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I’m a great admirer of statism, that is the state’s increasing control over our lives. Just imagine the harm we’d do ourselves if left to our own devices. We wouldn’t know what to do, say, think, drink or eat – we’d be like anonymous foundlings dropped at orphanage doors, Rousseau-style.

The state is our father, especially since so many of us are these days raised without the biological version thereof. And a father needs to be big and strong to protect us from life’s perils. Since every penny we pay the paternalistic state increases its size and power, our tax money is always well spent, even when it’s spent badly.

Sticks-in-the-mud will scream that conducting this massive audit will put extra pressure on public services, which aren’t exactly awash with funds. No, it won’t. The government will simply ask – nay tell – us to cough up more tax money, and we should all be happy to do so.

Hence I cheer Theresa May’s decision to create a new layer of bureaucracy required to conduct this audit, covering all aspects of the state: schools, universities, GP surgeries, hospitals, police, courts, job centres and benefits offices.

Yes, it’ll cost us. But I for one am tired of tossing and turning all night pursued by the nightmares of all those mistreated ethnic and poor people. So I’m prepared to pay for sound sleep and peace of mind.

However, while supporting this initiative wholeheartedly, I’m not so sure about the thinking behind it. Let me stress once again that I welcome any exercise of state power, however spurious the rationale for it is.

However, one has to admit that we still aren’t rid of reactionary fossils who feel differently. Such spoilsports may embarrass Mrs May by asking awkward questions and making her look bad.

For example, when Mrs May was still Home Secretary, she commendably highlighted the disproportionate number of blacks being stopped and searched by police. Stop and search equals SS – get it?

Indeed, though black people make up only 2.7 per cent of the UK population, they account for 14.6 per cent of all SS victims. You know and I know and Mrs May knows that this can only be caused by racial prejudice on the part of the police.

However, the aforementioned fossils may aver that this disparity is disproportionate the other way. They’ll cite statistics showing that, while blacks make up 14.6 per cent of SS victims, they commit, in London, 54 per cent of street crimes, 59 per cent of robberies and 67 per cent of gun crimes.

Since Met cops are too shorthanded to stop and search every iffy-looking individual, they have to go by probabilities. And – much to the indignation of progressive persons like me – these point at their laxity in only including such a small percentage of blacks in the group so egregiously abused by SS.

HMG also cites statistics showing that black pupils are three times more likely than whites to be permanently excluded from school. This outrage has to be testimony to rampant racism on the part of those blue-rinsed head mistresses.

However, the fossils may again argue that this situation may have a different explanation: the somewhat understated commitment to learning in black families. For example, 54 per cent of black boys can’t read or write properly at age 14 (to be fair, the statistic for poor white boys is even worse).

Then of course boys aged 10 to 16 commit 40 per cent of all street crime, and the proportion of blacks in this subset is even higher than in the population at large. If you think of the time and effort going into selling drugs and mugging toffee noses, you’ll understand why 60,000 pupils, most of them from black or poor-white families, skip classes every day.

It’s not just the cops’ and head mistress’s racism that’ll be investigated. Access to good schools, acceptance to universities, graduation rates and progression to graduate jobs, the availability of services such as free childcare will all come under scrutiny.

And, you’ll be relieved to know that, according to Downing Street, it’s not all about blacks: “The audit will show disadvantages suffered by white working-class people as well as ethnic minorities… For example, it will give more details about why white working-class boys are much less likely than others to go to university.”

Could it be because, when they call for an interview, they sound like blacks, thereby triggering the innate racism of potential interviewers? Worth pondering, that.

And, are you ready for this? “The employment rate for ethnic minorities is ten percentage points lower than the national average.” Of course racial bigotry is the only possible explanation for what Mrs May so rightly calls a “burning injustice”.

Methinks HMG should take its cue from the US, where blacks widely receive preferential treatment called ‘affirmative action’. That system has worked wonders there, and it can do the same to us… sorry, I mean for us.

“The audit will reveal some difficult truths,” says Mrs May. No, it’ll only reveal easy ones, those that progressive people like me will welcome with open arms.

