Author: Alexander Boot

Totalitarian states define truth as anything that serves them and a lie as anything that doesn’t.

Since such states are based on lies, what they define as a falsehood is usually true and vice versa. Thus actual reality is inverted by the virtual kind: an actual lie is a virtual truth to be rewarded, while an actual truth is a virtual lie to be punished.

It’s refreshing to observe how the same inversion is making inroads on our public life. These days any statement by any public figure is judged on its compliance with the ruling orthodoxy, and often solely on that. Whether or not it’s actually true is irrelevant.

Hence American scientists Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray were viciously attacked and eventually ostracised for their 1994 book The Bell Curve, in which they showed that a person’s IQ has a significant genetic input, which differs from race to race.

This was proved by a vast corpus of scrupulously gathered and analysed data, but that made no difference. The scientists were attacked as ‘racists’ not because either their data or their conclusions were disputed, but because their findings went against the dominant egalitarian ideology. Even though they were actually right, they were virtually wrong, which couldn’t go unpunished.

Totalitarian states punish ‘lies’ by prison or execution, expedients that are still largely outside the reach of modern ‘democracies’. ‘Largely’ is the operative word here, for there already exist a broad array of imprisonable thought offences, but so far legal prosecutions for what people say or think have been rare.

That, however, doesn’t mean such offences go unpunished. It’s just that the ruling orthodoxy uses different methods of punishment.

Public ridicule is one, ostracism is another, harassment is yet another, professional damage another still. For those people whose profession is politics this could effectively mean the end of their careers.

Thus Enoch Powell’s professional life was ended by his annoying familiarity with classical sources. His remarks on the social dangers of an uncontrolled immigration of cultural aliens were prophetic and since then amply vindicated, but no matter. Not only Powell’s career but even his posthumous reputation was destroyed for uttering an actual truth that was adjudged to be a virtual lie.

Nigel Farage can suffer the same fate if he isn’t careful. The other day he was attacked both verbally and physically for saying something that anyone who has ever had to meet a payroll knows: in businesses built on personal relationships with clients, women of child-bearing age, regardless of their otherwise sterling qualities, represent a risk that lowers their market value.

Farage who, unlike his critics, hasn’t spent his whole professional life in politics, said something every businessman knows to be true:  “And if a woman has a client base, has a child and takes two or three years off work, she is worth far less to the employer when she comes back than when she went away because her client base will not have stuck rigidly to her.”

Having been involved in running an advertising agency, I can confirm that this is indeed the case. The series Mad Men got a few things wrong, but one thing it definitely got right is that an agency can only ever get accounts, or especially hold on to them, if its employees enjoy good personal relationships with the clients.

There’s usually one such employee, called Account Director or some such, who’s the principal link between agency and account. When such a person leaves, so may the account – and with it the agency’s lifeblood.

Women often excel in the account-handling role, largely on the strength of their administrative and personal skills. They’re also less likely than men to irritate a client by being overly abrasive and argumentative.

However, all those laudable qualities count for nothing when a woman has to take a long time off to give birth and then look after the baby. I’ve seen agencies lose important accounts for this reason alone, which obviously has to make any sensible manager think twice before hiring a young woman for such a position.

She represents a risk that has to be weighed against her value. This doesn’t mean the agency won’t hire her – but it may have an impact on her remuneration and career path. I have no personal knowledge of other businesses, but five gets you ten the situation there has to be the same whenever personal relationships with clients are vital.

Now Labour Deputy Leader Harriet Harman has no personal knowledge of any business outside of politics. Between matriculating at university and gaining a parliamentary seat she spent a few years doing something with civil liberties, which is politics by another name.

Yet she confidently declared that Mr Farage was ‘downright wrong’. “I think,” she added, “that this is an affront to women in this country and I just can’t believe that he’s said that.”

Yes, Harriet, but was it true? I bet no one asked her this question, and if anyone had she would have been perplexed. Farage’s statement is ‘downright wrong’ not factually, but because it goes against the dominant egalitarian ideology. Nothing else matters. 

Meanwhile Harriet was on a roll: “There’s not a single business or public service in this country which would still have the lights on if women weren’t there at work.”

One wonders how businesses had managed to stay open until the ‘60s, before women began to enter the workforce en masse. Who said that? You?

Off with your head: you haven’t grasped the modern difference between true and false. But I hope you do realise that we’re rapidly slipping into neo-totalitarianism. You know, the disease whose reliable symptom is wicked inversion of truth.

 

A young and impressionable barman at a trendy East London restaurant has done something all decent people have wanted to do for a long time.

He arrested Tony Blair.

Having espied Tony having dinner with friends (with no doubt some burly bodyguards in close attendance), the youngster put his hand on the ex-PM’s shoulder and said, “Mr Blair, this is a citizen’s arrest for a crime against peace, namely your decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq.”

The exact wording of the mantra wasn’t improvised. It came from the website arrestblair.org, specially created to do what its name says.

The website offers a bounty to anyone attempting to nab Tony, and it lays down what looks to me like an airtight case. Yo-Blair, as he was referred to by his accomplice George W. Bush, was directly responsible for starting a criminal war that has so far cost the best part of a million lives.

Personally I’m less troubled by the illegality of the Iraq war than the young barman seems to be. As far as I’m concerned, a UN Security Council resolution is as weak a reason to start a war as its absence is not to start one.

