Author: Alexander Boot

Next door to us there’s a small Italian restaurant we call ‘home away from home’. Whenever I feel too lazy to cook we pop over for a plate of fresh but inexpensive pasta, a glass of wine and a chat with the owner.

Yet we and our neighbours didn’t do this often enough, for yesterday the owner told me he was closing down. ‘How much would it take to keep going?’ I asked.

‘Sacchi di soldi,’ he said, and then translated, ‘A lot.’ ‘What’s a lot?’ ‘Well, we need to advertise, hire more staff…’ ‘How much, Mario?’ I pleaded, cutting to the chase. ‘Oh, a quarter-million or so,’ sighed Mario wistfully.

‘Not a problem,’ I answered, whipping out my chequebook. ‘Here, you can pay me back later…’

I’ve just told a lie. I didn’t give Mario £250,000 – I don’t have it to give. The only way I could possibly have bailed Mario out would have been either to start an illegal counterfeiting operation or re-mortgage the house.

Occasional speeding apart, I don’t do illegal, and a new mortgage would reduce me to penury. So I just shook Mario’s hand and wished him good luck.

Judging by his new budget, George ‘Subprime’ Osborne doesn’t have similar qualms about the national economy. His scale is obviously larger, but he’s doing exactly what I was reluctant to do: he takes on ruinous debts, then counterfeits money to pay them (or not, as the case usually is).

Unlike Adam Smith, George and his likeminded thinkers don’t believe housekeeping principles apply at the macro level of national economy. Here’s a typical statement by Samuel Brittan, the FT economics guru: ‘Since my undergraduate days, I have been pointing out that a government budget is not the same as that of an individual…’ He is right about that; it’s not, not these days. That’s precisely the trouble.

Nor do this lot learn from even recent history. Otherwise they’d cast a quick look at the 2008 crisis (that’s still with us) and ask themselves what were its immediate causes.

Let’s see. Bill Clinton and the Federal Reserve system decided to do a Thatcher and promote wider property ownership. To that end they kept interest rates artificially low, while encouraging, bribing and coercing banks to offer a subprime mortgage to anyone asking for it.

The assumption based on nonexistent and counterintuitive evidence was that property prices would defy gravity by only ever going up. Yet in short order prices began to stagnate, inflation beckoned and the Fed in its wisdom quadrupled interest rates overnight.

A deluge of defaults ensued, the property market collapsed, so did other markets, so did some venerable banks, so did the rest of our securely globalised world… Now if you were our Chancellor, what lesson would you learn from this?

Here’s the lesson George has learned, and I bet it’s different from yours. Having inherited an economy severely compromised by Labour’s suicidal spending and borrowing, so far George’s shilly-shallying accompanied by cheap PR stunts has done nothing to improve the situation. His response is to follow the US model – not of getting out of trouble but of getting into it.

George will continue to keep interest rates low, while using the public purse to underwrite 95-percent mortgages, mostly for first-time buyers. This, he says, will stimulate the housing market, and no doubt it will. Then what?

The public purse is worse than empty – it’s saddled with debt approaching 90 percent of our GDP. The cost of servicing this debt already equals our defence budget, and anyone who studied economics for five minutes knows that this sort of thing is unsustainable. What will you use for money, George?

This is where the Canadian wizard Mark Carney, the newly appointed Bank of England Governor, comes in. When he takes over in three months, he’ll push the button on the old printing press and put it into a high ‘queasing’ gear, piling billions on top of the 375 of them already counterfeited… sorry, injected into the economy to such a resuscitating effect.

Generally speaking I refuse to don Cassandra’s mantle, for fear of looking silly if my predictions don’t come true. This time, however, I’m fairly confident.

The first whammy of George’s one-two, cheap and easily available loans, will boost the demand for properties and it’ll quickly outstrip the supply. Prices will skyrocket, and mortgage sizes along with them. Having reached the new plateau, there the prices will more or less stabilise, for Newton showed that nothing can go up indefinitely.

When the second whammy belches out another couple of hundred billion in counterfeit cash, inflation will climb, further boosted by the rise in property values. Visions of Weimar, street battles and wheelbarrows full of banknotes will flash before our spivocrats’ eyes. Even they will know that hyperinflation would have to be prevented at all cost.

The only way of doing so would be to make money more expensive, that is to raise interest rates. Suddenly mortgage repayments will at least double, a spate of defaults will follow and you know what’ll happen next – 2008 all over again.

So why is George, egged on by Dave, doing this? It’s not an economics textbook but the calendar that provides the answer.

Our spivocrats are gambling on the timing of the boom and bust. They hope that the former will come before the 2015 election and the latter after it. If this pans out, the Tories just may be re-elected, and that’s what politics is all about, isn’t it?

And you know what’s really scary? The other lot are even worse.

 

 

Back in the 1950s Germany’s economy did a Phoenix by rising from its RAF- and SAC-produced ashes. This rags to riches story is often referred to as ‘the economic miracle’ (Wirtschaftswunder for short as I, unable to conceal my admiration for the morphology of the German language, always add).

They call that a miracle? Really. What’s miraculous about it? A miracle is something one doesn’t understand, something solely attributable to supernatural forces. Germany’s recovery, on the other hand, is an illustration to basic economics taught in the first year at every decent university.

