Author: Alexander Boot

When it comes to the likes of Hobsbawm, nil nisi bonum might as well mean ‘another one bites the dust.’ I wouldn’t have spent two words on the demise of this utterly objectionable man, never mind two articles, if it were his demise only.

Unfortunately, Hobsbawm is symptomatic of a deadly disease afflicting our civilisation in general and Britain in particular: endemic anaemia of mind, will and morality. This is still worth talking about, in the full knowledge that it can’t be talked away.

Newspapers are quoting various things Hobsbawm said at different times, and God knows he said lots of them. However, some of them seem to contradict one another.

For example one paper quotes Hobsbawm as saying that he ‘regarded the suburban petty bourgeoisie with contempt’. That essentially means he despised most Brits he’d ever met, for one doubts he numbered many miners and mechanics among his acquaintances.

Another commentator points out elsewhere that Hobsbawm understood ‘that culture is what shapes the world… [and] that culture is totally democratic and comes from people. [People like Hobsbawm] discovered and popularised the value of popular culture – something so integral to our lives today it seems bizarre it was ever denigrated.’

We also denigrate AIDS, graffiti, puke on the pavement and many other things ‘integral to our lives today’, which doesn’t make them praiseworthy. Of course expecting sound logic from this lot is like expecting celibacy from a prostitute, so nothing new there.

Then Niall Ferguson talks about Hobsbawm’s ‘empathy with the little man’, which seems to tally with the previous panegyric. Until, that is, one recalls that all his life Hobsbawm shilled for regimes that had murdered more than 100 million just such little men.

Ferguson also mentions that he and Hobsbawm both ‘loved modern jazz’. This validates Hobsbawm’s devotion to popular culture, a word combination that can take pride of place among the more egregious oxymorons. Show me a sincere lover of popular culture in general and ‘modern jazz’ in particular, and I’ll show you someone whose hold on Western culture is tenuous at best, but then one expects nothing else from our pop historians.

Anyway, how do we reconcile the different facets of Hobsbawm’s personality, as emerging from these quotes? First, we find out that he despised the common man, which is to be expected from a lifelong communist, and a Hampstead communist to boot. Communists don’t feel empathy with little men, they use them as building materials for their political edifice, and slaughter en masse those who can’t or won’t be used in that capacity. This political affiliation also precludes by definition any excessive affection for democracy, and Hobsbawm never did or said anything to contradict this factual observation.

But then we’re told that he extolled popular culture for being ‘democratic’ and hence popularised its value. Contradictions galore, one would think, but actually it all adds up neatly.

Hobsbawm devoted his life to destroying everything in the West that’s worth keeping. He was also cunning enough to realise that the spread of oxymoronic popular culture worked towards the same end. It was what his idol Lenin called ‘legalism’, which is undermining the West by using the West’s own institutions and breaking no Western laws. In relying on this stratagem Hobsbawm converges with the Frankfurters, who fell out of Marx’s buns (this punning allusion to the hotdog is to establish my own populist credentials).

This is akin to Woodrow Wilson’s campaigning for world government, while proclaiming the sanctity of national self-determination. There was no contradiction between the two: the first was the end, the second the means. Wilson knew that an American-dominated world empire would be impossible to achieve without first breaking up Europe’s traditional empires, the British one emphatically included.

That political democracy, in its modern variant, can act as an aggressive weapon has been amply demonstrated by the democratically elected Messrs Hitler, Perón, Mugabe, Putin, Ahmadinejad and Macîas Nguema (who gratefully murdered a third of the population of Equatorial Guinea that had voted him in). Today’s empire builders of the US neocon species (and their British hangers-on, such as Ferguson) have also inscribed democracy on their banners. Let the world perish so democracy may triumph, is the underlying animus one can infer.

Cultural democracy can be an even deadlier WMD, and Hobsbawm must have felt it in his sick viscera. Had he thought that his purpose would be better served by an advocacy of cannibalism, he would have written tetralogies on the march of man-eating progress through history. As it was, he was a democrat today, a communist tomorrow, an elitist the day after and a populist the day after that. Whatever works.

That’s why the widely asked question, whether he was a member of the Cambridge spy ring in the 30s, is ultimately moot. If he was, how differently would he have acted throughout his life? If he wasn’t, he might as well have been.

This makes me repeat the question I asked yesterday, but so far haven’t answered. How is it that the likes of Hobsbawm and his sycophantic admirers, have come to dominate popular media and, through those, public opinion? The question is too involved for a short piece to tackle, but one can be certain that the answer will have nothing to do with a clash between the left and the right, conservatives and liberals, socialists and capitalists – at least not as those terms are defined today.

What then is the common ground on which the Hobsbawms of this world meet the Fergusons? The answer has to lie in the wholesale rejection of Western tradition, as it has been formed over two millennia. It’s not money that shapes the world, as both Ferguson and Hobsbawm preach, but indeed culture, as Hobsbawm also believed with his usual consistency.

It’s just that when the West was called Christendom, culture, understood here in the broadest possible sense, moved the world in one direction, and today’s cultural simulacrum moves it in the opposite one, towards perdition. One suspects that God alone can reverse this lethal motion. The rest of us can only abhor accolades for its active agents. Such as Hobsbawm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To be sure, he made some mistakes, and we must learn from them. He’s also said to have killed six million Jews and a couple of million Gypsies, cripples, homosexuals, psychos. Even if this was the case, and the jury is still out, it was all in good cause: improving the lot of the German people and introducing real social justice. Doesn’t the end justify the means?

Let’s not ignore Hitler’s achievements either: social services, free medicine, guaranteed pensions, full employment, brand new infrastructure. Did you know that it was Hitler’s scientists who first established the link between smoking and lung cancer? Many lives have since been saved as a result, and we shouldn’t forget that. In short, the pluses must be weighed against the minuses if we wish to form a balanced view.

Now what would you think of someone who spent all his life preaching the message of the two opening paragraphs? Do you believe such a man could have a successful academic career in Britain? Be awarded a Companion of Honour by the Queen? Be feted as a great thinker and one of the greatest modern historians? Regularly appear on the BBC? Have a widespread influence on our public opinion? Die to the chorus of sycophantic accolades from intellectuals representing a broad spectrum of opinion and scholarship?

