Author: Alexander Boot

The worldwide survey undertaken by the Vatican is bizarre on so many levels, one’s head spins.

The sheer cost of polling 1.2 billion subjects, which is the world’s Catholic population, must be staggering.

If it were conducted by a marketing company, the cost could run into billions. But even if much of the work will be done by local parishes, we’re still talking millions.

How this tallies with the Pope’s intention of turning the Vatican into ‘a poor Church for the poor’ is an interesting question. Also, does he mean the Church is only for the poor? If so, what’s the income above which a communicant would be excluded? I’m sure His Holiness will be able to field such questions with some élan. He was after all educated at a Jesuit seminary.

Then there’s the questionnaire itself. Its stated objective is to find out how Catholics feel about the Church’s family policy, how parishes apply it and how both handle such thorny issues as divorce, cohabitation and homomarriage.

I haven’t studied the demographics of the world’s Catholics, about half of whom live in Latin America. Most of the Catholics I know are erudite priests and laymen, but one doubts they’re a representative sample.

Yet some of the questions in the survey seem to be based on the assumption that all Catholics are at least as accomplished as my friends. To wit:

Question 1 a): “Describe how the Catholic Church’s teachings on the value of the family contained in the Bible, Gaudium et spes, Familiaris consortio and other documents of the post-conciliar Magisterium is understood by people today?”

Or else Question 2 a): “What place does the idea of the natural law have in the cultural areas of society: in institutions, education, academic circles and among the people at large? What anthropological ideas underlie the discussion on the natural basis of the family?”

I must admit the implicit presumption that most Catholics could be coherent on such issues shatters my preconceptions about the schooling of all those Peruvian campesinos. Alternatively, in addition to its known intoxicating and hallucinogenic properties, pisco must produce epiphanic experiences that override some likely gaps in their grasp of scholastic theology.

As so often happens, the context elucidates the text. Considering the pontiff’s earlier statements about the Church’s ‘obsession’ with things like abortion, divorce and homomarriage, along with his intention to make theology friendlier to women, one fears the Pope is considering a leftward shift.

The questionnaire contains fairly transparent hints at this. Thus Question 4 f): “Could a simplification of canonical practice in recognising a declaration of nullity of the marriage bond provide a positive contribution to solving the problems of the persons involved?” (“Are you comfortable with divorce?”, in plain English.)

Or else Questions 5 d): “In the case of unions of persons of the same sex who have adopted children, what can be done pastorally in light of transmitting the faith?” (“Should the Church bless homomarriage?” in other words.)

The Church hierarchy is denying that the survey implies any subsequent doctrinal changes. “The synod does not have to decide on the basis of the majority of public opinion,” says Archbishop Bruno Forte.

Then why spend the ‘poor Church’s’ millions? If the survey is inspired by customer-satisfaction polls of department-store customers, then surely the results must determine the merchandise on offer. If, on the other hand, the idea comes from politics, then policy changes are bound to follow.

Surely the money isn’t being squandered to satisfy idle curiosity? Not according to The Times.

“Let us hope [the survey] is a harbinger of change that is needed in the Catholic Church,” says the paper’s editorial. “Reforming an ancient institution is never easy,” it goes on. “Look at the House of Lords.”

I couldn’t agree more. Reforming an ancient institution is never easy. Deforming it, however, is a doddle – look at the House of Lords, to quote the formerly respectable paper.

It gets better (or worse, depending on your point of view). “In the developed world, at any rate, the Church’s doctrines concerning sexual and personal morality are now completely out of kilter with how people actually live and think.”

True. By the same token, many people break the laws against murder, theft and rape. On this basis does The Times think such laws should be repealed?

This is just one example of a shortfall in logic that’s the paper’s current trademark. The editorial provides many others:

“The Catholic Church… can choose to stand against social change in the name of a dogmatic interpretation of its principles. Or it can seek to adapt to changing mores… If this is the mission of Pope Francis then it is very much a welcome one.”

No doubt it is, in such pockets of staunch piety as Notting Hill and Islington. The rest of us reach for an antiemetic.

It’s not the Church’s business to ‘adapt to changing mores’. Its mission is to welcome those that agree with its teachings and fight tooth and nail those that don’t.

Somewhere a flip-flop occurred in what passes for the mind of the liberal elite. The Church is now expected to conform to the UN Charter on Human Rights rather than to Christian dogma. In the process it’s supposed to turn into a plebiscitary democracy, as if this method of government weren’t perverse even in its natural habitat.

Should the Vatican abandon subterfuge and let focus groups shape the Christian doctrine? The Times would welcome that, especially if the findings suggested that the divinity of Christ is no longer accepted by the majority.

Those intellectually challenged pundits simply don’t know better. Let’s pray the Vatican does.

 

The French are on the warpath against English invaders, in this instance words rather than muscular chaps bandying longbows and flipping two fingers at French knights.

Predictably the counterattack is spearheaded by L’Académie française, a body established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, first minister to Louis XIII and the villain in Three Musketeers.

The statesman, snappily named Armand Jean du Plessis, cardinal-duc de Richelieu et de Fronsac, was concerned about the purity of the French language.

Said purity was at the time threatened not so much by les anglais as by those technically French people who shunned the French language. The English chose less subtle ways of undermining France, mostly relying on military rather than linguistic aggression.

