Author: Alexander Boot

I would have definitely bet my house against it. Probably my car. Possibly even my wife (admittedly she might have had a say in such a wager, and especially its payoff).

And boy, am I glad I didn’t – I would have lost them all. For Ed and his Milibandits bucked the odds to score the greatest feat in modern British politics. They made Dave look good by comparison.

Don’t get me wrong: Dave too is perfectly capable of talking, and proposing, utter nonsense when his focus groups tell him that’s what the public wants to hear.

He too happily introduces the most asinine policies imaginable if he feels this may gain a couple of percentage points at the polls. But Dave is restrained – ever so marginally, but still – by his party, especially its grassroots.

Under Dave’s sage tutelage, the Tory party has already lost half its membership – this to the accompaniment of Dave’s triumphant elation that the attrition isn’t even more severe. A few more gems like homomarriage unearthed by Dave, and he won’t have a party to lead.

Since for old times’ sake British politics is still conducted through a party system, Dave can defy the Tory DNA only to some, albeit growing, extent. At some point a steel shutter will come clanking down: thus far, but no farther.

The Milibandits’ DNA is different. Coded into it is hatred of everything that makes Britain British – or for that matter of everything that makes the West Western.

That’s why it’s important to cut through the bovine dung of their rhetoric and see the destructive animus lurking underneath every policy they’ve ever proposed or, when in power, executed.

They talk about equal education for all as a means of helping the lower classes to move up the social ladder – hence the rout of grammar schools and the proliferation of idiot-spewing comprehensives.

As a result, those with the dirty end of the stick stuck down their throats are the very lower classes the Milibandits allegedly set out to help. Devoid of the social hoist of decent education, they remain stuck at the bottom. Social privilege, rather than disappearing, becomes chiselled in stone. Social mobility grinds to a halt.

They talk about equal medical care for all – our hospitals turn into death traps never before seen in the West, and Britain boasts the distinction of being a first-world country with third-world medicine.

They talk about helping the poor – hence the mind-numbingly stupid and subversive welfare state, making sure that the poor will not only always be with us, but that their number will continue to grow.

So never mind the well-meaning rhetoric. By their fruits ye shall know them, and those reared by the Milibandits happily combine toxic qualities with rancid taste.

Now they prattle on about changing the economy in ways that go back to the 1970s, when Britain was known as the basket case of Europe.

We don’t have to go too deep into the details, for these don’t really matter. It’s the spirit that counts, and it has spilled out of its bottle.

Many commentators have suggested that Ed’s economic goals vindicate his nickname (Red Ed). I’d suggest that it would be more appropriate to use another colour: russet (half-red, half-brown).

Divest the pre-kristallnacht Nazi Germany of its racial desiderata, and its economy would look exactly like the kind Russet Ed sees in his mind’s eye. Unlike the Bolsheviks, real reds, the Nazis were not out to transfer the ownership of the economy to the state. All they wanted was to exercise control.

Similarly, Ed doesn’t even mention the possibility of nationalising, say, the energy companies. All he wants is to introduce the Nazi-style mechanisms of wage and price controls to shift the ownership of the economy statewards de facto but not necessarily de jure.

How else is he going to keep his promise of freezing energy prices? The state can freeze the taxes and duties it imposes on energy (which wouldn’t be a bad idea), but not its wholesale price.

This, as we’ve seen in the past, can skyrocket overnight, especially since much of our energy comes from politically volatile regions. If what the energy companies pay the producers exceeds what Russet Ed allows them to charge the consumers, they’ll go bust – it’s as simple as that.

For businesses operate to make a profit, not to conform to the madness of the loony left, be that of the national or international variety. As Adam Smith explained, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their self-love…”

Deprive businesses of the profit motive, which Ed clearly wants to do to the energy companies, and we’ll all freeze in the dark. But socialists, national or international, never care how much misery they’re going to cause.

What matters to them is power, with its concomitant means to stage yet another diabolical experiment on human beings. What the Milibandits unveiled at their conference is just that: a power-grabbing gambit.

What’s deeply worrying is that Dave doesn’t hold exclusive rights to focus groups. The Milibandits use them too, and their findings must suggest that there are enough people out there to whom Ed’s subversive drivel appeals.

Be afraid, be very afraid. A couple of years from now we may well be missing Dave. Can you think of a worse fate?

It’s easy to get the impression that the Muslims are less rigorous in upholding religious tolerance than we are.

First two suicide bombers murdered over 80 Christians and wounded 120 more in Peshawar. The explosions came as worshippers were coming out of the church after Sunday mass.

Then another Muslim gang took over a shopping mall in Nairobi and shot in cold blood everyone who wasn’t a Muslim – 62 people in all. Apparently the attack was led by the white widow of another murderer who had blown himself up (alas, along with many others) on 7/7.

To the credit of the Nairobi Muslims they didn’t decide who was and who wasn’t Muslim on looks alone. Instead they gave the eager participants a little quiz, not unlike what one sees on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.

The salient difference was that there were no lifelines on offer. Answer correctly, and you may live. Don’t, and you die.

We know that exams cause undue stress, but this one must have taken the notion to a whole new level. The questions were designed to test the examinee’s knowledge of Muslim trivia.

One question was “What was the name of Mohammed’s mother?” Clearly anyone who didn’t raise his hand and shout, “Please, Miss! Aminah bint Wahb, Miss!” didn’t deserve to live.

