions to ask when they finally begin bargaining with Europe.”

That makes our ministers even dafter than one would expect. So allow me to offer my unsolicited services yet again. Don’t ask them any questions, chaps, not at first. Just tell them we’re definitely leaving. The Q&A can wait until the nitty-gritty has to be sorted out, and even that should be done from a position of strength, not supplication.

Otherwise people might think that HMG is trying to soft-pedal Brexit until it topples into the ditch. For three years is a longer time in politics than even Harold Wilson’s infamous week. A lot can happen.

Here’s one plausible scenario. It’s probable, nay guaranteed, that we’ll have a recession during that period. This will have nothing to do with Brexit but everything to do with the nature of our economy, which is an Origami arrangement spun out of the printing press.

When this comes about, economically literate people may scream themselves hoarse proving that the recession has happened not because of Brexit but in spite of it. They’ll be easily outshouted by the we-told-you-so chorus of Remainers.

Brexit, they’ll say, shouldn’t be a millstone around our necks. The people are allowed to change their mind. After all, Brexit is human, Breversal divine.

The only way to avoid this likely development is to compress the time our governing spivs have at their disposal. So let’s take to the streets and march (peacefully!) through Whitehall, shouting “Invoke Article 50 now!” Or, better still, “Let my people go!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://europe.newsweek.com/what-west-should-next-ukraine-453066?rm=eu

A few days ago I wrote about Donald Trump’s questionable links with Putin. Here’s a longer and better-researched piece from Edward Lucas, who writes for The Economist and The Mail. The lucky chap has ready access to those papers’ data services, which has enabled him to put some flesh on the bones of my article.

To sum up, I don’t think Americans have ever faced such a dismal choice as they do in the upcoming election. Can’t both candidates lose? No, I don’t suppose so. The only people who’ll end up losing will be Americans and the rest of us, maimed by the shock waves.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3738302/Is-Trump-Russian-agent-Kremlinologist-presents-tantalising-disturbing-dossier-presidential-hopeful-closer-links-Kremlin-appear.html

The law can only be effective when it’s both feared and respected. Respect is essential, for experience shows that fear alone isn’t a sufficient deterrent.

Yet even in a residually law-abiding country like Britain, the law must earn respect – and keep earning it. Failure to do so will deliver pinpricks to the law, and respect will escape through the holes.

The first requirement is that the law be just and seen to be just. Hence every time a burglar gets off with a slap on the wrist (and on average it takes more than a hundred burglaries and several convictions for the criminal to do any time), a bit more respect bleeds off.

Every time a violent mugger gets a lighter sentence than a tax-avoiding chap, ditto. Every time a man like the footballer Evans gets unjustly convicted for rape, ditto. Every time a man gets a hefty fine for going a few miles over the limit on an empty motorway, ditto. As those dittos multiply, the law diminishes and consequently crime increases.

Yet it’s not all about just sentences commensurate with the crime. It’s also about the dignity, solemnity and, if you will, ritual of the judicial process. Pomp and circumstance do matter.

That’s why our judges and barristers wear robes and wigs in court. This is seen as necessary decorum conferring gravity on the proceedings, much like clerical dress does in church, royal garments on state occasions or dress uniforms on army parades.

This brings us to the bit of dialogue that took place the other day at Chelmsford Crown Court, when Judge Patricia Lynch QC was sentencing a piece of particularly feral plankton to 18 months for his ninth ASBO breach in 11 years.

The plankton doesn’t seem to have much time for racial and ethnic minorities, which feelings he tends to vent as vile public abuse. Without claiming any judiciary rigour, personally I’d send him down just for the way he looks, but that’s beside the point.

When Judge Lynch, Queen’s Counsel (for the benefit of my foreign readers, that’s a special status conferred by the crown upon eminent lawyers,) announced her verdict, the plankton reacted the way human plankton does. He screamed abuse at the Judge, calling her “a bit of a c***.”