Konrad Adenauer and his economics advisor (later the Federal Republic’s Economics Minister, then Chancellor) Ludwig Erhard exceeded their authority under the law imposed by the occupying powers. Rejecting the Keynesian practices mandated by the Anglo-Saxons, Erhard freed up the economy in one fell swoop by removing price controls and introducing a stable currency.

He took that plunge on a Sunday, when American and British Keynesians had a day off and were thus in no position to stop him, as they surely would have done on any other day of the week. At the same time, Adenauer and Erhard told the Germans in no uncertain terms that there would be no huge deficit spending on a Bismarck-type welfare state, not in the immediate future at any rate.

This would come when the economy got up on its feet. Until then the Germans were told to tighten their belts, work hard and count their pfennigs. The ploy worked to perfection, and within a few years of low inflation and rapid industrial growth the country climbed to the economic summit where it has more or less stayed to this day.

Hence there was nothing miraculous about it at all – just applying the values and practices of good housekeeping to a national economy, something our FT analysts insist we must never do. Now if you want to know what a real economic miracle is, answer this question: which foreign country is the biggest investor into the Russian economy?

Is it a) China, b) the USA, c) Germany? The answer is d) none of the above. By far the greatest influx of foreign capital into Russia comes from Cyprus, a country of 1.1 million population whose economy, one is led to believe, isn’t exactly shipshape.

According to Rosstat, Russian state statistics agency, in 2011 alone Cyprus-based businesses invested £52 billion in Russia. That is almost four times Cyprus’s GDP, and surely Russia isn’t the only conduit for the Cypriots’ enterprising spirit.

The spirit is formidable. No other country has ever managed to invest abroad several times the amount of wealth it produces. In fact, those cynics among you who don’t believe in miracles might question these data.

‘O ye of little faith…’ as St Matthew once wrote, in Greek as it happens. The information is absolutely kosher, to borrow a term from another Abrahamic religion.

The cynics should take their cue not from economics but from biochemistry, specifically from the circulation of oxygen in nature. Plants and animals breathe in oxygen and exhale it to the air and water as carbon dioxide (CO₂). Algae and green plants then take the CO₂ and convert it into carbohydrates, with oxygen being a by-product. The world lives on.

For plants and animals, read Cyprus. For oxygen, read the flow into Cyprus of the ill-gotten money of Russian ‘businessmen’ and ‘politicians’ (all their money is ill-gotten by definition). For CO₂, read reinvestment into the Russian ‘businesses’ that had produced the ill-gotten gains. For by-product oxygen, read more money then laundered again through Cyprus banks.

This is a bright example of how one science can elucidate another, a bit like physics and metaphysics or else philosophy and theology. In fact, it’s to theology that we must turn next to understand the Cypriots’ eagerness to act as a player in a game that is proscribed by criminal laws in just about every country on earth.

For there is an authority much higher than men’s law. Both Cyprus and Russia are Orthodox, and it must be their denominational solidarity that accounts for this show of Christian cooperation, so rare in our heathen times. Surely there can be no other explanation? And if you think there is, it’s you who are heathen (I know I am, at least in this context).

Now imagine the same story unfolding in countries that are less devout, say Germany and Luxembourg. What if it became public knowledge that tiny Luxembourg is by far the greatest foreign contributor to Germany’s on-going Wirtschaftswunder?  One can’t help thinking that the questions asked under such circumstances would be somewhat more probing than those posed about Cyprus and Russia.

Even as we speak, the Cyprus finance minister is in Moscow, doing an Oliver Twist. Please, Comrades, can we have more? All in the spirit of Orthodox solidarity of course. ‘More!?!’ scream the Russians, scaring the poor lad out of his wits. ‘What’s in it for us?’ they demand in the same Christian spirit.

What’s in it for them is the possibility of acquiring a Mediterranean colony, complete with sizeable gas reserves, but then I already suggested this a couple of days ago. So I’m sure the Russians will come round one way or the other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For purely medical reasons I hardly ever listen to Radio 4 – their usual vulgar, pea-brained, heavily biased twaddle is contraindicated for hypertensives.

There are aesthetic reasons as well, for it’s my conviction that serious issues ought to be discussed at depth or not at all. Discussed the BBC way, they are at best vulgarised and at worst falsified.

But the title of their programme Lenin in Letchworth caught my eye and I did listen to it. I must say I was pleasantly surprised.

It’s not that the programme wasn’t shallow, biased and vulgar – it was all those things, for the BBC can do no other. But at least they did mention, albeit at the very end, that Lenin mustn’t be confused with Dr Schweitzer or Mother Theresa. They even went so far as to quote Lenin’s order to hang kulaks (industrious peasants) publicly, pour encourager les autres.

Such quotes run the risk of undermining the dominant conviction among our ‘liberals’, emphatically including the BBC staff, that nastiness in the Soviet Union only started with Stalin. Lenin, on the other hand, was a sincere, if possibly misguided and slightly too energetic, champion of the poor, a bit like Jesus.

Apart from that one quotation, it was business as usual. The programme mulled over the hypothetical possibility that Lenin might have visited Letchworth during the 1907 Fifth Congress of the Russian Socialist Party held in London.

The implication was that Lenin was acutely interested in the same bien-pensant agenda that drove Edwardian socialists like Ebenezer Howard or GB Shaw. The former was largely responsible for creating eyesore abominations called ‘garden cities’, of which Letchworth was the first and the truly hideous Milton Keynes the last, or at least one hopes so.