The problem with the Iraq war isn’t that it wasn’t authorised by an (at best useless) international organisation but that it was unjust, stupid, cowardly and shrouded in a tissue of lies.

Witness the number of times the putative casus belli changed in the explanatory speeches delivered by the perpetrators.

First, it was all about WMD which Iraq turned out not to possess – something Blair & Co knew from the beginning.

Then it was about regime change – Saddam was a nasty bit of work whose toxic presence could no longer be tolerated by a world as comfortable with Putin, Lukashenko and Kim Jong Un now as it ever was with Lenin, Stalin, dozens of communist chieftains and, from 1933 to 1939, Hitler (TIME’s Man of the Year, 1938).

After that the mendacious explanations grew more altruistic. Iraq was a nation that deserved to be ‘built’ – specifically by Tony, who was doing his level best to destroy his own nation.

American neoconservatives contributed their own penny’s worth by explaining that Iraqi people were being denied democracy, the only political system that can ever have even a shadow of legitimacy.

Since then the Iraqis have demonstrated – as if it needed demonstrating – that their affection for democracy is less urgent than their desire to be left alone so they can continue to kill one another. The country is being drowned in an ongoing bloodbath, and we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet, as Tony’s accomplice would say.

Moreover, the war has escalated into an ‘Arab Spring’ offensive, claiming even more lives, getting rid of some nasty but internationally impotent regimes, destabilising the Middle East and making the world an infinitely more insecure place. 

Unfortunately, the teenaged barman didn’t succeed in bringing Blair to justice. Tony talked his way out of trouble by unsheathing his rhetorical weapons. These proved sufficiently powerful to work on poorly educated teenagers, if no one else.

“Shouldn’t you be worried about Syria instead?” asked Tony, which is a bit like a burglar claiming he shouldn’t be arrested because there’s so much other evil in the world.

Then came the clincher: “But don’t you agree that Saddam was a brutal dictator and he needed to be removed?” The youngster replied “Not by an illegal war,” which isn’t an answer I would have given. He should have said that the second part of the question is an utter non sequitur.

Of course Saddam was a brutal dictator, but from this it doesn’t follow that he should have been removed by foreign powers. Said powers should only unseat foreign governments in their own national interests – otherwise the world would be turned into an incessantly bubbling cauldron full of blood.

Neocons, American and alas now also ours, are driven by their Trotskyist DNA to seek a permanent armed conflict, preferably a global one. The slogan they inscribe on their banners isn’t ‘revolution’, which their spiritual father favoured, but ‘democracy’, yet the animus is exactly the same temperamentally.

For at least a couple of decades neocons have been exerting a strong influence on US foreign policy, to which our spivs habitually play poodle. The war in question is a direct result.

Our Tone, to do him justice, lacks even such petty and asinine convictions. He desperately craves only two things: power first and money derivatively. And he knows that usually only wartime leaders go down in history as ‘great’.

Churchill, who incidentally extolled Hitler as ‘a strong leader’ in early 1934, was a vacillating and often unsound peacetime politician. But because he did well as an inspirational wartime PM, Churchill now enjoys a sterling posthumous reputation.

In that vein, Tony was clearly hoping that his valiant attempt to reduce Britain to third-world status would be written off by successful martial exploits. That hundreds of thousands were to die in the process wasn’t a minor consideration for him. It was no consideration at all.

That makes the next question he asked the arresting youngster so particularly emetic: “Don’t you know how many people died in the ‘80s?” Quite a few, would be my guess. Which was of course an excellent reason to kill many more, by orders of magnitude, in the 2000s.

I do hope one day Tony will be arrested for real and spend some serious time in prison. The pleasure one would derive from this would be purely aesthetic, for we’re only ever likely to have similar nonentities at the helm.

Still, don’t knock aesthetic pleasure. It’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

 

 

 

 

America’s third-largest retail company, Target Corp, suffered a virus attack on its POS (point-of sale) system at Christmas.

The intimate-most details of 110 million charge cards thereby became public property, or rather the property of criminals, most of them from Eastern Europe.

This alerted computer-security firms, and their investigation revealed that Target was only one of three national retail companies whose computers were burgled at Yuletide with hitherto unmatched virtuosity. One of them apparently is the luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group, to which I used to give some custom when in America.

The US government stepped in and classified the findings, which means I can’t share with you the names of the other companies unwittingly raising transparency to a whole new level. Still, you have to make up your own mind, but my glass-half-empty inclination would be to assume that criminals can now access my details every time I use a charge card anywhere in the world.

Also classified are the suspects in this case, or rather their names. However, some information has seeped out, and this has had a profound effect on me.

You see, some 25 years ago, when all that business with perestroika started, I was certain it would take the Russians several generations to produce enough people capable of running, or indeed operating in, a Western-style economy.

Generally speaking, I pride myself on getting most things about Russia right long before others do, but in this case – you can’t imagine how it pains me to admit this – I was wrong.

The Russians have learned how to operate on the margins of Western economies in record time, turning their country into the greatest crime syndicate in the West’s history. There’s nothing we can teach them any longer about money laundering, racketeering, drug trade, prostitution rings – and cyber crime.

Here’s another admission: even though I’ve spent most of my adult life in the West and therefore don’t consider myself a Russian, the current debacle made me feel a twinge of residual pride for the country of my birth.

