Author: Alexander Boot

Every self-respecting company has a corporate charter. And every corporate charter says “Our people are our greatest resource” or words to that effect.

The phrase is a bit hackneyed, but who says people who compose such documents have to be accomplished stylists? Yet the sentiment is doubtless true. Any company is only as good as its employees.

That’s why it makes sense to hire intelligent, well-behaved, well-educated youngsters blessed with work ethic, sense of responsibility and social skills. Or so one would have thought.

However, in thinking so one would be overlooking a problem growing in significance by the day. For, statistically speaking, most of such youngsters come from solid middle-class families or – hold on a second, let me make sure nobody’s listening – even higher.

Employment practices tend to reflect this statistical probability, which isn’t to be confused with certainty. It’s possible for someone raised on a council estate by a single mother to be a brilliant, conscientious, successful employee. But, alas, that’s not the way to bet.

That’s why 61 per cent of successful applicants at top firms attended one of the country’s 24 most selective universities. And, at a guess, most such alumni come from middle-class families.

That’s not good enough for those who, like me, believe in progress above all. That’s why I’m in complete sympathy with the principles driving the Social Mobility Foundation (SMF) and the government’s Social Mobility Commission (SMC).

Working hand in glove, they have come up with the Social Mobility Index, to be applied to all top companies. The goal is to make sure that most employees come from what our illustrious prime minister Tessa calls “just about managing families” (JAM).

To merit a satisfactory index, a company has to consider numerous criteria when interviewing a prospective recruit: his accent, the school and university he went to, his family background and parents’ occupation, the area he grew up in, whether or not he was eligible for free school meals and so forth. The lower the better is the guiding principle.

Education Secretary Justine Greening is almost as ecstatic about this initiative as she is about her girlfriend. Having companies compete for the prolier-than-thou accolade, she says, “is the collective goal we must all have if we are truly to tackle poor social mobility”.

I agree wholeheartedly – what other goal can we possibly have? Surely not making sure that our top companies remain internationally competitive.

Of course some might cite historical evidence showing that Britain used to be blessed with higher social mobility than any other European country. But that was achieved by unfair means, such as providing excellent education for anyone capable of receiving it. As a lifelong egalitarian, I’m aghast.

Equal education should be equally force-fed to all, regardless of ability. Hence I’m glad Mrs May and Miss Greening have abandoned their reactionary plan to bring back grammar schools. We don’t want 25 per cent of the pupils to be well-educated and the rest competent. We want them all to be equally ignorant, ideally unable to function in the modern economy, and that’s another “collective goal” towards which to strive.

Meanwhile, now that the Social Mobility Index is becoming a de rigueur employment criterion, I’ve done my modest best to promote this invaluable initiative.

If young persons of your kin or acquaintance are seeking a job, perhaps this advice will help them pass the interview with flying colours. I’ll highlight some possible questions (Q) and offer advice on wrong and correct answers (WA and CA).

Not to have to repeat mysel1f, every reply should start with “You what, mate?” and, after the question has been repeated, end with “innit”. The T sound in “what” must be replaced with the glottal stop. Warning: to pronounce this sound authentically, the youngster should spend hours practising, ideally with the aid of any Ray Winstone film. So:

Q: Where did you grow up? WA: Chelsea. CA: Under Chelsea Bridge.

Q: What does your father do? WA: He’s a financial consultant. CA: You mean me baby favva? Ain’t got no other favva, mate.

Q: What does your mother do? WA: Charity work. CA: Me muvva, she do it all, mate. Coke, meth, skunk – you name it.

Q: What kind of school did you go to? WA: Public school. CA: School of hard knockers, mate.

Q: And after that? WA: Exeter U. CA: Bugger U.

Q: Did you get free meals at school. WA: No, I’m afraid I didn’t. CA: Kin’ell, only grub I had, mate.

Q: Have you travelled widely? WA: My parents made sure we spent every holiday in a different country of great cultural interest. CA: Been to Shepherd’s Bush once, mate, to visit me bruvver at them Scrubs. He then ate a lightbulb, innit, and bled to death like.

Q: What is your favourite music? WA: Bach cantatas. CA: N**gaz Wiv Attitude.

Q: What is your favourite food? WA: Foie gras on toast. CA: Burger King on a bus.

Q: Do you smoke? WA: Absolutely not. CA: You mean fags?

This is just a small sample of the training programme I offer to all aspiring candidates for jobs at top companies. I can’t guarantee success, but I could definitely help a middle-class youngster reverse the statistical odds against him. Djamean?

The public reaction to the Finsbury Park incident reminds me of Russia, circa 1903. Now historical parallels are never quite exact, but they may be useful for illustrative purposes. This one certainly is.

In that year a wave of 600 anti-Jewish pogroms swept the Pale of Settlement. Kishinev and Kiev were hit especially hard. Thousands of houses looted, thousands of people beaten up, thousands of women raped, 48 people dead in Kishinev alone.

By the time the pogroms ended in 1906, 2,500 Jews had been killed, most of them in Odessa. (Russian chauvinists like Solzhenitsyn always precede such numerals with the word ‘only’.) But meanwhile it was 1903, and, in the wake of Kishinev and Kiev, the Jews of Gomel knew it was their turn next.

In preparation, they organised armed self-defence groups, which sprang a nasty surprise on those Russian patriots. When the marauding mob rampaged through the streets of Gomel, it was met with pistol shots.

As a result, ‘only’ 25 Jews died, and about as many murderous thugs. Now the term ‘moral equivalence’ hadn’t been coined yet, but, on the basis of the public reaction in the Russian press, it should have been.

Most papers insisted that both sides were equally to blame. Some, that the Jews even more so because they had fired the first shots. Phrases like “violence breeds violence” streamed off newspaper pages, along with regrets that the Jews hadn’t absorbed the Christian notion of turning the other cheek.

The subsequent court proceedings reinforced that line of thought. Eighteen Jews defending themselves were sentenced to penal servitude, and only 12 Russian thugs leading the rampage.

As I said, the parallel with the Finsbury Park aftermath isn’t quite exact. But neither is it nonexistent.