The programme’s general attitude towards socialism, either Christian or Edwardian, was typically sympathetic, and it was at pains to contrast Lenin’s ‘shaft of steel’ approach to ‘the transformation of the human spirit’ with GBS’s ‘soft, gentle’ idea of ‘creating a new world’.

This demarcation is both essential and comforting to BBC socialists, which is to say the BBC staff. The trouble is, it’s utterly false.

The difference between Soviet Leninists and British socialists is that the former managed to grab total power and the latter so far haven’t, although, as their current attack on free press shows, they appear to be well on the way. This explains what the programme referred to as ‘the difference in means’.

Had Shaw and his friends seized power in Britain, they would have perpetrated all the same monstrosities and possibly worse. Lenin, after all, didn’t suggest that all old people should be culled because they outlived their usefulness, and Shaw did: ‘Undesirables should be killed for the good of the whole’.

(It’s comforting to see how euthanasia is steadily moving towards the forefront of our ideas on improving the NHS – one can’t open the papers these days without reading laments about all those wrinklies undermining the otherwise unimpeachable socialised medicine.)

Along with the whole Bloomsbury set, Shaw admired not only Lenin and Stalin, but also their fellow socialists Mussolini and Hitler. But he reserved his warmest feelings for the Soviets. This is what he declared upon visiting Stalin’s Russia in the middle of the artificially caused 1931 famine that killed 15 million recalcitrant peasants:

‘It is a real comfort to me, an old man, to be able to step into my grave with the knowledge that the civilisation of the world will be saved. It is here in Russia that I’ve actually been convinced that the new Communist system is capable of leading mankind out of its present crisis, and saving it from anarchy and ruin.’

Radio 4 doesn’t quote such pronouncements by Shaw and other British socialists for this would make it harder to preach its belief in what the programme called ‘a different understanding of socialism.’ The understanding is the same, chaps, it’s the country that’s still slightly different.

Nor did the programme find anything wrong with Christian socialism, an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one. Christianity is in fact the exact opposite of socialism, not its religious expression.

Socialism is by definition materialistic and therefore atheist. The likes of Ebenezer Howard, the founder of the ‘garden city’ movement, and Rev. J Bruce Wallace, the driving force behind the creation of Letchworth, were engaged in social engineering, pure and simple. Their garden cities sprang from the same ideology as today’s council estates; they reflected the collectivist, socialist idea of how people ought to live.

What Radio 4 called a ‘new way of living’ is in fact the old idea of changing human nature in line with a set of preconceived ideas. Such attempts will always fail not because the execution is inept but because the underlying idea is evil. Unfortunately though, wherever such attempts are made in earnest they only fail after millions have had to die.

Other than drawing our attention to the commendable ideology behind ‘garden cities’, one wonders what exactly was the point of Lenin in Letchworth. Vitali Vitaliev, the Russo-English writer who is himself a resident of Letchworth sums it up neatly: ‘One thing I can say is that I don’t care a damn if Lenin, Hitler or another murderer and tyrant had visited Letchworth. If he indeed did and liked it, it is disturbing!’ Hear, hear.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The proposed raid on bank deposits in Cyprus is highway robbery, and only lazy commentators have failed to describe it as such.

The description is fair: from 6.75 to 9.9 percent of people’s money held in Cyprus will be summarily confiscated. And 100 percent of those deposits have been sequestered until the confiscation has taken place, which wise measure renders account holders unable to do anything about it. In parallel, and even industrious commentators mostly missed this, capital gains tax in Cyprus will be hiked 2.5 times, adding up to a crushing double whammy.

The question is why the ECB and IMF, which is to say Germany, made this raid a precondition for the bailout of Cyprus? After all, they were more lenient when bailing out Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain. Why single out Cyprus for rough treatment?

The answer is obvious: Cyprus is a floating refuge and laundromat for dirty Russian money. The exact amount of Russian cash held in Cypriot banks is hard to assess because much of the capital is fictitiously held by local proxies. Also, huge amounts come into Cyprus but only stay long enough to be rubbed clean before returning to their country of origin.

Of the available estimates the figure of around £40 billion sounds the most plausible. It’s thanks to this that Cypriot banks hold deposits equalling about eight times the country’s GDP.

Even more virtuous countries than Russia would translate economic domination into political leverage, and Russia has naturally done this. But it’s more than just about exerting influence on Cypriot politics – potentially the Russians hope to gain the elusive prize they’ve been pursuing since the late 16^th century: a foothold on the Mediterranean.

To capture that prize Russia fought Turkey 13 times between 1568 and 1918, with Russia emerging victorious more often but never succeeding in achieving her historic aim. This pursuit was always in the back or even the forefront of the Russians’ mind in all their wars, those involving not just Turkey but also Britain, France – and Germany.

In the last 100 years Germany and Russia fought twice. The first time, in 1914-1918, both sides lost, and – more important – so did the rest of Europe. This regardless of which side offered or accepted surrender.

For as a result both countries fell to the most satanic regimes in history, with awful and predictable consequences for themselves and the world. Part of the reason Germany and Russia could inflict such damage the second time around is that initially they joined forces. Mutual hostility came later, but before they fell out on 22 June, 1941, the two totalitarian brothers had got on famously.