Even imagining such a possibility would be preposterous, and rightly so. In any civilised country, a man like that would live a solitary, miserable life somewhere in a bad part of town and vent his hateful views to empty walls in a dingy pub at a quiet time. And if by some miracle such a man, say David Irving, did gain access to a public forum and mouthed a tenth of the drivel along those lines, he’d be ostracised and locked up in jail – to loud cheers from all decent people.

Yet Eric Hobsbawm built exactly the kind of career I describe on offering fulsome justifications for a regime that outmurdered the Nazis about five to one, and also another one that did even better than that. Among them, the communists of Soviet, Chinese, Eastern European, Cambodian and other varieties slaughtered between 100 and 150 million people – and yet Hobsbawm, a lifelong member of the Communist Party, found millions of good words to say and write about that satanic creed.

Hobsbawm used to sit on the advisory board of one of my British publishers. The publisher asked once if I’d like to meet him, to which I replied that I’d refuse to shake the man’s hand. So much more surprising it is then to see our major papers running obituaries produced by people who’d be eager not only to shake that despicable creature’s hand but also to kiss the less visible part of his anatomy.

One expects nothing else from the Guardian-Observer-Independent-Times-BBC crowd. As their worldview is circumscribed by various offshoots of Marxism refracted through the work of multitudes of pseudo-philosophers, these chaps are no better than Hobsbawm. In some respects they’re even worse, for they lack the courage of their convictions. Whereas he proudly wore his cannibalistic views on his sleeve, they cower under the shroud of liberalism, progressivism and whatever else Polly Toynbee extrudes out of her intellectual bowels.

But even those who, one would think, ought to know better toe the same line. For example, Niall Ferguson, described in the Times as ‘a rightwing historian’ talks about Hobsbawm as if he was Thucydides, Tacitus and Gibbon rolled into one. Ferguson’s obit in the Guardian is titled ‘a historian’s historian’, which sets the tone for the whole article.

Letting my eye slide along, I stumble across such pearls of wisdom as ‘his politics did not prevent Hobsbawm from being a truly great historian’, ‘his extraordinary intellectual flexibility’, ‘his best work was characterised by a remarkable breadth and depth of knowledge, elegant analytical clarity, empathy with the little man and a love of the telling detail’, ‘his extraordinary erudition and quick wit’, ‘he saw how important it was to understand the broader forces of historical change’.

Any sensible person would know that Hobsbawm wasn’t ‘a truly great historian’. He wasn’t a historian at all – he was a propagandist. To that end he systematically and knowingly falsified history, as a card-carrying communist always will. Such Soviet monstrosities as the GULAG, unprovoked attack on Finland, complicity in starting the Second World War, general reliance on violence, propensity for genocide were all either downplayed or excused in his books. Others, such as the massacre of 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn and elsewhere were never mentioned by Hobsbawm, for all his ‘love of the telling detail’. His books contain not a single idea worthy of the name, nor one page of sound analysis, and his popularity says more about our society than about him.

Ferguson strikes a girlish pose by saying, ‘It may surprise readers of the Guardian to know that Eric Hobsbawm and I were friends.’ Not being a Guardian reader, I’m not at all surprised. Ferguson himself spares me the need to explain why: ‘He and I shared the belief that it was economic change, above all, that shaped the modern era.’

This belief, Marx’s toxic residue in the world, is false, and any attempt to justify it will be intellectually puny regardless of the beholder’s academic attainment. It’s also ignorant in the fundamental sense of the word, if we define knowledge as a result of learning, not its equivalent. That a communist and a self-professed anti-communist should converge at this point only reinforces my view that the difference between the two is merely that of the mathematical sign. Whether it’s a plus or a minus, they are both cut from the same cloth.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, the Romans used to say, ‘speak no evil of the dead’. If followed, this adage would effectively mean never saying a word about Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao – and Eric Hobsbawm, who was born in the year of the bolshevik turnover and died a couple of days ago at the age of 95.

 

 

It’s like the same man acting as both judge and defendant in the same trial. No matter how intelligently he goes about his task, his integrity won’t survive intact.

No one demonstrates the accuracy of this observation more persuasively than Boris Johnson. His writing has always been entertaining and reasonably clever, if a bit on the lightweight side. One could never expect being enlightened by his pieces, but one could always count on being amused. A good egg, in other words, if occasionally overcooked.

That changed when Johnson became a politician and especially when he began to harbour the ambition of one day leading his party. Evidently, combining high political office with lucrative moonlighting isn’t against his party’s regulations, though in some quarters the subject of conflicting interests might come up. But that apart, a staggering, if predictable, metamorphosis occurred: overnight Johnson’s pieces stopped being amusing and became frankly emetic.

None more so than his yesterday’s Telegraph article. It neatly encapsulates everything that’s wrong with our spivocratic politicians: cynicism, a distinct lack of either moral or intellectual integrity, willingness to bend the truth beyond breaking point, egoism.

The very title evinces much of this: ‘I’m sorry to say it, but my old school chum isn’t PM material’. Anyone who hasn’t been doing a Rip Van Winkle for the last few months has to be aware of the facts to which the title alludes so flirtatiously.

First, there’s a movement afoot at the Tory grassroots that Dave isn’t up to the job, and only Boris can save the party from being routed at the next election. Second, Boris and Dave both went to Eton, and then to the Bullingdon, a drinking club with a nice little university attached.

Hence the calculated effect of the title, geddit? Boris pretends to believe that any reader would pretend to think that the title refers to Dave, though the reader knows that this would be a sheer impossibility, and Boris knows that the reader knows but chooses to play this silly game nonetheless, both in the title and the whole first paragraph.

The villain of the piece is of course Ed Miliband, not Dave Cameron, he of the classic scholarship fame. Boris proceeds to regale his readers with a few truisms about Ed being a sorry excuse for a statesman, a pernicious leftie redistributor and generally a disaster waiting to happen. Fair enough. The difference between a truth and a truism is that the former needs stating and the latter doesn’t, but hey, it’s only a newspaper piece.