Our politicians can no longer get anything right. But at least they’re going to get something a third right, if Justice Secretary Liz ‘Elizabeth’ Truss is to be believed.

The good third is that Miss Truss has confirmed HMG’s intention to scrap the Human Rights Act imposed by the EU and gratefully received by Tony ‘Anthony’ Blair.

The two bad thirds are, first, that Britain will remain under the aegis of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and, second, that the Act will be replaced by a British Bill of Rights.

The rights of Englishmen is a notion predating the ECHR by some 800 years, and in the intervening period the concept has grown in both scope and depth. There have been glitches here and there, but on the whole Britain has done rather well in that respect, and manifestly better than any other country in Europe.

Our constitution is arguably the best and certainly the longest-lasting the world has ever seen. And as Lucius Cary said almost 400 years ago, “If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”

I’m not convinced that Liz ‘Elizabeth’ adequately understands the constitutional issues involved, and how they differ from continental practices. After all, she’s a young woman with no legal background who has expressed republican sympathies in the past, when she was President of Oxford University LibDems (a perfect CV for a Tory minister).

To be fair, even many mature men with none of those drawbacks also have problems getting their heads around our constitution. These are exacerbated by Britain’s membership in the EU and concomitant exposure to continental legal principles, which are diametrically opposite to ours.

For example, the French will tell you that they have the rule of law, but that’s not exactly true. What they have is the rule of lawyers.

Unlike English Common Law, based on precedents accumulated over centuries, the French practise positive law, one imposed by government. The two legal systems are vectored in the opposite directions: from bottom to top in Britain, from top to bottom in France.

However, under the organic governments of Christendom French kings ruled by divine right and didn’t need much legislative activism. The need only arose with the advent of perverse politics inspired by the Masonic slogan of liberté, egalité, fraternité.

Lacking an organic claim to legitimacy, the revolutionary government – and all its kaleidoscopically changing successors – flooded the population with a deluge of laws.

All in all, since 1789 France has had 17 different constitutions (to be fair, the latest one goes back 58 years). As to the number of different laws spawned by those constitutions, one would need a mainframe computer to count them. Most of these laws come from the fecund minds of avocats who bang their clever heads together to devise legislation supposed to hasten the arrival of paradise on earth, but somehow always failing to do so.

Positive law has one negative social effect: it divides people into ‘us’, those who are supposed to obey the laws, and ‘them’, the powers represented by the clever lawyers sitting on the Conseil d’Etat and similar bodies.

By contrast, English Common Law has over centuries built a solid capital of justice, accepted as such by all. We’re living off the interest on that capital, rapidly frittering it away. But at least there’s some left, and we must both give thanks and remain vigilant.

Thus we have no need for the ECHR or any other European guarantors of the rights of Englishmen. The European Court of Human Rights is no more synonymous with human rights than the European Union is with Europe. Moreover, some members of that august body (Russia springs to mind) don’t seem to be overly constrained by its legal notions.

The ECHR is good at issuing variously inane laws, but its means of enforcement are somewhat lacking. If a law can’t possibly be enforced, it’s not a law but an ideological statement. As such, it will be heeded only by those who share the same ideology, which most Englishmen don’t.

Much the same logic can be applied to criticism of a British Bill of Rights. Though such a constitutional document wouldn’t be issued by continentals, it would be inspired by the spirit of positive law, which has a distinctly continental flavour.

Anyway, we already have one Bill of Rights, passed in 1689 as a result of the Dutch occupation known as the Glorious Revolution. Having another one would be tantamount to a tacit admission that there was something wrong with the first Bill. Indeed there was, plenty, and England has never been the same thereafter.

But at least it could be argued then that the Glorious Revolution represented such a tectonic constitutional shift that its legal aspects had to be summed up in a written document. Nothing like that is happening now – in fact Britain has made the first step towards reclaiming her ancient constitution, freeing it from the yoke of European legalism.

Therefore a new Bill of Rights will be redundant, which means it’ll do more harm than good. Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland, must be spinning in his grave.