However, Her Honour didn’t respond in the way judges normally do. She screamed right back: “You’re a bit of a c*** yourself!” Having thus received his licence to proceed in the same vein, the plankton shouted: “Go f*** yourself!” to which Her Honour replied in the same barroom style: “You too!”

The plankton then performed a Nazi salute and demonstrated his command of foreign languages by twice shouting “Sieg Heil!”. Then, for the delectation of those present, he delivered a rousing rendition of the popular song “Jews, gas them all…”

At this point I’d do two things: first, I’d disbar Judge Lynch, QC, for bringing our whole legal system into disrepute; second, I’d tag 18 years onto the 18 months that the plankton received.

My second proposal has been neither seconded nor aired by the public, but hundreds of people have communicated their admiration for Judge Lynch through social media, calling her a ‘hero’, a ‘legend’ an ‘idol’ and many other words of praise to the same effect.

This only goes to show the extent to which our public has been brutalised. The plankton in question still leads the pack, but apparently not by that wide a margin, and Judge Lynch is right in the pack.

Now I have an admission to make: my own language doesn’t always conform to the standards set by the original Debrett’s Etiquette for Young Ladies. My wife thinks I swear more than is seemly in all my languages, and my priest friend once mentioned in passing that he had never met anyone who swears as much as I do (he obviously hadn’t met many other London ex-admen, especially those who grew up in Russia).

Mea culpa, although expletives do add spice and colour to language, when used in appropriate settings. However, when used in a courtroom by a Queen’s Counsel, whose mission in life isn’t just to execute the law but also to bolster respect for it, such words don’t just offend – they destroy.

They implicitly countenance illegality and explicitly endorse our prevalent disintegration of civility. When a crusty old chap like me effs and blinds into his whisky, it’s only a sign of irascibility and abrasiveness. When five-year-olds routinely talk to their parents and strangers in the idiom suggesting familiarity with intimate anatomy and most sexual variants, it’s a sign of social collapse.

And when a QC uses such language in court, whatever the provocation, it’s a sign of a legal system rapidly losing justification to claim respect. A legal system, in other words, that’s failing all over the place.

Hugh Grosvenor has just become the seventh Duke of Westminster, after his father, the sixth Duke, died the other day. The title comes with an estate worth over £9 billion, for the family owns more or less the whole centre of London.

Predictably there’s an outcry in the press, shrill in The Guardian, slightly muted in The Mail, about the unfairness of it all. Isn’t it awful that young Hugh gets the whole thing, while his two elder sisters will have to live off miserable trust funds. The papers don’t specify the numerical expression of this misery, but something tells me the two women are unlikely to be found at the end of the breadline in any near future.

But that’s not the point that excites our progressive pundits. They can’t get their heads around the ancient law of primogeniture, with its feudal roots. Anything ancient has by definition been superseded and therefore must be dumped into the dustbin of history, to use a phrase originated by Trotsky and favoured by our Labour politicians.

One would be tempted to wonder how they feel about Magna Carta, which was as feudal as they come, but that temptation must be avoided. Watching grown-ups sound like retarded children isn’t a good sight.

Primogeniture is based on Salic Law that’s old and therefore ipso facto reprehensible to our progress touts. It goes back to 500 AD, when it was introduced by the Frankish king Clovis. That same chap had a few years earlier baptised France under the influence of his wife Clothilde, who must have regarded her exclusion from succession under Salic Law as rank ingratitude.

In 1066 the Normans brought primogeniture to England at the end of their lances. That makes it almost 1,000 years old, which is enough to give our progressive hacks’ faces the puce colour that foretells apoplexy.

When progressive French revolutionaries began to exterminate the titled and propertied classes, Salic Law caused heated debates, typically settled by the guillotine. “Where is it written?!?” screamed the revolutionaries. “It’s written,” replied Joseph de Maistre, one of history’s greatest constitutional minds, “in the hearts of Frenchmen.”

