Cycling as a (surrogate) moral statement

Yesterday’s incident in central London was simple, but its implications anything but.

Just before the lights were to turn green, an Audi edged into the cycle-only box. Law’s law and all that, but drivers hate those.

After all, we pay for the privilege of having our locomotion assisted by an internal combustion engine. The car itself is pricey, and then there are road and registration taxes, parking charges, maintenance costs and what have you.

We bear the costs for three reasons: comfort, safety and speed. Yet cyclists lining up side to side in their assigned box in front of us impose their own speed: having the power of 240 horses at our disposal, we have to get off the light at the pace of one man pushing two pedals.

Of course the cyclists could line up single file, leaving room for cars to accelerate properly. But they don’t – and didn’t before yesterday’s incident, as anyone with access to YouTube can see for himself.

One of those cyclists felt called upon to harangue the Audi driver for rolling into the box a second too early. The driver sensibly refused to engage in an argument and, when the light changed, drove on.

By now the cyclist was overcome with righteous wrath. He pursued the car at an Olympic-calibre speed and caught up with it at the next light. There he called the driver a ‘f****** p****’ and a few other things that these days roll off the tongue so naturally.

In response, the Audi’s passenger jumped out and hit the thug with a left hook, knocking him off both his bike and his moral perch. So far the cycling ruffian hasn’t reported the incident to the police, but do-gooders all over the country are urging him to do so. For my part, I have a few questions and observations.

First, what recourse do we have against being publicly insulted? The answer is none, unless sex-based epithets are interspersed with chromatic adjectives. Someone calls you a f****** p****, and you’re supposed to grin and bear it.

Things like dignity and honour have fallen by the wayside, as have any legal means of protecting them. This is part of the general transsexual programme in which we all must participate: men can’t act like men any longer but women must.

What gives cyclists the right to be so sanctimoniously self-righteous? After all, they don’t bear any of the costs I mentioned earlier. Who told them they can claim high moral ground?

Suddenly the context overrides the text. For cyclists have been told either explicitly or through the emanations of Zeitgeist that operating a vehicle consuming hydrocarbons isn’t just expensive but also immoral.

Yet having consulted my Exodus and Matthew 5-7, which laid down the moral law on which our civilisation is based, I found no proscription against Audis. Nowhere does it say, “Thou shalt love thy bicycle and hate cars with all thy heart, for verily they are the work of the devil.”

The problem arises from the obvious fact that modern morality is no longer based on Exodus and Matthew 5-7. They have been taken out of circulation, to loud cheers.

The cheerers didn’t notice at the time that a giant hole appeared in the social fabric and, unless the hole was filled, it would spread and there would be no fabric left.

Since then every hater of the book containing Exodus and Matthew 5-7, and the group isn’t just large but dominant, has tried to offer various new moralities. Yet each time a new morality was tested, the test turned out to be destructive.

We’re in the midst of another new morality being shoved down our throats. Since morals based on the truth have been rejected, this newfangled code is based on boldfaced lies – and only on boldfaced lies.

Such as: using private medicine or sending children to private schools is immoral; it’s immoral for financial institutions to generate profits; legally keeping some of our money from state extortion is immoral; it’s moral to use welfare to create a sociopathic dependent class; suggesting that man-made global warming is based on shockingly bad (and often falsified) evidence is immoral; it’s immoral to point out that there’s anything wrong with homomarriage – and so on, ad nauseam.

Every one of those surrogate commandments rests on either a cynical or ignorant, but in either case flagrant, lie. One such lie is that only energy produced by water, wind or our muscles is morally acceptable, even if other types regrettably have to be tolerated.

In other words, in order to vindicate its own mendacious morality, modernity is decrying its sole claim to legitimacy: scientific and technological progress. This is yet another clash of pieties that a fossilised reactionary like me takes so much delight in lampooning.

A small example: if you had a ruptured appendix, would you like to be taken to hospital by a) a bicycle or b) an IC-driven ambulance? The point is that the whole material progress, so dear to the hearts of those who are only capable of thinking in material categories, was fuelled by hydrocarbons. When all energy was renewable, life wasn’t always nasty and brutish, but it was almost always short.