Yet the Bretons, Normans, Picardians, Catalans, Basques, chaps from Languedoc and the Provence, Alsatians and so forth stubbornly insisted on clinging on to their own languages – and many of them did so well into the twentieth century.

Whenever they grudgingly agreed to speak French, they did so with less purity than one would have encountered in the Loire Valley, and Richelieu would have none of that.

The body he established, L’Académie française, was supposed to police the language of Rabelais, making sure that those hiring French for part-time use returned it in mint condition.

It’s hard for me to judge the extent to which the Academy succeeded in this undertaking, though on general principle attempts to interfere with the organic development of any tongue tend to fail miserably.

Les anglais no longer threaten to occupy the western reaches of France, although any visitor to the Dordogne may get a different impression. But the French are getting their culottes in a twist about the preponderance of English words in advertising, media and everyday speech.

“There are more English words on the walls of Toulouse than there were German words during the Occupation,” said philosopher Michel Serres, a member of L’Académie.

He was referring specifically to advertising hoardings, though any visitor to France will testify that many French walls also feature a profusion of handwritten English words, mostly those that until recently only ever appeared in unabridged dictionaries.

Mr Serres called for a boycott of any product advertised with the use of English words and of any film whose title hasn’t been translated into French. Considering the all-encompassing scale of the linguistic invasion, I’d say he’s on a losing wicket there.

To reverse the trend he’d have to resort to much more drastic measures, such as for example shutting down every tennis club. When I first joined one of those 13 years ago, I feverishly ransacked my rather limited French vocabulary in search of French tennis terms.

It turned out I needn’t have bothered. In French, ‘slice’ is slice (as in service bien slicé), ‘kick’ is kick (as in service bien kické), ‘lob’ is lob (the native French chandelle is regarded as uncool) and ‘walkover’ is walkover. However, ‘topspin’ is lift, which is also an English word, but a wrong one.

Something excellent is top in colloquial French and it’s possible to talk about une supermodel having a quiet weekend at home with a takeaway, although ce n’est pas cool. In fact, one could compile une checklist of such offensive vocabules, but don’t ask me to do so: I’m fully booké.

But I’ve got les news for you: any effort to stop the influx of English words into French or any other language will fail. English has become the world’s lingua franca, and I lament this development as much as Mr Serres does.

I hope my French friends won’t mind this admission, but I’m less concerned with the attrition suffered by their language than with the damage done to English itself by its global status.

A lingua franca may be useful to others as a way of cutting through language barriers. But when a language functions in this capacity it first gets maimed and then killed – Latin is a prime, though far from the only, example of such a demise.

We’re going through the maiming stage now, as any reader of EU directives can testify. A survey of 6,000 Commission employees found that 95 percent wrote in English, but only 13 percent of those were native speakers. Over half said that they rarely or never ran their documents by someone whose mother tongue was English.

The resulting semi-literate bureaucratese then reinfects the English spoken in its natural habitat. The natives are doing their destructive bit too: NHS leaflets and other government circulars are translated into 17 different languages as a sop to multiculturalism.

Thus we witness an odd process: English is ceding its dominant position at home while making huge advances abroad. The two developments may look opposite, but their eventual outcome will be the same: our great language will be universally reduced to a pidgin patois, badly mangled by ‘enemies foreign and domestic’, to borrow a phrase from the American Oath of Allegiance.

Perish the thought and punish the perpetrators. Don’t ask me how: I don’t know. And neither, unfortunately, does L’Académie française.

Yesterday I wrote an admittedly facetious piece pointing out the advantages of the niqab, “…provided of course we can be sure that the person inside the niqab is indeed a demure Muslim woman rather than an escaping male terrorist – something that apparently has happened a few times.”

What do you know – in a startling demonstration of life imitating art, that very day a tagged Somali-British jihadist used the garment to escape the attentions of the police.

Al Qaeda-trained terrorist Mohammed Ahmed Mohamed (MAM for short) entered a London mosque wearing normal clothes complete with an electronic tag. He then disabled the device and slipped out of the mosque in a burka.

Now we’re all in favour of free religious worship, but surely the freedom to adore Allah doesn’t incorporate the freedom to abet terrorists – or indeed to incite terrorism. It has always been my contention that any mosque implicated in such activities should be immediately and irreversibly shut down, even at the risk of having few mosques left.

In this instance someone inside the mosque must have helped MAM to disable the tag, and someone must have supplied the burka. This sort of thing may be called aiding and abetting in some quarters, but this is strictly a police matter. What should be a matter for society at large is that houses of God must not be used as safe houses for murderous aliens.

Moreover, we must ban the burka – even though the French have done so and we certainly don’t want to be known as copycats. For using the garment for terrorist activities is nothing new: it’s a tradition going back centuries.

Russia springs to mind. Throughout the nineteenth century the tsars waged a non-stop war against Caucasian, mainly Muslim, guerrillas. Echoes of this desperate struggle resonate from the pages of great Russian literature, from Pushkin and Lermontov to Tolstoy.

Using their books for historical reference, we find out that the use of a burka as a means of escape was widely practiced 200 years ago. In Lermontov’s sublime novel The Hero of Our Time, a young Muslim guerrilla demonstrates how effective this trick can be.