“Only a fool learns from his own mistakes,” said that good European Otto von Bismarck. “The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”

Yes, but what about those unable to learn from the mistakes of others, nor indeed from their own? There must be special schools for them, and EU leaders doubtless meet all the entry criteria.

Here’s the problem, class: the EU is moribund. Britain apart, the only major EU economy showing any growth is Germany’s. The rest teeter between stagnation and collapse, with the latter exceedingly looking likely in Italy and elsewhere.

This is directly attributable to the EU’s perverse founding impulse to bend economics to fit politics, and such attempts always end in disaster. A child has to be downright retarded not to realise that imposing the same economic policy on countries ranging from Sweden to Greece, and the same currency on most of them, is foolhardy.

Playing truant means missing essential lessons. For example, the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz predicts that the EU is hurtling towards “a cataclysmic event”, and children would be well-advised to pay attention.

But let’s concentrate on politics, especially since the EU was conceived as a political conspiracy. According to Jean Monnet, conspirator in chief, the economic jargon would only be used to deceive:

“Europe’s nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps, each disguised as having an economic purpose but which will irreversibly lead to federation.”

Altiero Spinelli, another major conspirator, reiterated that the goal was the “definitive abolition of the division of Europe into national, sovereign states”. Remember, class, those grown-ups meant what they said.

It doesn’t take a top GCSE score to see that the EU’s political structure is creaking at the joints, with the Brexit referendum bringing it closer to disintegration. Those dominoes are tottering and about to tumble.

Europeans are demanding similar referendums, with Holland leading the way, for once in something worthier than a cull of crumblies, legalising drugs and putting ugly whores into beautiful windows.

Italy will soon hold a constitutional referendum, and many observers believe it’ll be an exit plebiscite by another name. The natives are also restless in Eastern Europe, with the Czechs, Hungarians, Poles and Slovaks demanding a less centralised EU.

All these countries correctly blame the EU not only for their economic plight but also for the demographic destruction of Europe initiated and promoted by Angie and her paramours. They’re enraged by the sight of millions of cultural aliens overrunning their countries and turning them into giant Kasbahs.

They realise that once the size of barbarian mobs has gone beyond a critical mass, Europe will explode. The slower learners are helped along by the visual aids of uncontrolled Muslim terrorism threatening to turn cities like Paris into a Beirut circa 1980.

In short, the lessons are there, and the Brexit referendum ought to have focused the minds of those pupils who suffer from particularly bad concentration problems. Yet, as their reaction to Brexit shows, EU leaders are both unwilling and unable to learn.

Take economics for example. The giant protectionist bloc that the EU is stifles competition and limits opportunities for trade and foreign investment. This is the economic ABC, as are the measures known to alleviate such problems.

How do you attract foreign companies into your country, class? Right, by making such a move more affordable. And how do you do that? Correct. By lowering the cost of doing business, specifically the corporate tax.

However, having heard that Britain is planning to do just that, Stefan Löfven, the Swedish PM, threatened to punish Britain during subsequent Brexit negations, when and if they take place: “Aggressiveness from Britain in those types of issues… doesn’t improve the relationship.”

Keep the noise down, Stefan, and try to learn. This is what competition is all about, child, and perhaps you should ponder that. While at it, consider the consequences of Sweden’s ‘liberal’ attitude to Muslim immigration that has  turned the country into Europe’s greatest hotbed of sex crime.

And then Merkel, Hollande and Renzi went on a school outing to the same island on which Spinelli conceived the original conspiracy. They grudgingly accepted that not all of their problems are caused by the dastardly Anglo-Saxons.

Some of them are admittedly caused by the EU’s bossy efforts to eliminate independent nations that really wish to remain both independent and nations. So what was the upshot of the crisis meeting? What’s the answer?

Why, more integration of course, now that the British opposition has been removed. That’s it. The rest is a collection of meaningless platitudes, of the kind that have earned many a school essay an F.

Thus François: the EU needs “a new impulse on three fronts – the economy, defence and security.” Thus Matteo: “Europe… is also about peace, prosperity and freedom.” And Angie stressed the need to ensure “growth to ensure people have jobs and hope in the future”.