(I shamelessly purloin this phrase when arguing that a written constitution, unless it’s written in the hearts, is like a prenuptial agreement stipulating the frequency of sex: if you have to write it down, you might as well not bother. My American and French friends are aghast.)

The basic principle of all types of primogeniture is the same: the eldest son inherits the lot. Like most ancient laws surviving to this day, it’s wise. In fact, ancient laws survive to this day specifically because they’re wise.

It’s obvious that inheritance through all siblings regardless of sex will eventually reduce the family to powerless penury. With no primogeniture existing, as it didn’t exist, for example, in Russia, big estates were fractured to a point where they could no longer generate a living.

Thus in Leo Tolstoy’s will his estate was equally divided among his wife and nine surviving children. That was about four hundred acres each – another generation, and there would not have been enough left to feed a family. Mercifully, the Bolsheviks preempted that problem by confiscating the lot in 1918.

This isn’t just a facetious remark but a comment on a causal relationship. For the absence of primogeniture was one of the factors contributing to the Bolshevik mayhem. It shifted power away from the aristocracy and landed gentry and to the nascent, loud-mouthed middle classes weaned on the egalitarian ideas of the Enlightenment. When they began acting up, no other class had enough power left to stop them.

That property, especially landed property, confers power is indisputable. When power passes away from those who have a vested interest in the country’s physical plant to those who are mainly interested in expressing themselves and venting their resentments, a disaster befalls. This may or may not be sanguinary, but it’ll always be calamitous.

Primogeniture isn’t only about royal or aristocratic succession. It’s also vitally important to the group living off the land and feeding us all: farmers.

One doesn’t have to be an agriculturalist to realise that large plots are more viable than small ones. A farmer tilling hundreds of acres will achieve economies of scale, which is essential in an enterprise with traditionally minuscule profit margins. Small farms are beautifully pastoral, but they can’t feed the billions inhabiting the Earth.

None of this matters to our progressives. They hate primogeniture not because it doesn’t make sense but because it provides a link with the past, the traditional object of loathing for modern progress junkies.

Hatred of the past is a defining feature of modern anomie. As far as today’s lot is concerned, the dial is zeroed in every generation, and nothing achieved by those who created our civilisation is of any value. Neither indeed is the civilisation itself.

Instead of looking with reverence and filial piety at laws that have been around for millennia, they sputter venom at anything that created rather than destroyed. They’re like a snake eating its own tail, except that this lot will end up devouring the whole body.

 

That obscene show called the Rio Olympics is upon us, marred even further by the travesty of athletes representing their countries.

Instead they ought to represent, and be sponsored by, major pharmaceutical companies. One can see, say, the Pfizer eight, their eyes driven out of orbits by their sponsor’s fine products, outpacing Glaxo, whose research team didn’t get the cocktail just right.

But everyone has got tired of the drugs issue and, if truth be told, of the Games in general. Fatigue had set in before the first steroid junkie crossed the finish line.

There are more serious issues to concentrate on, such as did she or didn’t she? Did the BBC presenter Helen Skelton wear knickers under her skimpy dress, or did she not? Certain camera angles suggested she didn’t, and I won’t try to scandalise you with a description of what the lens espied.

Nothing, not even Michael Phelps winning Olympic golds, has generated as much excitement as Helen’s knickers or the absence thereof. Did she or didn’t she? The columnist Katie Hopkins, whose heart is generally in the right place and whose writing is usually entertaining, doesn’t think it matters:

“Who cares if she’s wearing knickers, no knickers, or her knickers on her head? She’s doing a brilliant job and making Rio vaguely watchable.” One wonders why stage such tasteless extravaganzas if the only thing that makes them even vaguely watchable is a pretty girl who disdains underwear.

Miss Hopkins seems to believe that the only possible alternative to the knickerless wonder is the tall, masculine lesbian Clare Balding, who used to present Olympics in the past. As a hypothetical possibility, she also suggests that few of us would prefer watching a burqa-clad Muslim woman who, for all we know, might very well be a man.