Closer to our own time, the Muslim, chiefly Turkic, provinces of the Russian Empire, never quite at ease with their status, rebelled against the Soviets directly they took over in 1917. The rebellion continued well into the 1930s, at first as a straight pan-Islamic war of national and religious liberation.

The war was truly pan-Islamic – for several years it was led by Enver Pasha, who had held the post of War Minister in Turkey’s Young Turk government. After the Red Army routed the badly outgunned and outnumbered basmachi groups in the mid-1920s, the jihad movement went underground.

The old burka trick stood the basmachi in good stead: bearded men could easily sneak up on Bolshevik occupiers and gun them down. Interestingly, one of the most persistent slogans used by the Bolsheviks in their early days was “Free the toiling woman of the East from the parandja [the Central Asian version of the burka]!”

Considering the well-documented affection the Bolsheviks felt for freedom of any kind, one may suspect that their main concern wasn’t so much the toiling woman as the sharpshooting man.

My retrospective sympathy is in this case with the Central Asian jihadists: they fought the greater evil and their cause was just.

You may call me a moral relativist if you wish, but I don’t exactly feel the same way about MAM and his fellow wild-eyed al Qaeda murderers. Their cause is evil, and the only way to defeat it is to display fortitude and resolve.

The two measures I’ve suggested (banning the burka and shutting down any mosque implicated in nastiness) would be a good start.

The next thing would be to look at the desirability of massive influx of Muslim (and other non-Christian) immigrants. Part of the rich panoply of life and all that, but I doubt many Brits agree with our consecutive governments that these groups enrich our life.

I may change this shamefully unfashionable, reactionary view if someone were to demonstrate the specific advantages we’ve derived from the presence of, say, the 115,000 Somalis (and these are just the ones we know about).

As our transvestite MAM proves, demonstrating the disadvantages would be considerably easier.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For once in his life Ken Clarke has said something sensible.

Muslim women giving evidence in court shouldn’t be allowed to wear ‘a kind of bag’, Ken explained, because that makes it ‘impossible to have a proper trial’.

You see, jurors often judge testimony on the basis of facial expressions and body language, both of which remain hidden under the veil. Since before he became a rotten politician Ken was a good criminal barrister, he knows what he’s talking about.

The rest of the time Muslim women can wear ‘what the devil they want’, added Ken and I agree wholeheartedly. Provided of course we can be sure that the person inside the niqab is indeed a demure Muslim woman rather than an escaping male terrorist – something that apparently has happened a few times.

Ken insisted that his comments ‘had no trace of Islamophobia’, and I for one am happy to hear that. There’s nothing worse in the world today than anything described by a word ending in ‘-phobia’.

The first part of the word doesn’t really matter. It may be ‘Islamo-’, ‘homo-’, ‘negro-’ – whatever it is, whoever evinces it should be, as a minimum, drawn and quartered.

But I do think it’s unfair to Islamic womanhood to restrict this sartorial issue strictly to utilitarian considerations. Call me a misogynist (or femalophobe, if you’d rather), but I don’t think a woman’s dress should be assessed without applying aesthetic criteria.

Now at first glance you may say that the shapeless black garment leaving only the woman’s eyes visible has no aesthetic argument going for it. So who’s being the misogynist now?

First, what’s the most beautiful part of a woman? No, it’s not what you’re suggesting with that scabrous smirk on your face (you ought to be ashamed of yourself). It’s her soul, that immanent link to God, however God is defined.

And as we all know, the eyes really are a window to the soul. Scientists concur: their research shows that patterns in the iris can give an indication of whether a woman is warm and trusting or neurotic and impulsive.

You have to agree that by veiling the woman’s more jutting attractions, along with the rest of her face, the niqab focuses our attention on the most beautiful part of her – her soul. What more would anyone wish to see?

I mean, once you’ve seen Chelsea, would you want to see Elephant & Castle? Of course not.

Let’s also not forget the practical considerations, those bordering on moral ones. We all agree that our wishy-washy blondes pale by comparison to the exotic beauty of Muslim women, especially after a little electrolysis.

Surely you can understand the desire of Muslim men to keep at bay swarms of panting males inflamed by the sultry, depilated beauty of an Aisha, a Soraya or a Fatima? If you were married to a raving beauty, or four of them, wouldn’t you like to keep all those lechers at arm’s length?

The niqab also has many other advantages we shouldn’t ignore. For example, and this is an important consideration during this season, it’s a natural Halloween costume. There’s no need to paint skull and bones on a woman’s dress – the niqab will do nicely all on its own.

Nor should we ignore other interesting avenues worth exploring. For example, now that I’ve mentioned the possibility of painting things on garments, it’s possible to treat the niqab as a broad canvas.

Not that it’s necessary, considering that we can still see Soraya’s most beautiful part. But suppose some men are less spiritual in their demands. Those sorry individuals may want to see more than just a woman’s eyes.

Well, then, how can this be reconciled with the Muslim men’s well-justified fear of competition for their women’s charms? Simple.

Why not silkscreen the face and body of a film star onto the niqab? Let’s say Kelly Brook, Marylin Monroe in her prime or Rachael Weiss? No, forget Rachael. She’s Jewish and we don’t want to offend the keenly felt sensibilities of Muslim men. But you get the idea.