Their friendship was partly ideological, but mostly strategic. Germany wouldn’t have built up her military muscle without a steady supply of Russian raw materials, nor would Russia have created the most formidable military machine in history without German technology, know-how and credits.

While still friends, the two regimes signed several treaties, some publicised, some secret, effectively dividing Europe between themselves. It was as allies that they attacked Poland, with the Russians getting into the act when it was still touch and go.

The Poles had managed to regroup, with their army group forming a strong defensive perimeter on the Vistula. The Germans, after the initial success of their blitzkrieg, were getting bogged down, partly because their munitions, especially aircraft bombs, were running perilously low.

The Russians kindly replenished the stock of German bombs (a service they later provided during the Battle of Britain) and then, for good measure, attacked Poland from the east, ending the conflict. The two predators divided both Poland and the rest of Europe between them, a cosy relationship that lasted for about two years.

Germany then attacked Russia in what the Nazis claimed, and all serious historians now accept, was a preemptive strike – recently uncovered documents show that Hitler beat Stalin to the punch by only a few weeks. In the ensuing conflict the two countries lost about 40 million people between them, but this time both emerged as strategic winners: Russia gained half the world, and Germany was launched on the road to economic domination of Europe.

However, for all her de facto and de jure territorial gains, Russia still failed to get entrenched on the Mediterranean: this was where the suicidally obliging Roosevelt and Churchill drew the line.

The German raid on Russian money in Cyprus (to call a spade a spade) is ostensibly perceived in Russia as a direct attack. Putin immediately described it as  ‘unfair, unprofessional and dangerous’, but one can almost see his eyes light up.

For, unlike the previous German attack, this one can conceivably turn Russia into a Mediterranean power. Gazprom, the world’s biggest producer of natural gas, has already offered to restructure Cyprus’s debt in exchange for exclusive exploration rights on the island. The Russians are also prepared to underwrite the whole bailout for the right to use a naval base on the island.

I don’t know how this whole thing will end – only a handful of men do and they aren’t talking. It’s highly unlikely though that the Germans didn’t consider the Russian angle before launching their confiscatory raid. Yet they pressed ahead, which raises all sorts of possibilities.

Could it be that yet another deal between Germany and Russia has been struck? After all, historically the two countries have demonstrated their ability to conclude secret treaties whose ramifications become known only decades later. The 1922 Rapallo Treaty, the 1926 Treaty of Berlin, the 1939 Non-Aggression Pact and Treaty of Friendship all had their secret protocols that left the rest of the world none the wiser.

With the German federal election coming on 22 September, and Merkel’s victory far from guaranteed, it’s hard to imagine her government undertaking such a hugely controversial measure at this time. After all, a catastrophic run on banks in the entire eurozone is a very possible consequence.

It’s not unimaginable that the proposed raid is but a diversion manoeuvre. With the tensions reaching breaking point, Col. Putin will ride in on a white steed and save the day. Germany won’t have to pay up, Merkel will win another term – and Putin will achieve what the tsars and the commissars failed to do: establish Russia on the Mediterranean.

This is of course mere speculation. But the propensity for underhand, backstage dealing in both the EU and Russia leaves much room for educated guesses. Anyway, we’ll know for sure in a few days.

 

 

 

 

These days I often find myself out of my depth trying to understand how Britain is governed.

The upcoming vote on press regulation is one such occasion – I simply can’t get my head around the maddening complexity of the issues involved. Mercifully I can rely on my good Russian friend Mr (formerly, and in his heart still, Comrade) I.L. Kutchaheadoff to sort me out.

I.L. happens to be in town this week, to approve the British advertising campaign for his new Russo-Anglo-Italian bank Londra Unlimited. A keen connoisseur of all Indo-European languages, Comrade Kutchaheadoff has misgivings about the proposed slogan: Londra for your money.

Yesterday he met with the advertising agency at a Mayfair casino where my friend spends most of his time whenever he’s in London. ‘Doesn’t Londra sound like laundry?’ he asked while putting £100,000 on red. ‘I’ve heard of truth in advertising, but this is ridiculous.’

‘Londra means London in Italian, that’s all,’ argued the creative director. ‘It conveys the international nature of the organisation.’ The red came up, which put I.L. in a jovial mood. ‘I don’t know, lads,’ he beamed happily. ‘Mull this over, will you? If the campaign doesn’t work, you’ll become structural elements in my new office tower, currently under construction. You know this, I know this, my partner Vlad Putin knows this.’

By association this reminded Comrade Kutchaheadoff that he still hadn’t returned to me with his ideas on press regulation. He turned to his secretary/bodyguard/mistress Svetlana Putitin and began dictating:

‘Comrades Cameron, Miliband and Clegg! Your collective heart is in the right place, but you’re overcomplicating the issue. And anyway, “Royal Charter” sounds like a tour operator – you don’t want this ambiguity.

‘My good friend and partner Vlad Putin likes to keep things simple, and he shows you the way. In our country every journalist is free. No one restricts his freedom in any way. He’s free to write – in his own words! – whatever Vlad wants him to write. And Vlad is free to choose among various means of protecting this freedom: shooting, beating, defenestration – you name it, total freedom of choice all around.

‘Everyone understands how the bone crumbles, no need to wash your Londra – I mean laundry – in public. Hell, there we go again. Don’t write this down, Svetlana, but this bloody name just won’t work for my bank, not in this country. Not yet anyway.