What follows, however, makes one want to fill the proverbial bucket. For Boris then launches into a stupid and disingenuous panegyric to Tony Blair, arguably the worst prime minister in British history, although Gordon and Dave may want to claim that distinction for themselves.

Boris talks, for example about ‘New Labour’s sensible accommodation with the wealth creators of this country’. Excuse me? Are we talking about the same New Labour that created the economic disaster we’re stuck with for at least the next generation? The government that raided the pension funds of ‘the wealth creators of this country’? Raised public spending to suicidal levels? Increased the overall tax burden? Printed more money than in the previous two centuries? Suffocated businesses with red tape, both domestic and especially European? Apparently we are. And it’s a Tory who does the talking.

Hold on, Boris isn’t finished yet. ‘You could vote for Blair and use private medicine,’ he goes on. ‘You could vote for Blair and send your children to fee-paying schools. You could vote for Blair and run a vast multinational corporation… ANYONE could vote for Blair.’

Under Blair, much of the NHS frontline staff were replaced with administrators, which was in line with the overall drive to shift employment into the public sector. If under John Major the country lost 800,000 public jobs, Blair created 500,000 new ones in just his first five years. The immediate effect on the NHS was that even many people who couldn’t really afford private medicine had to use it if they didn’t want to die (spoken from personal experience).

The same applies to fee-paying schools. The destruction of state education in this country, perpetrated by Blair’s parteigenossen and exacerbated during his tenure, made many middle-class people, already impoverished by Labour taxes, spend their last pennies on educating their children privately. The alternative to that was not to have them educated at all.

As to running a ‘vast multinational corporation’, that was indeed possible, but exceedingly difficult unless said corporation had intimate links to Tony and his cronies. In short, ‘anyone could vote for Blair’, provided he only had half a brain, and not the better half.

But, according to Boris, ‘voters aren’t fools’. If he really thinks that, he’d be well-advised to learn what Winston Churchill once said: ‘the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter’. But then Boris already knows it – he just won’t let on that he does.

He ends with a rousing chord: ‘David Cameron will be returned with a thumping majority in 2015’. On second thoughts, perhaps Boris does think we’re all fools.

Dave wasn’t able to win a clear, never mind ‘thumping’, majority in the midst of the worst economic catastrophe in Britain’s history, and standing against the party directly responsible for it. Only an imbecile would think he’ll be able to achieve this feat on the strength of his pathetic record. Even his coalition partners are ready to jump ship, even his close colleagues are plotting behind his back.

But Boris doesn’t believe what he says. Moreover, he’s clearly conducting a surreptitious campaign to replace Dave as party leader. And the campaign may yet succeed because the Tories know what Boris won’t admit for tactical reasons – Dave is a loser.

So of course is Ed Miliband, but the safe bet is that he won’t contest the next election – especially if Labour follow the course kindly charted for them by Boris. Revert to New Labour empty promises, pledge allegiance to the same vacuous policies and they just may get in.

The voters may not be stupid, but they’re certainly not blessed with a long memory. They may well forget the disastrous tenure of New Labour and vote in its successors. Particularly if the competition comes from the likes of Dave and Boris, Tony Blair groupies.

Not so long ago a judge praised burglars for their courage. Now, with equal justification, Dave is being extolled for the courage he displayed in implicitly attacking Russia and China in his UN speech:

“The blood of these young [Syrian] children is a terrible stain on the reputation of this United Nations. And in particular, a stain on those who have failed to stand up to these atrocities and in some cases aided and abetted Assad’s reign of terror.”

That’ll be Russia and China then. Dave must have a spectral analyser built into his eyes to be able to distinguish the blood of Syrian children from the blood of millions already dripping from the hands of those two regimes. On second thoughts, perhaps he doesn’t. For, just this once, the blood whose spilling he decries adorns a different set of hands.

As is normally the case, the blood of victims is on their murderers’ hands, in this instance on those belonging, in roughly equal measure, to Assad’s troops and the rebels. The second set of culprits are those who inspired, provoked, financed and supported the outbreak of violence that goes by the name of the Arab Spring. That is to say mainly the US administration, egged on by harebrained neocon effluvia, and HMG, so courageously led by Dave.

The courage of a statesman isn’t in making fiery and irresponsible speeches. It’s in being a statesman, something that Dave manifestly is not. Rather than uttering the rubbish he saw fit to mouth, a statesman would follow, and act upon, a totally different logic in the present situation: 

That Messrs Assad, Saddam Hussein, Mubarak, Qaddafi et al are not to be confused with Mother Teresa is beyond doubt. Equally certain is that, in an ideal world, all of us would work diligently towards overthrowing their sanguinary regimes. In such a world, we’d all close ranks with those champions of goodness and democracy who rose against those regimes; we’d all joyously die on the barricades erected in the name of human liberty and world peace.

Alas, we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in one in which bad Middle Eastern tyrants tend to be replaced by worse ones (remember the Shah of Iran and Ayatollah Khomeini?). One way or the other, the people in those countries are going to be mistreated, often killed. This doesn’t depend on any specific government there, and it would be sheer folly to believe that a benign, liberal Muslim state could ever be anything other than a figment of neocon imagination. Our actions must depend on an accurate understanding of the region and how the events there affect our national interests.

It’s hard not to notice that for the better part of a millennium and a half Islam has been waging war against the West, or Christendom as it once was. That doesn’t mean 1,500 years of non-stop fighting any more than the Hundred Years’ War meant a hundred years of incessant hostilities. There would be a remission, then a flare-up, then a remission again. We’re into an acute phase at present.

Now why has Islam been so consistently belligerent? Because it’s that kind of religion. There are 107 verses in the Koran calling for the murder of infidels, apostates and anyone else who holds back the global march of Islam. Unlike us, the Muslims follow the tenets of their religion, well, religiously. This means that a Muslim country will always be aggressive towards us in direct proportion to its religious fervour.