However, I’d suggest that there’s something in between a knickerless girl and a Muslim wearing a burqa or Clare Balding, who looks like she might be wearing a jockstrap. That intermediate stage would include good-looking women (my favourite kind) wearing clothes that offend neither the occasion nor decency.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not waxing prudish, and some of the best moments of my life have been spent in the company of knickerless women. I’m simply satisfied that my lifelong observation has been vindicated yet again: all perverse modern campaigns, especially those countenanced by the state, produce the opposite results to those intended.

A war on drugs increases drug use. A war on poverty makes more people poor. An attempt to redistribute wealth destroys it. An overhaul of education promotes ignorance. And the feminists’ frantic efforts to masculinise women only lead to social disasters and, what’s worse, aesthetic catastrophes.

Women have always flaunted their bodies, much to the delight of those of us who have an eye for certain feminine attractions. Just read the descriptions of ballroom dresses at, say, the court of Louis XIV of France or Alexander I of Russia and you’ll find they left little to the imagination.

Even in Victorian England women didn’t cover themselves head to toe at parties, balls or wherever semi-nudity was appropriate. Their secondary, though not yet primary, sexual characteristics were there for all to admire when the occasion allowed it.

During the first half of the twentieth century, with the male population drastically reduced, women were massively drawn into the workforce, with mixed results. Juggling a job and children, for example, was hard, and one of those balls often hit the floor. When that was children, they often grew up brutalised and ignorant, with dire social consequences.

But, this side of Hollywood, women were typically still trying to get ahead on the basis of their competence, not bountiful exposed flesh. As a rule, their colleagues had to wait until the Christmas party to catch sight of the sales manager’s shoulders and upper breasts.

However, feminism reaching hysterical pitch turned out to be the kind of action that produces an equal and opposite reaction. Women, who were supposed to be men’s equals in every respect, started to rely more on their primordial wiles to advance their careers.

Party clothes began to be worn to work, and women started popping every which way out of their work dresses, often worn with no other garments underneath. I remember, for example, working with a pretty girl who was an ardent, vociferous feminist.

In spite of her heartfelt convictions, whenever she needed a special favour she’d bend over my desk, advertising the absence of a bra under her low-cut blouse. “Please, Alex,” she’d pout, “do it for me”. (I’m man enough to admit I always did.)

Whenever I’m abroad, I watch morning news on Sky. Amazingly, all female guests there whose locomotion isn’t assisted by a Zimmer frame inevitably wear décolleté dresses or blouses – at eight in the morning.

Ladies, this was evening dress in the days when you didn’t claim being equal, or even identical, to men. Don’t you realise that every square inch of flesh you expose vindicates the prejudices of antediluvian fossils like me?

There’s a time and place for everything, especially bad taste and vulgarity. These, I’d suggest, are defining characteristics of our time. And few things are more vulgar than feminism dialectically coexisting with exhibitionism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Until now I’ve always maintained that Westerners extolling the virtues of KGB kleptofascism, otherwise known as Putin’s Russia, are either fools or knaves.

However, Putinistas’ recent offerings have made me realise that a third possibility exists: many are deluded or, in the medical parlance, bonkers. This clinical condition has its own aetiology and symptoms.

First compare these two contradictory, indeed mutually exclusive, statements.

Statement 1: “I have no illusions about Mr Putin’s Russia. It is a sinister tyranny where those who challenge the president’s power or expose his wrongdoing suffer very nasty fates.”

Statement 2: “Mr Putin’s Russia [is] now astonishingly the most conservative, patriotic and Christian country left in Europe.”

It’s clear that these sentences couldn’t have come from the same sane person. “A sinister tyranny” can’t be “the most conservative and Christian country”, although it could be patriotic – especially if the term is used broadly, also to include jingoism.

It could conceivably be the same person if the two sentences were years apart. One could imagine that the author first had one opinion of Putin’s Russia, but then, upon mature deliberation, changed it later.

