Author: Alexander Boot

While arrogantly claiming I know something about the science of politics, I humbly admit that I understand little about its mechanics. And whenever I forget to be humble, something like the current madhouse gets me back in touch with reality.

The Tory leadership contest seems all but sewn up. Home Secretary Theresa May has been endorsed by all and sundry, and her lead in the polls is so vast that, this once, one must conclude that the polls aren’t lying.

Why, even our most conservative paper The Daily Mail has come out in favour. The editors must have their reasons, considering that Mrs May is far from being the most conservative contender.

I find it impossible to understand how it’s possible to entrust the negotiations about leaving the EU to someone who campaigned against it. The only healthy premise for such negotiations is utter contempt for the EU and everything it stands for. In the absence of such, the negotiator may succumb to one of numerous temptations to sell Britain down the river.

Liam Fox, my preference of the bad bunch, isn’t seen as a serious contender, so the choice is reduced to Mrs May, with her awful taste in clothes, and Mr Gove, with his awful taste in women. But then modern democracy is all about the evil of two lessers.

(Speaking of Mrs May’s clothes, when announcing her candidature she wore a trouser suit of Clan Gordon tartan. Generally speaking, it’s in bad taste to wear tartan unless one is entitled to it by birth, which Mrs May isn’t. Specifically speaking, this is another example of devious politicking: support me, she’s saying to the Scots subliminally, and I’ll rain bribes on you to stay in the Union.)

Given such an uninspiring choice, any sensible person would prefer Gove. At least he had the courage to put his career on the line by leading the Leave campaign. Mrs May shilly-shallied at first, then came out in favour of Remain. However, she hedged her bets by keeping a low profile.

This lack of any discernible convictions seems to be an innate, or else family, trait. Although raised as an Anglican by her vicar father, young Theresa augmented her grammar-school education with a spell at a Catholic school. That’s a bit too ecumenical for anyone who takes religion seriously but, being a modern politician, Mrs May takes nothing but Mrs May seriously.

The Mail doesn’t seem to mind anything about her, and the things it admires are odd. According to the paper, she isn’t “a divisive, ideology-driven Right-winger”. This is leftie longhand for a conservative, and it’s disheartening to see a conservative paper using it.

The whole thing about Mrs May is that she’s a congenital fence-sitter, neither left nor right, nor anything much. Because she stands for nothing, she can fall for any lie proffered by the EU.

Then The Mail fires a shot in the class war by extolling Mrs May’s humble origins: “she is not a member of the privileged classes”. The implication is that Cameron is an unprincipled, ineffectual spiv because he’s a toff. This is nonsense, and pernicious nonsense at that.

Being an Old Etonian should be neither an automatic qualification nor disqualification to hold a government post. An overwhelming majority of Britain’s best political leaders came from ‘the privileged classes’, but the requisite qualities of intelligence, integrity and character aren’t confined to any particular group.

A claim that a vicar’s daughter is ipso facto more attuned to the interests of the common man is false, and grossly so. That by itself is sufficient to show that The Mail isn’t really a conservative paper.

Mrs May isn’t a conservative either, which is why she too joined the class battle, though with her characteristic timidity: “If you are from an ordinary, working-class family,” she said, “life is just much harder than many people in politics realise.”

Note the acuteness of observation and depth of thought. Consider also that so far the only intention Mrs May has stated as a future PM is to reverse just about the only sensible policy of Dave’s administration: commitment to eliminating the budget deficit.

So by all means let’s destroy the economy by continuing to spend billions (trillions?) more than we earn. That’ll help working-class families no end.

“Certainly,” admits the paper generously, “her record on controlling immigration has been disappointing, to say the least.” Not to worry, “in her steeliness, she is somewhat reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher”.

And chicken salad is somewhat reminiscent of chicken wire. The only thing the two ladies have in common is the same set of chromosomes, which these days is supposed to give a candidate a leg-up.

I’m not an unequivocal admirer of Margaret Thatcher, but she certainly had the strength of her convictions. Mrs May has neither strength nor convictions: she has no immediately obvious qualification to lead her country.

And here’s the clincher: Ken Clarke has endorsed her. Now Ken has maniacally devoted the last 20 years of his career to dissolving Britain’s sovereignty in the EU’s. Single currency, single army, single taxation, you name it, Ken loves it all.

One has to believe he knows something about Mrs May we don’t.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geoffrey Levy has written an article saying nasty things about Junk, as Jean-Claude likes to be known to his friends, among whom I proudly number myself. Actually Junk’s preference for this affectionate diminutive is regrettable, for nothing symbolises the unifying nature of the EU like his full name, including as it does both French and German constituents.

Mr Levy’s ad hominems are grossly unfair and in some quarters may be considered libellous. For example, he correctly states that Junk’s chosen tipple is Glenfarclas, a tasty Speyside malt whisky. So far so good, and any honest commentator would praise Junk for patronising a British product in preference to that froggish Martel Cordon Bleu he used to favour for breakfast.

Yet Mr Levy missed a further opportunity of praising Junk, instead targeting for scorn the scale on which Junk patronises that particular product. If he knew Junk as intimately as I do, he’d know that Junk consumes prodigious amounts of Glenfarclas, starting at breakfast, not because he’s, perish the thought, a drunk but because he specifically wishes to give a much-needed boost to Scotland’s economy.