Consequently, it’s in our interests to encourage and prop up the most secular Muslim regimes, regardless of how beastly they are to their own people. We must realise that, for as long as Islam holds sway over the Middle East, any alternative regime, in addition to probably being even more cruel internally, will also present a clear and present danger both to us and our allies.

Hard as it is to accept such a view on abstractly humanitarian grounds, we must also encourage, or at least not try very hard to stop, any internecine hostilities there. The more the Muslims fight one another, the weaker they’ll be to do harm to us.

This ought to be the general line of thought guiding a true statesman endowed with the courage to think straight and dispassionately. And what’s Dave saying?

“If the United Nations Charter is to have any value in the 21st Century we must now join together to support a rapid political transition.” [A transition to a fire-eating Islamist regime that’ll destabilise the region, endanger our few allies there and jeopardise world peace, is what this really means.]

“…Libyan public, who were not prepared to allow extremists to ‘hijack their chance for democracy,’ ” [Any chance for democracy in a Muslim country, Dave, is inversely proportionate to its being Muslim. The Arab Spring has so far brought to power Islamist regimes in every country that until then had been run by an awful but reasonably secular regime.]

“Today is not the time to turn back – but to keep the faith and redouble our support for open societies, and for people’s demands for a job and a voice.” [Those people don’t just demand a job and a voice. They also demand on-going war on the West waged by demographic or other means, the literal following of sharia law and an immediate annihilation of the West’s sole ally in the region.]

If this is courage, I’ll take a cowardly prime minister any day. But Dave’s courage or lack thereof comes out of the latest session with focus groups. A truly courageous statesman wouldn’t blabber away, tossing off at best meaningless and at worst dangerously idiotic phrases. He’d understand the situation and do what’s good for his country, her allies and the West in general.

Only a coward would resort to the easy option of making a speech like Dave’s oration at the UN. Only a naïve, or else ideologically inspired, commentator wouldn’t recognise this. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Following the old adage about our enemies’ enemies, anyone who dislikes billionaire Vladimir Putin is supposed to like billionaire Alexander Lebedev. Yet without in any way denigrating folk wisdom, one finds it hard to apply in this instance, though our papers don’t seem to share this problem.

Parallels are being drawn between Lebedev and Pussy Riot, with the altogether correct conclusion that justice in Putin’s Russia falls short of our standards. Fair enough, a quick phone call from the Kremlin can indeed open or close any case, and those that stay open often have the verdict decided in advance. But that makes neither Pussy Riot less hideous nor Mr Lebedev more innocent. 

Lebedev has been charged with hooliganism for beating up a fellow guest on a Moscow TV show. Taking exception to Sergei Polonsky’s perfectly innocent remarks, the oligarch got up and threw a well-rehearsed combination of punches, knocking the unsuspecting man off his chair to the floor.

The Times refers to the incident as a ‘punch-up’, implying bilateral action. It wasn’t. It was a savage, surprise attack that was neither provoked nor reciprocated.

Now Lebedev’s pugilistic exploits may earn him several years in prison, which on the surface of it doesn’t sound like terrible injustice. Nor is the vicious attack a groundless accusation: anyone with access to YouTube can watch it in living colour. Fair cop? Not according to the accused, who doesn’t mind venting his views urbi et orbi. And he can.

Unlike other Russian billionaires Mr Lebedev has easy access to British newspapers. After all, his family owns several of them, The Standard and The Independent being the jewels in their portfolio. About a year ago, the whisper started that Lebedev was also about to acquire The Times, but we’re not going to indulge in rumour-mongering, are we?

His self-defence is as virtuosic as his boxing technique (not every brawler can throw such short, straight punches, especially in combinations). ‘Anyone in my position would have done the same,’ says Lebedev. ‘The only thing I regret is that people might now perceive me as a violent person, which I am absolutely not.’

Perish the thought, whatever would give anybody that idea? Publicly beating up a man who doesn’t share our opinions is a perfectly normal, non-violent thing to do. Especially for a career KGB officer, which Lebedev was.

His son’s comment is breathtaking in its effrontery: ‘My father has spent his life trying to promote freedom of expression and justice in his fight against corruption in Russia.’ Of course he has. Shame on you for thinking KGB officers may devote their lives to anything other than promoting human liberties or, as The Mail described it, ‘quality journalism’.

Lebedev Jr was alluding to Russia’s Novaya Gazeta, which his father owns in partnership with Gorbachev. The paper has indeed taken an anti-Putin stance, and several of its correspondents, including Anna Politkovskaya, have been rather unceremoniously bumped off in assorted dark alleys – though not in ‘the shithouse’, as Putin once identified his preferred killing venue.

But even if, at a moment of weakness, we accept that Lebedev is animated by a noble spirit, rather than political ambitions or a personal squabble with his KGB colleague Putin, we still may find it hard to contain some disbelief. Much as we crave seeing Lebedev in the light shone by his son, facts just won’t let us. (Russophones can get these on kompromat.ru.)

Upon graduation from the Institute for International Relations, the notorious KGB breeding ground, Lebedev joined his alma mater’s sponsoring organisation and in 1987 was posted under diplomatic cover to the Soviet embassy in London. This was a more prestigious posting than Dresden, where Putin served, which may partly explain the colonel’s persistent resentment of Lebedev.

Exactly what assignments Lebedev carried out here isn’t known. Yet at the start of his ‘business’ career he liked to threaten his competitors with KGB ‘torture chambers’, boasting about his experience in their use.

After the 1991 transfer of power from the Party to the KGB, otherwise known as ‘the collapse of the Soviet Union’, the ruling elite felt compelled to portray Russia as a new oasis of freedom, democracy and free enterprise. To that end, state assets were transferred into the tender care of ‘appointed’ oligarchs, mainly drawn from three groups: komsomol (Young Communist League) functionaries, KGB officers and common criminals. In their moral principles and modus operandi the three groups were barely distinguishable, so their fusion into a single entity proceeded apace.

Lebedev was one of those who drew the long straw. He started a finance company that instantly prospered, then in 1995 bought the National Reserve Bank. How he managed in just a couple of years to put together enough money to buy even a struggling bank is a mystery, but then Russia is full of them.