Any more worthless truisms, class? What about real solutions to real problems – the economic, demographic and security disasters? Really, some pupils will never learn.

 

 

 

French politicians scare the proverbial matter out of me. For, although most Western countries are governed by nonentities, we’d rather not be governed by madmen. However, if Nicolas Sarkozy’s views on diversity are any indication, his likely comeback at the next election may indeed create such a fraught situation.

By way of background, the current outburst of Muslim terrorism hasn’t exactly endeared multiculturalism to the French. Over 60 per cent of them, as opposed to 49 per cent in Britain, feel there are too many immigrants.

Such subterranean tremors produce shockwaves of support for Marine Le Pen’s National Front. Marine won’t become queen but she could well become king-maker, by siphoning votes away from Sarkozy’s UMP and Hollande’s Socialists.

Hence Sarkozy’s urgent desire to come up with a cogent and, above all, popular plan for dealing with multiculturalism which everyone realises hasn’t been a success.

Alas, his rhetoric evinces some clinical symptoms of madness. The most worrying of them is losing all touch with reality, which Sarkozy manifests when favourably comparing the French treatment of immigrants with les Anglo Saxons:

“We are not Anglo-Saxons who allow communities to live side by side while ignoring one another…” Newcomers must assimilate “not just with nationality but also with values, culture and way of life.”

Far be it from me to suggest that Britain has handled Muslim immigration well. But claiming that the French have done it better, or that they’re any further advanced in pursuing assimilation, is sheer schizophrenia.

Over 40,000 cars are burnt in France every year, about 30,000 of them in the Muslim banlieues around Paris, with the rioters screaming “Nique la France!” (F*** France). The exact figures aren’t available because the French press, scornful of the British tendency to wash private linen in public, tacitly agrees not to wash even public linen.

This propensity for immolating private transport only gets an airing during electoral campaigns, especially when a member of the Le Pen family is a factor. The fear is that flogging that dead horse (or rather those dead cars) might foster racism, Islamophobia and other fashionable vices worse than which none exists.

The banlieues, where auto-da-fés (no pun intended) take place, are belts of public housing built around French cities specifically to accommodate some eight million North Africans currently resident in France. Having thus assuaged their post-colonial guilt, the French then pumped welfare billions into the banlieues, with the implicit reciprocal agreement that the denizens stay inside and don’t inundate city centres.

No serious attempt to encourage them to assimilate was ever made, partly because the French believe that any native speaker of French is already French, thereby blessed with an innate superiority over anyone of less fortunate nativity. The North Africans speak French, n’est-ce pas? Well, that’s it then. It’s just best that these particular French speakers stew in their own ghetto juice.

A social catastrophe flowed out of this attitude like wine out of a bottle. Up to 50 percent of the banlieues’ residents are unemployed, and for young people the figure is closer to 75 percent. One doesn’t have to be an expert sociologist to realise that such areas will in short order become criminalised.

So it has transpired. The banlieues have turned into urban jungles, bearing little resemblance to ethnic areas in Britain, although the gap is closing. The British still go to such areas to have a quick curry at a place that lets you bring your own beer. The French don’t go to the banlieues at all and avoid driving through them whenever possible.

Even the police steer clear, fearful of the automatic weapons in the hands of the locals. If les flics ever dare cross the line, it’s in armoured cars. That’s not to say we don’t have problems with Islamic alienation – only that the French problems are worse.

If Sarkozy really thinks that France’s situation, for all its acknowledged drawbacks, is any better than in Britain, he has a serious medical problem. The start of any successful treatment would be to acknowledge reality as it is, rather than as he wants it to be.

The second step would be to realise that all Western countries, emphatically including France, have failed to handle the problem of Muslim immigration because they proceed from the false Enlightenment premise of equality. The wrong assumption is that Muslims are fundamentally like us, and the only reason they aren’t really like us is that they’ve been denied opportunities to assimilate.