‘Give you an example. Last year this defence reporter at Kommersant abused his freedom by publishing a piece about us sending missiles to Comrade Assad on the sly. And what do you know, he got so upset when he realised what he’d done that he threw himself out of the window with so much force he took the window frame down with him.

‘Now we in Russia have a different culture, I appreciate that. But you’re coming round to our way of thinking, which is good. What you don’t need is all this glasnost. It’s not our cup of vodka, and it shouldn’t be yours either.

‘Just let your ministers and newspaper owners meet for a drink at a public house – did you know this means ‘brothel’ in my country? – and work out an understanding. Oh by the way, just thought of a funny one. What do you get if Conrad Black buys The Mail? The Black Mail, that’s what. But enough of this Levety. As in Leveson, geddit?

‘The understanding can be as simple as sturgeon pie. As the ministers are all legislators, they can lay down the law, isn’t that the idea? So they say to the hacks, you undertake to publish what we tell you and there won’t be any need for undertakers.

‘Now isn’t that beautifully simple? Happiness all around, no need for press regulators, royal charters and all that nonsense. But hey, I’m no stick in the mud. I understand you English can’t live without forming yet another government agency. So here’s an idea for you.

‘Comrade Cameron’s defence policy leaves no room for the SAS, so what do you do with all those unemployed chaps? You turn them into press regulators, that’s what. They have all the right training already. We did this with our ex-Spetsnaz, and it worked gangbusters.

‘This way everyone does what he’s trained to do. Legislators legislate, reporters report, observers observe, guardians guard, ex-SAS regulate. We become like you, you become like us – perfect foundations for lasting peace.

‘Oh well, got to run. There’s this Londra business to sort out. Keep up the good work, Comrades. And don’t worry about Parliament. Next time I’ll teach you how to make sure good people never cast bad votes.’  

 

Stepping outside his immediate brief, Cardinal Wilfrid Fox Napier, the Catholic Archbishop of Durban, saw fit to share penetrating psychiatric insights with his BBC audience.

According to His Grace, paedophilia is an ‘illness, not a criminal condition’. People become paedophiles, he explained, because they themselves were abused as children. So when a pervert presses his attentions on a little tot, both are victims and neither is a wrongdoer.

The Archbishop then vouchsafed the information that he personally knows at least two priests who abuse children because they themselves were abused. (What does ‘at least two’ mean? Three? Thirty? Or does it just mean two?)

‘Now don’t tell me,’ thundered the prelate, ‘that those people are criminally responsible like somebody who chooses to do something like that. I don’t think you can really take the position and say that person deserves to be punished. He was himself damaged.’ In other words the criminal act hurts the priest as much as it hurts the child he’s brutalising.

Predictably, this spirited defence of perversion has drawn criticism from the usual liberal quarters, along the lines of ‘I myself was abused as a child by a priest, therefore there is no God.’ The critics are positively glowing: here’s another bullet to fire at Catholicism and, more generally, Christianity and, even more generally, faith.

This is a wrong line of attack. Recounting over and over again the suffering of an abused child is manipulative, touchy-feely sentimental and, even worse, superfluous. Any decent person will know anyway that statutory rape, which is the legal term for sex with a child, is a heinous crime. Nobody with a modicum of moral sense needs to have his heart’s strings tugged to know that the perpetrator ought to be locked up, with the key thrown away.

The Archbishop’s problem isn’t that he’s a bad lawyer. Nor is he ‘ignoring the child’, as one of his critics said. It’s that he’s ignoring the fundamental tenets of Christianity. In other words, Cardinal Napier is a bad and ignorant Christian, and it pains me to say this about one of the 115 men who’ve just elected the new pope.

At the heart of Christian morality lies the doctrine of free will, and it applies to crime as well. A man may be severely provoked to commit evil deeds, and the provocation may indeed come from an inner urge. But such an urge does not trump the ability to make a free choice between good and evil – it can’t turn a human being into an automaton whose buttons are pushed by an invisible and irresistible force.

If there is one scriptural phrase that sums up this divine property of man, it’s John 8: 32: ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’ Much of Christian moral philosophy flows out of this one sentence.

If we accept as a given that God loves us, that indeed God is love, then we must find it hard to explain how such love could have been expressed by turning us into puppets, or else pre-programmed robots. God’s is the absolute freedom, but if we are truly created in his image, ours has to be at least a relative one. Only God can be totally free, but that doesn’t mean man has to be totally enslaved.

All this comes from the theological primer, and you’d think that one of the world’s senior clergymen would have graduated to more sophisticated sources. Alas, the primer still seems to be very much needed.

His Grace ought to know the difference between a criminal urge and a criminal act. He may even be right that this particular urge is caused by the criminal having suffered similar abuse as a child. Personally, I’m not sure about this but, devoid of Cardinal Napier’s superior knowledge of psychiatry, I’m prepared to concede this point.

Similarly, a man whose parents beat him up as a child may, as an adult, feel the urge to punch strangers. This psychological quirk is understandable and may even be excusable. But it doesn’t absolve the chap of criminal culpability if he actually attacks people. It’s debatable whether or not people are responsible for their inclinations. It’s indisputable that they are responsible for their acts.

Cancer, diabetes, MS are diseases – one either gets them or not, and there’s little one can do about it. Even assuming that there’s nothing a paedophile can do about his desires – and this assumption is at best suspect in a man of God – he can still choose to control himself. If he chooses not to, he’s a criminal, not a patient.