Unlike those Gomel Jews, Darren Osborne (no relation to George, as far as I know) wasn’t in any immediate personal danger – he wasn’t pre-empting or warding off an attack. However, he was justified in feeling threatened as a member of the group routinely and indiscriminately targeted by Muslim terrorists – just as Jews were targeted in Russia circa 1903.

That feeling he had, however justified it might have been, doesn’t excuse his criminal action. But it certainly mitigates it.

I’m not a physical coward – growing up in the tough neighbourhood otherwise known as Russia didn’t allow me that option. But nowadays I tense up slightly every time I find myself in a Central London crowd. And – call me a racist and report me to the Commission for Racial Equality – I automatically examine every young Muslim coming my way.

Is he carrying some work tools or a gun in that satchel? Is it food or a bomb in his Sainsbury’s bag? Unlike Mr Osborne, I’m a civilised man, so I don’t go beyond looking with apprehension. But I can understand his action, even if I can’t excuse it.

It’s not Islamophobia that has put the electricity of fear and tension into the atmosphere, but Islamic terrorism. So surely our response to the Finsbury Park attack should distinguish between action and reaction.

Both may be reprehensible, but it takes a broken moral compass to suggest they are equally reprehensible. Or else it takes a conscience warped by what some call political correctness and what could more appropriately be called our civilisation’s suicide wish.

This is a dangerous disease, and our prime minister is showing advanced symptoms of it. She assigned an equal measure of “hatred and evil” both to the Finsbury Park attack and the numerous and more deadly acts of Muslim terrorism that had provoked it.

The former, said Mrs May, is “every bit as insidious and destructive to our values and our way of life” as the latter. That’s why “We will stop at nothing to defeat it.”

Nothing, Mrs May? That’s good to hear. So let’s begin by admitting that we’re at war – not with alienated loaners on cannabis, not with Islamists, not with Islamofascists, not with Islamic fundamentalists, but with Islam.

This war has been going on for 1,400 years, and it has had lulls alternating with flare-ups. We’re going through a flare-up now, and unless HMG does something about it, people like Darren Osborne (no relation to George) will.

If they start doing it en masse, that could spell disintegration of public order, with vigilante justice replacing the rule of law. And then, “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

When Enoch Powell thus quoted Virgil in a similar context, he was instantly vilified, and our progressive press still sputters spittle at the “rivers of blood” speech. But, even though Powell didn’t have specifically Muslims in mind, he saw the dangers of multi-culti diversity.

His moral compass hadn’t gone haywire, as Mrs May’s has. If she really will stop at nothing to defeat violence, she should start by stopping the Muslim action first, and the reaction to it second. This isn’t just a temporal sequence, but a moral pecking order.

 

 

Observing a fortnight ago the aftermath of yet another Muslim atrocity, I suggested a couple of stock acronyms for expressing public condolences.

Since all politicians use the same platitudes, there’s no point in spelling them out in full. Hence T&P and IV are time-saving ways of saying ‘thoughts and prayers’ and ‘innocent victims’.

In that spirit my T&P go to the IV in Finsbury, where a gentleman shouting “I’m going to kill all Muslims” and “I did my bit” drove his white van through a crowd of worshippers outside a mosque.

The driver obviously never attended the Muslim Offensive Steering Course (MOSC for short), for his IV score was meagre by comparison to those usually achieved by the alumni of that educational establishment: a mere one dead, 10 injured.

In spite of that underachievement, the Muslim Council of Britain described the incident as “the most violent manifestation” yet of Islamophobia. That offended my sense of fairness.

Haven’t we already learned that suicide bombers or van drivers manifest nothing but their own madness? Aren’t they all alienated, cannabis-addled loners pursuing no ideological or religious objective?

Therefore this particular van driver is entitled to the same consideration. His pusher must have given him some skunk instead of his usual milder weed, and off he went.

The driver certainly didn’t mean to ‘do his bit’ by ‘killing all Muslims’. It was skunk talking, not Islamophobia. White people are a race of peace and they can’t all be tarred with the same Islamophobic brush. I mean, fair’s fair.

Not everyone sees it that way. Toufik Kacimi, chief executive of the Muslim Welfare House, told Sky News that “he is not mentally ill, he is conscious, he did what he did deliberately to hit and kill as many Muslims as possible.”

And not a single spliff anywhere in sight, no symptoms of derangement – just a perfectly sane, calculating Muslim-hater, symptomatic of a most worrying trend threatening every Englishman of the Mohammedan persuasion.

Comrade Corbyn doesn’t pray, so the ‘P’ part of my acronym doesn’t apply. Thus his “thoughts are with… the community affected by this awful event.” As I’m sure they are with the victims of the atrocities committed by Comrade Corbyn’s friends from Hamas, Hezbollah and the IRA.

Our future prime minister hasn’t limited himself to stock condolences. He also said: “I’ve been in touch with the mosques, police and Islington council regarding the incident.”

He isn’t the only one concerned. Neil Basu of the Metropolitan Police has promised to put extra security around mosques, even though “it is an incredibly challenging time for London”, with emergency services already “stretched”.

The Deputy Assistant Commissioner wisely refrained from mentioning what it is that they’re stretched by, which suggests he’s going places in politics. Anyway, the task he has set himself and the Met is difficult, but not unduly so.

There are only (!) 427 mosques in London, so a thousand or so armed officers may suffice to provide the extra security. Doing the same for millions of other Londoners risking their lives every time they find themselves in a crowded place is a different matter altogether.

No sane person would condone the Finsbury act of terrorism. No intelligent person would say it was unpredictable, especially if he studied physics at school. Didn’t Newton explain that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction?

It’s axiomatic that, if the state won’t protect the people, the people will protect themselves. The laws of political correctness superseding all other laws, the state has done nothing to solve the problem of Muslim terrorism or even to acknowledge that this is what it is.

This problem, it’s useful to remember, is of the state’s own doing. Both main parties are implicated in this, but especially the one so ably led by Comrade Corbyn. For, as Peter Mandelson has admitted with his customary cynicism, Blair’s government deliberately set out to admit millions of Muslims, whom they correctly saw as future Labour voters.