The second question was, “Can you recite any verses from the Koran?” Apparently 62 students failed to answer correctly, possibly because they were distracted by the sound of Kalashnikovs being cocked. Or else they had somehow overlooked this vital aspect of their education.

In case you find yourself in a similar situation, you must do your homework. Now you know the name of Mohammad’s mother, you must, just in case, learn a few verses from the holy book her son dictated. Here’s a random selection for your delectation:

“Slay them [unbelievers] wherever ye find them…” (2:91); “We shall cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve.” (3:151); “Take them [unbelievers] and kill them wherever ye find them. Against such We have given you clear warrant.” (4:91); “The unbelievers are an open enemy to you.” (4:101); “Take not the Jews and the Christians for friends…” (5:51); “Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush” (9:5); “Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.” (4:74); “…If they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them…” (4:89)

This should suffice to get you out of trouble – and perhaps explain why you could find yourself in that kind of trouble to begin with.

What’s also instructive is the reaction of our media to the two carnages. It’s conspicuous that much more prominence was given to the Kenyan carnage than to the Pakistani one. This even though the latter produced more corpses.

I’m sure there must be all sorts of possible explanations for this, but I can think of only one off the top. The Nairobi victims were slaughtered because they weren’t Muslims. The Peshawar ones lost their lives specifically because they were Christians.

In the eyes of our ‘liberal’ media – not that they’d ever say this out loud, not yet anyway – people who go against the grain of public opinion by obstinately sticking to their minority faith have only themselves to blame.

Religion, you see, doesn’t really matter to our ‘liberals’, and they can’t for the life of them understand how others may feel differently. You’re a Christian, I’m a Buddhist, he’s a Taoist, they’re Muslims, what’s the difference? All religions are equally good, which is to say equally irrelevant.

So if by ignoring Ramadan you put yourself in danger, don’t count on us to help you out. If you die as a result of worshipping Jesus Christ, it’s your own silly fault – see if we care.

Now the Nairobi victims weren’t murdered because they espoused a wrong religion. They were massacred because they didn’t espouse Islam.

That calls for much more empathy – after all, our ‘liberals’ don’t espouse Islam either. So the same thing could have happened to them. As to going to Sunday mass, they wouldn’t be caught dead doing that, as it were. So they’re on safe grounds there.

One wonders how many such crimes it’ll take for our opinion formers, and those whose opinions they form, to realise that the problem isn’t Islamist fundamentalism. It’s Islam, tout court.

Quite a few, would be my guess. And then many more for this lot to review their firm stand on multiculturalism and religious tolerance.

As it is, there’s a war to the death under way. Except that one side is fighting it and the other is making well-meaning noises. So who’s going to win? If you don’t know the answer, call a friend at one of our papers.

 

Upset by the unjustly critical reaction his open letter caused the other day, His Holiness decided to make his meaning abundantly (abunde) clear. To that end he sent an open letter to the readers of this blog, particularly the Anglican ones (heretici Anglicani). Here it is:

Ad majorem gloriam hominis

Brethren and cistern,

[Fr Ignatius, my amanuensis, read the salutation and took exception to the last word. I told him not to be such a stickler for semantic and orthographic convention. If language does not adapt to modern times, it will collapse like a house of cards.]

Ab initio, when I was still in Argentina, I sometimes behaved in an authoritarian manner – mea maxima culpa! This misled some lost lambs to accuse me of being an ultraconservative, which is the only kind of conservative in His Creation. Now I may be a sinner, but I am not that much of one.

The accusation of ultraconservatism upset me so much that I went down the local bar in Puerto Madero to settle my nerves with a whisky. The barmaid took one look at me and said, “Mi padre, by the looks of you, a single one won’t do the job. A triple is what you need.”

I followed her advice and a miracle occurred: I immediately felt better. It was then that I realised that women ought to play a more prominent role in the Church, to the point of becoming priests, nay prelates. Ergo, I propose that my favourite doctrine should provide not only for papal, but also for mamal infallibility. [Shut up, Fr Ignatius, there is such a word if I say there is.]

As I indicated in my previous missive, the Church is at grave risk of collapsing. It is putting people off by being intransigent in its preoccupation with homosexual marriage and heterosexual abortion. Good Catholic men are leaving the Church in droves because it won’t allow them to marry one another. And good Catholic women stop believing in God because the Church denies them the God-given right to scrape foetuses out piece by piece.

Now it so happens that I became well-versed in dialectical philosophy while still a student at the Jesuit Seminary in Buenos Aires. Ergo, I know that the absence of negation is tantamount to the presence of affirmation, and nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus say that two men cannot be joined in holy matrimony, nor that women cannot abort as many babies as they wish. (St Paul is entitled to his res privata.) Ergo, they must have sovereignty over their own bodies. Absolutum dominium, as we say in these parts.

Is not the doctrine of free will as essential to the Church as the one of papal/mamal infallibility? And free will means doing as one pleases. [I thought I told you to shut up, Fr Ignatius.] Ergo, if two men wish to marry, who am I to judge them? Who am I to deny them their God-given right to exercise their free will? De gustibus… and all that.