Indeed, if there were only a few thousand Muslims here or there, they’d have no option but to assimilate, if only as subterfuge. But in a country that admits millions of them they’re much more likely to stick together and try to impose their ways on the hosts.

Hence Western countries cursed with a large Muslim presence can solve the concomitant problems only by curtailing Islamic immigration, reducing the numbers already there by mass deportations of those who evince hostility to the host country, and punishing violent harangues and acts with exemplary firmness.

Neither Sarkozy nor any other Western leader will do that. This makes their variably crazy pronouncements on the subject especially nauseating and sphincter-loosening.

Rowan Atkinson based his Mr Bean character on his brother Rodney. And, having met Rodney, I can testify that, though devoid of Rowan’s talent, he’s fully his match in creating make-believe.

He exercises this ability in supposedly serious articles, whose stock in trade should be truth, not fantasy. Specifically, he writes hysterical pro-Putin pieces wholly based on KGB/FSB propaganda.

Mr Bean’s ignorant rants are only worth debunking because some cleverer people than him also act as Putin’s useful idiots, a concept first popularised by Lenin. Alas, unlike the syphilitic dictator, Putin recruits that group mainly on the right.

In Mr Bean’s virtual world the West is in the grips of unaccountable and unprovoked Russophobia. For example, he writes “…a Syrian or Iraqi hospital bombed mistakenly by Russia is called a war crime but when US aircraft bomb a hospital for hours it is called a mistake!”

Yet both claims are true. Just look at the ordnance used by both parties.

The Americans mostly deploy guided projectiles designed for precision strikes. Obviously, bombing paramilitary forces using civilians as live shields will cause collateral damage. But only a liar will claim that mass murder is the Americans’ aim.

By contrast, the Russians widely use high-altitude bombing with free-falling fragmentation blockbusters first developed in 1956. Each explodes into 11,500 fragments, creating a killing zone of 14.5 square miles. This explains why the Russians have already killed more civilians than ISIS has managed.

Segueing from ignorance to madness. Mr Bean then accuses the Ukraine of belligerence towards Russia. Yes, and Poland was belligerent towards Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939.

Russia committed criminal acts by invading the Crimea and two Ukrainian provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk. What better proofs of Ukrainian belligerence would one want? Yet Mr Bean obligingly provides them:

“Banning communist deputies.” One could argue that a party committed to destroying parliaments must be denied parliamentary representation. Moreover, communists murdered millions of Ukrainians, at least five million in Holdomor, the artificial famine organised in 1932-33 specially for that purpose.

Can you explain why banning heirs to those crimes constitutes belligerence against Russia? Mr Bean can.

“Overturning a democratically elected Government”. ‘Government’ shouldn’t be capitalised in English, but Mr Bean’s prose does read like a translation from German. Nor does he understand the situation in the Ukraine.

The country gained independence from Holodomor murderers 25 years ago. Yet Putin refuses to regard the former Soviet republics as anything other than parts of the ‘Russian space’ to be reclaimed.

To that end, the Russians put in place puppet regimes wherever they can. One such was Yanukovych’s government. Referring to it as ‘democratically elected’ is either mendacious or stupid. In places with no democratic tradition, but with a long experience of institutionalised lies and corruption, it’s impossible to take elections seriously.

But let’s assume for the sake of argument that ousting Yanukovych wasn’t nice. What business is it of Russia? The Ukraine is an independent country that can run its affairs as it sees fit.

“Banning the Russian language”. Judging by Mr Bean’s command of his own tongue, I’m not surprised he can’t tell Russian from Ukrainian. Yet Russian remains the dominant everyday language east of the Dnieper, including Kiev. However, all official business is indeed transacted in the country’s official language. Awful, isn’t it?

“Bombing civilians in East Ukraine”. Meaning the bandit units, armed and augmented by Putin’s army, that occupied the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Interestingly, most Russophone refugees from these areas flee west, not east. They want to remain in the Ukraine, not become chattels of Putin’s junta.

Mr Bean then demonstrates his command of Google by stating that the Crimea was “Russian for over 220 years”, which supposedly justifies Putin’s invasion. Now India was British for almost the same 220 years – should we annex a part of it on that basis?