For there are strong indications that the devilishly elaborate virus software was designed in Russia. Dubbed KARTOKHA (‘spud’ in Russian) by hackers, the virus first appeared on the black market last spring, showing traces of the Russian language all over the place, particularly in the comments accompanying the programme.

According to the cyber-security company iSight, the ‘spud’ attack on Christmas sales is “unique”. “The intrusion operators displayed innovation and a high degree of skill,” the company’s desiccated report says. Professional appreciation touched with envy shines through, especially in their praise for the near invisibility of the programme.

This is due in part to the programme’s unique feature: unlike other such viruses that all operate around the clock, ‘spud’ is active only during the prime shopping hours between 10 am and 5 pm. 

The Target hacking worked as a double whammy. First, the firm’s card payment devices were infected with the virus, which made them transfer all data on Target’s own servers. Then the hackers breached the servers’ firewall and collected the stolen data.

Another security company, IntelCrawler, went further in its investigation. Apparently the virus was designed by a 17-year-old denizen of Petersburg. Now that’s what I call precocious: the youngster isn’t just a computer genius but also a smart business operator.

The tyke has sold more than 60 versions of the virus on the black market and, though according to IntelCrawler his name is “well-known to experts”, presumably including the police, he hasn’t yet been arrested.

Part of the reason is that the lad isn’t greedy: he flogs his software but doesn’t use it himself, even though he must be sorely tempted. Then of course, with a perspicacity amazing in one so young, he has probably learned how to keep Russian authorities sweet by sharing some of his ill-gotten gains.

(Back in the USSR the West was described as a place where ‘everything can be sold and bought’. Replace ‘everything’ with ‘everyone’, and you’ll have an accurate idea of Russia today.)

I don’t know if this bit of news will make you take scissors to your charge cards. Probably not – our purchasing habits are now too ingrained to abandon altogether.

But if you’re planning to visit Russia in the near future, perhaps to find out how it’s possible to stage cross-country skiing events in subtropical Sochi, it may be a good idea to take a large amount in cash.

That is unless you’re prepared for the good news of a monthly statement listing a few thousand’s worth of goods you never bought. If the brand names are in Russian, you’ll know what’s what.

 

My new book How the Future Worked is available from www.roperpenberthy.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk and the more discerning bookshops.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Have you noticed how our newspapers are full of sex stories? Some involve celebrities, but at a pinch anyone will do.

One can understand the tabloids – this is after all their stock in trade. But our broadsheets do their bit too, especially on a slow news day.

For the last couple of days they’ve been filled with lurid accounts of a universally known actor (whose name I’d never heard until the naughty stories came out) being tried for twice raping an innocent 15-year-old girl who didn’t know where babies come from.

Presumably she has learned by now, for the alleged offences took place 50 years ago. Now in her sixties, the erstwhile 15-year-old is understandably hazy about the details, such as whether or not she was indeed 15 at the time.

Apparently she went to the actor’s house to get his autograph, but got raped instead. The thespian, according to her, used no coercion, verbal or physical, so we’re really talking about statutory rape, defined as unlawful sex with a minor.

Anyway, the young lady was given a material lesson in birds and bees, which apparently she didn’t learn well. For several months later she went to the actor’s house again – with the same lamentable result.

This makes the victim so dim-witted that I wonder if the jury will see her as a reliable witness. Given the obvious fact that no forensic evidence has survived the intervening half-century, one wonders why the CPO saw fit to bring the case to trial at all. One also wonders what makes this utterly uninteresting story such big news.

Even assuming that most people are better than me at staying abreast of popular culture (now there’s an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one) and therefore know who the alleged offender is, at best this should warrant half an inch on Page 57. But I did say it was a slow news day.

Then hardly an issue comes out without yet more earth-shattering news about a female teacher in her mid-twenties having her wicked way with a schoolboy of 16 or 17, thereby traumatising him for life. Please spare me.

It’s only one man’s experience, but a zillion years ago I too was 16 or 17. Most of my energy in those days was spent on desperately, and as a rule unsuccessfully, trying to fulfil assorted sexual fantasies.

Women teachers figured prominently in those – as they do, I’d suggest at the risk of being accused of generalising, for most straight boys that age. Once or twice I tried to make a tentative pass at a teacher, only to be rebuked with richly deserved contempt.

Now, indulging in a bit of retrospective fantasy, had one of my advances succeeded, I would have been ecstatic, grateful, proud, self-congratulatory, elated – choose your own adjective. One thing I absolutely guarantee I wouldn’t have been is traumatised.

It’s hard to believe that today’s teenagers, who are much more savvy and precocious in such matters than I was at their age, will forever bear emotional scars after doing a pretty and, to them, sophisticated 25-year-old woman in the back of her car. More likely they’ll remember her with warmth and gratitude for the rest of their lives.

I’m not suggesting that a grown-up in a position of authority shouldn’t be punished for doing something unethical or illegal. But the severity of punishment ought to be commensurate with the crime, and surely any just jurisprudence must distinguish between malum prohibitum and malum in se.

The latter, such as murder or theft, is a transgression going against higher law; the former, such as driving after a couple of glasses of wine, contravenes only made-up, what Aristotle called positive, laws, not all of which are just.

So why are testosterone-drunk youngsters encouraged to report on girls only a few years older than they are, those whose favours they’ve enjoyed? Why do school boards bar those girls for life and why does the CPO often charge them with felony?