Just imagine a semi-clad or, ideally, nude Kelly smiling at you from every niqab. How good is that? Wouldn’t it make a stroll through central London a more pleasurable experience? Of course it will.

It’s time we rehabilitated the niqab, at least this side of a courtroom. If you’re against the veil, you’re against diversity. That’s worse than any -phobia I know, for being all-encompassing. And let’s not forget the strongest argument in favour of the niqab: the French are against it.

All I’m saying is give veils a chance. All together now: All we’re saying…

 

 

 

When last month the new Pope called for ‘a stronger presence of women in the church’ and ‘a truly deep theology of women’, I wrote, “But such a theology already exists, certainly in the Catholic Church, where Mary’s status almost equals that of her son. What does ‘a stronger presence’ mean? Female priesthood? Female episcopate?”

Indeed, since it was clear to any reasonable person that the Catholic church could never possibly ordain a woman, the pontiff’s meaning wasn’t immediately obvious.

It is now, if persistent rumours are to be believed. His Holiness is planning to let a woman don a cardinal’s red hat.

The rumour (news?) originates from an article in the Spanish paper El Pais. A former Brazilian priest, Juan Arias, wrote the idea was ‘not a joke’. “Knowing the Pope, he wouldn’t hesitate before appointing a woman cardinal.”

If true, this means my wild conjecture had a touch of truth about it. After all, according to the ruling of Pope John XXIII (d. 1963),all cardinals are automatically bishops.

Linda Hogan, theology professor at Trinity, Dublin, is the woman allegedly picked to model the red hat at the conclave.

The lady’s credentials are unimpeachable: she’s married, leftwing and in tune with the Pope’s innermost convictions. According to a colleague, “One of her strong beliefs is something Pope Francis has been hinting at, too: that the basis of moral theology starts from human experience.”

And there they were, all those Augustines, Origens and Aquinases, thinking that ‘the basis of moral theology’ started with God. How wrong they were. Trust the Frank and Linda double act to sort them out.

The next step will be renaming the Lord’s Prayer as Kant’s prayer: “Our Immanuel who art in heaven, give us this day our moral law and do not bother to forgive our trespasses for this is what our courts are for…”

This raises interesting possibilities for traditional Christians, and not just in the Roman Catholic church. Anglican traditionalists, for example, find themselves in a trap resembling that designed by Lenin and Stalin.

Those gentlemen noticed with their eagle eye that people tend to flee from any place where their wellbeing, material but especially spiritual, is threatened.

The Soviet Union was living proof of this tendency, what with millions running away from the most progressive society in history. Millions fled immediately after the revolution, more millions during the Second World War, more millions still in the last 40 years.

In the middle of this timeline, the number of Soviet Socialist republics went down from 16 to 15. The Karelo-Finnish SSR, carved out of Finland in 1940 as a result of Soviet aggression, had to be rolled into Russia proper in 1956. The reason was simple: its whole population had escaped to what was left of Finland.

Long before this happened the founders of Bolshevism realised that a mass exodus from progress wasn’t so much likely as guaranteed. They tried every trick to make sure the USSR still had some people left.

The Soviet frontier became the most guarded national frontier in history, with million-strong border guards instructed to shoot on sight, their dogs trained to go for the throat. Thousands of searchlights made sure it was always daylight at the border, so the running human targets were clearly visible.

Nothing worked: people kept running, as they later did in Germany, scaling the Wall under fire. The solution presented itself: to nick the exodus in the bud the Soviets had to make sure that there would be nowhere for the people to run.

In other words, they had to extend the Soviet paradise to the whole globe, a pictorial representation of which duly appeared in the Soviet national escutcheon. If the whole world could become uniformly Bolshevik, people would stay put. Running away would be meaningless.

In an odd sort of way, not just Catholics but also traditional Anglicans are finding themselves in the same position as those Soviet slaves of yesteryear.

The liberal hierarchy of the Church of England is deadset on making it impossible for traditional Christians to stay in the fold. The church has suffered tremendous attrition, especially at its High end, after every progressive innovation, including of course the ordination of women.

For many the eventual consecration of female bishops will be the last straw. Much as it would pain them, traditional Christians would be simply unable to remain Anglican.

Thanks to Pope Benedict’s generous offer of the Ordinariate, at least they have somewhere to escape to. They can join the Catholic rite while preserving much of the traditional Anglican liturgy and most of its beautiful scriptural texts.

Now Pope Frances has allegedly come up with a ploy that could have been inspired by Soviet experience. What’s the point in leaving a confession that allows female bishops for one that allows female cardinals?

None at all, especially if we remember that any cardinal could become Pope – just as any Anglican bishop could become the Archbishop of Canterbury.

All traditional Christians can do is cling to the word ‘rumour’, hoping that this is all it is, but fearing that there’s fire behind all this smoke.

This reminds me of the press conference given by the baseball player Joe ‘Shoeless’ Jackson after he was accused of fixing the 1919 World Series. A desperate fan screamed, “Say it ain’t so, Joe!”

Say it ain’t so, Your Holiness.

Having despaired of ever harmonising the economies and cultures across Europe, the EU has decided to harmonise the bogs instead.

Thomas Crapper’s invention now must flush exactly the same way from Finland to Greece and everywhere in between. No more than five litres per cistern or three per half-flush, get this, you British wastrel?