Yet we’re discussing not a man’s intellectual development but a patient’s clinical symptoms. For the two statements were indeed uttered by the same man, Peter Hitchens. And rather than being years apart, they came in the same short article.

Having diagnosed a delusional disorder, let’s consider its aetiology. One observes that, like many such sufferers, nutters in the medical parlance, the patient makes sense on most other subjects.

In fact, this clinical picture is widespread among conservatives: they’re driven mad by modernity with its totalitarian glossocratic urge to punish anyone going against the PC grain.

My book How the West Was Lost shows that I too have been exposed to the same triggers that produce delusions in so many others. In fact, I argue that all modern governments are at least latently totalitarian – with the latency disappearing fast.

But at least I don’t maniacally search for virtue in a kleptofascist regime resulting from history’s unique blend of secret police and organised crime, one the patient himself describes as “a sinister tyranny”.

One can sympathise with this condition. Conservative people are so called because they wish to preserve everything lovable in the West. One can understand how we can be driven to despair (round the bend, in the medical parlance) watching everything we love being wantonly destroyed.

It’s also understandable that some should seek a model the West could follow to get back to normality. Alas, many are deluded into believing that such a model can be found in a regime that has murdered, among many others, hundreds of journalists.

The clinical picture becomes complete when the patient adds delirium to delusions by trying to explain his mania:

“You have no need to guard your tongue as you did in the communist days, when a poem could get you executed and a joke could send you to an Arctic labour camp for 20 years. I saw all that filth end, in person, and rejoiced to see it go…”

Unlike Hitchens, I grew up “in the communist days” of the 1960s. Though my friends and I constantly swapped anti-Soviet jokes, no one was sent “to an Arctic labour camp for 20 years”. Actually, the maximum prison term in the USSR at the time was 15 years. The one up from that was execution, and no one suffered it at the time for telling jokes or indeed writing a poem.

A situation he describes did exist under Stalin, but, for chronological reasons, the patient couldn’t have seen it “in person”. He worryingly seems to think he did, but then we’ve already diagnosed a delusional disorder.

This is not to vindicate Brezhnev’s Russia – it was indeed filth, a softened version of the worst tyranny ever. But, while some writers and dissidents were imprisoned then, they weren’t murdered en masse as they are in Putin’s Russia.

And Christian? It’s as true as it’s upsetting that the West is no longer Christian. But it’s sheer madness to think Russia is.

Putin has whipped up a chauvinistic imperial psychosis, to replace the discarded communist ideology. Russian imperialism has traditionally had a Third Rome theocratic dimension, and this has been incorporated into Putinism, next to money laundering.

The church, whose whole hierarchy, including the patriarch (‘Agent Mikhailov’ in KGB reports), is made up of lifelong KGB agents, plays along. Under its indoctrination, many people are using Christian noises to fill the deafening vacuum of their lives.

But church attendance in Russia is lower even than in England. And many of those church-goers espouse heretical creeds like Seventh Day Adventism or Pentecostalism, which sane persons wouldn’t readily describe as exactly Christian.

Russian conservatism the patient blabbers about is only found among a few intellectuals whose websites Putin has blocked. Among the governing elite (85 per cent of which are KGB officers) it survives only as conservative estimates of their purloined wealth laundered through tax havens. Putin’s personal wealth is thus conservatively estimated at $40 billion, whereas the more liberal, and probably truer, estimates are three times as high.

There we have it: the symptoms and the aetiology, but alas no cure. I’d suggest the patient should avoid this subject altogether, lest he might harm himself as much as his deranged musings are harming others.

 

 

 

 

To be fair, Thomas Jefferson may have put this idea into words, but he didn’t invent the ‘thinking’ behind it. He simply inhaled the Enlightenment Zeitgeist and caught the acrid aroma of equality.

Actually, this isn’t so much an idea as an ideology, and the difference is telling. Divine revelation apart, an idea must be founded on evidence, analysis or both. An ideology, on the other hand, is founded on nothing but base emotions.