At the same time no efforts were made to integrate the Muslims into British society. On the contrary, Islamic particularism was encouraged in the name of diversity. Nor has anything been done to make sure that none of Britain’s 1,600 (!) mosques would be used as recruitment grounds for mass murderers.

Specifically, from 1997 until 2003 the Finsbury Park Mosque, the site of this morning’s crime, provided a platform for Abu Hamza to preach Islamic hatred for our hospitable country. And this was far from the only mosque used for that purpose.

Those impassioned youngsters, many of whom can’t even speak proper English despite being born in Britain, are easy clay to mould. They go out and kill in the name of Allah, with people in Britain becoming increasingly desperate and insecure.

Pressure has been building up in the cooker for a long time, and everyone knew the top would be blown before long. Actually, the only thing that surprised me was that the first act of unsanctioned counter-terrorism took place in London: I thought a northern city, such as Leeds or Manchester, would be more likely.

How long before Muslims are routinely attacked in the streets? How long before order turns to ordure? It’s anybody’s guess. But this is a matter of when, not if.

I’m genuinely sorry for those poor people in Finsbury. But I’m even more sorry for Britain.

We should all follow the example of His Grace Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Since Comrade Corbyn may soon inaugurate an age of justice and equality, if at some cost to liberty, His Grace has made all the necessary provisions for the future.

He has established himself as an early frontrunner for the job of Atheism Minister in Comrade Corbyn’s government.

His duties will consist in detoxifying the population currently coming off the opium of the people. Since going cold turkey may prove medically dangerous, His Grace has already devised a titration strategy featuring several incremental steps.

The first such step was taken the other day, putting tears in the eyes of all noxious Christian insects (a term Comrade Corbyn will doubtless borrow from Comrade Lenin) and a broad smile on Comrade Corbyn’s face. After the full implications of His Grace’s new policy have been realised, the Nicene Creed will be slightly modified.

Instead of “I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins”, it’ll say “I acknowledge two or more baptisms for the commission of sins”. (The part about believing in one God also needs some work, but that has been put off until His Grace assumes his new office.)

This alteration is only a stop-gap measure, designed to fill in until the complete new version of the Welby/Corbyn Creed has been adopted. In the final draft this sentence will be further changed to say “I acknowledge no baptism for any reason whatsoever, and God shall smite anyone who believes in him.”

For the time being, the new text is required to accommodate the numerous instances of men and women changing their gender (or sex, as it’s still called by the aforementioned noxious insects). This creates conundrums of great theological import.

For this perfectly legitimate and laudably courageous act invalidates the baptism of John, who has now become Jane, a name that never crossed the lips of the priest performing the original ritual.

As a woman imprisoned in a man’s body, John might have been baptised as indeed John. Now, as a woman mercifully released from the confines of her alien body, complete with a fixture that no self-respecting woman should possess, Jane may need to be re-baptised as such, perhaps for fear that her noxious insects of parents may otherwise disinherit her.

Those bishops gathering at Nicaea in 325 somehow failed to provide for such a situation, which goes to show that they lacked not only prophetic powers, but indeed elementary foresight. Their shameful oversight has now been corrected by His Grace, who has sanctioned our hypothetical John’s re-baptism as our hypothetical Jane.

The ensuing change in the Creed will soon follow, with other valuable details added. For, to provide for the real if unlikely possibility that, having lived as Jane for a while, John may want to revert to his original identity, the text will now say “two or more baptisms”. And it’ll replace the outdated, passive word ‘remission’ with the vibrantly active word ‘commission’.

Having thus established his credentials for a post in Comrade Corbyn’s government, His Grace Comrade Welby has provided an inspiration for us all. I for one would like to apologise to Comrade Corbyn for having been misunderstood as his opponent or, God forbid, critic.

In fact, when I referred to him as an evil exponent of a cannibalistic ideology whose election would spell a possibly irreversible catastrophe for Britain, few realised that I was merely trying to conceal my unmitigated admiration for Comrade Corbyn and everything he stands for.

One thing that particularly appeals to me is his idea of requisitioning rich people’s houses to accommodate the socioeconomically disadvantaged. It’s patently unjust that one such downtrodden person, Alexander Boot, has to live in a small Fulham flat, while some noxious insects live in large Belgravia houses, where they don’t even spend every minute of every day.

Yes, the flat is reasonably well appointed, and Fulham is a nice area of London, but the unfairness of it all rankles nonetheless. As a first step towards correcting this injustice I propose that a 10-bedroom house in Belgravia, Chester Square for preference, be requisitioned and given to me. Let those even more socioeconomically disadvantaged than me have the Fulham flat, once they’ve completed a fridge-operating course.

I realise that this initiative will be insufficient to qualify me even for a minor post in Comrade Corbyn’s government. But perhaps our venerable Archbishop will see it in his heart to employ me as his amanuensis at the new Atheism Ministry.

My CV includes all the necessary educational qualifications. At my Moscow university I took compulsory courses – and passed exams! – in such essential academic disciplines as Dialectical Materialism, Historical Materialism, Scientific Communism, Marxist Aesthetics and – most relevant of all – Scientific Atheism.

I’m ready and willing to serve Comrade Welby and especially Comrade Corbyn, whose forthcoming advent I now see as the dawn of a new era and a welcome step towards the arrival of paradise on earth.

Watch this space and join all the wise men in following the star that now shines not over Bethlehem but from the Kremlin turrets. Long live the new Creed!

 

Her Majesty’s realm is in mortal danger, and the sooner we realise this the better. It’s not hysterical alarmism but stark realism that makes me want to scream so someone will hear: BRITAIN IS ON THE VERGE OF CATASTROPHE!!!

Bolshevik-style sedition is gearing up to subvert Parliament, overturn centuries of Europe’s most stable political system and plunge the country into the kind of despotism she has never suffered in all her history.

The neo-Trotskyist Labour Party is working in cahoots with the Mafioso unions and all sorts of degenerate extremists to use the mob as a wrecking ball swinging away throughout the summer.