What’s important is that government-owned Gazprom, the world’s biggest gas producer, instantly transferred $300 million into the bank, even though it seemed to be on its last legs. But then, to use the Lebedev mantra, any major energy company, be it BP, Esso or Shell, would jump at the chance of transferring their hard-earned into a moribund bank days after it was acquired by someone with little experience in business. Wouldn’t it?

In due course, Lebedev bought a big share of Aeroflot and never looked back – until now, that is. For eventually a rift appeared between the ‘appointed’ oligarch and Putin.

Such oligarchs don’t really own their money – they keep an eye on it and are allowed to use some. This arrangement is contingent upon their behaviour. If they just enjoy their instantly acquired wealth and jump when Putin tells them to, they are welcome to their toys, such as jets, yachts, English football clubs or, in Lebedev’s case, London newspapers. But, as Mikhail Khodorkovsky will agree, the moment they launch unauthorised forays into politics they’re in trouble.

Lebedev too got ideas above their station. ‘Money for me,’ he once said, ‘is rather an opportunity to… affect public life.’ Now indulging in anti-Putin politics leaves an oligarch only two options: either do a Berezovsky and go west, preferably to London, or do a Khodorkovsky and go east, to a Siberian prison camp. Lebedev has rejected the former, so the latter may await.

Yet only someone who knows nothing about Russia or indeed people in general can portray him as a ‘freedom fighter’ committed to ‘quality journalism’. I don’t always understand the meaning of ‘quality’ as a modifier, but, assuming they mean high quality, one would suggest that perhaps The Independent and The Standard aren’t the brightest-shining examples of journalistic excellence. Under Lebedev’s stewardship the latter has reduced its price to nothing, which is about what it’s worth.

No, Mr Lebedev is committed to something else, and I wouldn’t venture a guess as to what that might be. Neither am I going to deny that, if Putin’s poodle Abramovich had indulged in TV violence, he probably would have got away with it.

But by the standards of any civilised country, what Lebedev did would be classified as assault. That Russia isn’t a civilised country shouldn’t mean that Lebedev’s thuggery wasn’t assault. If he’s thrown into jail, I, for one, won’t shed any tears.

What does vex me is that chaps like him are allowed to buy means of affecting public opinion in England. Free enterprise should be encouraged – but not allowed to become a suicide pact.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One would have thought that Dave’s experience with talk shows would make him steer clear of David Letterman and his little traps.

In 2006 Dave appeared on Jonathan Ross’s BBC show, only to be asked if, as a young lad, he had ever masturbated to a photo of Margaret Thatcher. Any normal man would have instantly got up and left. Then, if by some stroke of luck, that same man became prime minister a few years later, he’d question exactly how hideous, unfunny vulgarians like Ross contribute to ‘promoting education and learning’ and ‘stimulating creativity and cultural excellence’, both stipulated in the BBC Charter. He’d then threaten to revoke this charter unless the BBC complied with it.

Our Dave of course did none of those things. Walking out would have communicated to the electorate that he’s not a MAN OF THE PEOPLE. That cherished distinction presupposes regarding words like ‘wank’ as ipso facto amusing. So Dave just smiled as if he had heard a dazzling witticism. And, judging by the fact that the BBC continues to churn out trivial, mindless and often offensive entertainment, its compliance with its charter has never been questioned.

Now Dave has got into hot water over another charter, the Great one. Letterman offered him a brief quiz on things British, such as who wrote Rule, Britannia. Not only was Dave blissfully unaware of this piece of trivia, but, by guessing it was Elgar, he was at least a full century out. A couple of decades ago, any primary school pupil unburdened by learning difficulties would have known the name of Thomas Arne and what he was famous for, but we’ll let it pass.

The next test Dave failed involved Magna Carta, and this one wouldn’t inconvenience a moderately bright kindergarten pupil. To Dave’s credit, he knew what Magna Carta was and when it was signed. After some visible mental effort he even identified the place where that momentous event took place. What utterly defeated our old Etonian was the English translation of those two devilishly difficult words.

Now let’s suppose for the sake of argument that Dave has never read history books, many of which refer to this document as The Great Charter. Let’s further suppose that he played truant when Latin was taught at Eton and then spent all of his university years getting pissed at the Bullingdon Club to the exclusion of any academic studies. Such suppositions hurt, for generally one expects that a national leader would have been drawn from the pool of those who did well at school. But I, for one, am ready to be lenient about such gaping holes in Dave’s education.

The next problem is much worse. For any averagely intelligent man, even if he never attended a single Latin lesson, ought to be able to guess what these two words mean. The normal thought process would lead him towards other words sharing the same root. Let me show you how this is done, Dave, and for once in your life pay attention.

You must have ordered magnums of Bolli at the Bullingdon, didn’t you? Fine, fine, it wasn’t Bolli but Krug, but that’s beside the point. It’s the word ‘magnum’ that I want you to concentrate on. You know what it is, don’t you? Excellent. It’s indeed a bottle twice the normal size. A very big bottle, in other words. And how do we say ‘very big’ in one word? No, not ‘huge’. Not ‘bloody humongous’ either, and anyway it’s two words, not one. And not even ‘gigantic’, though we’re getting warmer. What was that? Super. You got it in one, or four rather. It’s ‘great’!

Now where else do we find this root Dave? Yes, that’s right, magnum also means a big cartridge in firearms, but I was thinking of different words. No? All right, I’ll give you a tip. What kind of glass do we hold to objects to make them appear larger? That’s right, good lad. A magnifying glass.

That’ll do us for the first word. Admittedly, one has to make the mental jump from ‘magnum’ and ‘magnify’ to ‘Magna’, but even Dave’s cerebral agility should be up to this task.

Now for the second word. Here we’re on shakier grounds, as connecting ‘Carta’ with ‘charter’ may require an IQ in three digits, or certainly no lower than 90. Words like ‘card’, ‘cartography’, ‘carte blanche’ should lead us to ‘chart’, and then we’re within one hop, skip and jump of ‘charter’.