Purveyors of an ideology may post-rationalise it for public consumption. But there’s no ratio to it. In fact, the more an ideology contradicts reason, the more attractive it becomes to those unable to draw inferences from facts, which is to say to the majority.

An ideology requires no proof. It may prove disastrous, but many will still clutch the straw saving them from having to think for themselves and refuse to emulate lemmings on a march to the abyss.

Conversely, an idea is that pudding whose proof is in the eating. Since we’re fallible, our take on facts may be wrong, our thinking faulty and the resulting idea spurious. When that proves to be the case, an honest thinker abandons the idea and thinks again.

This brings us to Mrs May and her commendable decision to overturn the 1998 ban on grammar schools introduced by Tony Blair, the most revolting personage ever to inhabit 10 Downing Street.

England’s secondary education, until 1965 the envy of the world, has since become its laughingstock. Way back then, state schools were divided into two broad categories: secondary modern and grammar.

The former, while teaching some academic basics, mainly prepared pupils for careers in trades. The latter, covering about 25 per cent of all children, was a fast track to university. Academically, most grammar schools matched most public schools, and many of our prominent figures, including Mrs May herself, went through them.

Then the egalitarian ideology kicked in, proclaiming that all children were equally able. Some, alas, were less privileged than others. Hence eliminating grammar schools would open paths for the underprivileged to fulfil their untapped academic potential.

In 1965 Education Secretary Anthony Crosland set out to destroy what he called “every f***ing grammar school”. He must have been aware that by doing so he’d be destroying education in any meaningful sense, but that made no difference.

That was exactly the end for which his progressive loins ached. Education didn’t have to be good. It just had to be equal, which in practice meant equally abysmal for anyone not blessed with parents able to pay for private schooling.

As a side effect, this consigned to eternal misery the very poor in whose name the socialists acted. The bootstraps of free grammar schools by which the clever poor could pick themselves up were cut.

Another side effect was replacing aptitude with money as the ticket to good education. Since most comprehensive schools were dreadful, those parents who didn’t want their offspring to grow up illiterate had to cough up for private schooling.

Now free of serious competition, public schools vindicated economic wisdom by raising their fees, which these days may be as high as £40,000 a year, well too rich for most parents’ blood. Ability to learn was thereby replaced with ability to pay, and meritocracy with plutocracy.

Results of the first half-century of comprehensive ‘education’ are appalling. A survey of teenagers aged 16 to 19 in 23 developed countries placed British youngsters at 23 in literacy and 22 in numeracy, which doesn’t exactly redeem the underlying ideology.

During that period Tony ‘Anthony’ Blair introduced a total ban on new grammar schools, spreading coarse salt on the academic field to make sure nothing would ever grow again.

It’s this ban that Mrs May is proposing to overturn, giving me a rare opportunity to say something nice about a politician, and our parliamentarians a chance to reaffirm their frenzied commitment to destructive ideology.

Labour and LibDems are joining forces with a few Tories (!) to block this “retrograde” legislation in the Lords. Like all ideologues, they don’t care how daft their rationale sounds.

The dafter, the better is the essence of glossocracy. Forcing people to accept manifestly unsound statements is proof of power, and that lot realise this as well as their Bolshevik predecessors did.

Thus LibDem leader Tim Farron: “A new generation of grammar schools would help a very small number of the richest children while ignoring the needs of millions more children…”

But grammar schools are free – what do riches have to do with anything? ‘The richest children’ are more likely to go to public schools anyway.

Labour education spokesman Angela Rayner: “Selection belongs in the dustbin of history and has no place in modern society.”

Dustbin of history, eh? It’s comforting to hear our parliamentarians quote Trotsky, before acting on his ideas.

Labour leadership contender Owen Smith wouldn’t be outdone: “Grammar schools entrench disadvantage – they don’t overturn it.” But they do, Owen, demonstrably so. However, when ideology speaks, facts and reason fall silent.

I do hope Mrs May has the political nous to push this excellent legislation through. She may get into my good books yet.