Once the cornerstone of our parliamentary monarchy has been knocked out, another election will be called in the autumn. This time the bullied and brainwashed people will vote themselves into Bolshevik-style slavery by electing the evil creature Corbyn and delivering power to his wire-pullers.

He’ll no doubt promise to restore order, which will be appealing after several months of non-stop strikes, demonstrations and violent riots. People already corrupted by decades of socialist propaganda will prefer any kind of order to chaos – they’ll joyously swap liberty for tyranny in the hope of some peace and quiet.

The parallel with the Bolshevik mayhem isn’t a product of my disturbed mind, for the militants don’t bother to conceal the source of their inspiration. Moreover, they flaunt it – in so many words.

And the words are: “We will have a Red October with Jeremy Corbyn as our Prime Minister!” Red October, as I’m sure you know, refers to the 1917 advent of social justice, equality and mass cannibalism in Russia.

Lest you might think it’s just the loony fringe frothing at the mouth, thunderous incitement to sedition comes from the upper reaches of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has called for unions to drum up a million people to stage a riotous demonstration on 1 July and destroy what will be left of British polity.

The leftovers won’t be plentiful. The wrecking ball will start swinging next Wednesday, when a vast mob will be out in force to drown the Queen’s speech with sloganeering shrieks and harangues.

Make no mistake about it: what has been going on in London for the past two days is but a rehearsal for the mass revolt – and these masses are indeed revolting. Expertly egged on by today’s answers to Lenin’s ghouls, they storm public buildings, fight with police and create a general mayhem under the slogan of “May out!”

Make no mistake about this either: the fiery tragedy in North Kensington isn’t the reason for the disturbances. It’s but a catalyst added to the already bubbling discontent by neo-Bolshevik evildoers.

They don’t have to reinvent the tactical wheel. It was invented by Lenin’s gang and attached to a juggernaut that then rolled over millions of lives.

In keeping with that fine tradition, a sinister organisation called the National Shop Stewards Network has issued a circular on “linking up strikes”. Meaning that all unions, including teachers, doctors, ambulance drivers, rail guards, flight controllers and cabin crews etc., will coordinate industrial action to do the greatest possible damage and plunge the country into chaos.

The subject of the e-mailed circular is “Organise to Get the Tories Out”, which at least offers the benefit of honesty. They could have said, for example, “Organise to improve the working conditions” or “Organise to demand better public services”. That’s what they would have said had they felt a need for subterfuge. But they don’t: the rabble-rousers are feeling smugly self-confident.

Nor is any subterfuge likely to deceive anybody. After all, doctors, pilots and teachers may all have grievances against their employers, but they aren’t likely to be the same grievances.

Hence uniting them all together into one massive revolt can’t possibly aim at addressing specific problems. The only possible aim is sedition leading to a revolution, which in some quarters may be called treason.

Says Comrade McDonnell: “What we need now is the TUC mobilised, every union mobilised – get out on the streets. We need people doing everything they can to ensure the election comes as early as possible.”

But we’ve just had an election, Comrade, which Labour lost. One realises that the EU has fine-tuned the technique of ignoring elections whose results it doesn’t like and telling people to vote again until they get it right. But one hoped Britain would be immune to such chicanery.

The hope is forlorn. It increasingly appears that Britain isn’t immune to anything, including a bloody Bolshevik takeover.

On 14 August, 2015, shortly after Corbyn took over Labour, I wrote: “‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,’ said Edmund Burke. Jeremy Corbyn is a harbinger of such a triumph, which good men must realise – and do something about it.”

What can we do, now that said triumph is just round the corner? I’d suggest we, just like our enemies, should learn the lessons of Red October.

At that time, resolute action on the part of Russia’s Provisional Government could have nipped Bolshevik evil in the bud. Yet the democratic government vacillated, couching its cowardice in bien pensant phrases about vox populi. A catastrophe followed, and the whole world is still reeling from it.

What form resolute action should take is open to debate. But the debate should start from the premise that what’s planned for this summer is criminal in the strict legal sense of the word. And criminals should be dealt with by any means required, including, if all else fails, armed force.

These are painful words for a conservative to utter, but, unless they’re uttered and acted upon, there won’t be any conservatism. What there will be is social and political disintegration followed by the advent of a tyranny red in tooth and claw.

If the government calls for volunteers to fight this plague, count me in.

The Grenfell Tower disaster is assuming the significance of that fatal 1914 shot in Sarajevo. Awful in itself, it looks as if it may yet lead to something worse.

The mob braying for blood has already occupied Kensington Town Hall, and the PC brigade is cheering, ill-advisedly certain that the blood will be someone else’s and not theirs.

The usual emetic sentimentality is dripping from every word uttered in public. This was conspicuous this morning, when Sky News interviewed Communities Secretary Sajid Javid.

Looking appropriately aggrieved and customarily robotic, his face immobile, the white visible all around his empathetic irises, Javid opened his mouth to say what government ministers usually say under such circumstances.

But before the first fulsomely sympathetic sound came out, the interviewer said: “First, would you like to express your condolences for the victims?”

This peremptory request had a twofold purpose: reminding Javid of the statutory protocol for such interviews and communicating urbi et orbi that Sky News is on guard against any possible deviation from the diktats of modern ethos.

Mrs May didn’t comply: she visited the site of the inferno but didn’t hug any surviving residents. She isn’t much of a hugger, which I think is to her credit. But the mob thinks otherwise. It’s holding her personally responsible for the tragedy – even though she had already announced a full independent inquiry and wept privately at Number 10.

But weeping privately isn’t good enough. The Dianisation of the public is in full swing: just like the 1997 mob screaming at Her Majesty “Ma’am, show us you care!!!”, today’s version demands public effusiveness and knows it can enforce it.

Unlike Mrs May, Comrade Corbyn can hug with the best of them, which he demonstrated at the site of the fire. This arguably most evil leader of a major Western political party also said a few things that a mere couple of decades ago could have been treated as incitement to riot.

He practically demanded that the mob march on Westminster to reverse Labour’s electoral defeat. And he struck a note of avuncular reassurance when proposing ways of resettling the newly homeless survivors:

“Properties must be found – requisitioned if necessary – in order to make sure that residents do get rehoused locally… How is it acceptable that in London you have luxury buildings and luxury flats kept empty as land banking for that future while homeless people look for somewhere to live?”