We, the Church, cannot insist on just one way of looking at issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. Come to think of it, dialectically speaking, abortion is at base but a method of contraception, and the world is overpopulated as it is. A fortiori, by dialectically linking coitus with free will, we arrive at a new, appropriately and laudably modern, dogma: Coito [sick], ergo sum. Or else omnia vincit amor of any kind, take your pick.

It has also been brought to my attention that many good Catholics are threatening to leave the Church because of its overemphasis on the divinity of Jesus Christ. They cannot reconcile this part of our dogma with the modern world, out of synch with which the Church lamentably appears to be.

Ab imo pectore I wish to find such reconciliation, and if this means reducing a few emphases at the margins of doctrine, then so be it. Personally, I pray even when I am waiting at the dentist: “Pater Omnipotens, not another cavity please.” But who am I to tell others, ex cathedra or otherwise, how, when or to who to pray? [Yes I know, Fr Ignatius, but modern people don’t say ‘whom’. So just shut up.]

Much as it pains me to say so, you Anglicans (heretici Anglicani) are showing us the way. You already have women priests, soon you will have women bishops in Wales, with England to follow. Good Catholics keep asking me in Rome, “Holy Father, why can’t we be like the English (maiali Inglesi)?

“Nil desperandum, brethren and cistern,” I reply. “Just give me a couple of years and you won’t believe your eyes. The Church will change.” “Make sure it does, Holy Father, or there won’t be any Church. It’ll fall like a house of cards.” And who am I to tell them they are wrong?

In nomine Patris, et Filiis et Spiritus Seculari. [Keep it shut, Fr Ignatius.] Amen.

Yours,

 

Frank, alias His Holiness     

Pope Francis, explaining his explanation

Upset by the unjustly critical reaction his open letter caused the other day, His Holiness decided to make his meaning abundantly (abunde) clear. To that end he sent an open letter to the readers of this blog, particularly the Anglican ones (heretici Anglicani). Here it is:

Ad majorem gloriam hominis

Brethren and cistern,

[Fr Ignatius, my amanuensis, read the salutation and took exception to the last word. I told him not to be such a stickler for semantic and orthographic convention. If language does not adapt to modern times, it will collapse like a house of cards.]

Ab initio, when I was still in Argentina, I sometimes behaved in an authoritarian manner – mea maxima culpa! This misled some lost lambs to accuse me of being an ultraconservative, which is the only kind of conservative in His Creation. Now I may be a sinner, but I am not that much of one.

The accusation of ultraconservatism upset me so much that I went down the local bar in Puerto Madero to settle my nerves with a whisky. The barmaid took one look at me and said, “Mi padre, by the looks of you, a single one won’t do the job. A triple is what you need.”

I followed her advice and a miracle occurred: I immediately felt better. It was then that I realised that women ought to play a more prominent role in the Church, to the point of becoming priests, nay prelates. Ergo, I propose that my favourite doctrine should provide not only for papal, but also for mamal infallibility. [Shut up, Fr Ignatius, there is such a word if I say there is.]

As I indicated in my previous missive, the Church is at grave risk of collapsing. It is putting people off by being intransigent in its preoccupation with homosexual marriage and heterosexual abortion. Good Catholic men are leaving the Church in droves because it won’t allow them to marry one another. And good Catholic women stop believing in God because the Church denies them the God-given right to scrape foetuses out piece by piece.

Now it so happens that I became well-versed in dialectical philosophy while still a student at the Jesuit Seminary in Buenos Aires. Ergo, I know that the absence of negation is tantamount to the presence of affirmation, and nowhere in the Gospels does Jesus say that two men cannot be joined in holy matrimony, nor that women cannot abort as many babies as they wish. (St Paul is entitled to his res privata.) Ergo, they must have sovereignty over their own bodies. Absolutum dominium, as we say in these parts.

Is not the doctrine of free will as essential to the Church as the one of papal/mamal infallibility? And free will means doing as one pleases. [I thought I told you to shut up, Fr Ignatius.] Ergo, if two men wish to marry, who am I to judge them? Who am I to deny them their God-given right to exercise their free will? De gustibus… and all that.

We, the Church, cannot insist on just one way of looking at issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. Come to think of it, dialectically speaking, abortion is at base but a method of contraception, and the world is overpopulated as it is. A fortiori, by dialectically linking coitus with free will, we arrive at a new, appropriately and laudably modern, dogma: Coito [sick], ergo sum. Or else omnia vincit amor of any kind, take your pick.

It has also been brought to my attention that many good Catholics are threatening to leave the Church because of its overemphasis on the divinity of Jesus Christ. They cannot reconcile this part of our dogma with the modern world, out of synch with which the Church lamentably appears to be.

Ab imo pectore I wish to find such reconciliation, and if this means reducing a few emphases at the margins of doctrine, then so be it. Personally, I pray even when I am waiting at the dentist: “Pater Omnipotens, not another cavity please.” But who am I to tell others, ex cathedra or otherwise, how, when or to who to pray? [Yes I know, Fr Ignatius, but modern people don’t say ‘whom’. So just shut up.]

Much as it pains me to say so, you Anglicans (heretici Anglicani) are showing us the way. You already have women priests, soon you will have women bishops in Wales, with England to follow. Good Catholics keep asking me in Rome, “Holy Father, why can’t we be like the English (maiali Inglesi)?