After all, if Scotland does split away from the UK and joins the EU, Junk will have to pick up the tab currently footed by the English taxpayer. That’s why he has a vested interest in the state of Scotland’s economy: the stronger it is, the less the EU will have to pay in subsidies.

You may say that even consuming two bottles of Glenfarclas, as Junk does so faithfully, represents but a drop in the rapidly receding ocean of the Scottish economy. But hey, a man can only do what he can do, and what’s Mr Levy done for Scotland lately?

Fair enough, failure to praise doesn’t constitute libel, although it does suggest poor judgement on Mr Levy’s part. But then he maligned Junk to such an extent that, if I were Junk, I’d be instructing a law firm even as we speak.

But judge for yourself: “Juncker is said to have a particular weakness for Glenfarclas malt whisky (which costs up to £130), bottles of which are said to be kept in the fridge behind his Commissioner’s desk,” writes Mr Levy.

A weakness, Mr Levy? I’d call it a strength. The hack obviously wishes to impugn Junk’s character by implying that he uses EU funds for his own pleasure. That he may do at times, and who among us would miss the opportunity to stick our snout into that particular trough?

But, while some varieties of Glenfarclas do reach the level Mr Levy mentioned, its normal price range is within 10 quid on either side of £50, and I happen to know that these are the kinds Junk prefers with his cornflakes. However, it’s the second part of Mr Levy’s statement that really upset Junk.

“Alex,” he told me on the phone, “quel genre de Dummkopf does this espèce d’enculé think he is?” (Junk prides himself on his multilingual eloquence.) “No normale Mann would ever penser of keeping a decent malt in a foutu Kühlschrank. This would absolutely zerstören the saveur, turning a great Scottish product into pisse de cheval. Nicola would kill me tot if she found out I did that. I don’t keep my booze in a bloody Kühlschrank behind my desk. I keep it in my foutu Schreibtisch.”

Junk was referring to Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s First Minister. In fact, if truth be known, she’s a bit more than a friend to Junk, which he unwisely revealed to the media the other day.

Junk let himself be photographed kissing Nicola on the mouth, with his right hand on her left breast. Unwise it might have been, but that uninhibited gesture said so much about Junk, so many things that made me admire him even more.

For one thing, he was clearly in his cups, showing yet again his laudably unwavering commitment to boosting Scotland’s only viable export. Also, by indulging in public foreplay for the camera, Junk demonstrated commendable disdain for the wagging of the mauvaises langues, or mauvaises Zungen, as he likes to say with his multilingual ease.

And then, by feeling up this grossly unattractive creature, Junk showed that, in common with all worthy men, he’s more fastidious in his taste for whisky than for women. Of course he also gave Nicky the Fish, as he lovingly calls her, a sense of being wanted, something so important to plain women.

Or plain men, it has to be said, for immediately after the referendum Junk took advantage of another photo op by kissing Nigel Farage on the lips (“No Zungen, Alex, me old china,” he told me afterwards).

One can see how Junk and Nigel may feel affectionate towards each other, for all the divergence of their views. Men can have stronger bonds than mere politics, and those uniting Junk and Nigel are unbreakable. Both love a drink and both are married to German women, which again shows they got their priorities right. “There are no ugly women,” say the Russians. “There’s only not enough booze.”

So here’s to you, Junk. The sun is over the yardarm somewhere, Junk, my old porcelaine. Bottoms up, as Nicola would say.

The EU is a flimsy structure built on a foundation of lies. These are indeed fundamental, not a misquoted number here or there. Listing all the lies would be tedious, but it’s worth mentioning some salient ones, those bandied about widely.

One is that the EU is primarily a trading bloc, pursuing not so much political ends as the economic good of its members. In fact, the reverse is true – and has been from the very beginning. Witness these two quotations from Jean Monnet, the first one from 1943:

“There will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty… The European states must constitute themselves into a federation.”

That’s the strategy. Here are the tactics:

“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation.”

Cynical? Devious? Evil? All those things, to be sure. But above all those clear statements are to the point: any claim that the EU is mainly about economics is a lie.

Nor does Germany, the EU’s ringleader, care about the wellbeing of other members – that’s another lie. Time and again the economic interests of every member nation except Germany have been wantonly sacrificed for political ends.

After all, no one could have been so stupid as to believe that fusing 28 nations, each with its own history and culture, into a single economic and political entity could possibly work. And as to the lunatic idea of imposing a single currency on 19 nations varying from Germany and Holland to Greece and Portugal, the results are there for all to see.

National economies were sacrificed at the altar of wicked politics, which is why the per capita GDP of every eurozone country (save Germany, of course) has declined since Maastricht.

However, of all the flagrant lies spouted by Eurogues, none incenses me more than the claim often heard in southern Europe, that the EU is a product of Catholic universalism, the modern answer to the Holy Roman Empire.

At play here is another example of what I call the larcenous shift of modernity, wherein Christendom’s social and moral property was broken off its religious underpinnings, dragged into the house of the new owner and adapted to his nefarious purposes.

Thus Christian expansiveness was transformed into modern expansionism. Christian introspection became modern obsession with psychology, understood in a materialistic way. And Christian nurturing of reason as a cognitive tool, one of many, re-appeared as modern belief in reason as a be-all and end-all.

Another term I favour is ‘rule by simulacrum’: people are fed sounds to which their ears have been attuned for centuries, except that those sounds now mean something different. Thus nebulous, secular human rights are a simulacrum of the Christian belief in the self-significance of every person created in the image of God; destructive modern egalitarianism is a simulacrum of the Christian belief in equality of all before God – and so forth.