I’ll tell you how it’s acceptable in two words, Comrade: private property. The idea of requisitioning comes naturally to a communist in all but name, but outside that murderous ideology people’s property is seen as a guarantor of liberty.

If the mob – or the state scared of it – ‘requisitions’ people’s houses, that’ll mean letting the jinni of left fascism out, thereby perpetrating a far worse tragedy than even the Kensington inferno.

In keeping with the sacramental protocol, I too would like to express my heartfelt condolences to those directly touched by the incident. And then there are a couple of other things.

First, in my rather long life I’ve owned about 20 fridges, made in the USA, Britain, Italy, Germany and France. The first half a dozen or so were made in Russia, and I hope you’ll take my word for it that they weren’t state of the art technology even by the standards of the time.

Yet none of them has ever exploded, and until 14 June I hadn’t heard of any such explosions with other people’s fridges either. The Ethiopian owner of the explosive appliance must have done something wrong, even though fridges aren’t the hardest machines to operate.

Not being an expert in fridge design I can’t even guess what that might have been. Keeping explosives next to the fish fingers would do the trick, but nothing else comes to mind, though it might come to the mind of a refrigeration expert.

What does occur to me is that it’s not Mrs May who’s to blame for the tragedy but Comrade Corbyn, or rather the ideology he touts with fanatical zeal.

Looking at the post-inferno TV footage with the sound turned off, one would be hard-pressed to guess that the incident happened in London. Every Asian and African group is represented in huge numbers, with only a few token white faces present for diversity’s sake.

It was socialist ideology that flung Britain’s doors wide-open to millions of people who were alien and typically hostile to its ethos, knew nothing about it and were unwilling to learn. Just think: if those people hadn’t been admitted to Britain, they wouldn’t have been there to throw their children out of the top floors of a burning building.

This influx has created incalculable economic, social and cultural problems. The obvious one is housing: in Britain people don’t live out in the open, or at least aren’t supposed to. The climate is rather inclement for that, to mention just one thing.

Now these days most public services aren’t there to serve the public. They’re an expression of an ideology, the further to the left the better. This ideology has a clearly perceived aim: increasing state power.

Urban planning is like any other public service. City councils aren’t out to make people’s lives better or their towns prettier. They want to find an architectural method of making their power absolute.

That’s why in the several post-war decades they were joyously razing Georgian and Victorian terraces and replacing them with modern eyesores unfit for human habitation. If you’re interested in the scale of this architectural subversion, read up on the destruction suffered by formerly one of our most beautiful cities, Bath.

This is where Corbyn meets Corbusier, emphasising the similarity between communism and fascism. And Corbusier’s fascist outlook can be inferred not only from his writings but, more tellingly, from his day job.

Corbusier’s work screams totalitarianism in concrete, his preferred material. He didn’t care which totalitarian was in power, as long as Corbusier was his architect. Stalin, Laval, Mussolini, Hitler could all look at his designs and smile.

When you see today’s ugly concrete structures giving parts of great European cities that unmistakeably Soviet je ne sais quoi, think of Corbusier. It’s to his ideas that we owe today’s vast areas of state-run tower blocks.

Corbusier strove to drive people into soulless, inhuman slabs of concrete, and his British co-ideologists promptly obliged by inundating the country with stinking, drug-addled, crime-brewing hellholes mostly inhabited by welfare freeloaders.

For people like Corbyn, such jerry-built tower blocks are ideal. They play the same role as mass immigration and the welfare state: creating a mob dependent on, and controlled by, the government and, typically, voting Labour.

Regarded in this light, the strategy has worked: Kensington has gone Labour for the first time in history, and it was Northern Kensington that swung the vote, people who live in tower blocks identical to Grenfell Tower.

Those who wonder why the state didn’t spend a few extra thousand to install fire-proof cladding or fire-sprinkling systems miss the point. Of course all those monstrosities disfiguring London’s skyline were slapped together on the cheap.

It suits the ideology much better to construct 10 death traps than one sound building. Ideally, they’d want all London housing to be run by the state, reflecting Corbusier’s fascist ideas expressed in cheap concrete.

I’d suggest that, next time Comrade Corbyn wants to point a finger at someone, he do so in front of a mirror. If he can stand the sight, that is.

 

In resigning as LibDem leader, Tim Farron put it in a nutshell: “To be a political leader – especially of a progressive, liberal party in 2017 – and to live as a committed Christian, to hold faithfully to the Bible’s teaching, has felt impossible for me.”

It felt impossible because it is impossible – and not only for Mr Farron but for any mainstream politician. All major parties everywhere in the West are progressive and liberal, with both terms meaning exactly the same these days.

Yes, some politicians may practise Christianity in their spare time, and conservative ones must pretend they do, especially in the US. But woe betide any politician who dares to let Christian commandments interfere with his day job.

Christianity is thus reduced to a hobby: some politicians play golf on Sunday, some have a lie-in with the supplements, some go to church. None of those pastimes has the slightest effect on what they’re going to do on Monday.

While applauding Mr Farron’s integrity, one may still wonder how he has managed until now to reconcile his faith with socialist politics – and until Corbyn’s communists took over Labour, the LibDems had been Britain’s most socialist party.

Reflecting on the virulent attacks on his faith, Mr Farron said that “we are kidding ourselves if we think we yet live in a tolerant, liberal society.” But we do, Tim, we do. It’s all a matter of definition.

Anyone, never mind a politician, must know that nowadays words with even remote political connotations mean the opposite of their real meaning. Thus liberal means illiberal, and tolerant means intolerant. Understood that way, nobody has to kid himself: we indeed live in a tolerant, liberal society, modern style.

It’s in the spirit of such tolerant liberalism that the paragons of modernity are never satisfied with people just meekly toeing the line. Like their communist cousins they demand not passive acquiescence but enthusiastic support. And if that comes belatedly, the culprit is supposed to debase himself by public recantation.