Nil desperandum, brethren and cistern,” I reply. “Just give me a couple of years and you won’t believe your eyes. The Church will change.” “Make sure it does, Holy Father, or there won’t be any Church. It’ll fall like a house of cards.” And who am I to tell them they are wrong?

In nomine Patris, et Filiis et Spiritus Seculari. [Keep it shut, Fr Ignatius.] Amen.

Yours,

 

Frank, alias His Holiness     

Every week I read something that makes me say, well, now I’ve seen everything. The next day I find I haven’t.

This time the star columnist of The Times David Aaronovich has come up with something truly emetic.

David, you see, has never seen a destructive New Age cause he couldn’t love. I don’t even have to mention any: you name it, he supports it.

This time it’s the ‘transgender’ cause that has made him pick up the banner. Now an old hand like me who has indeed seen, if not everything, at least most things, doesn’t have to drink a whole bottle of corked wine to realise it has turned to vinegar. One sip or, in an article, one word is enough.

In this instance, the word is ‘gender’, in the meaning of sex. Show me a man who uses it, and I’ll show you a leftie nonentity. Such a man is so scared of offending other leftie nonentities (and they do offend easily) that he’d rather offend taste, logic, decency, morality and a few other minor things. Such as 2,000 years of civilisation.

‘Gender’, David, denotes a grammatical category. What separates men from women is called sex. At least that’s what people with a modicum of taste call it.

Anyway, the case that got David going involves Bradley Manning, an American traitor currently serving 25 years in prison. While there, Bradley decided that he wanted to become a woman. Ergo, he demanded that the requisite procedures be administered while he paid his debt to society.

David ruefully admits that he started from a position of bigotry, that is from a normal human reaction to an aberration. This is something he now regrets, presumably because he had a vision.

Chelsea Manning, née Bradley, must have appeared before his eyes and asked the lapidary question: “Why do you persecute me so?” David fainted and fell off his high horse. When he came to he wrote, “When Bradley became Chelsea Manning I laughed – until the transgender truth shut me up for good.”

At this point I jumped up, punched air and cheered loudly. Alas, I was immediately disappointed. David didn’t shut up not only for good but even for a second.

Without missing a beat he tugged on our heart strings by relating several soppy stories about the suffering of transsexuals. David was deeply moved, but then it doesn’t take much to make this lot deeply moved by any perversion.

“As I’ve read more about it, it becomes apparent that there is a small group of people… who were, if you like, ‘born in the wrong bodies’. These people need our help and understanding and are as deserving of them as anyone else. But they have received none so far from me. Why not?”

I can answer that, David. Because you had normal human instincts that have now been overridden by a pernicious ideology.

A Christian would emphatically disagree that these people deserve ‘help and understanding’, in the sense of publicly financed sex-change procedures. Such people deserve love – because all people do.

If they indeed suffer, they deserve it even more – and perhaps also advice on the noble role of suffering. David is of course unfamiliar with such things, and if he isn’t he despises them, but suffering is the formative experience of our civilisation.

Every great Western thinker has written about its morally and spiritually elevating role in the development of a personality. To put it simply, without suffering there is no development and hardly any personality.

Those born with the disorder that has so excited David’s puny imagination are unlikely to find much physical happiness in life. But they’d have a head start in their search for spiritual happiness – provided the Zeitgeist weren’t shaped by the likes of David.

He then goes on to admit that the sight of a woman with a beard or a man with breasts makes him feel “threatened”. Such heartlessness is to him a deadly sin and, in the good tradition of our civilisation, he expiates it by repenting. He recognises the error of his previously normal ways. 

“This recognition [made me] look my ‘transphobia’… full in its fearful face.” A lovely neologism, that. If David invented it, this knack for new coinages will get him into the thesaurus of quotations before he’s through.

Once the repentance wagon got rolling, David went on to repent his reaction “to other situations – like the wearing of the burka – in which my discomfort may be overwhelming my reason. … It is not actually a big problem in this country. Nor is it ever likely to be.”

Islamisation of Britain, a problem? Perish the thought. Of course there’s the small matter that the same chaps who make their women cover up would happily eviscerate anyone named Aaronovich, but David rises above personal interests.

Speaking of his interests, I understand David is a Spurs fan. Well, the IT worker Paul Lovell is currently on trial for corrupting the morals of a sheep next to the club’s training ground in Enfield. David ought to start a campaign for his release.

After all, the poor man was born that way. He can only find happiness in tucking ovine hind legs into his Wellies. Paul Lovell deserves help, understanding and a publicly financed flock of sheep, not prison.

And we must also take up the cause of David Aaronovich, a mindless creature trapped in the body of a columnist.

 

 

Every week I read something that makes me say, well, now I’ve seen everything. The next day I find I haven’t.

 

This time the star columnist of The Times David Aaronovich has come up with something truly emetic.

 

David, you see, has never seen a destructive New Age cause he couldn’t love. I don’t even have to mention any: you name it, he supports it.

 

This time it’s the ‘transgender’ cause that has made him pick up the banner. Now an old hand like me who has indeed seen, if not everything, at least most things, doesn’t have to drink a whole bottle of corked wine to realise it has turned to vinegar. One sip or, in an article, one word is enough.

 

In this instance, the word is ‘gender’, in the meaning of sex. Show me a man who uses it, and I’ll show you a leftie nonentity. Such a man is so scared of offending other leftie nonentities (and they do offend easily) that he’d rather offend taste, logic, decency, morality and a few other minor things. Such as 2,000 years of civilisation.