By the same token, the founders of the EU, many of them Catholics (Monnet, Schuman, Gasperi, Adenauer, Spinelli), created a secular simulacrum of Catholic universalism. Hence their liberal use of words like ‘solidarity’ and ‘subsidiarity’, which came from the lexicon of Catholic social teaching.

That those men were raised as Catholics had as little significance as the Catholic background of Hitler or the Orthodox one of Stalin. Whatever they were in their private lives, in their pan-European politics they pursued strictly non-Christian, not to say anti-Christian, aims.

In this they followed a path well-trodden by all heresies throughout history. Heretics readily accept most of doctrine – except one detail. That one fragment is then broken off the whole and peddled as the most important thing. The ostensible aim is purification and simplification. The real aim is perversion and destruction.

Thus Arianism, a heresy that began, and almost made sure Christianity would end, in the third century, accepted practically the whole doctrine: a single, loving, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God, Jesus Christ as the Son of God endowed with divine nature. One minor thing they didn’t accept was Christ being consubstantial and coeternal with the Father, part of the same triune Godhead.

That minor detail eliminated at a stroke the Holy Trinity, the cornerstone of Christianity, reducing Christ to the same role he’d later play in Islam, that of merely an important, divinely inspired prophet. Had Arius not been defeated at the 325 Council of Nicaea, Christianity would have been reduced to an obscure cult.

By the same token, those Catholics who conceived an EU, took such Catholic concepts as universalism and solidarity coupled with subsidiarity and shifted them into the secular realm of wicked politics. Alas, one minor detail, God, got lost along the way.

The genesis of the EU owes more (though not everything, I hasten to add) to the Third Reich than to the Holy Roman Empire. However, one has to admire the sheer effrontery of those who insist on its Catholic roots. Lesser men would be too embarrassed to pull such a fraudulent trick.

Talk to any woman who has gestated a foetus to full term, and she’ll tell you what a spiritually rewarding experience that is.

To feel a life growing inside you and then popping out to face the wonders of the world – such joy must transcend the quotidian life and reach out to the mystery of man, the mystery of God.

As a passionate believer in universal human rights, those bestowed not by some nebulous God but by the tangible, ironclad UN Declaration, I regard this transcendent experience as an inalienable right of every sexually mature human being, irrespective of sex… sorry, I mean gender, how very reactionary of me.

However, this indisputable right, bestowed by the United Church of Internationalism, has so far been denied to a full half of mankind… sorry, I mean personkind, how very reactionary of me. Granted, some men keep on trying to partake of this ineffable joy – 1.5 per cent of us if you believe research, or 25 per cent if you believe Peter Tatchell and other dedicated fighters for this sacred right.

Alas, all their vigorous, thrusting efforts to be impregnated by fellow men have remained in vain, frustrating their souls, blighting their lives and enraging those observers who, like me, are passionately devoted to equality über alles, the phrase Germans use to sing but prudently don’t any longer.

Any inequality demands correction and restitution, no one can argue against that. The first step is to acknowledge the enormity of it all and offer one’s heartfelt apologies.

His Holiness Pope Francis showed how the other day, by stating from the height of his ecclesiastical authority that “the Church not only should apologise to a gay person whom it offended but it must also apologise to the poor as well, to the women who have been exploited, to children who have been exploited by work.”

No parallel demand was issued for reciprocal apology from ‘gay persons’ who might have offended the Church, and quite right too. The Church, as everyone knows, is history’s greatest, nay only, oppressor, and she’s the one to keep apologising till the cardinals come home.

That’s the only way to pour balm on historical wounds, to alleviate the pain suffered by ‘gay persons’, women and children since that nasty male God chose to punish women by making childbirth excruciatingly painful.

All of us good Christians should sign, if only inwardly, this plea for forgiveness, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find something else to apologise for, thereby correcting the pontiff’s omission. So here I am, on bended knee, offering my grovelling apologies to all those men who have since the time of Adam craved pregnancy but have been denied life’s unique experience by the cruelty of God and inadequacy of medical science.

You might think that, being neither God nor a medical scientist, I’m not to blame for this outrage personally. That only goes to show it’s you and not me who’s hopelessly reactionary. There’s no such thing as individual guilt – all guilt is collective, shared equally by every member of the delinquent group and indeed society at large. So, on behalf of all men who have never wanted to get pregnant I’m hereby offering an apology to those who have.

Now comes the restitution part, doubtless inspired by courageous women like Chastity Bowick, born a man but miraculously transformed into a woman, and an appropriately named one at that. As a boy, Chastity dreamed about giving birth one day: “If you’re a trans woman, this is a way of completing the dream,” says Chastity, now as feminine as any woman you’d ever wish to meet, provided it’s not in a dark alley.

Well, Chastity, there is Santa Claus: the dream is about to become reality. According to Scientific American, the wonders of modern science are such that a former man can – or at least soon will be able to – become pregnant by uterine transplant:

“Here is how it could work: First, a patient would likely need castration surgery and high doses of exogenous hormones because high levels of male sex hormones, called androgens, could threaten pregnancy. (Although hormone treatments can be powerful, patients would likely need to be castrated because the therapy might not be enough to maintain the pregnancy among patients with testes.) The patient would also need surgery to create a ‘neovagina’ that would be connected to the transplant uterus, to shed menses and give doctors access to the uterus for follow-up care.”