Mr Farron found that out the hard way in April, when sadistic inquisitors, otherwise known as reporters, subjected him to days of public torture. Time after time his tormentors demanded he acknowledge that homosexuality isn’t a sin.

Now no Christian can accept homosexuality as a valid, morally neutral option. However, no politician may these days even hint that he regards homosexuality as anything other than a normal, moral option.

But of course Mr Farron, who’s on record as having said that “abortion is wrong”, thereby attacking another ‘progressive’ article of faith, regards homosexuality as a sin. His religion is unequivocal on the subject.

He knew it, his torturers knew it, he knew that they knew, and they knew that he knew they knew. Hence their inquiries weren’t a genuine request for information but a demand for recantation.

To Mr Farron’s credit, he held out for days under a constant barrage, refusing to answer the question, while his tormentors refused to talk about anything else, including LibDem policies.

In the end Farron had to hiss through his teeth words to the effect of “Fine, fine, homosexuality isn’t a sin. Now will you leave me alone? Please?”

By now resigning Mr Farron proved he’s a good Christian. But his thinking appears to be jumbled.

In his resignation statement, he said he’s a “liberal to my finger tips” and, as such, would never impose his Christian views on others. If by imposition he means proclaiming the truth of his views, he doesn’t quite understand how his faith relates to quotidian life.

The founder of Christianity certainly didn’t expect his followers to keep their views to themselves: “And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” He demanded not tacit reticence but fiery proselytism.

That’s why Christ’s temple is neither a social centre nor a self-help group. It’s the Church Militant: “For we wrestle… against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Not much room for relativism there: spiritual wickedness exists. Rather than being confused or equated with spiritual good, it must be wrestled against. There isn’t a hint at the modern ethos of share-care-be-aware diversity.

The founders of the first modern and therefore atheist state, the USA, were perfectly aware of the fundamental incompatibility of newfangled politics and Christianity. As Christianity was the essence of the old order, it had to be shoved aside.

The US Constitution coyly eschews the phrase ‘separation of church and state’. Instead the First Amendment states only that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

But in his comments both before and after the ratification, Thomas Jefferson was unequivocal: this amendment, he gloated, built “a wall of separation between Church and State”. He could have been more emphatic: modernity built a wall of separation between Christianity and politics.

Hence Mr Farron has made the right moral choice. Now he should make the right intellectual one and realise that he can’t be both a Christian and a “liberal to my finger tips”.

I hope he does, but meanwhile he must be congratulated on having already gone further than any other so-called Christian in Parliament.

The style is indeed the man (Le style, c’est l’homme même, as Buffon put it).

That’s why I’d impeach Trump simply because he tops a business suit with a baseball cap. A man who commits such sartorial solecisms either is a vulgar lout or, which is worse, pretends to be one for populist reasons.

Also, if the on-going investigation implicates Trump in illegal dealings with Putin’s kleptofascist regime, he ought to be not just impeached but imprisoned, with the key thrown away.

Meanwhile, Trump is trying all sorts of things on for size, some good, some bad. Some he gets away with, some are blocked in Congress and some others put him in the way of slings and arrows.

Amazingly, he’s drawing the densest barrage for one unequivocally good thing he has done: getting out of the obscene Paris Agreement.

The reason Trump cited involved American jobs: compliance with the Paris guidelines would shift them to countries that routinely flout international laws and regulations, especially China and India.

Perhaps a politician seeking popularity has to come up with this argument. But a truth seeker would simply explain that the whole global warming hysteria is a hoax, and a pernicious one at that.

It’s a hoax because the anthropogenic contribution to global warming is so small as to be trivial. It’s a pernicious hoax because its genesis isn’t in science but in ideology.

Solar activity is by far the greatest contributor to climate change: the more active the sun, the higher the temperature. And solar activity is cyclical, swinging within both a vast 1,500-year amplitude and a small 30-year one.

This explains why, since people began to juxtapose temperature and the sun some 400 years ago, 30-year-long thermal cycles on earth have consistently coincided with the 30-year-long solar cycles. Hence in the twentieth century temperature grew from 1900 to 1940, then dropped from 1940 to 1970, then began to go up again.

The bigger cycles follow the same pattern. The earth swings between periods of extreme cold, such as the Ice Age, and comfortable warmth, such as now.

Hippos, who hate cold, could be found in the Thames 150,000 years ago. When the Romans came to England, grapes grew in the North Country and in Scotland, suggesting a warmer climate than now – and Romans didn’t use aerosols. A thousand years ago world temperature was warmer than today, yet no fracking was under way. And 800 years ago, reindeer, who perversely like cold weather, roamed the woods of England – there must have been quite a chill in the air.

Nobody’s denying that we’re going through one of the warmer periods, even though the increase in temperature is nowhere near as steep or calamitous as Trump’s critics claim – nor as universal.

Global warmers are claiming that scientists agree with their doomsday predictions. Some do, but it’s a lie to say that a consensus exists. Many noted scientists specialising in disciplines tangentially touching upon anthropogenic global warming, such as physics, chemistry, astronomy, astrophysics, palaeontology, geology and so forth, blow this theory out of the water.

That isn’t surprising. After all, the anthropogenic origin of warm weather is the first discovery in the history of science made not by scientists but by a political body, the UN. Much as one admires the epic successes this organisation has enjoyed in its own field (Yugoslavia springs to mind, among many other calamities), one has to say that the evidential base of its theory is, to be charitable, weak.

The political base, however, is massive, and the banners of global warming have drawn all the same people who oppose nuclear energy, shale gas, medical experiments on animals, free enterprise and everything else that can improve and prolong human lives.

They use the word ‘capitalism’ as their bogeyman, but in fact they’re driven by visceral hatred of our civilisation. In the past, those dreadful capitalists exploited the proletariat; now they’re destroying ‘our planet’ (I’d make the admittedly radical suggestion that you should punch in the nose anyone who thus refers to the earth.)

Those same people, or their typological progenitors, used to prefer the virtues of Stalinism to the vices of capitalism. When the global warming myth runs its course – and they’ve already had to replace that defunct term with ‘climate change’ – they’ll march against something else.