Why do our broadsheets, to say nothing of tabloids, cover such cases at inordinate length and with obvious approval of any draconian punishment? Do the hacks, many of them young men themselves, seriously think that those teenagers suffered serious trauma?

There’s a one-word answer to all these questions: modernity. Specifically the post-Enlightenment modernity that has to proceed from Rousseau’s assumption that we’re all born perfect.

If most of us demonstrably don’t grow up perfect, it’s somebody else’s fault: our parents’, our schools’, capitalism’s, socialism’s, society’s, the climate’s – choose your own culprit.

This puny mindset naturally encourages seeing everyone as a potential victim, which in turn intensifies a search for perpetrators.

Youngsters are reared in that poisonous atmosphere and, being impressionable, inhale it with their lungs wide open. Victimhood is top of the mind, which naturally makes it top news.

This is illogically and hypocritically combined with the blanket sexualisation of education, mass communications and society at large. Children are implicitly invited to plunge headlong into a life of sexual activity, and yet they’re somehow told to see themselves as victims when their paramours are older than they are.

Boys and girls acquire sexual experience at an age when in the past they still used to play, respectively, with trains and dolls. Then those same boys and girls, now a few years older, go to teachers’ training colleges and consequently find themselves surrounded with attractive, adoring and eager teenagers in their care.

Expecting them to remain prim under such circumstances is presuming too much on human goodness, à la Rousseau. So by all means, they should be reprimanded. But treating them as criminals is hypocrisy at its most soaring.

The more capable of those boys and girls – who were nonetheless brought up in exactly the same environment – eschew teaching for journalism. In due course they get to decide what stories are big news and how they should be covered.

The culture of victimhood thus gets a steady influx of fresh blood, while a similarly educated public gets its prurient instincts properly satisfied. The circle becomes truly vicious and it’s society that falls victim, not those randy teenagers.

 

My new book How the Future Worked is available from www.roperpenberthy.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk and the more discerning bookshops.

I’ve been spending much time in France for 14 years now but I still can’t figure out French voters.

They elected my friend François, presumably because they like his promised policies. We’ll leave aside the question of how anyone with an IQ above room temperature (centigrade) could possibly fail to see that the policies were asinine and subversive. That’s not the point.

The point is that, as president, François proceeded to do exactly as he had promised – with entirely predictable results. The French economy is rapidly descending to the level of England’s c. 1975.

One would think the French should be happy: they’ve got what they voted for. “Tu l’as voulu, Georges Dandin,” as Molière wrote, which can be loosely translated as “You’ve made your bed, you lie in it.”

Yet against all logic the French turned against pauvre François within weeks into his presidency. His popularity rating instantly dropped way below Pierre Laval’s after his execution for treason, or so it seems.

But you have to hand it to François – he has found a way to fight, or rather shag, his way out of trouble. Defying logic yet again, the current scandal has actually made him more popular, or rather less unpopular. Not by much, but still.

If before one had to question the intelligence of French voters, now one has to doubt their taste. For, rather than being a slightly naughty but piquant ménage à trois, the whole affair is but a sleazy reminder of what’s wrong with French, or more broadly Western, modernity.

First, the very presence of Valerie Trierweiler as First Lady is obscene. French media unkindly refer to Valerie as the Rottweiller, in homophonic reference either to her aggressive nature or to her amorous preferences, I’m not sure which.

Yet no one had ever questioned her status, or indeed the €1,000,000 she costs French taxpayers every year, until my friend François played away from home. This shows what 100-odd years of laïcité has done: the French no longer perceive any valid difference between marriage and cohabitation.

No wonder that 56 percent of French children are born out of wedlock: family can now be defined in any which way, usually to exclude the father. A fine achievement, that, but the French shouldn’t rest on their laurels: we’re catching up with them fast.

It has to be said that François has made his own modest contribution to this statistic: he produced four children in 30 years with his fellow socialist Ségolène Royale, without ever popping the question.

Enough is enough, decided François after Ségolène failed in her own bid for the presidency. Out went the loser, in came the Rottweiler who, upon François’s ascent to the Elysée, became more royal than Royale.

Now François co-stars in the tasteless spectacle being played out before a drooling public, although the Rottweiller has managed to upstage him.

When she allegedly found out about his affair with the actress Julie Gayet, that is after the rag Closer blew the whistle on it, the Rottweiller took a finely judged overdose of pills, enough to put her into hospital but not enough to do much harm.

It’s true that the wife, or in this instance the mistress, is always the last to find out, but this is ridiculous. Le tout Paris has known about this affair since it began in 2011, before François’s electoral triumph.

I knew about it, and God knows even London gossip usually passes me by. In this instance, I found out a few months ago from a friend who owns an exclusive Paris shop patronised by all the president’s women.

I can bet my house against your pint that the Rottweiler, who’s friends with every gossip journalist in France, knew about the hanky-panky from the word aller.

She clearly didn’t mind – for as long as she continued to receive that million’s worth of perks and have her picture taken with heads of state. It’s only after the exposure threatened her unwarranted status that the Rottweiler decided to make a last stand.

François, on the other hand, has demonstrated yet again what we already know: our ‘leaders’ everywhere act as if they’re above all considerations of taste, decency or indeed legality. They lie through their teeth to us, so why not to their women? At least those in Anglophone countries are usually more discreet.

A couple of American presidents were involved in sex scandals too. But they were never photographed sneaking around Pennsylvania Avenue wearing an oversized motorcycle helmet and riding a Vespa.