 

‘Gender’, David, denotes a grammatical category. What separates men from women is called sex. At least that’s what people with a modicum of taste call it.

 

Anyway, the case that got David going involves Bradley Manning, an American traitor currently serving 25 years in prison. While there, Bradley decided that he wanted to become a woman. Ergo, he demanded that the requisite procedures be administered while he paid his debt to society.

 

David ruefully admits that he started from a position of bigotry, that is from a normal human reaction to an aberration. This is something he now regrets, presumably because he had a vision.

 

Chelsea Manning, née Bradley, must have appeared before his eyes and asked the lapidary question: “Why do you persecute me so?” David fainted and fell off his high horse. When he came to he wrote, “When Bradley became Chelsea Manning I laughed – until the transgender truth shut me up for good.”

 

At this point I jumped up, punched air and cheered loudly. Alas, I was immediately disappointed. David didn’t shut up not only for good but even for a second.

 

Without missing a beat he tugged on our heart strings by relating several soppy stories about the suffering of transsexuals. David was deeply moved, but then it doesn’t take much to make this lot deeply moved by any perversion.

 

“As I’ve read more about it, it becomes apparent that there is a small group of people… who were, if you like, ‘born in the wrong bodies’. These people need our help and understanding and are as deserving of them as anyone else. But they have received none so far from me. Why not?”

I can answer that, David. Because you had normal human instincts that have now been overridden by a pernicious ideology.

 

A Christian would emphatically disagree that these people deserve ‘help and understanding’, in the sense of publicly financed sex-change procedures. Such people deserve love – because all people do.

 

If they indeed suffer, they deserve it even more – and perhaps also advice on the noble role of suffering. David is of course unfamiliar with such things, and if he isn’t he despises them, but suffering is the formative experience of our civilisation.

 

Every great Western thinker has written about its morally and spiritually elevating role in the development of a personality. To put it simply, without suffering there is no development and hardly any personality.

 

Those born with the disorder that has so excited David’s puny imagination are unlikely to find much physical happiness in life. But they’d have a head start in their search for spiritual happiness – provided the Zeitgeist weren’t shaped by the likes of David.

 

He then goes on to admit that the sight of a woman with a beard or a man with breasts makes him feel “threatened”. Such heartlessness is to him a deadly sin and, in the good tradition of our civilisation, he expiates it by repenting. He recognises the error of his previously normal ways. 

“This recognition [made me] look my ‘transphobia’… full in its fearful face.” A lovely neologism, that. If David invented it, this knack for new coinages will get him into the thesaurus of quotations before he’s through.

Once the repentance wagon got rolling, David went on to repent his reaction “to other situations – like the wearing of the burka – in which my discomfort may be overwhelming my reason. … It is not actually a big problem in this country. Nor is it ever likely to be.”

Islamisation of Britain, a problem? Perish the thought. Of course there’s the small matter that the same chaps who make their women cover up would happily eviscerate anyone named Aaronovich, but David rises above personal interests.

Speaking of his interests, I understand David is a Spurs fan. Well, the IT worker Paul Lovell is currently on trial for corrupting the morals of a sheep next to the club’s training ground in Enfield. David ought to start a campaign for his release.

After all, the poor man was born that way. He can only find happiness in tucking ovine hind legs into his Wellies. Paul Lovell deserves help, understanding and a publicly financed flock of sheep, not prison.

And we must also take up the cause of David Aaronovich, a mindless creature trapped in the body of a columnist.

Dave has taken time off his busy schedule to defend the rights of Tottenham Hotspur fans to call themselves ‘Yids’ if that tickles their fancy.

It’s good to see our political leader occupying himself with the nitty-gritty of football chants, the literary genre in which the British comfortably lead the world. Seems like for Dave no job is too big or too small – to mess up.

For those of you that have more interesting things than football to worry about, Spurs are based in North London where they draw much of their support from the Jewish community. Moreover, Jewish businessmen are heavily represented on the club’s board.

Hence ‘Yids’, which is the Spurs fans’ not-so-affectionate nickname. This is screamed at them by local supporters whenever Spurs play away from home. The screams are usually accompanied by hissing sounds, supposed to represent gas being released into death chambers. Nazi salutes are also quite popular.

In the good Jewish tradition of being able to laugh at themselves, Spurs fans have picked up the nickname and run with it. They now call themselves the ‘Yid Army’, which the Football Association told them they mustn’t do.

The fans objected that they can call themselves whatever they like because it’s impossible to insult oneself. The argument was heading for an impasse, so Dave decided to step in.

“You have to think of the mens rea,” he declared. “Hate speech should be prosecuted – but only if it’s motivated by hate.” I haven’t often heard hate speech motivated by anything other than hate, but let’s allow this solecism to the master of the genre.

Alas, this is about the only genre in which Dave feels comfortable. Anything with subtlety takes him out of his rather shallow depth.

A few points are in order. First, persecuted minorities tend to develop defence mechanisms. One of those is describing themselves by the same hateful names their persecutors use.

This mechanism is often activated in Russia, where Jews have been persecuted and abused in one way or another throughout the country’s history. The most popular term of abuse is the word ‘zhid’ (Yid) and its numerous derivatives, such as ‘zhid porkhatyi’ (dandruffed Yid), ‘zhidovskaya morda’ (Yid snout) and so forth.