There we have it Dave. The Great Charter, the bedrock of Englishmen’s liberties, commonly though not exclusively referred to as Magna Carta.

Now please tell me it was all a publicity stunt, another trick designed to position Dave as a MAN OF THE PEOPLE. THE PEOPLE, on average, probably wouldn’t even know what Magna Carta was, never mind what the words mean. Is that what your focus groups say, Dave? Do they also confirm that THE PEOPLE don’t want their elected representatives to be cleverer than they are?

On second thoughts, perhaps it may be better to have a mentally challenged ignoramus for prime minister than a devious, calculating spiv. Then again, it may not.

And Dave? Next time you appear on a talk show, make sure it’s prerecorded. Those live ones can land a chap in a spot of bother, what?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why do you think we need an EU?

No nation in Europe can by itself achieve the necessary scale of economic freedom to meet all social demands.

So essentially we are putting collective security above individual sovereignty?

Now at last the time has finally come when the people of Europe, in their understandable striving for economic security, can make the decisive step to co-operation.

That still doesn’t address the issue of national interest in relation to collective security.

The will towards European Community effort… must become the leading concern of the basic, ruling economies… It means a readiness in certain circumstances to subordinate one’s own interests to those of the European Community. That is the highest goal which we require from the European states and we are striving to attain it. In individual cases this will mean sacrifices but the outcome is that all people will benefit.

But surely the tendency in the EU runs towards creating a protectionist bloc, something generally regarded as economically counterproductive?

If one considers the natural potential of our continent, it becomes apparent that Europe, in fact, meets all the requirements of a complete, self-sufficient economic area.

How do you think a unified economy can accommodate the interests of individual countries?

The preconditions for a political order to achieve the co-operation of the peoples of Europe are clearly identified. Its essence: respect for national character, development of own economic resources, long-term economic treaties. Economic interdependence is endorsed by destiny. The economic unity of Europe is manifest.

Aren’t we talking about essentially a statist economy?

The new empowerment of the originative and creative power of the individual is grounded in the community, the creation of a uniform economic understanding and attitude, the allocation of decisive tasks through the political leadership… Apart from this, the economy is free and self-responsible.

Don’t you think that the only major freedom remaining in individual states is that of running suicidal debts?

It has to be said that the debt is generally overstated compared to what it actually is. The arithmetical error runs on because differences in accounting periods, balances and balances in contra are not simultaneously taken into account.

That may be. But surely the monetary union inevitably presupposes the pooling of debt?

This task [of creating a single currency] is only possible if we first bring the European national economies into order…

But one can’t help noticing that the current austerity measures, feeble as they are, are causing unrest among people used to getting something for nothing.

Such a fundamental economic belief demands a social conscience. The people of Europe must and can demand social responsibility and consciousness from their state leadership in the realisation of the new economic order.

You seem to be suggesting that social responsibility may have to come at a cost to prosperity.

The new European economy will have to consider as its first task the fulfilment of its social obligations.

Thank you, Mr…

Well, replacing the ellipsis with the interviewee’s name would be telling, wouldn’t it? You still haven’t had the chance to guess who he was.

In the good, if recent, tradition of British education, I’ll give you a multiple choice. Was it a) José Manuel Barroso, b) Jacques Delors? c) Jacques Santer? d) Romano Prodi?

Got you going there, didn’t I? The interviewee could have been any one of those venerable gentlemen, but wasn’t. The correct answer is e) None of the above.

Every reply to my questions came from a speech delivered in 1942 by Walther Funk, Hitler’s Economy Minister and President of the Reichsbank (published in English by SMP Ltd.). Herr Funk spoke from the heart and with his usual eloquence about the EEC,  Europäische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft for short.

In pursuit of his high-minded ideals Herr Funk indulged in certain peccadilloes that eventually earned him a life sentence at Nuremberg, with a hangman’s noose a distinct possibility until the last moment. But in a modern context his words speak louder than his deeds.

Each one of them shows an uncanny resemblance to the language of every formative document of the EU and the organisations out of which it came like Eve from Adam’s rib. Such likeness of words must betoken at least partial, if not yet total, similarity of principle and purpose.

Suffice it to say that the glittering prize Herr Funk saw in his mind’s eye, a federal Europe dominated by Germany, is a whisker away from becoming a reality. It’s true that some of the trappings of the Third Reich, those revolving around mass murder, are so far absent from the everyday practices of the EU.

However, much too often, when talking about either Reich, people concentrate on the consequences of the founding principles, rather than the principles themselves. Far be it from me to suggest that these are identical in the EU dominated by today’s Germany and wartime Europe dominated by Nazi Germany.

Yet it takes a blind man, or else one who won’t see, not to realise that they aren’t a million miles apart. And if you don’t believe me, I suggest you talk to the spirit of Walther Funk.

Carnivorous socialists, whether national or international, kill people. More herbivorous ones, oxymoronically called ‘democratic’, concentrate on softer targets, such as economy, family – and language.

The first type relies on guns and torture, the second softens resistance with a PC barrage and then the state’s troops move in.

François Hollande’s government is nothing if not socialist. Therefore it’s nothing if not hateful. Like all socialists, he makes pie-in-the-sky promises he has no means, nor indeed intention, of fulfilling. But whenever he promises to destroy something, old François is always as good as his word.

This pattern is observable in all types of socialist. Lenin, for example, promised to eliminate the upper classes and build a paradise on earth. The advent of said paradise has somehow been delayed, but the first promise was kept with unwavering resolve. Not to be outdone, Hitler pledged to deliver a thousand-year Reich and to kill Jews. The Reich lasted 12 years, but six million Jews were honestly killed as promised.

Our own Tony-Gordon-Dave-Nicks follow exactly the same pattern: positive promises are all broken, negative ones are all kept. François wouldn’t be a socialist if he changed this trend and let les Anglo-Saxons do all the running.

Hence his commendable adherence to his campaign pledge to squeeze enough money out of successful people to drive them out of France. Well, this second part actually wasn’t in the pledge, but even François isn’t so stupid as not to have realised that it would naturally follow the first.