So far the only viable alternative to hydrocarbons is nuclear energy, which is by far the safest source and also one that can claim the moral ascendancy of being carbon-free. But nuclear runs headlong into another self-refuting moral law of modernity: though hydrocarbons are wrong, any other than antediluvian alternatives to them are even more so.

I doubt the feral cyclist involved in yesterday’s conflict has ever formulated a coherent moral code to live by. It’s a simple physiological fact that most people are incapable of thinking for themselves – they act like lemmings following one another towards the precipice.

But while impervious to reason, modern barbarians are sensitive to the vibes of Zeitgeist. Hence their nauseating self-righteousness – the blighters think they’re moral, but in fact they’re only moralising.

 

 

 

 

Is Denis Healey whispering in Ed Balls’s ear?

Elect the Milibandits in 2015, and by the end of their term they’ll clear Britain’s deficit, promised Ed Balls. Then we’ll begin to reduce our national debt.

“Without fiscal discipline and a credible commitment to eliminate the deficit,” explained Ed, “we cannot achieve the stability we need.”

Few will argue. Some, however, will doubt that such commendable goals can be achieved by any government led by our two fast Eddies, Balls and Miliband. Their CV gives little grounds for optimism.

Just imagine a company interviewing an applicant for the CEO job.

“What do you see as the highlights of your career, Mr Smith?”

“Well, I successfully drove my previous employer into bankruptcy.”

“Really? This sounds interesting. How did you achieve that?”

“It wasn’t easy but I was perfectly qualified for the task. At first I made sure that the firm’s outlays consistently and increasingly exceeded its income…”

“As simple as that?”

“Not quite. I also doubled the staff by adding unnecessary jobs, paying my employees way over the odds. And I allowed many of them not to come to work at all while still getting paid.”

“And the board went along?”

“They wouldn’t have of course, had they known. But I hired some capable youngsters to cook the books, at the same time planting glowing reviews of the company in the trade press. The board members didn’t bother to do any checking of their own, and after a few years the company was well and truly… well, on the rocks.”

“Excellent! You’re just the man we’re looking for!”

If you think this is a somewhat unlikely scenario, marvel at modern politics. For Ed Balls and Ed Miliband both had major economic posts in the previous Labour government (Treasury Economic Secretary and Secretary for Energy respectively).

Hence they had key roles to play in using public finances for party political purposes, bribing the electorate with unprecedented handouts, using extortionist taxation to destroy as much enterprise as possible, borrowing and printing money with criminal irresponsibility, running insane deficits, driving the national debt over £16 trillion, straining public services to breaking point by opening Britain’s borders to millions of potential Labour voters, inviting (and religiously complying with) miles of EU red tape and complementing those outrages with epic mismanagement.

Yet their victory in the next election isn’t just possible, but likely. What does this say about our present government? The Tory party? The electorate?

Leaving such sweeping questions aside for the moment, let’s ask an easier one: “And how do you propose to balance the books, Ed, considering your personal record and your party’s general outlook on life?”

It would be irresponsible, answered Ed with the swiftness of a used-car salesman, “to make detailed commitments and difficult judgments about what will happen in two or three years’ time.”

Yes, but can you give us a teeny-weeny whiff of your plans?

Well, if you insist. We’ll raise the top tax rate to 50 percent to reduce the deficit “more fairly” and in general follow the route charted by Denis Healey who in 1973 promised to “squeeze the rich until the pips squeak.”

The rest of the Milibandits’ economics remains unsaid, but what Ed has already revealed is enough. They’re going to do all the same things they’ve always done, causing the same economic catastrophe they’ve always caused.

That’s fine with all factions of the Labour party, including the Blairites. By all means, they say, do all those things when elected. But for Tony’s sake don’t talk that way before you’re elected. Are you insane? Talk like Adam Smith to get in, then start acting like Vladimir Lenin – isn’t that the proven model?

“The whole point of New Labour,” explained one prominent Blairite, “was it showed you could help the poor and wealth creators at the same time.”