Sure enough, as a version of the Stockholm syndrome, Russian Jews often refer to themselves as ‘zhidy’, and they don’t feel offended when another Jew uses the word. So many psychological strands come together in this that one can easily get entangled.

There has to be an element of reaching for social acceptance by identifying with the majority. There’s probably another one of self-mockery. Trying to establish even a stronger bond with other victims of abuse may also come into that. Some self-hatred is also a possibility: if everyone despises me, perhaps I am indeed despicable. Keeping a brave face on is also a credible motive.

Someone afraid of being poisoned by large doses of arsenic may wish to immunise himself by taking regular small doses of the same toxin. This may enable him to survive – by internalising the threat, he’ll defang the poison being administered from outside. But make no mistake – there’s poison involved.

Note also that many American blacks, who too have suffered from abuse for centuries, routinely call one another ‘nigger’. The mechanism is roughly the same, as are its actuators. The difference between the blacks and the Jews is that no American Jew would say ‘nigger’ in polite company, whereas I’ve heard blacks call Jews ‘Yids’ or ‘kikes’ in the street. But that’s a separate subject.

For all such reasons, the word ‘Yid’, whether used by Jews or gentiles, is doubtless offensive, disgustingly so. However, it’s not the only one. The English language offers many ways of insulting people.

For example, centre half John Terry ruined his England career by calling an opponent a ‘f***ing black c***’. Of the three words, only the middle one is usable here in its uncensored form. Yet it was this, the only polite, word that got Terry in trouble. Had he called an opponent on the pitch – or anyone in the street – simply a ‘f***ing c***’, no one would have batted an eyelid.

Such words are undeniably objectionable. Those who call others offensive names aren’t nice. But this doesn’t mean that the state should step in and ban such words. Nor is it even the business of public officials to comment on such matters, one way or the other.

Just as they can’t bomb a foreign country into democracy, they can’t coerce their own people into civilisation. This particular potato is too hot for our simple-minded politicians to handle.

They would be well-advised to ask people to curb their hypersensitivity, rather than encouraging it by taking it too seriously. They won’t of course: their own power grows when they try to change human nature, even when they predictably fail.

But between us boys, the word ‘Yid’, whoever utters it, is venomous. When Jews or other Spurs fans themselves use it, it’s less toxic than when anti-Semitic louts use it. But toxic it remains.

 

 

 

 

 

  

The heart, said Pascal, has its reasons that reason knows not of. The same can be said of today’s politicians on either side of the Atlantic.

Thus Sen. Blumenthal came up with a scheme that can only have its provenance in the heart, not reason. Hence a certain deficit of logic, attractive in a man who speaks from the heart.

“The Syrians could not conduct this war without Russian financing,” Blumenthal said in a letter co-signed by three other senators. “We can freeze their assets. We can stop them from doing business in the United States, prevent their employees from travelling here and, in effect, impose very heavy financial pain on the Russians.”

In other words, the Russians have been naughty. They’ve prevented Sen. Blumenthal and his likeminded colleagues from bombing Syria flat. For this they must be flogged where it hurts: in the pocket.

This is certainly a step in the right direction, but the stride isn’t long enough. After all, as preliminary head counts showed, the motion on bombing Syria flat was going to be defeated in Congress.

That means that most of Sen. Blumenthal’s colleagues are Putin’s accomplices in the crime of preventing Sen. Blumenthal from killing a few more Syrians and then establishing al-Qaeda rule in Syria.

If I understand jurisprudence correctly, this makes them equally culpable. Justice Blumenthal-style therefore demands that their bank accounts be frozen too. Let the Honourable Gentlemen sell their furniture for food, see how they like it.

As it happens, the idea of freezing Russian accounts all over the West is a sound one. It’s only the reasoning behind it that’s risible.

The Russians must be deprived of their ill-gotten wealth because it’s indeed ill-gotten. It’s safe to assume that every sizeable bank account held in the West by Russians represents the proceeds of illicit activity.

The cause of this takes us back to the first years of the post-Soviet state. There were many reasons for the Soviet nomenklatura to consign the Soviet state to posterity.

But the human factor came from the realisation that its wealth was denominated in non-convertible and therefore worthless (what the Russians call ‘wooden’) roubles. That meant that the nomenklatura could just about match the living standard of the Western middle class, but not much higher than that.

The only way to get their hands on those 500-foot Mediterranean yachts was to convert roubles into dollars, breaking the state’s monopoly on hard currency possession. For that to happen, the nature of the state had to change – hence all those perestroikas.

Since the massive conversion of the nomenklatura’s wealth into dollars had to bypass official channels to a large extent, the Party and the KGB intermingled with the crime barons of the shadow economy. This created a new elite, wherein Party apparatchiks, KGB officers and gangsters fused into a cohesive, homogeneous group.

Perhaps the biggest influx of personnel into the new elite, especially its ‘business’ end, came from komsomol, formally a youth extension of the Party that in fact had closer links with the KGB, acting as its breeding ground.

Thus three post-war KGB heads, Shelepin, Semichiastny and Andropov, came up through the ranks of komsomol. The same arrangement existed in Soviet satellites as well. Their equivalents of komsomol were just as tightly attached to their equivalents of the KGB. (This raises interesting questions about Angela Merkel who held a nomenklatura position in East Germany’s Kommunistischer Jugendverband Deutschlands.)