A lovely read, that. All those technical glitches mentioned are soon to be removed – the march of progress is unstoppable. If something can be done, it must be done: progress springs to life from this unassailable premise. Hence before long it’s new women like Chastity who will develop that majestic glow hitherto denied them.

All we can do is rejoice with them, while apologising unreservedly for the cruelty of having denied them this dream for so long. I do hope His Holiness will join me in expressing such sentiments – he can do grovelling apology with the best of them.

The pernicious petition to hold a second referendum is being investigated for fraud, but not rigorously enough. For example, this document has been signed by 39,000 residents of the Vatican, whose census population is a mere 800.

At the same time some petition-mad woman published a postal code on The Guardian website, saying that anyone without a British address of his own is welcome to use it. One is tempted to think that the 77,000 fraudulent signatures already thrown out don’t even begin to scratch the surface.

This is much worse than just old-fashioned political corruption. The response to the referendum is fascism in action.

The other day I commented on the fundamentally fascist nature of the EU, arguing that arbitrary power may well flourish even in a seemingly democratic soil. Hence the classic question asked by political scientists: What if the people vote to sell themselves into slavery? If the government ignores the vote, it’s no longer democratic. If the government abides by the vote, it’ll never again be democratic.

We routinely accept the Lockean fallacy that government can only draw legitimacy from consent. In fact, it’s just government that forms consent, not vice versa. An idealised picture Locke must have had in mind was that of ‘the people’ coming together in the past and voting consent to the liberal, secular state.

Alas, this never happened. In fact, no modern attempt to replace a traditional monarchy with a ‘liberal’ republic, be that the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, the American and French ones of the eighteenth, or the Russian ones of the twentieth, involved asking ‘the people’ for their consent.

What they all did involve was an attempt by an impassioned and devious elite to impose their rule on the people in the name of the people. Unlike the democratic element in, say, the traditional English polity, modern unchecked democracy is always bogus: the demos doesn’t really have a say in how it’s democratically governed. It only thinks it does.

The difference between modern ‘democratic’ and ‘totalitarian’ states is that of method, not principle. The latter impose their will by an amalgam of propaganda and violence, the former relies on more subtle forms of manipulation. Consent is claimed in all instances, which goes to show how easily it can be falsified or, that failing, coerced.

Obviously anyone would rather be manipulated than killed. Fair enough – unless he thinks that, if he succumbs to dishonest manipulation, he remains free.

Modern governments all have seeds of fascism in their makeup. In the EU, boosted by its quisling viceroys in member countries, the seeds have sprouted luxuriantly. Witness the current events in Britain, a textbook picture of fascism in action.

First Cameron dangled the plebiscite carrot before the electorate. Both he and his EU overseers arrogantly believed they were offering nothing tangible: the combined weight of their lying, scaremongering propaganda would carry the day easily.

The plot has backfired: the British, those same hoi polloi our elites despise so much, are still a sturdy lot who don’t scare easily. We had the temerity to “confound their politics” and “frustrate their knavish tricks”, to quote the second, never sung, verse of our national anthem.

Thereby we showed our ignorance of modern democracy: we thought it was real, whereas it’s only a make-believe simulacrum. People are welcome to vote as long as their ballots don’t upset the applecart. Now that apples are rolling all over Europe, even simulacra aren’t good enough. Fascism rules, okay?

If the people vote wrong, they must be told to ponder and vote again. The British are children who’ve proved to be naughty. It’s time for the grownups in Islington, Notting Hill and Brussels to spank them.

The methods employed by said grownups are frankly fascistic: a massive – and massively mendacious – propaganda push, combined with mob action and stigmatising all opponents as stupid, racist bigots. But million-strong mobs, be that Lenin’s komsomol, Hitler’s SA, Mao’s Red Guards or the asinine youngsters in London streets, don’t gather by themselves. They must be organised, brought together and told what to bray.

Meanwhile that Blair creature is leading the chorus screaming that the disastrous consequences of the referendum are so blindingly obvious that it’s self-evidently invalid.

What consequences? Some initial turbulence in the markets that every half-intelligent commentator had predicted? No, the only disastrous consequence is another unleashing of the fascist beast lurking inside modernity.

When Gen. Pinochet, commonly described as a fascist, rather than the national saviour he really was, lost a national plebiscite in 1988, he accepted the result and graciously stepped down – even knowing this would entail criminal prosecution against him.

The EU lot, democratic in jargon but fascists at heart, aren’t like that. If a referendum goes against them, it must be repeated until they’re happy with the result. This has happened in Ireland, Denmark and France. Why should Britain be any different?

I’m opposed to plebiscites on principle, finding them an inadequate way to settle serious issues. But the EU lot don’t mind a referendum – they just aren’t prepared to accept any result they don’t like.

I smell logical and moral rats on a rampage, but fascism has logic and morality all its own. One just hopes there’s enough spunk left in the British to “frustrate their knavish tricks” irreversibly.

The barometer Trotsky talked about has fallen off the wall and smashed. Now real people are about to cut their feet on the shards of glass.

Anyone who has read my book Democracy as a Neocon Trick knows I have misgivings about an inordinately large franchise. And I’m not the only holder of this subversive thought.

Edmund Burke wrote that in his contemporaneous Britain there were only about 400,000 people capable of voting responsibly. Adjusted for population growth, today’s number would be about five million. Hence, since the actual size of our electorate is closer to 50 million, one has to infer that the requirement for responsible voting has been dropped somewhere along the way.