It didn’t. It promised it would and afterwards claimed it did. In between New Labour did exactly the same thing socialists always do: it destroyed the economy first and Britain’s social fabric second.

The same Blairite complained that, “The trouble is they [the Milibandits] are economically illiterate and have no understanding of business or profits.”

That’s not what he meant. The trouble, according to the Blairites, is that the Milibandits don’t know how to conceal their economic illiteracy. Haven’t they learned anything from Tony? Talk Smith, act Lenin – that’s the trick.

That Labour remains Labour is really no surprise. A leopard can jump through circus hoops and stand on its hind legs, yet it can’t change its spots. But how can the electorate go along with that evil nonsense to a point where the Milibandits are consistently leading in the polls?

That, I’m afraid, isn’t surprising either. The nation has been thoroughly corrupted by socialism, as perpetrated by all three parliamentary parties. At the heart of this pernicious philosophy lies an appeal to envy and concomitant hatred of hard-earned economic success.

The argument that attacking enterprise is tantamount to cutting off your nose to spite your face is sound, but it doesn’t work. The British no longer mind suffering as long as they can be sure that some, preferably the squeezed ‘rich’, will suffer more.

That’s why no government – and certainly not Labour – will ever do what any sound economist knows has to be done: gradually eliminating the welfare state, drastically reducing taxation, providing incentives for investment and enterprise, banning deficit spending in peacetime, reducing the size and power of the state.

But socialism, whoever preaches and practises it, isn’t about sound economics or indeed reason in general. It’s about activating people’s most shameful and destructive instincts, bribing and cajoling them into committing deadly sins.

At least Tory leaders have to mitigate their wickedness to some extent – there’s still some residual grassroots pressure left, something Labour leaders don’t feel. Dave and George may be evil, but they’re marginally the lesser evil.

If we fail to realise this by 2015, it’ll be Balls to us all. 

Bait rottweilers at your own peril

William Shakespeare invented 1,700 words now in common use, which is more than an average Englishman uses or, if comprehensively educated, even knows (yes, there must be exceptions, thanks for reminding me).

Not only that, but the Bard contributed enough aphorisms to the language to justify one wit’s quip: “What I hate about Shakespeare’s plays is that they’re so full of clichés.”

Yet Shakespeare didn’t fill the whole Thesaurus of Quotations, just much of it.

One of the most quoted, and often misquoted, adages in the English language comes from another William, Congreave, who lived 100 years after Shakespeare. He too knew a thing or two about human nature, to wit:

“Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d,// Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.”

I can testify to the veracity of this observation, for it’s amply supported by my personal experience. In my impetuous and, alas, dissipated youth I scorned a woman or two, finding myself on the receiving end of their ensuing fury.

One long sufferer credibly threatened to smash my skull with a flatiron when I fell asleep, giving me chronic insomnia as a result. Another threw a kitchen knife at me with the accuracy of a circus performer, but mercifully without the power (the knife didn’t penetrate my back deeper than half an inch or so). Yet another victim of my beastliness punched me in the face in a crowded street and, when we got home, smashed a stack of plates.

All this is par for the course, and many a formerly dissipated man can recount similar episodes. But few can match François Hollande’s story of woe (Shakespeare is today’s leitmotif, in case you haven’t noticed).

For his ‘woman scorned’, Valérie Trierweiler, directed her wrath not at my friend François’s person but at his office, which she, not to cut too fine a point, trashed. In the process she destroyed, along with other national treasures, a Sèvres vase that belonged to Louis XVI. The overall damage is estimated at €3,000,000, but it’ll cost less to François than those broken plates once cost me.

You see, I pay for my own plates, but François doesn’t these days pay for his Sèvres vases that belonged to Louis XVI. Nor are they his own – they belong to the nation. François has no more claim to them than you or I would have to the furniture and fixtures at a hotel where we spend a couple of days.

Valérie, affectionately known as ‘Rottweiler’, possibly because of her sexual preferences (I’m guessing here), has even less of a claim. In fact, in her capacity as François’s mistress, she has none at all.