Pope Francis has his work cut out for him if men like Cardinal Napier find themselves in positions of influence. The immensity of the task facing His Holiness will, one hopes, overshadow his concern for the ownership of a little rock whose name presumably means ‘lousy wine’ in his native language.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have to admit to a weakness: a general distrust of certain groups of people en masse. This even though I believe that individuals ought to be judged as just that, individuals.

People, I’ve often written, retain the freedom of choice, and their behaviour can’t be explained mostly, and never merely, by their group identity.

This freedom is the most valuable of our possessions, and firm belief in it precludes determinism of any kind, be it national, cultural or biological. Corollary to this is the realisation that even after the choice has been made people remain free. They can in due course opt for a different or even opposite choice, renouncing their past.

This is in theory. In practice, certain choices may taint a person for life, springing as they do from horrendous character flaws. For example, a chap who in his youth made lampshades out of Treblinka inmates is beyond salvation, in this world at any rate.

This judgment may be too cruel, and I may be too vengeful a man. Be that as it may, I simply wouldn’t be able to shake the lampshade-maker’s hand even if in the intervening 70 years he has become an upstanding pillar of society, a multiple and doting great-grandfather and a lifelong member of his church’s PCC.

Now what about those who had told him that turning people into household items was both desirable and commendable? Those who had systematically and deliberately corrupted his mind and soul, dredging evil longings out of the far recesses of his personality and encouraging him to indulge them? I’m afraid my answer would be the same, even if they eventually got to profess enthusiasm for free markets, democracy and lampshades made of less exotic fabrics.

It’s a reasonable bet that most people will agree with me on that. It’s even a safer bet that, if I replaced ex-Nazi with ex-Communist functionaries in my hypothetical example, my support would shrink even among those who know that the Communists out-murdered the Nazis six to one in Russia alone.

This is most unfortunate. True, many Eastern Europeans joined the Party or its offshoots simply to get a better job, and this was as far as it went. Other than the actual act of joining they never did anything reprehensible, and their guilt is only that by association. They can’t become ex-Communists in any meaningful sense because they never were real communists in the first place.

Yet there are those who actively pursued careers within the party or its muscular extension, the secret police. Here we’re talking about a totally different human type, especially in my generation or the next one.

If before the war a Russian asked to cooperate with the secret police had a choice only between accepting or dying, after Stalin’s death it was possible to say no without suffering any repercussions, certainly not fatal ones. Hence actively seeking a career in the Party or the KGB betokened an irredeemably amoral and corrupt individual, scum of the earth.

That’s why I’d describe someone like Vladimir Putin in those terms even if I didn’t know that he’s running a fascist state in which KGB officers like him have fused with the criminal underworld to form the ruling elite. I’d regard him as evil even if I didn’t know that he represents a clear and present danger to everything I hold dear.

Mind you, Putin isn’t trying very hard to get in my good books. Not only has he not renounced his KGB career, but he’s proud of it. ‘There’s no such thing as ex-KGB,’ he once said. ‘This is for life.’ In his speeches, especially those designed for internal consumption, he screams zoological hatred for the West and everything it stands for, which is a trademark of his sponsoring outfit and the party that had spawned it.

Angela Merkel is a different matter. She is regarded by most people, even those who don’t care much about either Germany or the EU, as a mainstream Western politician.

Those who care about such things know that she grew up in East Germany where she belonged to FDJ (Free German Youth), a communist organisation. By itself, they correctly assume, that’s no big deal: most Eastern European youngsters had to belong to such groups. Holding this against her would be like holding his Hitlerjugend past against the outgoing Pope.

However, Merkel wasn’t just any old member. Angie Kasner, as she then was, was a member of an FDJ district committee, and its secretary for Agitprop. That, ladies and gentlemen, brands her as someone rotten to the core. Later she claimed that she had only been secretary for culture and, when caught in that lie, complained about bad memory. Amnesia is more like it. In any case, either post was nomenklatura, and one didn’t get there without doing a Faustian deal.

Frau Merkel, no longer Kamerad Kasner, became an enthusiast for political pluralism only in 1989, when the Wall came down. Until then, and she was 35 at the time, she hadn’t had a blot on her Communist reputation, which means she had an indelible one on her character.

Nothing but hypertrophied opportunism? Possibly, and this trait stands her in good stead in democratic politics, as it has become in the West.

Fair enough, she wasn’t exactly a lampshade maker. But for many years she was morally indistinguishable from those who a decade before her birth would have provided inspiration for this handicraft.

Perhaps it’s time we adjusted the scale of our moral judgment, preferably upwards. This may improve our political judgment as well.

The Queen has signed the new Commonwealth Charter, which states inter alia that ‘We are implacably opposed to all forms of discrimination, whether rooted in gender, race, colour, creed, political belief or other grounds.’

So would Her Majesty approve of an heir to the throne marrying a Muslim, animist or, God forbid, Catholic? If not, she then opposes not all forms of discrimination but only some of them, implicitly including transgressing against ‘gender equality’ and ‘gay rights’.

Apparently this opposition isn’t as implicit as all that, for the Queen is said to have privately expressed support for such liberal radicalism. The Charter, however, has to relegate it to subtext, albeit a highly transparent one.