The reason is obvious. Ever since government by divine right was replaced with government by manipulation, politicians have depended on a silly electorate easy enough to manipulate.

The quickest way of achieving this devious goal is to lower the voting age. The young, so beloved of Trotsky and other tyrants, are so beloved specifically because, while their gonads are at their most active, their brains aren’t yet even wired properly.

This is an ideal combination for expert manipulators to take advantage of, and they’ve always done so in spectacular fashion. Every revolution in modern history featured mature gentlemen inciting murder, but the young actually perpetrating it.

Everywhere in the West the voting age is being pushed down, which is illogical. After all, in Burke’s time the average life expectancy in Britain was 41. Hence, arithmetically speaking, 18-year-olds were middle-aged then, and one could have understood allowing them to vote.

Today’s 18-year-olds are children physiologically and, typically, infants intellectually. Easy to organise into a rioting mob, they’re incapable of passing mature judgement on even trivial matters.

If you work for a company, would you feel comfortable if the entire management team were made up of scrofulous adolescents? Yet, though managing a business is child’s play compared to running a country, we feel that children ought to have an equal say in how the country is run.

The folly of this is being demonstrated even as we speak. A couple of days ago a gaggle of teenagers were asked on TV how they liked being excluded from voting in the referendum. They were aghast.

“We’re the ones who are going to live with this, so we should have a say,” was the general consensus. By the same logic, 2-year-olds will live it for even longer, so should they vote too?

The demographic break-up shows that the young went for Remain as solidly as the mature people went the other way. Fair enough, but now they’re acting not just like harebrained adolescents, but like babies throwing their toys out of the pram.

A mob of predominantly adolescent idiots are demonstrating in Westminster, demanding that we hold another referendum because they don’t like the result of the first one. And almost three million similarly handicapped persons, again most of them young, have signed a petition to that effect.

Even more bizarrely, many have also signed a petition for London to split away from Britain and enter the EU on its own. Admittedly, though the de jure aspect of this would be hard to work out, de facto London already doesn’t look English.

Descendants of those who made Britain great number a mere 40 per cent of the city’s population, which partly explains London voting to Remain. Most of its denizens must feel they’ve left England already.

There’s no legitimate reason to complain about the referendum. The turnout was the highest of any election since 1992, and Leave got more votes than Yes to Common Market in 1975, Major in 1992, Blair in 1997 and Cameron in either 2010 or 2015.

But the young don’t ponder, nor can they understand, such incidentals. Given the odd prod here or there, they’ll be happy to exert their pedocratic rule by mob action.

And prodders, foreign or home-grown, aren’t in short supply. That slimy fish Sturgeon is threatening to veto our exit in Scottish parliament. Lawyers and their hangers-on pontificate on the referendum not being legally binding. Assorted MPs, past and present, roll on the floor frothing at the mouth.

The stage is set for the EU, in cahoots with our governing spivs, to pull the same trick they’ve pulled so many times before. They could change the EU charter cosmetically, possibly allowing us to soften some of the social provisions, to regain some token control of our borders, perhaps even to repudiate a move towards a closer union.

After that they’ll claim that the deal has changed enough to invalidate the referendum – the EU the British voted to leave is no longer there. Then our own MPs, barely a quarter of whom supported Leave (contrasted with the 52 per cent vote in favour, this shows how out of touch our governing spivs are with the very demos in whose name they govern), will grasp the proffered straw with alacrity and then…

I don’t know what will happen then. All sorts of possibilities are on the table, including street battles and a likely disintegration of social order. What I do know is that we shouldn’t hold our breath. Leon Trotsky may not yet have said his last word.

 

 

 

 

Imagine being hit on the head, not hard enough to knock out but hard enough to daze. Good, now you know how the defeated federasts feel.

This stupor affects their thought, never especially deep to begin with, which then comes across in what they say.

Witness Labour’s Stephen Kinnock, MP, both of whose parents became millionaires off the EU’s euro, and whose wife was until recently Denmark’s PM. Given such family involvements, I for one wouldn’t expect Mr Kinnock to be impeccably disinterested on this issue.

But I’d still expect one of those who govern us to be less daft than the proverbial brush. Alas, Mr Kinnock frustrated such expectations by declaring: “If the British people voted to leave the EU that’s one thing. But can we really say they voted for the devastation and destruction of the entire exporting sector of our economy?”

He clearly sees this as an inevitable consequence of Brexit. One wonders on what basis he has reached that conclusion.

His co-believers are clamouring about the collapse of the pound in the wake of the referendum. Actually, going from £1.29 to £1.24 falls rather short of the apocalypse they predicted in the run-up to the vote.

But do let’s suppose that the pound will remain at its present level or drop even lower. That would make imported goods and travelling on the continent dearer.

However, a lower pound will reduce the unit cost of British goods, making them more competitive on world markets. In fact, currency devaluation is a time-honoured way of boosting exports, one that had enabled, say, France to compete with Germany until the deutschmark, in the guise of the euro, became the single currency.

Then, rid of prohibitive EY tariffs, we’ll now be able to trade more easily with countries outside the EU, which already make up 60 per cent of our foreign trade. At the same time our trade with the EU has been going down steadily, dropping below the pre-Maastricht level.