 

The other day, parts of London and other major cities were paralysed by mobs expressing solidarity with the plight of American blacks who, according to the rabble rousers, are being wantonly slaughtered by trigger-happy white cops.

Heathrow airport was cut off by riotous crowds organised by the Socialist Workers Party, which is what the Communist Party calls itself these days. Communists in general have a most touching concern for human lives, except those 150 million or so they themselves have taken in different parts of the world.

In this case, they are half-right: blacks are indeed being wantonly slaughtered – but not by white cops. True enough, white US policemen kill on average about 200 blacks a year. In most cases this is self-defence, for stubborn facts show that a white policemen is 18.5 times less likely to kill a black man than to be killed by him.

And yes, some of the killings, very few, are unjustified, as they’re bound to be in a country where blacks account for 85 per cent of all violent crimes. Many of those are committed with guns, and a policeman would have to be inhuman not to have his finger tight on the trigger when approaching a black suspect. Sometimes tight fingers twitch too fast or at a wrong time, and a tragedy occurs.

Now communists aren’t good at putting things in perspective, but we must be. And the perspective shows that blacks are indeed being slaughtered in America – by other blacks. Over the past 35 years, an estimated 324,000 blacks have been killed in the US by people of the same skin pigmentation.

One doesn’t see too many protesters with placards saying ‘Blacks, stop killing one another’. Black lives matter, but not that much. Actually, not at all.

Nor did black lives matter during the genocides in Burundi and Rwanda, when close to 1.5 million Tutsis were slaughtered by Hutus and vice versa. Typologically the same mob was then too busy protesting against black South Africans not having quite the same rights as the whites. It’s that perspective thing again.

The rioters favour melodramatic gestures, such as chaining themselves together and blocking approach roads to Heathrow and Birmingham airports, or lying across tram tracks in the centre of Nottingham. They know in advance that no one will drive a car or a tram over them – at times one is sorry we’re too civilised for our own good.

Some of the road blocks prevented ambulances from getting patients to hospitals, but the statistical probability is that most of those patients were white. Their lives don’t matter to the crazed leftie mob. Neither do black lives or those any other colour. Theirs is the kind of action that is the aim in itself.

Just as the only real purpose of mass murder is the murder of masses, the only real purpose of such disruptive action is to act disruptively. These people cherish every opportunity to thumb their noses at society, ideally hurt it, bring it to a standstill or, as in this case, prevent normal people from going on holiday or to work.

They never really defend a cause, especially when the cause is as clearly indefensible as this one. They’re venting their pent-up resentment against society and hatred of, well, everything.

Some just come for the ride: an opportunity to create mayhem is too good to miss. Some come because of peer pressure, but then they themselves have chosen their peer group. None of them really cares about the declared cause or has thought it through. The slogan on their placards is a pretext, not the reason.

They detest everything they describe as the establishment, refusing to accept that they themselves are it. Iconoclasm lives on long after all icons have been smashed.

No, my enraged friends, black lives don’t matter, not as such. Human lives matter, whatever the colour of the bodies within which they unfold. And it’s the likes of you who are responsible for making our lives at best unpleasant and at worst endangered.

A few of the demonstrators were arrested, and I wonder what the charge will be, if they’re indeed charged. Probably public disturbance, one would think. I’d charge them with the more serious crime: unlawful arrest and kidnapping. They did, after all, hold hundreds of thousands to ransom.

The moment I heard about the knife attack just behind the British Museum, and before the attacker’s identity was revealed, I sensed that somehow Norwegians were involved.

Sitting on huge oil reserves, those smug Norsemen aren’t satisfied with being the world’s sixth richest country. They also want to commit acts of terrorism all over the world, and specifically in Russell Square.

Then the knife-wielding murderer chose as his target a middle-aged American woman. This must have reflected the pressure Norwegians feel from the US, the world’s ninth richest country, but closing in fast.