The reason for such taciturnity is obvious. In 41of 54 nations that make up the Commonwealth (née the British Empire), homosexual acts are illegal. Nor do they constitute a trivial offence incurring a derisory slap on the wrist. In Nigeria and Pakistan, for example, practitioners of ‘love that dare not speak its name’ can be executed; in Malaysia first flogged and then imprisoned for 20 years.

Are these countries going to change their laws once the Charter goes into effect? I doubt it. Will the 49 Commonwealth members that don’t recognise same-sex marriage join those five that do? Not on your nelly.

Thus the Queen, who may or may not have had her hand forced by her subversive ministers, will be signing a largely symbolic document. But what with her role being largely symbolic anyway, this symbolism is vitally important.

Our monarchy, along with the Church of England, is here primarily to link our generations past, present and future into a cohesive continuum. By signing this awful document, which veers further to the left than even the UN ever has, Her Majesty effectively breaks the continuum. This inadvertently promotes the cause of republicanism, terrifying those of us who have a reasonable grasp of, and affection for, the country’s constitutional history.

At the risk of buying a one-way ticket to the Tower, if not Tyburn Hill, one can detect seemingly incongruous socialist leanings on the part of many members of the Royal family. Demonstrably unqualified to do so, I wouldn’t venture a foray into psychoanalysis by suggesting, say, that this is animated by guilt feelings about the family’s own privileged status. Nor will I ascribe it to any cold-blooded calculation of personal interest – though inherently socialism does limit upward social mobility, thereby protecting aristocratic privilege.

I’ll merely observe that, during Mrs Thatcher’s tenure, Her Majesty could barely conceal how little time she had for her first minister, with her economic and social ideas. That such animosity was at all discernible is especially astounding in the light of the exemplary dignity and noble restraint with which the Queen has served the nation for 60-odd years.

Nor would some other members of the Royal family be automatically admitted into a real conservative party, if we had one.

Prince Charles, for example, once famously declared that, when ensconced on the throne, he’ll regard himself as Defender of Faith, not the Faith. A jack of all faiths, Supreme Governor of none, I’d suggest. Such even-handedness is clearly unconstitutional, what with the realm being constituted along explicitly Anglican Christian lines.

On 2 June, 1953, the Queen answered ‘All this I promise to do’ when asked by the Archbishop, ‘Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England?’

For Charles or any other prince to give a different answer, the constitution would have to be debauched, as our government already is debauched. As it stands, the law of the land doesn’t provide for the monarch’s commitment to any old faith. Such as, for example, pantheism, the echoes of which sounded in the Prince’s recent statement ‘nature is a great deal more powerful than we are.’

If you realise, as I do, that republicanism will destroy what’s left of this country, you’d be more comfortable with the word ‘God’ replacing ‘nature’ in the same sentence. Alas, our comfort doesn’t count for much.  

 

 

 
 

 

 

It seems churlish to criticise our new Archbishop of Canterbury so early in his tenure. However, the initial signs aren’t good.

First, much to the delight of Dr Miranda Threlfall–Holmes writing for The Guardian, he appointed a woman, the Rev Jo Bailey Wells, Chaplain of Canterbury.

Dr Freefall says this is good news because the appointee is highly experienced and qualified. But this point is irrelevant to the argument. In fact, before the Church developed an irresistible urge to play lickspittle to every newfangled secular perversion, there would not have been an argument.

According to the ecclesiastical tradition established over two millennia, the Rev Jo isn’t fit for the job, or indeed to be a priest, not because there’s something wrong with her sterling intellect or administrative nous, but simply because she’s a woman.

One may take either side in this argument, but this is what the argument is. Of course, it’s silly to expect intellectual rigour from someone as fanatically ideological as Dr Freefall. But her conclusion seems to be accurate: ‘Justin Welby has already signalled his faith in women’s ministry.’ Indeed he has. Whether such faith comes at a cost to the more important one remains to be seen.

Now he has also ‘signalled his faith’ in joining, on the left side of the divide, purely secular debates. Specifically, the Archbishop came out against the government’s plans to cap rises in working-age benefits and some tax credits to 1% for three years.

Not to cut benefits, God forbid. Not even to cap all of them. Just to slow down, by an almost imperceptible amount, the growth of our ruinous welfare state. This, according to the Archbishop, is wrong, and shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper thinks he’s ‘absolutely right’ because the plans are ‘immoral’.

Having Mrs Ball (‘Ms Cooper’ to you) pontificate on morality is a bit like Chris Huhne acting as marriage counsellor. However, her support for any proposition whatsoever ipso facto proves it’s spurious, so she does have a useful role to play in politics.

However, Archbishop Justin doesn’t need Mrs Ball’s support. He can do self-refutation with the best of them.

According to the Archbishop, ‘civilised society’ has a duty to support the vulnerable. That’s God own truth. Where he makes his first mistake is in confusing society with the state. This is characteristic of someone who has neither studied such subjects in any depth nor thought them through properly.

Society and state were indeed coextensive in the Hellenic world, particularly in Athens. The polis was what the Romans later called res publica, public affair. Every citizen had a direct involvement in state affairs, and it was through such involvement that people expressed their innermost aspirations.

By privatising the spirit, Christianity separated society from the state. In fact the two are often, and these days invariably, in conflict – something that was unthinkable in Hellenic antiquity.