Rather than ‘devastating and destroying’ our export sector, Brexit will make it stronger. Market traders, more intelligent and less ideological than Mr Kinnock, realise this, which is why Rolls-Royce shares shot up yesterday.

Mr Kinnock seems to be suggesting that, now we’ve decided not to become a province of The Fourth Reich, the EU market will be closed to British exports.

However, our trade balance with the EU is negative: they sell more to us than we to them. Protectionism inevitably produces retaliation in kind, meaning that, should the EU slap punitive tariffs on us, we’ll do the same to them. So where will the Germans sell their expensive cars? Greece? Portugal? Why, if the EU tried to do what Mr Kinnock predicts, it’ll instantly implode.

In other words, he’s talking through his hat, or rather through a portion of his anatomy that can’t be named in this decorous space.

Then there’s Sir Anthony Seldon, who has used the occasion to plug his upcoming biography of Cameron. Sir Anthony is nobody’s fool, but ideological bias can make even a clever chap sound dumb.

Sir Anthony writes, correctly, that “Cameron’s lack of deep beliefs has been another trait.” Yet in the very next paragraph, Sir Anthony shows no olfactory sense for non sequiturs: “His high intelligence, work rate, calm during crises, and integrity were his greatest strengths. So too was his patriotism.”

How do ‘high intelligence’ and ‘integrity’ tally with ‘lack of deep beliefs?’ Highly intelligent people think deeply about the world, which activity inevitably produces deep beliefs. If they have integrity, they tend to live their lives according to those beliefs.

A politician with no deep beliefs can be many things: a cynic, spiv, unprincipled manipulator, even a traitor. One thing he can’t possibly be is a highly intelligent man of integrity.

Nor can a man who has tears in his eyes when announcing his resignation boast ‘calm during crises’. And, if Sir Antony seriously thinks that staking his whole career on dissolving his country’s sovereignty is a sign of a politician’s patriotism, then his take on that faculty is rather different from mine.

Because of my unfortunate accident of birth, I also read Russian commentators in addition to English and French ones. Now even otherwise brilliant Russian pundits know next to nothing about Western politics, and understand considerably less.

Hence their state media are gloating about Brexit, while the ‘liberal’ opposition bewail it, both for the same reason: only Putin will benefit.

First, it may come as a surprise to those solipsistic chaps, but we don’t always base our politics on what Putin would like or dislike. Second, exactly how will he benefit? By gaining a military advantage?

But Britain is leaving the EU, not NATO. And it’s NATO, not the EU, that keeps Putin’s aggressive designs in check.

Neither is there any discernible economic payoff for Putin’s junta. On the contrary, one immediate effect of Brexit was a drop in the price of oil, meaning that Russian cellists will have fewer billions to buy musical instruments in Panama.

Everyone is saying that Brexit is divisive. So it is: it divides those who think clearly and those who don’t. The Russians can be forgiven their traditional ignorance of the West, which license can’t be extended to Westerners themselves.

Never in my life have I been so happy, nay ecstatic, to be wrong. Along with so many others, including Nigel Farage, the bookies and the pollsters, I thought the cause was lost. Two propaganda juggernauts, those of HMG and the EU, had been rolling for months, and they seemed unstoppable.

Now I’d like to apologise to the English people for underestimating them. Their innate common sense has seen through the scaremongering lies.

I do mean English rather than British, for the Celtic fringe, besides Wales, supported Remain. Scotland in particular craves staying in, in the misapprehension that the EU’s shattered finances will stretch to picking up the bill currently being footed by the English taxpayer.

Scotland’s politics is aptronymically fishy, meaning it lives up to its leaders’ surnames, Sturgeon and Salmond. Now they’re demanding another separatist referendum, but they’re in for a letdown.

Should they get what they want, the EU will welcome them with open arms but tight fists. They’ll greet the Scots with the same message the Russian PM recently delivered to starving pensioners: Hang on and stay cheerful, but we have no money.

Another excellent result is that we can now say good riddance to Dave, whose photograph should adorn the dictionary next to the word ‘spiv’. His resignation speech was supposed to be dignified, but instead sounded pathetic.

Yet, as far as Dave is concerned, it demonstrated that there’s a silver lining to his referendum cloud. Dave may have lost his job, but he has regained the Eton-Oxford vowels he no longer has to suppress for political gain. Felicitations, old boy, your gain is ours as well. Now off you go, to all those speech-circuit millions. Say hello to Tony for me, will you?

Like any outgoing PM, Dave listed his achievements, in the descending order of importance. Characteristically, he mentioned his subversive campaign for homomarriage above any economic achievements.

One doubts he’s bright enough to see that his push for destroying the institution of marriage might have cost him this referendum. Much of the Leave success has to be due to so many intuitive Tories loathing Dave personally, a feeling doubtless caused largely by his shoving homomarriage down their throats.

People will believe scaremongering only if they respect the scaremonger. Otherwise they’re more likely to be annoyed, and I’m glad the English vindicated this observation.

Also pathetic was the coverage of the historic turnaround on Sky News, a daily dose of which I have to swallow on my France sojourns. One announcer betrayed his true feelings by rounding off the 48.1 per cent Remain vote to 49 per cent. Another screamed at Chris Grayling, one of the Leave leaders, that, contrary to his predictions, the markets are punishing us for the vote.

“I never predicted anything of the sort,” replied Grayling. “We always said there would be some initial turbulence, but it won’t last.”