Of course such a destiny-changing innovation couldn’t have been introduced by unsubstantiated fiat. Prior research was essential to make sure proper harmony would be for everyone’s benefit. To that end the excrementally inspired European Commission spent £72,000 on a comprehensive comparison of lavatorial habits.

The resulting 122-page study is snappily titled Development of EU Ecolabel Criteria for Flushing Toilets and Urinals. Personally, I would have named it Flush in the Pan, but then I do have this inordinate affection for puns.

The title sets the stylistic standard for the subsequent prose: “Establishing ecological criteria for flushing toilets and urinals and promoting appropriately the awarded products, if accepted by a wider range of producers and users, will contribute to greener product purchases, which shall reduce the consumption of water… this should also result in… lower water pollution and eutrophication (in relation with wastewater), energy saving and lower related air emissions (in relation with water supply, wastewater treatment and product production), lower resource consumption and potentially higher resource efficiency management (in relation with product materials, longevity and recyclability issues), etc.” Nicely put.

Many have now commented on the sheer bureaucratic waste of this crappy project, but I knew all along it had to be more sinister than that. And so it is.

Being as fond of conspiracy theories as I am of puns, I’ve got to the bottom of this dastardly German plot against everything the Brits hold dear.

Now I know one isn’t supposed to generalise about national characteristics, but this doesn’t mean they don’t exist. For example, the Germans seem to be naturally (unnaturally?) inclined to coprophilia, which is deriving perverse pleasure from faeces.

In fact the only German comedy show I’ve ever seen involved four chaps talking to one another for 30 minutes while sitting on the loos. So who says the Germans don’t do humour?

Apart from listening to Wagner, nothing pleases Germans more than examining their own waste (actually, the two proclivities just may be closely related). To that end German-made loo pans are designed in such a way that the stuff doesn’t sink to the bottom before flushing, but floats on the surface for the user’s delectation.

Part of the reason the German are so suspicious of the Brits is that we don’t include this particular perversion into our list of favourites. Instead we concentrate on those we share with the more southern EU members, such as Greece.

Since Germany is the driving force behind the EU, the Germans expect the Brits to resemble them rather than the Greeks. When this expectation is frustrated, they have traditionally united their own nation and, given half the chance, many others under the slogan Gott Strafe England (God punish England).

In this instance England must be punished for paying insufficient attention to matters faecal, which to the Germans betokens a certain gastric, not to mention moral, laxity.

Then the Germans, whose infantile competitiveness matches what my late friend Sigmund would describe as their anal retentiveness, noticed that they lag far behind the Brits in overall alcohol consumption.

How can they bring the imbibing Brits down a peg? Scheiße! said the Germans when they couldn’t come up with an immediate solution. And then – in a flash – they realised that was the solution.

Drinking heavily means going to the loo more often, nicht wahr? This means that, provided those Englische schweinen flush after themselves, they must use up more water than the Germans. Worth checking, that.

Check it they did, £72,000 worth, and sure enough – the Brits do flush 30 percent more water than any other EU nation. Suddenly, German coprophilia, distaste for the British and irresistible urge to bully Europe all came together.

Halt! Hende hoch! No more than five litres for Number Zwei, three litres for Number Eins! If you don’t follow this order, get off the loo. Raus!

The rest of the EU meekly went along. When asked to comment on this development, Jose Manuel Barroso issued this official statement: “S*** happens.”

There, I hope you’ll accept this bit of detective work as being true to life. And if you think I’m trying to be funny, think again.

There’s really no need to mock the EU. It can mock itself much more successfully, if not always intentionally.

 

Having despaired of ever harmonising the economies and cultures across Europe, the EU has decided to harmonise the bogs instead.

Thomas Crapper’s invention now must flush exactly the same way from Finland to Greece and everywhere in between. No more than five litres per cistern or three per half-flush, get this, you British wastrel?

Of course such a destiny-changing innovation couldn’t have been introduced by unsubstantiated fiat. Prior research was essential to make sure proper harmony would be for everyone’s benefit. To that end the excrementally inspired European Commission spent £72,000 on a comprehensive comparison of lavatorial habits.

The resulting 122-page study is snappily titled Development of EU Ecolabel Criteria for Flushing Toilets and Urinals. Personally, I would have named it Flush in the Pan, but then I do have this inordinate affection for puns.

The title sets the stylistic standard for the subsequent prose: “Establishing ecological criteria for flushing toilets and urinals and promoting appropriately the awarded products, if accepted by a wider range of producers and users, will contribute to greener product purchases, which shall reduce the consumption of water… this should also result in… lower water pollution and eutrophication (in relation with wastewater), energy saving and lower related air emissions (in relation with water supply, wastewater treatment and product production), lower resource consumption and potentially higher resource efficiency management (in relation with product materials, longevity and recyclability issues), etc.” Nicely put.

Many have now commented on the sheer bureaucratic waste of this crappy project, but I knew all along it had to be more sinister than that. And so it is.

Being as fond of conspiracy theories as I am of puns, I’ve got to the bottom of this dastardly German plot against everything the Brits hold dear.

Now I know one isn’t supposed to generalise about national characteristics, but this doesn’t mean they don’t exist. For example, the Germans seem to be naturally (unnaturally?) inclined to coprophilia, which is deriving perverse pleasure from faeces.