So yes, ‘civilised society’ should look after those who can’t look after themselves. But a society where this function is assumed by the state, which in the process vastly increases its own power to destroy said society, is no longer civilised. It’s barbaric.

A man giving money to a beggar helps him, while contributing to his own salvation. The same man giving money to the state that then beggars society for its own sake contributes to social, moral and economic decrepitude.

Looking after the vulnerable is a fundamental Christian duty. But no moral duty requires the mediation of the state to be discharged. For centuries the helpless were helped effectively by hospices, alms houses, hospitals and orphanages run either by religious or secular charities. The best the state can do here is not to get in the way, which our state does with enviable consistency.

Moreover, under no circumstances can most recipients of the state’s largesse be regarded as truly needy. Able-bodied youngsters must work to support themselves, and if the Archbishop is unsure about this, he should glance into the book that ought to carry more weight than the latest Labour manifesto or even a Guardian feature. ‘If any would not work, neither should he eat,’ it says (2 Thessalonians 3: 10).

A system that makes it more beneficial to stay on welfare than to seek work isn’t just economically disastrous – it’s profoundly immoral. One would think this would be basic to a prelate, especially one with much-touted experience in business. Apparently not.

Incidentally, I take exception to the view that such experience is a sine qua non for either clergymen or politicians. For example, our present PM’s detractors put some of his manifest unfitness for the job down to his never having held any job outside politics. This, I’d suggest, is the least of his problems. Anyway, how much business experience did William Pitt have? Edmund Burke? Benjamin Disraeli? Such a lacuna didn’t prevent them from becoming fairly useful statesmen.

Neither were Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Richard Hooker or John Henry Newman held back by their lack of prior experience in the commodities market. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that such experience isn’t essential to becoming a great minister of either God or government. Its absence, if at all relevant, can be made up for by an outstanding mind, character and courage.

The absence of such qualities, however, can’t be compensated by a prior business career. In fact such a career is more likely to do harm, if only by reducing the amount of time devoted to the man’s life work.

Our politicians manifestly lack essential qualities, regardless of whether or not they have done other things before getting into Parliament. So, if his first steps are any indication, does our new Archbishop. The good thing is that he has plenty of time to prove me wrong.

On 4 July, 1776, the Thirteen American colonies declared independence from Britain. Americans celebrate this day as a national holiday. The British, understandably, don’t.

On 14 July, 1789, a French mob stormed the Bastille, inaugurating one of the most disastrous upheavals in world history. The French celebrate this day as La Fête Nationale. The rest of us don’t.

On 8 May, 1945, Germany capitulated on the Western front. Western allied powers celebrate the day. Germany doesn’t.

On 9 May, 1945, Germany capitulated on the Eastern front. The Russians celebrate this as their Victory Day. The Germans don’t.

The same day, in other words, can be an occasion some want to remember and others would dearly like to forget. This brings us to Mothering Sunday, a Christian holiday celebrated throughout Europe since at least the 16^th century.

On that day, the fourth Sunday of Lent, millions of people would go ‘a-mothering’, that is return to their mother church, the main church or cathedral in the area.

Servants and children would be given a day off. On the way to church, the children would celebrate the reprieve from Latin and Greek by picking up wild flowers and giving them to their mothers. After Mass families would eat traditional cakes and buns.

Obviously, such a reactionary, obsolete tradition had no place in a world of modernity championed by the United States. Hence early in the 20^th century Americans began to celebrate Mother’s Day instead. Moreover, using the stratagem perfected by modern vandals, they did so on the same day as Mothering Sunday, piggybacking the new on the old.

This is what constitutes the great larceny of modernity: shoplifting the Christian ethos that formed our civilisation and shoving secular simulacra down people’s throats. Tradition was like a spoonful of sugar that, according to Mary Poppins, helps the bitter medicine go down.

In subliminal reference to the Holy Trinity, even the most pernicious slogans of modernity were usually made up of three elements, either words or phrases. This larcenous tradition began with the French liberté, egalité, fraternité, but it didn’t end there.           

Americans contributed ‘life, liberty and pursuit of happiness’. The Russian ‘vsia vlast sovetam’ (all power to the Soviets). The Germans ‘ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’ (one people, one nation, one leader). And even a somewhat less significant revolution had to chip in with a vapid ‘Work harder, produce more, build Grenada!’

The revolutionaries sensed that the world around them was alive with Trinitarian music. As people’s ears were attuned to it, they were predisposed to respond to similar sounds even if they conveyed a different meaning.

Following in the wake of baseball caps, Coke and verbs made out of nouns, American Mother’s Day had also been making steady inroads on traditional Mothering Sunday until it ousted it. This was ominous.

On the face of it, there’s nothing objectionable about celebrating motherhood – it’s something worth celebrating. We all have mothers after all. Yet in the past we also had a Father, whose bride the Church was. The motherhood celebrated on this day was thus spiritual, not physiological – even though human mothers were also honoured by association. 

This is now gone. A few church-going Christians still celebrate Mothering Sunday. Many others think it’s just an archaic term for Mother’s Day. Most have never even heard of Mothering Sunday.  

So I hope that your joy of celebrating this occasion will be tinged with sadness. For tradition is an anchor that keeps us embedded in our civilisation. Lift the anchor, and the civilisation is cast adrift – this holds true for believer and non-believer alike.

Happy Mothering Sunday to all you fellow reactionaries out there.