Their girls were delivered to them, suitably camouflaged, at the White House and then ushered out post-coitally. When the news of such dalliances broke, the presidents looked immoral but never ridiculous. By contrast, François, the unlikely penile jockey, comes across as an unfunny dirty joke.

Meanwhile the new First Squeeze Julie Gayet went into hiding, content to be appearing on the cover of Elle magazine above the headline Une passion française. To keep herself in the news during her widely publicised absence, she has sued Closer for breach of privacy.

This seems like a logical thing to do, but the amount Julie wishes to claim in damages is suspiciously low: €50,000. What happened to those seven-figure tort suits for which modernity is so justly famous?

Well, you see, €50,000 is a small enough claim to be settled quietly. Had Julie demanded her seven figures, the case would have gone to court and all sorts of interesting details would have come out.

Even in a permissive France that would have spelled the end of François’s tenure, and there would have been no point in supplanting the Rottweiler (somehow one doubts that Julie’s love is wholly disinterested). Smart girl, Julie, which is further proved by the judiciously leaked rumours of her pregnancy.

Seems like François is about to boost the statistic of illegitimate births, which is easier to do than making those economic indicators curve upwards for a change.

What a sorry lot politicians are. What a sorry time we live in. Alas, we’re powerless to change either.

 

My new book How the Future Worked is available from www.roperpenberthy.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk and the more discerning bookshops.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to Robert Gates, America’s former defence secretary, Britain no longer has ‘full-spectrum military capabilities’.

In other words, we’re strictly second rate in military muscle, which doesn’t sound all that bad. Second-rate would be a shining ideal for our third-rate healthcare and fourth-rate education.

So in a way Gates was paying us a compliment. Your military strength, he implied, far outpaces your capacity for treating cancer or teaching children how to read and add up.

One would expect that Dave would smile and say, “Thank you, Mr Gates. Yes, we’re cutting our army to a risible strength of 82,000, while the Royal Navy is losing 6,000 men and the RAF 5,000. But the military remains the only public service we provide with any kind of competence. And anyway, as I say to Sam, it’s not the size that counts.”

However, for some inexplicable reason Dave & Co. decided to take offence. Predictably, they came out fighting with their favourite weapons: empty phrases and statistical larceny.

“We are a first-class player in terms of defence,” said Dave, “and as long as I am Prime Minister that is the way it will stay.” Re-elect me, in other words, and Britain won’t disband her military forces altogether. We’ll always have the TA to rely on.

Politicking out of the way, it fell upon our former Defence Secretary Liam Fox to fill in the blanks with technical detail. Mr Fox left the front bench under ever so slightly murky circumstances and he’s waging a full-blown campaign to return on the back of his technical expertise.

“We’d be able to carry out an enduring stabilisation operation at brigade level – that’s about 6,500 personnel – while conducting a complex non-enduring one of about 2,000 personnel plus a simple one at the same time,” he reassured the nay-saying Yank.

Sounds good and appropriately informed. Even those of us who don’t know the difference between enduring and non-enduring will be impressed by the terminology. That is, until we recall that we had 23,000 soldiers at Waterloo, which is almost three times more than Fox says we can field at the same time now (that’s assuming he’s not playing fast and loose with numbers, never a safe assumption with politicians).

“We’re one of only four or five countries inside Nato to meet our 2 per cent GDP spend commitment. So I don’t think we can be questioned on that,” continued Mr Fox.

True enough, we spend £6 billion a year more than, say, France does. Nevertheless, France has a bigger navy than we do – and an operational aircraft carrier, which we no longer possess. This means that not only would we be unable to match our numerical strength at Waterloo but, closer to our own times and technologies, neither would we be able to launch an equivalent of the South Atlantic operation of just over 30 years ago.

Not only that, but France’s armed forces have 72,000 more personnel, 51 more jets and 2,000 more armoured vehicles. This suggests that a revolution in military thought is under way: the less a country spends on defence, the stronger it becomes.

Taking this discovery to its logical extreme, it should give Dave food for thought: perhaps if we eliminated the defence budget altogether, we’d become much stronger, possibly even to the point of being able to afford a carrier or two.

Then there’s an outside chance we’ll be able to restore the naval status quo in relation to France, whose navy until recently had never been a match for ours since 1805. You know, one of those dates our children no longer learn at school.

The children’s time can be more profitably spent on learning how to use condoms in variously inventive positions, and we know how important that is for the future strength of our country. Meanwhile, the money saved from the defence budget could find better uses too.

Dave and his jolly friends from all political parties aspiring to government could use it to bribe more voters into voting the right way. We could build up our dependent underclass, pay more benefits to Romanian pickpockets and Bulgarian beggars, send more foreign aid to African billionaires, hire more administrators for the NHS, make greater contributions to the EU, conduct more studies on the use of condoms in elementary schools… Why, the possibilities are endless.

Of course such ambitious goals couldn’t be met simply by eliminating the defence budget. We’d still need to print more cash and dip even deeper into the money markets.

But at least nobody would be able to moan, as some unreconstructed reactionaries still do, that the cost of servicing our existing national debt is already greater than our defence budget.

Spend nothing on defence, and this problem will solve itself. Dave will be walking tall, reactionary fossils will have to shut up and Robert Gates will be happy with our growing military strength. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

 

My new book How the Future Worked is available from www.roperpenberthy.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk and the more discerning bookshops.