One would think that in this instance French law would apply the principle first enunciated by some retail outfits: “You break it, you’ve bought it.” Sounds reasonable that the baited Rottweiler should pay for the damage, or alternatively (perhaps additionally) go to prison for gross vandalism.

That’s what would happen to anyone who tore down a suite at, say, Georges V, wouldn’t it? I can’t for the life of me see any legal or moral difference between that and what the Rottweiler did at the Élysée Palace. Surely it’s the same law for everyone, isn’t?

Silly me. Of course it isn’t. François and his assorted concubines have been touched by the neo-divine hand of the state. This gives them the dispensation to do as they please, treating the law as at best a statement of intent.

They are part of the new untouchables, the ruling elite that lives according to its own laws, not those of the nation. Certain of their impunity, they expect to get away with anything short of murder – and les mauvaises langues hint that, say, Mitterand may have got away even with that.

France can’t claim exclusive rights to that sort of thing. Hardly a month goes by without one of our politicians being caught in a scandal of a sexual, fiscal, political or simply criminal nature (for example, attacking people physically).

Most of the time they get away with it, occasionally they don’t, but what really matters is that they fully expect to go unpunished. They too have been anointed by the God of State Power, and he’s a merciful deity when it comes to the denizens of his Olympus.

The story of the Rottweiler attack on national treasures was broken by Closer magazine. It’s the same publication that had earlier divulged that François was a naughty boy, thereby baiting the Rottweiler into baring her fangs. (The magazine’s previous scoop was publishing photographs proving that Prince William has an impeccable taste in women.)

The Élysée Palace denied the story, but none of my French friends, some of whom revolve in government circles, doubt it for a second. Yet none of them has suggested that the vandal ought to be prosecuted. The thought simply doesn’t cross their minds.

Trying to picture the trashed office, one recalls another Shakespearean story, this one dating back to the Victorian era.

The visiting French actress Sarah Bernhardt delivered a bravura performance in Antony and Cleopatra. In the last scene she tore down the whole palace and rolled all over the debris in paroxysms of rage.

On the way out of the theatre, an elderly lady was overheard saying to her companion, “How different, how very different from the home life of our dear Queen.” Quite.

 

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

 

 

Multiculturalism watch: seems like there’s more work to be done yet

Repeat after me, so I can hear you:

Our culture is no better than any other, just different. Louder! It’s no better! Just different! And, when all is said and done, not that different either!

Good. But now that we’ve added our voices to the received mantra, let’s consider just how different.

For example, do you agree there ought to be a law banning young women from going out with men from another village? And that any transgressor must be sentenced to be gang-raped half to death?

If you don’t, you haven’t grasped the full meaning of multiculturalism. You should be sent to West Bengal to complete your education.

There, in a village just a few miles from the birthplace of the great humanist Rabindranath Tagore, a 20-year-old woman was tried by a kangaroo court for having an affair with a man outside her own community (and its religion).

By way of an improvised dock, both she and the man were tied to posts sticking out of an elevated bamboo platform. The judicial process was swift, none of that adversarial nonsense complete with dithering juries or loud-mouthed barristers.

At first the transgressor was sentenced to a fine, just £490 in our currency. Yet neither she nor her family could cough up that princely sum, which represents a fortune in that nuclear power capable of launching satellites into space. (Obviously we must urgently up our foreign aid, but that’s another story.)

The elders discussed the situation and, being sage men well-versed in the intricacies of tribal law, came up with an alternative punishment. The woman was to be gang-raped by all comers.

The verdict was hailed as just by all villagers, except perhaps the defendant’s family. They begged for a night’s reprieve, so they could scrape the exorbitant sum together. Their request was denied: just like in Stalin’s Russia, where the guilty were shot immediately after the verdict was announced, there was no delay.

“If the family does not pay up, go and enjoy yourselves,” the chief judge told the male villagers, and enjoy themselves they did, proceeding to execute the punishment with unbounded vigour. Some of the 13 rapists were barely post-pubescent children, some others men old enough to be the victim’s father.