They’re scaring us with a high content of CO2 in the atmosphere, and it’s indeed high. However, it was 12 times as high during the Cambrian period, yet somehow mankind managed to muddle through.

And what’s wrong with a higher level of CO2 anyway? Rather than harming people, it benefits them in any number of ways. Above all, it improves global food security, which is critical considering the rising population. Not only does CO2 make food more plentiful, but it also makes it better, for example by increasing the amount of Vitamin C in citrus fruit.

The ‘greenhouse effect’ does exist, but it’s trivial compared with the effect of solar activity. And in any case, plants, animals, volcanoes etc. will continue to produce CO2 in greater amounts than man does – and thank God for that.

But even assuming that the ideological scaremongering about warm weather has some merit (and this is an assumption no sensible person would make), the Paris Agreement is a grossly inadequate and implicitly subversive measure.

According to the iffy data touted by its initiators, global temperature is going to increase by 2-5 per cent over the next few decades. Yet even the stated goal of the Agreement is only to shave some 0.2 per cent off that.

However, the hysterical pitch of the clamour surrounding Trump’s correct decision suggests that the stated objective isn’t the real one. That’s always the case with massive crusades driven by ideology.

Lenin, Stalin and Mao supposedly sought the good of the people, whereas in fact they craved their blood anointing the power of an evil elite. The UN supposedly prevents wars, whereas in fact it reflects the perennial socialist dream of world government. The EU pretends to pursue Europe’s economic interests, whereas in fact its objectives are the same as the UN’s, if on a smaller scale.

By tossing away the dreadful Paris Agreement, Trump called its fans’ bluff. He’s being attacked not because their case has merit, but specifically because it doesn’t. No one is hated more than an apostate, and the president went against a tenet of the wicked global creed.

Why, for that one can almost forgive him that slumming baseball cap.

Since I’m grateful to any publication that expands my vocabulary, my gratitude to The Sunday Times knows no bounds. Not only did its article on the thespian Asia Kate Dillon teach me new words, but it also opened up whole new horizons in grammar.

You’ll notice that I eschewed a gender-specific noun like ‘actor’ or ‘actress’ in identifying Dillon, opting instead for the gender-neutral ‘thespian’. For, as the article explains, “The actor Asia Kate Dillon is non-binary, meaning they identify as neither a man nor a woman and use the pronouns ‘they/them/their’ instead of ‘she/her’ or ‘he/his’.”

This short sentence enriched both my lexicon (‘non-binary’) and, by implication, grammar. The implication involves the verb following the plural antecedent ‘they’, when used to denote a single non-binary person.

Speaking of Dillon, is it ‘they are non-binary’ or ‘they is non-binary’? This dilemma evokes the memory of my childhood language, Russian.

In times olden, a peasant always spoke of his master in the plural. Thus a butler would tell a morning visitor that ‘they are not up yet’, meaning his master was still in bed.

This usage is a solecism. Russian, along with just about every European language except English, has two forms for addressing a person: informal ты and deferential вы (tu and vous in French, du and sie in German, tu and usted in Spanish and so forth). But educated speakers don’t transfer these plural second-person pronouns into third person.

What sounds quaint in Russian used to sound impossible in English, but, thanks to The Sunday Times, things are changing. As a lifetime champion of progress, I jump up and salute. And, as a creative person of the masculine gender, I’d like to make a modest contribution to solving this conundrum.

Since ‘they are’ in the singular sense doesn’t sit easily with the archaic canons of English, and ‘they is’ doesn’t yet seem possible this side of certain demographic groups, I propose the gender-neutral verb ‘be’ as the panacea. ‘They be’ also sounds vaguely ethnic, but that offers the extra benefit of enhanced diversity.

Other verbs may still present a problem though. Saying that Dillon ‘love’ acting may hint not so much at non-binary sexuality as binary personality, which is a psychiatric disorder.

Here the solution must be less straightforward. For example, since we’ve already accepted ‘be’ as a cure for all reactionary ills, perhaps we could build any sentence around this grammatical breakthrough.

Thus, instead of saying ‘they love acting’ or, even worse, ‘they loves acting’, we could say ‘they be in love with acting’. A word of caution: when saying this, refrain from indulging in Ali G gesticulation.

The article is written with the empathy and sensitivity one has learned to expect even from our conservative press. For example, the author laments, blood dripping out of their [sic] heart, that “Throughout the process of writing this profile, I heard Dillon misgendered as ‘she’ multiple times and even their IMDB page refers to them as an ‘actress’.”

A stick-in-the-mud pedant might suggest that the first four words in that sentence could be replaced with ‘when’, but this is a minor quibble compared to the gratitude one must feel for having learned yet another new word. I bet you’ve never heard the verb ‘misgender’ or its derivatives before – I certainly hadn’t until enlightened by our venerable newspaper.

Dillon themselves be a graduate of the Sunday Times language school, as witnessed by this heart-rending passage: “I feel like one thing I encounter is that, particularly with men who identify as men, when they find out I’m non-binary, they don’t know how to be in relation to someone that isn’t something that they understand.”

According to the article, Dillon be in possession of a fine aesthetic sense and a keen understanding of utilitarian morality: “Their body is inscribed with eight tattoos, including ‘Einfühlung’, the German word for empathy, on their neck, and ‘What you will’ on their right inner forearm – the alternate title to Dillon’s favourite Shakespeare play, Twelfth Night (of course), ‘and a reminder to me that as long as I’m not hurting myself, or anyone else, I should do what makes me happy’.”

I feel ashamed about having neglected to use my body as a poster site advertising my erudition, such as it is. However, though grateful for discovering that ‘alternate’ now means the same as ‘alternative’, I could still make a timid objection to the statement at the end.

When my bladder is bursting, relieving myself in full view of a Chelsea crowd would make me happy without really hurting anybody. However… well, you get the point.

Yet this slight philosophical lapse is more than made up for by Dillon’s ground-breaking contribution to physiology and microbiology. To wit: “Sex is between our legs, gender identity is between our ears.”