Indeed, only an economic illiterate would have expected the markets to take such a momentous shift lying down. Traders hate cataclysms and normally respond with panic. Predictably both the shares and the pound plunged the morning after, but by lunchtime they recouped half of their losses.

Our Chancellor threatened a punitive budget if Brexit won, but he’s unlikely to stick around long enough to deliver it. Like Cameron, Osborne unwisely bet his political career on the cause of destroying our constitution. However, it has hung on, which means he won’t.

He predicted the Brexit aftermath to be ‘the first DIY recession in history’, displaying both ignorance of economics and moral turpitude.

It was ignorance because every recession is DIY. Economic upheavals aren’t force majeure. They may be metaphorically described as tectonic shifts, but in reality they’re always man-made, caused by human folly. It was turpitude because it’s conceivable that by DIY Osborne meant that he himself would cause a recession by punishing the people for their wrong choice.

The word ‘punishment’ is very much in the air all over Europe, along with more pleasing words, such as ‘contagion’ and ‘domino effect’. The federasts are running scared, and few sights are more delightful to behold.

Nigel Farage predicted that the EU was moribund whatever the referendum result. That might have been so, but there’s no doubt that the Leave vote makes this rewarding outcome more likely.

Nearly half the people in France, Italy and Holland want to leave the EU and many more (60 per cent in France, for example) have negative feelings about this vile contrivance. Demands for referenda are heard all over the continent, and this kind of fermentation can’t be kept in the bottle indefinitely.

Even the Germans are fed up with sharing their earned wealth with those who haven’t earned it, and Merkel’s political longevity is far from assured. One just hopes that all those Eurocrats, 6,000 of whom get higher salaries than the British PM, have invested their ill-gotten wealth wisely.

I don’t know if Johnson at No 10 and Gove at No 11 will be better than the outgoing duo. But at least they will have got there in the wake of a great victory. Congratulations to them and all those who have fought for it so valiantly and tirelessly. Let’s rejoice.

 

 

 

 

It’s not looking good. The early polls suggest that Eurofascist propaganda has worked. Yes, as US President Tom Dewey and our PM Ed Miliband could testify, early polls can be deceptive – I pray in this case they are.

For, if the early polls presage the outcome, Britain might have chained herself to a powder keg, with the wick smouldering away. An explosion will come, and we might be missing the chance to stay a safe distance away.

Yesterday I argued that the EU shows every telltale sign of a fundamentally fascist contrivance. It represents an attempt to replace politics with administration, thereby making the ruling bureaucrats unaccountable and their power absolute.

Mercifully, there’s one thing all fascist states have in common: they don’t last. The Thousand-Year Reich lasted 12 years. The Roman Empire reincarnated in Mussolini’s Italy managed 21. The Soviet regime, which Mussolini once correctly described as “a Slavic type of fascism”, lasted 70-odd years, but only by suppressing its own people with the kind of brutality no other fascist regime dared to try.

Yet no fascist regime has ever been ousted without some violence. Blood has always flowed, and every pre-condition is in place to suggest it will this time too, whichever way the referendum goes. It’s just that a Remain vote may eventually add a stream of British blood to a European river.

One such pre-condition is an economic catastrophe, and few would deny that this is exactly what’s happening in the EU, especially the eurozone. Stagnation reigns, with for example the Italian economy showing no growth since 1999. By wisely refusing to don that straitjacket, the British economy has grown by 35 per cent in the same period.

The EU’s fourth largest economy remaining the same size for 17 years means it has calamitously contracted in real terms, something that’s befalling France as well, with practically no growth for five years. I’m not even talking about Greece here, whose economy has contracted by almost a third. In fact, the only EU economy that’s growing nicely is Germany’s, but that won’t last.

Germany’s economy is driven by exports, and it’s hard to expect continuing growth when the principal target market is depressed. Nor is Germany immune to the EU banking crisis that’s cutting off the supply of credits, an economy’s lifeblood: her biggest lender Deutsche Bank lost €6.7 billion last year. But at least German banks are still lending, if at a loss, which few other European banks are.

No credits spell mass unemployment, another pre-condition for an explosion. The average unemployment rate across the EU is 10.2 per cent, twice Britain’s, but average numbers are misleading.

Germany has practically full employment, with a shortage not of jobs but of labour. That, incidentally, explains why Angela Merkel flung the EU door open to millions of Muslim migrants, 75 per cent of whom are young men. Anyway, if you take Germany out of the equation, EU unemployment rates begin to look truly disastrous, especially for young people.

Youth unemployment in Spain is 45.3 per cent, in Italy 39.1, in France and Belgium around 25 per cent and so forth. Even in Germany 6.9 per cent of the young are unemployed, which is all bad news.

When blood flows, it’s mostly the young who spill it, with the unemployed young leading the way. It was mostly unemployed lads who wore brown shirts in Germany and black ones in Italy. All it took to unleash them was extremist parties putting those shirts on their backs.

Burgeoning extremism is another pre-condition for an explosion. In Europe there’s no shortage of fascist parties, and they’re growing stronger by the moment. You may think there’s a paradox to predicting that fascist parties may rise against what I describe as a fascist superstate, but in fact there’s none.

France’s National Front, Belgium’s Vlaams Belang, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Hungary’s Jobbik, Italy’s Forza Italia, Austria’s Freedom Party and so forth all espouse fascism of the nationalist type. EU fascism, on the other hand, is internationalist, closer to the communist model than to the Nazi one. (The Nazis also preached pan-European unity, always provided Germany sat at the top. Suddenly, the EU doesn’t look that far from the Nazi model either.)