It was from the ranks of komsomol that much of the freshly minted business elite was drawn. If you scratch most post-perestroika ‘oligarchs’, such as Khodorkovsky, Nevzlin, Abramovich, Berezovsky, you’ll uncover a former komsomol apparatchik or at least activist.

The Russians refer to this group as ‘appointed oligarchs’. They were indeed appointed to act as guardians of the new elite’s wealth, of which they were given a leasehold, not a freehold.

Their reward was the means to live the life of Riley off the interest, even abroad if such was their wish. Their obligation was to remember they were the monkeys, not the organ grinders.

When they forget this crucial precondition, their memory is refreshed in ways ranging from assassination to imprisonment. For example, Khodorkovsky, the richest ‘appointed oligarch’ and former komsomol head of a Moscow borough, has been in prison for 10 years.

The top-to-bottom criminalisation of commercial activity in Russia guarantees state control not only of business but also of politics. Since no transaction in Russia can be conducted without some illicit money changing hands – if only by way of paying protection kickbacks – the whole self-employed community is effectively held hostage to the government, indeed to Putin personally.

One step away from the well-trodden path of obedience and sycophancy, and they can be imprisoned on ostensibly criminal, but in fact political, charges.

The European Court of Human Rights will then rule, as it did in Khodorkovsky’s case, that the charges were not politically motivated. True enough, in any civilised country the prosecution would have won a similar criminal case on prima facie evidence alone.

But in Russia the case would not even have been opened had Khodorkovsky not stepped out of political line. The lesson has been learned. Since even bogus democratic politics requires heavy funding, and since no rich man is going to finance opposition parties on pain of imprisonment, no effective opposition to Putin can arise.

Any civilised state would be within its rights to confiscate assets illegally obtained. Sanctions of this sort have traditionally been applied to pariah states, of which Putin’s Russia is certainly one.

This is what Sen. Blumenthal ought to occupy his flaming conscience with – not with Putin’s charitable act of saving Messrs Barack, Dave and François from their own stupidity.

 

 

 

Victoria Beckham, formerly known as Posh Spice, has made the list of racist designers, as compiled by the supermodels Iman and Naomi Campbell.

The list also includes a veritable Who’s Who? of haute couture: Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, Chanel, Armani, Gucci, Saint Laurent and Roberto Cavalli. Characteristically absent is John Galliano, who’s much given to video-documented anti-Semitic diatribes in bars.

In one such, he confused a group of Italians for Jews and ranted, “I love Hitler… People like you would be dead. Your mothers, your forefathers would all be f***ing gassed.” For all such multiple if at times misdirected efforts, Galliano failed to make the rather long list of racist designers.

So what did Posh do to qualify? It had to be something more egregious than anything Galliano has perpetrated. Indeed it was: Mrs Beckham’s catwalk show appeared to involve only one non-white model, as defined by Iman and Campbell to whom Asian models don’t count as non-white.

In their open letter to the governing bodies of the fashion industries in New York, London, Paris and Milan the dynamic duo, assisted by the ex-model Bethann Hardison, wrote:

“Eyes are on an industry that season after season watches design houses consistently use one or no models of colour. No matter the intention, the result is racism.

“Not accepting another based on the colour of their skin is clearly beyond ‘aesthetic’ when it is consistent with the designer’s brand.”

Following ‘another’ with ‘their’ shows that the authors must have suffered from educational discrimination, which alone is these days accepted as the reason for functional illiteracy. Yet, considering that they’ve made millions in an industry dominated by white designers, their prima facie evidence in support of the case against professional discrimination is somewhat weak. 

Their case for accusing Posh of racism is even weaker, and let’s face it: this is about the worst accusation that these days can be levelled at anyone – worse than murder, treason or even having sex without permission.

Realising this, Naomi was quick to offer an oral disclaimer: “We’re not calling them racist, we’re saying the act was racist.” It’s good to see that grammatically challenged persons are still capable of drawing such fine distinctions.

Not being privileged to know Mrs Beckham personally, I don’t know if she harbours any racial prejudices. What I do know is that the demographic composition of her catwalk crew proves nothing in that department, one way or the other.

‘The act’, Naomi, is neither racist nor aesthetic. It’s commercial.

Models in any marketing promotions, be that TV advertising, in-store posters or catwalks, are chosen on the basis of the market segment to which the promoted products are designed to appeal. Such decisions are made on research data, not personal idiosyncrasies.

Thus if John Galliano’s market research showed that his dresses appeal mostly to Jewish women, every one of his models would have a huge Star of David dangling between her half-bared breasts. Anti-Semitism would be strictly for after hours.

Every model agency has a thick book close at hand, matching the credibility of every model to every imaginable market segment. The subsequent choice is then made not by the couturier but by the calculator.

The cost of engaging a model (in the case of Iman and Naomi, the exorbitant cost), is weighed against her projected effect on the revenue. The more positive the balance, the greater the likelihood that the model will be used.

For my sins, I spent 30 years in the advertising industry on both sides of the Atlantic. Sensitivity to the sales potential of spokesmen and models is particularly fine-tuned on the American side, where there are many advertising agencies exclusively catering to the black and Hispanic markets.