Now comes the turn of the family, the bogeyman (bogeyperson?) of all socialists, whether national, international or ‘democratic’. François promised to legalise homomarriage and, voilà, he’s about to do it. But first comes a bit of softening linguistic barrage.

François’s France is about to ban the words ‘father’ and ‘mother’ from all legal documents. These offensive vocabules will be replaced by ‘parent’, while marriage will be redefined as the union ‘of two people, of different or the same gender.’ Actually, as a champion of political correctness of long standing, I find the word ‘two’ unnecessarily restrictive. For example, a judge in Saõ Paolo recently married a threesome, thus blazing the trail for all of us. But let’s stick to François’s innovation.

I welcome the general intent, while bemoaning the singular lack of creativity in the detail. The word ‘parent’ is too cold and impersonal to oust ‘mother’ and ‘father’ from common parlance – even if it replaces them in official documents. Of course, summary imprisonment of anyone who uses such obscenities could help, but that’s best kept for François’s second term.

Instead I propose to follow the thinking behind the blend already universally used in France: messieursdames. The beauty of this plural blend is that in French it would sound exactly the same in the singular. Thus the government official conducting a marriage ceremony could refer to both the bride and his/her blushing groom as monsieurdame, and to their proud parents as pèremère. And if you think this sounds a tad hermaphroditic, you don’t belong in polite society. In fact, if François’s ideological brethren have their way here, you’ll soon belong in prison.

In defence of the forthcoming legalisation of marriage between, or among, two or more messieursdames, François’s Justice Minister monsieurdame Christiane Taubira spoke from the heart: ‘Who is to say that a heterosexual couple will bring a child up better than a homosexual one?’ Who indeed? This is one of those questions that, if asked, can never be answered to the monsieurdame’s satisfaction. How about everybody over the 5,000 years of recorded history? The Bible? Tradition? Empirical evidence? Aesthetic sense? Common decency or indeed common sense? No, none of those works.

Still, as a linguist by training, and champion of political correctness by conviction, I’m more interested in how we can take François’s lead and implement such changes here. It’s not as if we haven’t had a head start.

For example, the third-person singular pronoun ‘his’ has been effectively eliminated from our language. In its place we use ‘their’, not to sully our lips with the egregious gender-specific word, even though ‘her’ still persists. At the same time we’ve replaced a biological category with a grammatical one, by changing ‘sex’ to ‘gender’ (How’s your gender life these days?)

That’s good, but it doesn’t go far enough. One is still occasionally enraged to hear such locutions as ‘in his Fulton speech, Churchill said…’ Wouldn’t it be so much more correct, not to mention mellifluous, to say ‘In their speech…’? Of course it would be, and soon it will be. As a side benefit, this would elevate everybody to royal status by universalising the entitlement to the royal plural.

I’m particularly fond of the contraction Ms, as it communicates in no uncertain terms that an autonomous person of the female gender won’t be defined by her marital status. But the same gripe applies here: we’re still left in no doubt that the addressee is indeed a person of the female gender. This isn’t good enough, is it?

Instead we must contract all those titles, irrespective of gender, to M. In addition to solving the problem at hand, this would also warm up the salutation by the oblique reference to James Bond’s boss, thereby implying that female persons are capable of competing on even – or superior! – terms with anybody.

Now the Bible may prove more recalcitrant, though giant strides towards its neutering have already been made. Thus my title above is already used in some churches, though this does present another problem, that of addressing priests. Call me a reactionary, but I just don’t think ‘Parent Mullen’ will ever stick.

No, we must come up with our own blend, going the French one better. How about ‘Frother’? Or ‘Mather’? We’re getting close, aren’t we? There’s definitely room for thought there.

 

 

 

 

 

This title is a mea culpa for my previous posting in which I lampooned the deficit of principles in our politicians. But the LibDem conference has proved beyond any doubt that there’s something much worse than self-serving politicians: those who proceed from honestly held pernicious principles.

For there’s little doubt that the Nick-Vince-Danny gang are inspired not only by self-aggrandisement but also by a genuine urge to destroy our country. In this they converge with the Milibandits, and, if there is such a thing as a coalition made in hell, this would be it.

Allow me to recap briefly the main prongs in the LibDem attack on Britain. First, they insist on penalising anyone who lives in a decent house. Second, they crave extra taxes on the group that pays most of them anyway, those with an annual income exceeding £50,500. Third, they feel in their viscera that, even though British businesses are suffering from investment anorexia, they should pay more corporate tax. Fourth, they’ve come up with a devious system of making sure every last loophole is taken out of the inheritance-tax laws. Fifth, they think parents should use their pension funds to pay, or at least collateralise, their children’s education costs. At the same time, they think it advisable that the tax-free ceiling on pension contributions be lowered.

One almost wishes these chaps could emulate their colleagues in the sunnier European climes by taking a backhander to abandon their subversive notions. But they won’t: their policies are driven by viscerally and selflessly held commitment to envy, hatred and stupidity. When these are in the forefront, reason needn’t apply.

However, if we leave the swamp of putrid ideological emanations and cast a dispassionate look at their proposals, we’ll instantly see what a shattering effect they’ll have on the economy.

First, with asset inflation outstripping the monetary kind at least by a factor of seven over the past couple of generations, someone living in an expensive house may not have much money to pay any extra tax. Many such individuals simply got lucky that their parents bought an average house in a good postcode, which at the time may have been quite ordinary. In fact, a few of my friends live in such houses, even though their income may fall short of the £50,500 seen as obscene wealth to be punished.

Now someone making that amount would be lucky to clear £30,000. This is, in a first-world country at any rate, a subsistence wage for a couple with one child, never mind more. Half of it would probably pay for the mortgage, council tax and maintenance. That is, of course, provided they didn’t inherit the house from their parents who had bought wisely. Should that be the case, the left jab of extra income tax would be followed by the right cross of mansion tax to knock them cold.