In fact the only German comedy show I’ve ever seen involved four chaps talking to one another for 30 minutes while sitting on the loos. So who says the Germans don’t do humour?

Apart from listening to Wagner, nothing pleases Germans more than examining their own waste (actually, the two proclivities just may be closely related). To that end German-made loo pans are designed in such a way that the stuff doesn’t sink to the bottom before flushing, but floats on the surface for the user’s delectation.

Part of the reason the German are so suspicious of the Brits is that we don’t include this particular perversion into our list of favourites. Instead we concentrate on those we share with the more southern EU members, such as Greece.

Since Germany is the driving force behind the EU, the Germans expect the Brits to resemble them rather than the Greeks. When this expectation is frustrated, they have traditionally united their own nation and, given half the chance, many others under the slogan Gott Strafe England (God punish England).

In this instance England must be punished for paying insufficient attention to matters faecal, which to the Germans betokens a certain gastric, not to mention moral, laxity.

Then the Germans, whose infantile competitiveness matches what my late friend Zigmund would describe as their anal retentiveness, noticed that they lag far behind the Brits in overall alcohol consumption.

How can they bring the imbibing Brits down a peg? Scheiße! said the Germans when they couldn’t come up with an immediate solution. And then – in a flash – they realised that was the solution.

Drinking heavily means going to the loo more often, nicht wahr? This means that, provided those Englische schweinen flush after themselves, they must use up more water than the Germans. Worth checking, that.

Check it they did, £72,000 worth, and sure enough – the Brits do flush 30 percent more water than any other EU nation. Suddenly, German coprophilia, distaste for the British and irresistible urge to bully Europe all came together.

Halt! Hende hoch! No more than five litres for Number Zwei, three litres for Number Ein! If you don’t follow this order, get off the loo. Raus!

The rest of the EU meekly went along. When asked to comment on this development, Jose Manuel Barroso issued this official statement: “S*** happens.”

There, I hope you’ll accept this bit of detective work as being true to life. And if you think I’m trying to be funny, think again.

There’s really no need to mock the EU. It can mock itself much more successfully, if not always intentionally.

Gen. Sheridan (d. 1888) once said, “If I owned hell and Texas, I’d rent out Texas and live in hell.”

According to Michael Burleigh’s panegyric in today’s Times, Texas has come a long way since then. By the sound of it, given the choice between living in Texas and paradise, Prof. Burleigh would rent out the Garden of Eden.

He’s of course entitled to that opinion, as we’re entitled to ignore it. I certainly would – if this bizarre article didn’t evoke so many thoughts and recollections.

Recollections first: for my sins I actually lived in Houston for 10 years as a young man. Now if I were to seek an afterlife metaphor on the basis of that experience, I wouldn’t describe Texas as paradise. I’d describe it as comfy hell for the whole family.

This assessment is so diametrically opposite to Prof. Burleigh’s that so must be the criteria from which we proceed. As so they are: his are entirely material and mine aren’t.

This is worth a comment, for underneath it all one detects a clash between victorious modernity, as personified by Prof. Burleigh, and my hopelessly forlorn clinging to what used to be known as Western civilisation.

The benefits of modernity are all expressible in numbers, and Prof. Burleigh did his homework. His trusted calculator close at hand, he leaves one in no doubt that Texas is rich, its cities are growing faster than anywhere else, and it creates more jobs than the rest of the world combined (or words to that effect).

Even operating at that level, I’d be tempted to add that Texas’s riches are almost totally beholden to the market price of oil. Every Texan baby knows today’s value of a barrel, for his comfort depends on it.

When oil prices soar, the influx of immigrants from other states and countries is as impressive as Prof. Burleigh finds it. When they plummet, it’s impossible to hire a U-Haul truck – everyone is rushing for the exit (spoken from personal experience).

But with crude at today’s $115 a barrel, Texas is indeed as prosperous as Prof. Burleigh extols. So what more do we need?

Quite a few things, actually. First, I can solemnly swear that Texas is by far the ugliest place I’ve seen on my travels.

Houstonians say that you can stand on a stool and see into Oklahoma, and it’s only a slight exaggeration. The state is as flat as Prof. Burleigh’s prose – one has to drive 100 miles north of Houston to see hills the height of Hampstead Heath.

The space in between and for hundreds of miles in any other direction is barren, filled with ‘the brush country’, desert to you and me. Scorched earth with the odd bush about a foot high is all one sees, and the ugliness is so unremitting that one almost welcomes the sight of venomous snakes wiggling their way towards one’s boots.

That footwear, in addition to its symbolic folksy value, thus has life-saving significance: most snakes can’t sting higher than the top of a boot.

Add to this Phillip Johnson’s skyscrapers disfiguring the downtown areas of Texas cities and one can safely say that, yes, everything is big in Texas. But nothing either natural or manmade is beautiful.

Prof. Burleigh’s view seems to be that a house with a swimming pool would outweigh that drawback, but it takes living there for a few years to realise how deadly visual deprivation can be. Just imagine years of saying nothing beautiful at all, not a patch of forest, not a picturesque river, not an interesting landscape, not a building that’s neither dull nor a dreadful eyesore.

Trying to find some relief, people drive to the beaches of Galveston or Freeport on the Gulf of Mexico.