Those not taking direct part in the fun watched it with relish, cheering and filming the action with their mobile phones (the village obviously keeps abreast of modern technology). The poor girl’s family were in a distinct minority and could do nothing.

Her cries reverberated through the night, by the end of which she was dumped at her doorstep, bleeding profusely from severe internal injuries. She’s now in hospital, fighting for her life.

Far from showing any repentance, the villagers barracked the police the next day when they finally arrived. The women were in especially fine voice, insisting that their men had done nothing wrong and the girl had been punished justly.

They even tried to prevent the police from arresting the criminals, and eventually reinforcements had to be brought in to take them into custody. But no government official has visited the scene of the crime yet, or talked to the victim’s family.

So far it’s unclear what action, if any, will be taken against the arrested men. It is however crystal-clear what action will be taken against the half-dead woman and her family.

“We will never allow the woman and her family to return,” vowed the villagers. After all, she had been warned not to continue the affair, or else. It’s because of her lackadaisical response that those good men ended up in prison, though, the villagers hoped, not for long. And the family had no business grassing up to the cops.

Actually, I have faith in India’s justice, and I doubt the savages will see their native village in the near future. Nor am I trying to suggest that India at large is in any way similar to that Bengali hellhole.

However, I doubt that a similar incident could have occurred in Cornwall, Bordeaux, Andalusia, Calabria or Brabant. This isn’t to say that our culture is inherently better, God and the Equality Commission forbid – only that it’s so different that any attempt at homogenising East and West will be as futile as Kipling once suggested.

Spanning such a chasm even within the borders of a Western country seems like a losing proposition – unless Eastern arrivals desperately wish to abandon their ways and adopt ours. It may be an optical illusion, but one doesn’t readily observe any effects of any such desire in Britain.

On the contrary, having reached a certain numerical critical mass, many ethnic and religious groups resident here openly preach contempt, often hatred, for everything British and indeed Western (except mobile phones, trainers, cars and I-Pads). For example, even though they’re born in this country, some Muslim youngsters join the ranks of suicide bombers murdering their fellow Brits.

Cultural and linguistic alienation is in full flow, whereas genuine adaptation is increasingly rare. Just think about it: those Bengali rapists are unlikely, one hopes against hope, ever to be admitted here. But their accomplices, all those cheerers and photo snappers, may well end up in Birmingham or Leeds. How British do you think they’ll become?

A harrowing thought, that, but an utterly realistic one. For our rulers are hell-bent on destroying our society and its culture, with dilution being one of the most effective stratagems. The less our electorate is British culturally, the more troubled the waters in which our spivs like to fish politically.

They proceed unimpeded for they’ve sold to the public the toxic myth of multiculturalism, realised in practice as a free-for-all for all cultures except that of Christendom. Few dare raise their voice against this newly hatched orthodoxy, and those who do are either hushed up or ostracised.

You know, like the family of that poor girl in West Bengal.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

You and I don’t understand “the complex strategic dilemmas of the 21st century”

The phrase comes from Matt d’Ancona’s article in the Evening Standard. Unlike you and me, Matt is on top of strategic dilemmas, no matter how complex.

Yet he also has a laudable common touch, which he once proved by flying clear across the world to attend Elton John’s party. Those less catholic in their tastes wouldn’t be caught dead at such a party even if it were held across the street – and in fact would complain to the police about too much noise.

But not our Matt: his grasp of ‘strategic dilemmas’ is fully matched by his celebrity worship. Both are evident from the article’s title: “Tony Blair’s instincts on Iraq were right – and Syria proves it.”

As far as Matt is concerned, Tony’s instinct are right on everything: after all, they both belong to the smart set that more or less runs Britain.

This elevated status raises them above the quotidian rough-and tumble where traditional moral and intellectual standards operate. The likes of Tony and Matt are true Gnostics, privy to knowledge inaccessible to anyone else.

The knowledge is purely metaphysical: no crude standards of logic or factual proof need apply. Those of us who have to crawl on the flinty ground of time-proven ratiocination simply can’t judge our modern demiurges.