At a time when British wealth creators are showing every symptom of economic consumption, corporate tax must be repealed, not increased. Surely this ought to be clear to anyone blessed with an IQ of above room temperature (Celsius)? Businesses must be given every incentive to invest, hire and grow bigger, not to cut back, lay off and grow smaller.

Such a gifted individual would also know that limiting people’s ability to pass their wealth on to their children will cool off their desire to create this wealth. Blowing money on a Spanish villa or, say, an iffy oil-drilling venture would appear more attractive, with disastrous effects for the economy.

And if pension funds stop being just that, which is to say a nest egg for people’s old age, they’ll be debauched even more than they are now. To be fair, congenital, cordial hatred for the very idea that people should be independent of the state isn’t the exclusive property of the LibDems. This is the genetic disorder of all statists. Thus the first act of Blair’s government was to launch a £5-billion raid on pension funds. This is understandable: people more independent of the state will be less likely to vote for any old Tony, Nick or Eddie whose life’s work is to make the state more powerful and the individual less so.

If their proposals are acted upon, moderately dynamic wealth creators will become apathetic, truly enterprising ones will flee, and we’ll all suffer. Tax revenues will go down, but taxation will have served its punitive purpose, and that’s the whole point to this vindictive lot.

To come up with such cretinous, suffocating measures at a time the economy is booming would be ill-advised. To do so now, when our economy is on its last legs, gasping for breath, should be an imprisonable offence, or perhaps a loony-binnable one.

This drives home yet again that neither crises nor bad politicians can succeed in bringing about a catastrophe on their own. A catastrophe befalls only when a crisis happens at a time when bad politicians are at the helm.

We are living at such a time, and we must thank the LibDems for serving a useful reminder that this is the case. Only a conservative party led by intelligent, resolute patriots could save us from this disgusting lot. And if you think we have such a party now, perhaps you’d like to buy Westminster Bridge. I can get you a good deal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Coalitions are coalescing all over the place, except for those that are falling apart. Backs are being scratched, horses traded, accusations levelled, apologies made, hints dropped, the other one pulled, categorical denials issued – and only a fully paid up political junkie can keep track.

That’s something I’m emphatically not, so I need your help to negotiate my way through SW1A. Let me see if I got this right:

Nick won’t play unless Dave taxes every rich bastard out of Britain. If he does, Nick will go along with the cuts that really aren’t, provided Dave commits to tax rises that really are. Are you with me so far?

At the same time Vince has been talking to Ed Balls – and texting him, for in spite of his mature age Vince swings with our high-tech times – about kicking the other Ed into touch and forming a Labour-LibDem coalition, while also talking to the other Ed about the future Chancellor’s job, which Ed Balls thinks is his for the asking, but which the other Ed is reluctant to promise him for fear that Balls will then go for the top job and get it.

So Ed M. is ready to strike first and knife Ed B. in the back, provided Vince does the same to Nick first and Dave second, thus really clearing the way to a proper coalition, not the one Nick and Vince are serving so loyally now with the transparent purpose of sending Dave on a fulltime lecture circuit in 2015 if not sooner.

But Dave isn’t quite ready to start lecturing anybody other than his cabinet colleagues, so he’s keen on getting out of the coalition with Nick and Vince. The original deal was that Dave would coalesce with a third party, which the LibDems no longer are, having lost that distinction to UKIP Nigel, who suddenly looks like a better bet as a coalition partner to Dave.

For his part Nigel doesn’t mind forming a coalition with Dave, though he has made it abundantly clear that he’d just as eagerly play with anyone who’d promise him an EU referendum, be that Nick, either Ed, Vince, Putin or, at a pinch, Hugo Chavez. Dave is ahead of the pack because he has experience in making that very pledge, but for some unfathomable reason Nigel isn’t entirely satisfied that Dave would be as eager to keep such a promise as he would be to make it.

The problem isn’t insurmountable, for Nigel would regain faith in Dave’s veracity if Dave opened a vein and signed the contract in blood. Yet Dave is unwilling to do so as he suspects that not many of his loyal friends would be falling over themselves to stop the bleeding. He’ll sign in ink and that’s his top offer, but Nigel won’t wear it.

Meanwhile, Jessye Norman says that Dave’s Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell has ‘retoxified the Tory brand’ by calling a policeman nasty names based on his class origin and mental ability, while also threatening to have his f—ing job for not letting Andrew ride his bike into Downing Street, which is what Boris is planning to do, at this point only figuratively… Sorry, my wife has just looked over my shoulder and informed me that it was the hack Matthew, not the singer Jessye, Norman who diagnosed the poisoning, and I can’t even tell her to sod off because according to Dave’s new law that would be the same as beating her up, and I’d end up in pokey for psychological cruelty.

And, silly me, I didn’t even know that ‘Tory’ was a brand, rather than the nickname of a political party working in our national interest. This changes the game, as far as I’m concerned, and Dave should really shift his emphasis from dumping Nick and coalescing with Nigel or, at a pinch, Hugo Chavez.

Instead he should focus on coming up with a catchy slogan encapsulating his brand proposition in such a way that punters would want to buy it. The time-proven options to consider would be ‘Dave reaches the parts neither Nick nor Ed does’, ‘Dave is it’, ‘Dave whitewashes whiter’ and ‘By George, or for that matter Boris, Dave won’t be undone!’ This last one really rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?

Nick meanwhile has apologised for not having enunciated his promise not to raise tuition fees a bit more clearly, thereby leaving room for misinterpretation. The word ‘not’ inadvertently slipped between ‘will’ and ‘go up’, thus changing the meaning of Nick’s pledge that all along was intended to say, ‘Tuition fees will go up.’

Not everyone has accepted the apology, but Dave has, for the time being. He’ll keep Nick in the coalition because, if he doesn’t, Boris will barge into Downing Street on his own bike, and he’s the one Nigel would rather play with because, having once been bitten by Dave’s promises, he’s now twice shy, and Boris hasn’t lied to him yet though he probably will in the future.

You could see me wiping my brow even as we speak. So glad we’ve sorted out the mess. It took a while to understand the high principles animating our leaders, but we’ve got there in the end. Thanks for your help.