 

 

 

 

 

 

You have to hand it to our politicians: they’ve raised dissembling to such a dizzying height that any normal person would get nauseous vertigo.

Today our Chancellor will deliver a virtuoso performance to do any conjurer proud. He’ll pretend to stand in judgment of the EU while lying prostrate at its feet.

(Knowing what he’ll say doesn’t make me clairvoyant. It’s just that in the good, if rather recent, tradition of our politics, the text of the speech has been leaked. Our ‘leaders’ have to know in advance which of their heart-felt, immutable principles they must change to make them more palatable to more voters.)  

If you haven’t been following British politics closely, I congratulate you. But such laudable detachment means you must be brought up to date on the context of the speech. After all, in modern political oratory it’s the context, not the text, that matters.

In this instance the Tories are heading for yet another chasmic rift over Europe. Much of the parliamentary party detests the EU, and even some cabinet members make decidedly anti noises.

Under normal circumstances a bit of internecine jousting could be absorbed, but next year’s election makes the circumstances far from normal. It’s already predicted that the presence of an anti-EU UKIP will cost the Tories 50 parliamentary seats. Another internal squabble could easily double that number – with the inevitable result of Dave and George retiring to the dinner-speech circuit.

As such a calamity has to be averted at all costs, D&G must play both ends against the middle.

On the one hand they have to mollify some of their own voters and most of Labour’s and LibDems’ by screaming love for the EU. On the other hand they must reassure potential UKIP voters that they hate the EU. This of course runs the risk of D&G coming across as the unprincipled spivs they actually are – and speech circuit, here we come.

Aware of the dangers, Dave has been indulging in footwork to put a tap dancer to shame. Don’t worry, he has been saying. Elect me and George again, and we’ll hold a referendum on Europe. Of course if you don’t, no dice. It’s up to you.

Meanwhile, don’t listen to those UKIP Little Englanders. We – you! – don’t want to leave the EU. If we do, Nigel Farage will be the only Brit left with a job. The rest of us, those who aren’t doing the speech circuit, will be queuing up at soup kitchens.

What we want isn’t to leave the EU but to reform it. We want all those federasts to abandon their principles as readily as we abandoned ours years ago, when we were still pissing it up at the Bullingdon.

We want them to grant us enough autonomy to please those UKIP nutters. We want them to let us pass some of our own laws – not many, but some. Perhaps they could also find it in their heart not to destroy every European economy with miles of red tape wound up around the idiotic single currency. And in an especially kind mood they could also let us keep a few – very, very few – Romanian pickpockets out.

In other words, D&G want, or rather pretend to want, the leopard not just to change its spots but to stop being a leopard. They feign confidence that an organisation set up with the explicit purpose of concentrating all power in the hands of utterly corrupt ex-Trotskyists will suddenly embrace moral goodness.

Oh they do know this isn’t going to happen. They’re just begging the EU to play along long enough and with sufficient verisimilitude for D&G to win in 2015. After that, let all hell break loose, see if they care. Thus in every speech D&G deliver on the subject they only sound like critics. In fact they’re supplicants.

This brings us back to George’s speech today. He’ll start by laying some numbers on the listeners. The EU, he’ll say, accounts for seven percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of its economy, but – are you ready for this? – a whopping half of its welfare spending.

“We can’t go on like this,” George will say, meaning that if we do go on like this, as he knows we will, UKIP’s case will become strong enough to put D&G on the speech circuit.

Every fourth person in the EU is out of work, George will continue, and why is that? Because of its “failure to reform and renegotiate”, that is to pretend to reform while pretending to renegotiate with enough conviction for D&G to stay in that Downing Street terrace for a little longer.

“Over the last six years, the European economy has stalled,” George will thunder. “Over the next 15 years Europe’s share of global output is forecast to halve. Make no mistake, our continent is falling behind.”

A highly credible prognosis, I’d say. And one that’s guaranteed to be fulfilled, for the EU is no more about competitive economies than the USSR was. It’s about political domination, just like the USSR.

If some countries within the EU can rely on their own resources to keep their economic heads above the general morass, fine. If not, that’s fine too – as long as the EU’s raison d’être isn’t threatened.

The only sensible solution for Britain would be to get out immediately, without the benefit of plebiscite, leaving the EU to its own vices and devices.

Rather than munching on that old chestnut about ‘reforming and renegotiating’, that’s what George should be saying today, and if our electorate has been sufficiently corrupted to recoil in horror, then so be it.

Don’t call for the men in white coats. I know how insane it sounds, this suggestion that our politicians should stand on principle. Or indeed have one.

 

My new book How the Future Worked is available from www.roperpenberthy.co.uk, Amazon.co.uk and the more discerning bookshops.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A strong case can be made that our last four prime ministers have been the worst Britain has ever been cursed with.

Yet there’s no limit to perfection and Ed Miliband, given the chance, has a good shot at outdoing them all. His Mili-mouthed Telegraph article shows he’s already anybody’s match in mendacious cynicism, and that’s no mean accomplishment considering the stiff competition he faces from Tony and Dave.

The article’s title alone is enough to secure Ed’s leadership in the cynicism stakes: Only Labour Can Rebuild Our Middle Class.

The whole raison d’être of the Labour party is… well, I don’t know what that might be. Personally, I see no reason for it to exist at all, but I realise that others might come up with one.