The picture was clear in my mind, and when the police did reveal that the murderer was a Norwegian national, I toasted my soothsaying powers. The slight snag was that the killer wasn’t, shall we say, a typical Norseman.

He turned out to be Zakaria Bulhan, a Muslim Norwegian national of Somali origin. This redeemed Norwegians in my eyes, but only partly.

For, the police explained, there’s no evidence that Bulhan was “radicalised” or “motivated by terrorism”. There was evidence, however, that he was “mentally ill”. Hence he must have been motivated by his Norwegian identity. And mental illness is pandemic in Scandinavia. Just look at their suicide rate.

My facetiousness apart, we’ve heard roughly the same official mantra after just about every Muslim atrocity. God forbid we’d make a connection between Islam and terrorism. Let Norway carry the can instead.

Now I’d suggest that the urge to stab people at random is ipso facto fairly radical, unlikely to be motivated by moderation. Nor is a stabber likely to be a well-balanced individual. There exists, however, a gap between some emotional instability, which is widespread, and mental illness, which is relatively rare.

The former doesn’t override the ability to tell right from wrong; the latter may. Our police are clearly under orders to make a blanket claim of mental illness for all Muslim murderers. But what’s the truth of the matter?

Enter Parmjit Singh, Bulhan’s next-door neighbour, who has known the murderer for seven years and is willing to talk. And what do you know? Turns out the youth was “a devout Muslim”. Moreover, his ‘mental illness’ has turned out to be both a red herring and, to mix zoological metaphors, a scapegoat.

“They said he had mental health issues but that was not the boy I knew,” said Mr Singh. “The news of his mental illness is completely new, we never heard that. Honestly, I think his mental health problems are a scapegoat.”

So why did that knife see the light of day? “He wasn’t working, he was hanging around with Somalian boys and I think they had possible links to serious ISIS people – not directly, but they see all this stuff and are inspired by it.”

All that stuff Mr Singh was referring to is jihadist literature of which Bulhan was rather fond, if heaps of it found in his house are any indication.

“I think boys have put pressure on him to go there and do something,” explained Mr Singh. “He was very impressionable growing up”.

Well, this just about gets Norwegians off the hook, as far as I’m concerned. And puts us all firmly on it.

Our police diligently pursue anyone guilty of looking at child porn (the only sexual perversion singled out for opprobrium), while being completely lackadaisical about ‘all this stuff’ that incites ‘impressionable’ young Muslims to murder.

Without in any way justifying that sort of voyeurism, one could still suggest that jihadist literature presents the greater danger. The experience of the last 1,400 years shows that many young Muslims are impressionable enough to heed the murderous message and do what the founder of their creed did with so much gusto.

Any sensible government would realise that its main, not to say only, legitimate function is to protect its people. This is one duty about which there can be no ‘yes, but…’ And there’s only one possible answer to the question of how far a government should go in pursuit of this objective: as far as it takes. Whatever works.

Mass internment and deportation may be necessary if other measures fail. These may include tagging all Muslims, shutting down every mosque or community centre in which one jihadist word has ever been uttered, stopping Muslim immigration, dispersing Muslim ghettos inundating our cities, withdrawing citizenship from any Muslim disseminating jihadists literature, punishing those who read it, prohibiting such Muslim symbols as the burqa, outlawing any practice of Sharia law – you name it. Whatever works.

Above all, the point must be communicated in no uncertain terms that our enemies aren’t jihadists, extremists, Islamic fundamentalists or even Norwegians. It’s Islam that’s waging war on us, and we must fight back.

The operating words there are ‘sensible government’. Alas, our government isn’t sensible, it’s modern. Its metaphysical premises won’t allow it to take physical measures along the lines I mentioned. To paraphrase the old saying, what would Mrs Merkel say?

So let’s brace ourselves for more ‘impressionable’ youths, all mentally ill and non-radicalised Muslims, with hatred in their hearts and weapons in their hands. Let’s follow Hollande’s advice and learn to live with terrorism. And die by it.