There they park their trucks right on the water edge and start tossing empty beer cans and burger wrappers all over the beach. Stepping on one of those would be unpleasant but less so than stepping on a tar patch.

These are more numerous than cowpats on a ranch, for just a couple of miles offshore one can see oil platforms pumping the source of Texas wealth, some of which settles as tar patches on the sand. Step into one and it’ll take about a fortnight to wash it off.

After I left Houston I took my English wife there for a few days. I wanted her to be amused and it worked: she couldn’t stop laughing for a second.

The first thing that caused her mirth was a musical-instrument shop (she’s a concert pianist) that advertised its wares by perching a grand piano on top of a 100-foot mast towering over a spaghetti junction.

Then I took her to a cute, mock-European plaza where every shop was called ‘Chez Michel’, ‘Chez François’ or ‘Brocante Parisienne’. Only one shop eschewed European flavour. It was simply called GUNS, in blazing 6-foot letters.

Then we had a drink at a lovely outdoor café styled after those in the Côte d’Azur. We sat under a multi-coloured umbrella looking at palm trees that could almost be real. But they weren’t: the outdoor café was actually four stories underground in The Galleria shopping mall, the cultural highlight of Texas.

Add to this seven months of 95 degrees-plus heat and 95% humidity every year, regular floods, hurricanes, and tornados, and you’ll have a realistic picture of hell on earth. (In his tourist enthusiasm Prof. Burleigh remarks blithely that “with air-conditioning, it’s not even as hot as it once was”. True, but that means spending one’s whole life in an air-conditioned space, never venturing outside for longer than a few minutes.)

Prof. Burleigh confuses standard of living with quality of life, and in this he’s truly a man for our times. Perhaps he should move to Houston or Dallas. Being an inveterate retrograde, I’ll take even Hull any day.

Y’all have a nahce day now, ya heah?

Sorry to be so rude to Their Honours, but how would you describe a person capable of writing this sentence?

“A child’s best interests have to be assessed by reference to general community standards, making due allowance for the entitlement of people, within the limits of what is permissible in accordance with those standards, to entertain very divergent views about the religious, moral, social and secular objectives they wish to pursue for themselves and for their children.”

This reminds me of the American quip about a Polish godfather: he makes you an offer you can’t understand. Except that the author of the sentence isn’t a Polish mobster but Sir James Munby, the President of the Family Division.

One of our leading judges, in other words, and if you aren’t quaking in your boots you’re made of sterner stuff than I am. If this is the best our legal profession can throw up, no wonder the country’s going to pot.

What on earth does he mean? Clarification, sir, please.

Sir James dutifully obliges: Britain may be a Christian nation, but judges “[are] secular… serving a multicultural community of many faiths sworn to do justice to all manner of people.”

Who exactly is sworn, judges or the community? Was His Honour’s address originally written in German and then translated into English by a Hungarian?

The confusion deepens, but trust Sir James to straighten it out: “We live in a society, which on many of the medical, social and religious topics that the courts recently have to grapple with, no longer speaks with one voice. These are topics on which men and women of different faiths or no faith at all hold starkly different views.”

So far so good, said a man falling down past a 20^th floor window. People who live in Britain may differ on a number of points. I think we can all agree painlessly.

But then the pain starts, at first as a headache but threatening to afflict the area called gluteus maximus in the medical parlance. The common law, declares Sir James, must show a “malevolent tolerance” of cultural and religious diversity.

I don’t know what ‘malevolent’ means in German, as translated into Hungarian and then, by way of Chinese whispers, into English. But in the target language this word is generally free of positive connotations.

Yet the judge unwittingly put his finger right on it: the kind of tolerance he’s talking about is indeed malevolent. So much so that in effect it means its exact opposite: intolerance, specifically of Christianity and English legality.

“A secular judge must be wary of straying across the well-recognised divide between church and state,” explains Sir James. Who, to quote Byron, will explain his explanation?

Actually Britain is one of the few Western countries in which Christianity isn’t separated from the state, at least until the accession of our Defender of All Faiths.

This bit of trivia may be too arcane for Sir James, but he must have gone to law school at a time when they still taught the historical and religious antecedents of Western legality.

Surely he must be aware of the link between Judaeo-Christian morality and our common law? No, perhaps not.

But he definitely must have heard of equality before the law, the cornerstone of our liberties. That means one and the same law for everybody, which in this country means the English Common Law.

Sir James must also know that this legal system is based on precedents going as far back as we can trace them.

Now most of those precedents go back to the time when England was still a savage, backward land on which no light of multi-culti virtue had yet shone. You know, when she had chaps like St Anselm, Byrd and Shakespeare.

At that time judges hadn’t yet abandoned, as according to Sir James they now have “rightly” done, “their pretensions to be the guardians of public morality”.

Judges then understood that public morality was shaped by Christianity and the courts’ function was to translate this into secular justice. Those fossils hadn’t yet been imbued with the undoubtedly progressive idea, so dear to Sir James’s and Rowan Williams’s heart, that some elements of Sharia law must be recognised as valid in England.

Britain’s legal system, says Sir James, must tolerate anything society may find undesirable, provided the law isn’t broken. If non sequiturs were an Olympic event, he’d win the gold medal.

Not only Britain’s but any conceivable legal system is by definition obligated to tolerate anything that doesn’t break the law. What Sir James means is that our law should be replaced with another, expanded to include some Sharia provisions.