No one has accused such agencies of complicity in racial discrimination. It’s understood that appealing to specialised markets requires specialised expertise. It’s further understood that some products appeal to some markets more than to others.

For example, once in New York I was writing copy for a female-hygiene product. Research and sales records showed that the market for the product was about 90% black.

Our first inclination was to choose a black model for all ads. However, further research told us not to be too hasty. Apparently, the likely buyers of the product were ready to accept a white woman as aspirational (don’t ask me why).

In the end, we chose a white model but had her so severely backlit that her skin colour was ambiguous. I can swear on a stack of Bibles that no racial, never mind racist, considerations played any part in any of the choices. It was nothing but cold-blooded commercialism.

Never having been involved in the fashion industry, I don’t know exactly how the houses choose their models. But I bet my annual income against Naomi’s daily fee (or the hourly profits of the Russian oligarch she’s cosy with) that the process isn’t dissimilar.

Of course racism these days is anything anyone says it is. If our millionaire models feel underprivileged, they are.

So Posh should watch her step. Since racism is not only decried but criminalised, one day she may find herself in the pokey for making business decisions.

 

Alas, poor Dave. The chap just can’t win.

He has papered over the gaping holes in all his policies without the focus groups being any the wiser.

Prospective voters don’t seem to mind his firm commitment to destroying the institution of marriage.

They turn a blind eye on his economic policy with its phoney, and predictably catastrophic, focus on turning us into a nation of estate agents. We’ll all grow rich by selling houses to one another – until the bubble bursts and 2008 returns with a much bigger bang.

But since the implosion isn’t likely before the next election, Dave doesn’t mind that. And neither do the focus groups.

They even let Dave get away with one of the most pathetic foreign-policy fiascos ever suffered by a British PM, when his clamorous commitment to bombing Syria was quickly replaced by a craven agreement to let Putin call the shots.

The focus groups winced but swallowed – as they did the never-ending list of promises Dave has broken. I mean, does anyone even remember his Big Society?

And yet Dave is on course to losing the next election because he’s out of touch with women. ‘He does bugger-all for women like me,’ said one former Tory voter. Actually he also does bugger-all for men like me, for reasons I’ve outlined.

But what are the women’s reasons? They must be compelling and numerous: after all, Dave has managed to convert a 5% lead among 2010 woman voters into a 13% lead for Labour among the same group.

Apparently, the strongest reason is that Dave is posh. He has the gall to have been educated at Eton and Oxford, rather than at a comprehensive in a bad part of town and South Thames College. This automatically means he can’t possibly understand today’s women. Even though he too went to Oxford, Ed Miliband does much better with girls, and he’s not even that handsome.

I’m disappointed with Dave. Fair enough, what’s done is done, he can’t undo his educational qualifications. But can’t he do a better job pretending to be a man of the people? This is after all the only ironclad requirement for electoral success these days.

It’s not as if he hasn’t tried. Calling himself a voter-friendly Dave rather than a toffee-nosed David was a good start, but clearly more work needs to be done. Pronouncing his name as Dive would show willing but it can’t stop there.

Dave ought to make more of being married to a tattooed woman, thereby reducing the gap between himself and council estate dwellers. Referring to Sam as ‘me trouble’ wouldn’t hurt either, as in “me trouble ‘ad ten Mahatmas down the pub, got elephant’s and wallaced on the rory.” (For non-British readers unfamiliar with Cockney rhyming slang, trouble and strife = wife; Mahatma Gandhi = brandy; elephant’s trunk = drunk; Wallace and Grommit = vomit; Rory O’Moore = floor.)

Of course it’s not just the lines but also the delivery that matters, and this must be the hitch. Dive would be employing all the lexical tools I’ve suggested, and then some, if he felt he could pull it off phonetically.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to possess even the modest talent Tony Blair displayed in that area when he began to drop his aitches in mixed company. At times Tony forgot in which company he should do so and in which he shouldn’t, but he got top marks for trying.

This brings me to the kernel of my proposal. Since women voters demand downmarket sensibilities from politicians, and since Dave doesn’t seem to be able to fake those convincingly enough, the Tory party should put an actor at its head.

Look at the sterling job Ralph Fiennes (the blighter even pronounces his Christian name as ‘Rafe’ – they don’t come much posher than that) and Sir Ben Kingsley did. The first played a London gangster in the film In Bruges, the second in Sexy Beast.

With some help from a speech coach, both men sounded convincing enough as Cockney speakers to fool foreign viewers, if not quite authentic enough to make Ray Winstone or Bob Hoskins seek a career change.

Why not cut to the chase and appoint one of the four men, or better still a professional impressionist like Rory Bremner, as leader of the Conservative party? In reality they’d probably do a better job than Dave-Dive – it’s hard to do a worse one. More important, they’d run away with the top prize in the perception sweepstakes, and that’s all that really matters to our comprehensively educated electorate.

This isn’t to say that some clever chaps couldn’t back up the chosen actor with policy advice. That kind of arrangement worked gangbusters for Reagan who wasn’t quite compos mentis in his second term. So his Chief of Staff James Baker ran the Reagan administration while Ronnie was wheeled out to deliver folksy asides  whenever needed.

Djahmean, Dive? It’s the tin tack for you, me old China. Or, in your parlance, you’re hereby sacked, old boy.