Yet whatever it is, every policy Labour has ever advocated when in opposition or enacted when in power has been aimed at destroying the social, economic, cultural, moral, spiritual and religious foundations of the middle class.

This isn’t really a party-based observation: destruction has been wrought not specifically by Labour policies but by socialist ones, and Dave for one shows that Labour’s patent to subversive ideology has lost its exclusivity.

However, the patent was first issued to Labour, the party that, unlike the Tories, has never in its history deviated from the socialist course. Much of it was charted by Marx who was fanatically dedicated to wiping out the ‘bourgeois’ (middle) class.

As has been amply demonstrated in every place where Marx’s theories have been tried in practice, the middle classes can only be destroyed at a terrible cost to the whole society. This includes total enslavement complete with judicial murders, democide, genocide and concentration camps.

This isn’t the cost Western countries are prepared to bear at the moment, so socialists (in Britain specifically Labour) have had to adapt their tactics to their political environment, which in Britain is still defined by seeking votes.

Thus, for example, rather than simply confiscating all private property in one fell swoop, the socialists surreptitiously undermine it by shifting more and more wealth into the state domain, creating a huge and growing dependent underclass, tangling up businesses in miles of red tape and extorting exorbitant, confiscatory taxes.

In the process they make sure such policies will thrive in perpetuity by saddling future generations with ruinous debts and systematically reducing people’s savings to worthless paper.

Family, that bedrock of middle-class values, has also fallen victim to socialist vandalism. The state assuming the father’s provider role for millions of families has pushed the real father into oblivion, with almost half the children in Britain being raised without him. Total, not to say totalitarian, advocacy of variously degenerate forms of sexual promiscuity unerringly works towards the same worthy goal.

Even most feeble protests against any such outrages are met with institutionalised mockery, ostracism and, increasingly, legal action. At the same time many offences covered by the Decalogue are becoming effectively decriminalised. A burglar, for example, only goes to prison, on average, after 15 known offences and about three times as many unknown ones.

To make sure that the populace meekly submits to such Milibanditry, the socialists have devised an educational system specifically and deliberately aimed at creating a nation of unthinking, illiterate lemmings ready to follow one another over the precipice. The abyss isn’t just economic: the religious, moral and spiritual bases of the traditional middle class have all fallen into the gaping hole.

Morality based on Judaeo-Christian doctrine is routinely held to ridicule, and the illiterate population doesn’t notice that every attempt to introduce a new morality instead has failed catastrophically.  

Lest the people be reminded of their nation’s history of self-sufficiency, industry and enterprise, the socialists have always, and not just in the last couple of decades, tried to yank the country off her national roots.

This glorious purpose has a two-directional vector built in: on the one hand, Labour has always promoted the eternal socialist dream of denationalising government by transferring sovereignty to an international bureaucracy (in our instance the EU); on the other hand, the party has always – self-admittedly! – pushed for diluting Britain’s nationhood with an unsupportable influx of foreign, preferably alien, immigration.

So which of these outrages does the Mili-mouthed Marxist propose to reverse in order ‘to rebuild the middle class’? Silly question.

What’s happening is that Labour’s lead in the polls has been reduced to three points, and Alistair Campbell, Blair’s strategist, has told Ed that he must shift closer to the middle ground from his customary position of proximity to Lenin and Trotsky.

To this end Ed wrote (or rather signed, would be my guess) this revolting article promising to reverse ‘the cost-of-living crisis’. A man with a modicum of decency would have owned up to his own complicity in creating this crisis in the first place, but hey – it’s politicians we’re talking about.

The Labour government in which both Eds, Miliband and Balls, served with so little distinction inherited an economy in which no such crisis existed. By way of legacy for the incoming Tory-led coalition, Labour left an economy sliding towards a collapse.

A party led by the likes of Dave Cameron could never stop the slide, but at least the Tories have marginally slowed it down. However, even if HMG were led by a composite figure comprising the best of Pericles, Palmerston and Adam Smith, no improvement at all, regardless of how marginal, could have been achieved without some diminution in the standard of living financed by the printing press.

The shambles left by Labour was too fetid to be fumigated in a few short years. And yet now not just the same party but actually the worst offenders in the same party have the gall to preach the cause of the middle class.

“The British middle class is being squeezed as never before…,” writes Ed. “The motors that once drove and sustained it are no longer firing as they used to. Access to further education and training, good quality jobs with reliable incomes, affordable housing, stable savings, secure pensions: they have all been undermined.”

Quite right. By socialists. Like Ed and other Milibandits.

Mind you, nothing about our political class surprises me anymore. I’m not even surprised that by most calculations next year’s election will be Labour’s to lose. The socialists of all parties have laid the ground work and the road to hell is being paved.  

Alas it’s not good intentions that act as the cobbles but wicked, mendacious, harebrained politicking. If de Maistre is to be believed, this is all we deserve.

In 1965 the critic Kenneth Tynan ushered in a new era by saying the ‘f’ word on television. “I doubt,” he pronounced in an interview, “if there are any rational people to whom the word ‘f***’ would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden.”

Tynan gets bottom marks for social commentary, for public opinion still frowned on public obscenity at the time. But what is a true pioneering effort if not blazing new trails?

Tynan thus gets the highest marks for self-fulfilling prophecy. As a true seer he clearly envisioned that time would arrive when various cognates of the ‘f’ word, sturdily reinforced by its cultural equivalents, would become common currency in public discourse. That time is now.