Not all, thanks be to Allah. Such provisions must be tolerated “so long as they are legally and socially acceptable and not immoral or socially obnoxious or pernicious.”

Sir James does explicitly brand as “beyond the pale” things like forced marriage, female genital mutilation and “grotesquely misnamed honour-based domestic violence”.

What about polygamy? Islam allows chaps to have up to four wives – how does this sit with family law of which Sir James is in charge? (A purely hypothetical question, as I hope my wife understands.)

Should our laws recognise polygamy for Muslims but not for Christians? Surely Sir James doesn’t mean that equality before the law has been abandoned?

And please, please don’t tell me that the stoning of adulterers will be allowed – I don’t want to see most of my friends emigrating.

I hope I haven’t done an injustice to Sir James by misinterpreting his pronouncements. If so, I apologise, but then I have little German and no Hungarian.

The real threat to this country isn’t so much genital as mental mutilation, both female and male. Look, even our top judges have fallen victim.

 

 

 

 

Yesterday Dave visited a Mini factory in Oxfordshire, as one does when one has to come across as a man of the people who feels their pain.

He then made a speech designed to reinforce that impression. With UKIP breathing down his neck, Dave knew exactly what he had to say.

“You go round factories in our country and half the people have come from Poland or Lithuania or Latvia… But as a country what we ought to be saying is ‘no’.”

Did you hear this, you prospective Tory-wreckers from UKIP? Dave doesn’t want any bloody foreigners here any more than you do.

Yes, but what about Dave’s more, shall we say, progressive constituency? Is this the message he wants them to receive? You bet it isn’t.

“You can’t blame them,” Dave hastened to add. “They work hard. They see the jobs, they come over and they do them.”

God forbid we blame foreigners, that just isn’t The Guardian way. Then whom do we blame?

It’s the fault of our schools, explained Dave plausibly, because British youngsters aren’t “fully capable” of holding down jobs. ‘Not fully capable’ means ‘fully incapable’ in political, in case you’re wondering. Like not being able to read, write and add up, while having a rotten attitude and no work ethic.

Add to this a welfare system discouraging work, continued Dave, and the problem is there in a nutshell. Also, of course – and don’t get Dave wrong – he loves foreigners, but there are just too many of those ‘hard-working’ Eastern Europeans here.

But being a prime minister who wants to stay that way, Dave can’t just identify problems; he must offer solutions. Decisive, intelligent, no-job-too-big-or-too-small solutions. Otherwise the natives will get restless and vote for Ed, even if this means cutting off their nose to spite their face.

Dave didn’t disappoint. Far from it – he offered not one, not two but three solutions:

“First, let’s get our education system right… Second, let’s reform the welfare system so that it doesn’t pay to be out of work. And third, let’s have sensible controls on immigration. Crack those three problems together [my emphasis] and we’ll create an economy that really generates wealth for our people.”

That’s it. Not a dry seat in the audience, deafening sounds of “hear, hear”. But the rest of us are ever so slightly confused.

‘Together’ is a good word in politics, however it’s used. We all adore togetherness. But does it really apply, in essence and not just in sound, to the problem at hand?

Let’s imagine a plausible timetable for Dave’s tripartite programme, back to front. How long will it take to introduce ‘sensible controls on immigration’? What will it take?

As the people Dave mentioned specifically come from EU countries, they have a legal right to work here. For that to change so must our relationship with the EU.

Britain will have to demand controls over her own borders, and something tells me those chaps in Brussels just may say no. What then?

Why, have an immediate in-or-out referendum, or at least threaten to have one. Assuming that Britain wins the resulting standoff and stares the EU down, and this isn’t a safe assumption by any means, how long before we can drastically reduce immigration?

At least a year, I’d say. So that’s Dave’s third point taken care of. One year, more probably longer, most probably not at all. But do let’s be optimistic and agree on 12 months.

Next point, reforming the welfare state. Compared to the previous task, this one is a doddle, it could be done in one fell swoop. Just announce that as of next month able-bodied young people won’t be getting any state assistance. Job done.

Or is it? We’re after all talking about millions of people, most of whom aren’t ‘fully capable’ of working for a living. Are we going to let them starve? Of course not. We’re going to train them, which brings us to Dave’s Point 1, getting ‘our education system right’.

How long will this take, assuming (and that’s another unsafe assumption) that we remove all the stops, reinstate grammar schools, introduce a voucher system, attract good teachers by paying them more and so on, whatever it takes?

With the best will in the world, even in theory it’ll be impossible to see any positive and sizeable results in less than a generation, more likely two, educational cycles being what they are. But let’s again be kind to Dave, let’s say 20 years.

This leaves a gap of at least 19 years between slamming the door into those Eastern European faces, reforming our welfare and producing in sufficient numbers those willing and able to work.

If we accept Dave’s figures at face value, then half the labour force will disappear from our factories for almost two decades. This means at least half of our factories, and probably more, will shut down. So when those bright-eyed and bushy-tailed youngsters are ready to get jobs, there won’t be any jobs for them to get.

There’s got to be something wrong with my calculations. Surely our venerable PM can’t be so cynical, brazen and lightweight as to say such things with no hope of ever making them come true? Don’t bother answering.