Now though I can claim only cursory familiarity with the disciplines in question, I seem to recall reading somewhere about things called ‘chromosomes’ that supposedly determine sex – sorry, I mean gender – identity. Skimming the surface, I’ve also run across words like ‘hormones’ or, more specifically, ‘testosterone’ and ‘oestrogen’. Silly me, I’ve never realised that those things reside strictly between our legs – or, come to that, between our ears.

“Today,” continued the article, “Dillon… lives… with long-term partner Christopher, who identifies as a man (they have an open relationship), and Eugene, a 12-year-old cat.” Neither the cat’s identification nor its role in the open relationship was made clear.

What Dillon stated unequivocally was that, other than Christopher, those who identify as men present a deadly threat to them: “They’re, like, ‘Do I… am I supposed to kill you?’”

The article is in awe of their courage: “Dillon mentions the potential instinct to kill someone who is non-binary so casually that it almost doesn’t register, but the threat of violence is a reality that they and other gender non-conforming individuals face daily.”

If that’s true, I’m appalled and yet hopeful. Such troglodyte urges can’t stop progress, whose salutary achievement is that a non-binary person like Dillon now performs in TV dramas – rather than at the county fairs of yore, alongside a man with breasts and a woman with a beard.

 

Intellectual pygmies, especially those of the neocon persuasion, get giant salaries at American universities, belying the widespread belief in their superior quality.

I can prove my point with two words: Niall Ferguson. And if that still doesn’t do the trick, read his rant in The Times two days ago.

It was ostensibly against populism but in reality against Brexit, hostility to which is shared by all American neocons. In this, Ferguson, British gone native in the US neocon circles, toes the party line with unwavering loyalty.

That line ends in an arrow aimed at the heart of Brexit. This stands to reason.

The neocons have never shaken their Trotskyist heritage. They’ve only shifted the same radical animus from a ‘permanent revolution’ promoting communism to a permanent war promoting Democracy.

That’s why they’re non-conservative statists. A global crusade for a particular political form (divorced in their minds from any underlying content) can only be undertaken by the omnipotent state. To be able to do that, the state has to grow pari passu with the scale of global ambitions.

Since any single state has limits to its expansion, the neocons support the notion of a supranational state, ideally governed by America. The EU is seen as an intermediate step on the road to such unification.

Hence in the run-up to the referendum Ferguson wrote articles with such robust titles as Brexit’s Happy Morons Don’t give a Damn About the Costs of Leaving.

When the vote went the other way, it took Ferguson some six months to recover from the shock. “My mistake,” he then wrote, “was uncritically defending Cameron and Osborne instead of listening to people in pubs.”

Translating from snide to human, it was uncouth pub-crawlers who swung the referendum in favour of British sovereignty. Clever people like Dave, George and above all Niall knew better, but made the tactical error of not tossing the louts a few crumbs off the Remain table.

Now that Trump has won in America and Corbyn almost did in Britain, Ferguson develops the same theme.

It’s worth mentioning parenthetically that, though Trump is many things, a neocon he emphatically isn’t. That’s why the neocons sputter spittle at the very mention of his name – and that’s why many of them voted for Hillary, who has all the intellectual failings of Trump plus the moral one of being downright evil.

In any case, the neocons have nothing against the Democratic Party. Some of their iconic founders, such as Moynihan and Kirkpatrick, were Democrats themselves. And all four American wars in the twentieth century, the two world wars, Korea and Vietnam, were started under Democratic presidents.

Closer to home, Ferguson explains the Brexit vote by the fact that “Politics in mid-2016 was dominated by populist memes [such as] ‘Take back control’”. And he explains Corbyn’s electoral success by the failure of said “populist memes”, those that led the unwashed masses into wishing to reclaim Britain’s independence.

It’s true that Mrs May’s incompetent campaign featured, inter alia, a demand for a mandate to take a strong stand against EU blackmail. But it’s not true that most votes cast against the Tories were really cast against Brexit and its ‘hard’ version in particular.

Let’s agree on one thing: ‘soft’ Brexit means no Brexit at all, which is why the likes of Ferguson support it. Formally leaving the EU but remaining in the single market and customs union means negating three key reasons – and I can’t think offhand of many others – for leaving in the first place.

Our parliament would still be subject to superseding EU laws. We’d still have little control of our borders. We’d still have to pay billions into EU coffers. Effectively we’d keep every disadvantage of EU membership while relinquishing even our minuscule 1/28^th part of the control.

With the characteristic neocon knack for self-refutation, Ferguson unwittingly presents data giving the lie to his assertion that every vote against May was cast against Brexit.

First he writes that the election featured an usually high turn-out of young voters, with 67 per cent of those aged between 18 and 24 voting Labour. And second, “Only 8% of Labour voters said Brexit was the most important issue…”.

The first datum is a strong argument against the kind of democracy run riot that the neocons favour. The less qualified the electorate is to cast votes with selfless intelligence, the better it is for those wishing to entrench their own control. In that spirit the neocons and other crypto-socialists would gladly lower the voting age not just to 16 years but to 16 months.

Hence Ferguson’s implicit gloating over the swing of “the younger, healthier and better-educated” voters to Labour. He clearly shares the view of Trotsky, the spiritual progenitor of neoconservatism, that “the youth is the barometer of the nation”.

And yet Ferguson acknowledges that only eight per cent of Labour voters saw Brexit as important. How this proves that May lost votes because of Brexit escapes me, but then I’m not privy to the intricate thought processes of our intellectual elite.

“The younger, healthier and better-educated” voters so dear to Ferguson’s heart are those immediately before, during or soon after university. Since according to our sage himself they don’t attach much importance to Brexit, something else must have tickled their naughty bits, those the young use in lieu of brains.

Could it perchance be Corbyn’s irresponsible promise to abolish tuition fees and cancel the debts already incurred thereby? No, of course not.

Such narrow-minded selfishness would blow the neocons’ democratic totem sky-high, showing that even “younger, healthier and better-educated” voters are ignorant of, and indifferent to, the needs of society at large.

Ferguson’s analysis isn’t worthy of the name, representing as it does not serious thought but the longings of his apparatchik loins. Underneath it all, what matters to his ilk isn’t truth but victory for their perverse understanding of the world.