Yet at a weak moment, such as now, one can’t resist the odd bit of analysis – in the full understanding that only the likes of Tony and Matt can ever possess the ultimate truth. 

Matt is upset, as we all are, by the “systematic torture and killing of detained persons in Bashar Assad’s Syria, including the death of around 11,000.” Yet what does this prove? That Assad is a brutal dictator? But we already know this. That he falls short of our understanding of absolute goodness? Ditto.

Yet Assad isn’t exactly up against the forces of such goodness. Instead of indulging in oral flatulence, which is always easy, Matt should weigh one evil against the other, letting us decide which is the lesser one. Well, if he could, he wouldn’t be Matt.

Speaking to a group of university professors a year ago, I invited them to compare the number of people killed under South African apartheid (a few hundred) to those murdered by the Russian communists (about 60 million). The educators got very angry. When morality is involved, they screamed, numbers don’t matter.

“They do,” I objected, “to those extra 60 million victims and their families.” I was immediately accused of moral relativism (false) and dismissed as a hopeless reactionary (true).

In that spirit I’d suggest that the ‘death of around 11,000’ should be weighed against the death of around 1,000,000, those killed as a direct result of Tony playing lickspittle to Dubya over Iraq and Afghanistan.

Moreover, those ‘around 11,000’ were brutally murdered by a regime fighting for its life against a band of jihadist fanatics who at the moment represent perhaps the greatest threat of a world war.

Modern wars in general, and particularly those in that part of the world, especially if they are civil wars, aren’t fought to Queensberry rules. So of course Assad’s regime is guilty of atrocities. And of course Matt is wholly within his right to deplore them.

What he shouldn’t do is confuse moral indignation with resolving ‘strategic dilemmas’. Strategically, we must all go down on our knees and pray that Saudi-financed al-Qaeda cannibals don’t take over in Syria. Once they’ve got their hands on the country’s resources, not only Israel but we all will be in mortal danger.

Advocating direct military involvement on al-Qaeda’s side is the acme of criminal stupidity, exacerbating no end the gross folly of having attacked Iraq in the first place. Yet obviously Matt, privy as he is to the Gnostic understanding of ‘strategic dilemmas’, doesn’t see it that way. To wit:

“One wonders how many detainees have been maimed and killed since the Commons rejected possible military action against the Syrian dictator last August. [Not nearly as many as those killed by the Anglo-American aggression, Matt. And is it just Assad’s side that’s maiming and killing? Surely not.]

“This, of course, is Blair’s strongest point: that inaction, as much as intervention, has a cost. [Sounds almost Burkean, that. In this instance, inaction will mean that evil will prevail. However, intervention will mean the triumph of a far greater evil, something that’ll kick off the kind of bloodbath neither Saddam nor Assad would have dreamed of – not to mention its being a direct threat to us and our allies.]

“It is not always right to intervene, and often impractical to do so in any case. But those who do nothing should be held to account, too. Who interrupts the appeaser’s meal?” [A barman in a London restaurant, that’s who (see my yesterday’s piece). But I for one wouldn’t mind interrupting the meal of Assad’s al-Qaeda enemies. You know, the chaps who munch on freshly removed human organs?]

So, according to Matt, naked aggression against a sovereign state is an act of appeasement. George Orwell, ring your office. Doublespeak is alive and well.

Don’t know about you, but I’m scared out of my wits. What frightens me isn’t just the possible triumph of jihadists in Syria and the Middle East at large, although God knows that’s frightening enough.

What really gives me sleepless nights (apart from drinking too much wine at dinner) is the thought that it’s the likes of Tony, Dave, Dubya, Barack Hussein et al who tackle our ‘strategic dilemmas’ – and the likes of Matt who are in a position to egg them on.

In their capable hands those dilemmas can turn around with a ferocious scowl, leaving us all impaled on their horns.

 

 

 

Truth hurts (whomever dares speak it)

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.

 

“Yes, but apart from that, Mr Blair, how did you enjoy your meal?”

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.



 

 


 

 

POS or SOS? Ask the Russians

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can always count on sex to keep you going

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.

François Hollande adds a whole new dimension to pluralism

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.