None so hostile as divergent exponents of the same creed. Thus Lenin and Stalin reserved their greatest venom for those socialists and communists they saw as heretical, not for the vermin they affectionately described as blood-sucking capitalists. Hitler culled Röhm’s heretical Nazis more mercilessly than even the communists. And the loony fringe will turn against the EU not because they’ll see it as diametrically opposite. They’ll see it as something close, but not close enough.

Today’s fascists are also excited by the massive influx of migrants, whom they correctly identify as aliens but deplorably wish to kill.

Hence every pre-condition for a violent explosion is in place, and it won’t take long. One just hopes that Britain will be wise to stay away from the epicentre.

“Leave campaigners sound a lot like Enoch,” moans David Aaronovitch of The Times, something which is repulsive to any leftie hack. Alas, they don’t sound like Enoch enough – because everyone will soon realise that Enoch Powell was right. I hope it won’t be too late.

P.S. My trusted Larousse translates ‘unaccountable’ as “les représentants qui ne sont pas responsable envers le grand public.” The blighters don’t even have a word for it.

The Elizabethan poet Sir John Harrington uttered an eternal truth: “Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”

In other words, emotively pejorative designations no longer apply if those who merit them emerge victorious. Hence, because so far the EU has swept all before it, none dare call it fascist. However, fundamentally that’s exactly what it is.

The word ‘fascism’ is rich not only in denotation but also in connotation, and the connotation is largely emotional, evoking as it does concentration camps and genocide. Yet state-initiated violence is but a manifestation of fascism, not its essence.

It certainly can’t be used for the purpose of defining fascism. In fact, so-called democracies may well outdo fascist states in that category.

For example, nobody calls the US circa mid-1860s fascist. Yet Lincoln closed down 300 pro-Southern newspapers (and had their presses smashed), suppressed the writ of habeas corpus and had 13,535 Northern citizens arrested for political crimes between February 1862 and April 1865.

Comparing his record with that of the indisputably fascist Mussolini, who only managed 1,624 political convictions in 20 years and yet is universally and justly reviled, one begins to see political taxonomy in a different light.

Any valid definition has to be exclusive to what’s being defined. I’d suggest that fascism can be best defined as the end of politics and thus of governmental accountability. A fascist state replaces politics with administration.

The administrators are neither politicians nor statesmen, but bureaucrats who rule more absolutely than any Christian monarchs ever did. Whether or not the bureaucrats are elected doesn’t matter as much as is commonly believed.

By whatever means they ascend to power, once they get there they’re no longer accountable, and their power becomes arbitrary even if they had to go through the travesty of elections along the way.

People don’t like to be excluded from politics, which is why there’s always a fair amount of dissent fomenting at the grassroots of fascist states. Therefore they have to rely on two expedients to hold on to power: propaganda first, violence second. The former is ever-present, but the amount of the latter may vary from nonexistent to egregious. Whatever it takes.

Modern Western states all have germs of fascism within their systems. But some, those loosely called democracies, also have antibodies preventing the germs from wreaking havoc. These are traditional institutions, those that inoculate the body politic with healthy doses of accountability and equity. The older and more robust such institutions are, the less likely are the germs to develop into a full-blown disease.

That’s why we mustn’t be misled by the EU still not building concentration camps. It’s nonetheless a classic fascist state in the making, only a step or two removed from gestating to full maturity.

The boot in the face may or may not come. If this god-awful contrivance sticks around long enough, it definitely will come sooner or later. For, make no mistake about it, since the state being created on the European continent bears every hallmark of fascism, sooner or later it’ll have to protect itself with violence.

The EU is an unaccountable bureaucracy riding roughshod over every national tradition, institution and custom. It may not yet crash a boot into your face, but it’s already crushing underfoot everything that makes England English.

For England, or for that matter Britain, is dramatically different from other European states. Most of them had an outbreak of wartime fascism and, even if they’re now in remission, few have been cured of this horrible disease. It reveals itself, as it does in Germany and France, as greater tolerance of statist bureaucracy reaching for greater power.

It’s on this heritage, latent or otherwise, that the EU is building its shaky foundations. This isn’t the kind of building that England can live in – not with her 800-year tradition of just, accountable government. This is our vaccine, but it can be overridden.

The other day the Queen asked her guests to name three good reasons for her realm to stay in the EU. I doubt they managed to do so, for there isn’t a single one.

Every reason the Remain campaign has concocted is spurious, if not downright mendacious. Yet the Leave campaign hasn’t communicated the reason to shake the EU dust off our feet clearly enough.

Instead it has tried to catch the red herring of immigration by its tail. Yes, unlike the Remainers’ harebrained scaremongering, uncontrolled immigration is a real problem. But much of it is caused not by the EU but by our own negligence in controlling our borders, which had been too permeable even before 1992.

I suspect this problem will exist, on perhaps a smaller scale, even if we left the EU. Yes, reducing the scale of this problem is a reason to leave, but it isn’t the reason.

The reason, the only valid one, is choosing liberty over servitude. It’s to nip fascism in the bud, before it has conquered. As history shows, it’ll still be stoppable then, but only at an awful price.

Tomorrow, ladies and gentlemen, is your chance to say no to fascism, while we still dare call it what it really is. Please don’t miss it, for this would upset me too much.