We are generously treated to prime ministers’ bonhomie of calling their cabinet colleagues ‘f***ing idlers’ – all in the best possible taste of course. And in this realm, if not always in economics, one can always rely on the trickle-down effect.

No one these days bats an eyelid when hearing 3-year-olds use the kind of language that could have got their great-grandfathers arrested. We see nothing wrong when the tots’ mothers scream at them in the same idiom on public transport. And we giggle when walking past a Chelsea Thai restaurant called ‘Phat Phuc’.

In fact, speech profusely adorned with foul language is seen as a sort of password separating friend from foe. Now largely devoid of any semantic meaning, four-letter words send a semiotic signal of kinship, an implicit Mowgli-style assurance “We be of one blood, ye and I.”

What Tynan didn’t anticipate, and we must mark him down for this lapse of prescience, is that in another generation or two lexical rectitude would be stood on its head. While obscene references to complex sexual variants elicit avuncular, indulgent smiles, perfectly common words now draw opprobrium and variously severe punishment.

Last season the footballer John Terry was banned for four games and fined £220,000 (a fortnight’s salary) for publicly calling a colleague a ‘f***ing black c***’. Of the three components of the triad, only the middle one can be used non-elliptically in a respectable publication – and yet it was this seemingly inoffensive word that got Terry into all sorts of trouble.

For he transgressed against the Eleventh Commandment that has more or less superseded at least half of the other 10: “Thou shalt not offend any member of any minority that thou art told qualifies as such.”

Had Terry simply called the other chap a ‘f***ing c***’, no one would have noticed. But sneaking the word ‘black’ into the middle bespoke racism, so off with his head.

Fair enough: we all know that any sin ending in an -ism or -phobia is of the mortal (and probably illegal) variety. Or rather we’d think we all know that – until we’re shaken out of our complacency by yet another incident. Suddenly we realise that our understanding of written and unwritten codes is lamentably incomplete.

The skies open yet again and a booming voice thunders from high above: “What you thought was unacceptable is actually fine – and (are you listening, you callous reactionary?) vice versa!”

The Newcastle manager Alan Pardew had this Damascene experience yesterday when, arguing about a disallowed goal, he called the Manchester City manager Manuel Pellegrini a ‘f***ing old c***’.

As in the Terry incident, directional microphones at the pitch obligingly put the tirade into public domain, much to an outburst of public indignation. How dare he use such language! He has no respect for decency! Throw him to the wolves!

By now you realise that what upset the public so wasn’t either of the words Pardew put on the wings. It was the one he played through the middle: ‘old’.

By using this imprudent diction Pardew forever branded himself as an inveterate sinner against new morality. His sin is another one of -ism variety: agism.

Actually, the public ought to have been more lenient, considering that Mr Pardew is only four years Mr Pellegrini’s junior. I mean, if an overweight gentleman like me calls a similarly proportioned chap a ‘big, fat c***’, then surely he’d be guilty only of boorishness, rudeness and bad taste, not the mortal sin of weightism or some such.

A penny would drop, one hopes, that every word used in such situations is desemanticised, not just those Kenneth Tynan pioneered in mass media. By all means, denounce such people as ill-mannered brutes (at times I myself qualify – mea culpa), but don’t accuse them of mythical offences against bogus morality.

The danger is very real: by exchanging old certitudes for new ones we risk abandoning the time-honoured notions of virtue and sin, and replacing them with awful caricatures. As the caricatures grow bigger and more ferocious, the may well devour our society.

Risk? Wrong word. This situation is upon us already, and isn’t it a f***ing shame?

 

My new book How the Future Worked is available on www.roperpenberthy.co.uk,  Amazon.co.uk and at the more discerning bookshops.

 

  

When I was little, my mother taught me never to say nice things about myself. Like many of her lessons this one scored high on the moral or aesthetic scale and rock bottom on the scale of useful practical advice.

These days it’s hard to get by in any field of endeavour without blowing one’s own trumpet. People have become more credulous than ever in the past; they’re prepared to accept others’ self-assessment on face value – naturally expecting that the same courtesy will be extended to them.

Thus a self-effacing lady or gentleman is unlikely to get far in life, especially in a field where few objective criteria exist. People assume that any modest person has to have a lot to be modest about. Conversely, as so many artists and musicians prove, putting on fine airs paves the road to success much more reliably than any real mastery of their art.

Alas, this is one of the very few of my mother’s commandments that I have followed (with minor and infrequent deviations). That’s why I won’t say what I think of my new book How the Future Worked (available on www.roperpenberthy.co.uk), leaving gasps of delight to others:  

“Alexander Boot explains what it is to be Russian. Reared in the hell that was Brezhnev’s paradise, he writes about his homeland with a kind of benign despair, giving so vivid a portrayal of a Soviet childhood and youth we could almost be there, while being very glad we weren’t. Entertaining and informative too.” Fay Weldon

“A brilliant evocation of life in the Soviet Union after it had settled down into its oppressive-drab phase, which will tell you more about Russia than a hundred academic volumes. Boot plunges us imaginatively into the Gogolian-Leninist Russian world as if we were there ourselves.” Dr Theodore Dalrymple

“A gripping, intelligent and masterly narrative that flows naturally while revealing the truths of Soviet and Russian life like no other memoir I’ve ever read… Boot is a superb writer.” Vitali Vitaliev

Anyway, enough of all that. Normal service on this blog resumes tomorrow.