He then reconfirms his unshakeable trust in the ballot box by informing us that “the retrieval of the Crimea is backed by an unambiguous vote of the Crimeans themselves”.

What made the vote definitely ambiguous was the presence of Putin’s armed invaders at every polling station. Also the large Tartar community, decimated by Putin’s precursors, boycotted the election altogether: they know what to expect from a KGB-run Russia.

Those Western Russophobes shout about the danger of further Russian aggression against the Ukraine. Specifically, “NATO’s former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Sir Richard Shirreff, takes his madness into the realm of pseudo fiction.”

‘Pseudo’ fiction means it’s not fiction, but Rodney writes his own English. And, in addition to understanding matters martial better than Gen. Shirreff does, he also has his own facts.

Russia has deployed 40,000 armoured troops on the Ukrainian border, including the elite First Guards Tank Army, comprising, among other units, two of the country’s best divisions: the Taman and the Kantemir.

Hardly an hour goes by that one of Putin’s mouthpieces doesn’t brag about being able to take Kiev in a few hours and Warsaw in a few days. All Gen. Shirreff wrote was that NATO should take such a possibility seriously and prepare for it.

Mr Bean must be privy to Putin’s innermost thoughts. He knows that Putin has no hostile intentions, which is more than he can say for NATO and its dastardly aggression against “the post Soviet” space.

Rodney is as dismissive of facts as he is of hyphens. Otherwise he would have offered examples of NATO’s annexation of ‘post Soviet’ countries or portions thereof. But useful idiots are useless when it comes to truth.

 

 

 

As a lifelong champion of progress, I welcome any new expansion of old and tired concepts. Unfortunately, some fossilised dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries still cling to their outdated notions.

Just ask them to define the sex (gender?) of a person who has a man’s testosterone count, testes, deep voice and general appearance, while lacking such old-fashioned attributes of womanhood as ovaries and a womb. They’ll reveal their rotten core by saying that such a person is a man, dread word.

Then they look at the South African Olympic gold medallist Caster Semenya, who answers the description above, and hiss (reactionaries always hiss, they don’t just say) it’s unfair that she should compete against persons who do possess a womb, ovaries and a third of Caster’s testosterone count.

And that’s not all! Wait a minute, I need some time to compose myself, I’m so enraged… Because Miss Semenya is black, these troglodyte yahoos are guilty not only of sexism (genderism?) but also of racism. Should a white man crash a women’s competition, they wouldn’t bat an eyelid. But just because Caster is black… well, you get my point even if I myself don’t.

It’s time those cavemen learned that sex or, as champions of progress now call it, gender is neither absolute nor objective. It’s relative and subjective, meaning that every person is whatever sex he/she/it says he/she/it is.

Not only that, but no one can contest such a self-definition without being branded a sexist (genderist?), racist, homophobe, agist, misogynist, misandrist, fascist, xenophobe, Brexiteer and all other things progressive people like me condemn.

Such people deplore the blatant violations of her human rights that Miss Semenya has had to suffer throughout her distinguished running career. To name one, after her well-deserved triumph at the 2009 world championships Caster was brutally subjected to a sex (gender?) test, which found the abnormalities…

There, see what I mean? That’s what brainwashing over many centuries does. Even a lifelong champion of progress like me has let slip this revolting word. There’s no such thing as abnormalities because there’s no such thing as norms. Repeat after me: There’s no such thing…

After Caster’s human rights were so egregiously stamped into the dirt, she degradingly was made to take tablets to get her testosterone down to the level normally encountered among women, which she claims to be and therefore is.

To the delight of all lifelong champions of progress, in 2015 the IAAF reversed its shameful policy on what in the medical parlance is called hyperandrogenism (a woman being too much like a man, putting it in the language even we can understand). The new ruling states that there’s insufficient evidence that testosterone increases athletic performance.

Actually, androgens include not only testosterone but also anabolic steroids, which – as any lifelong champion of progress must now accept – don’t increase athletic performance either. All those athletes who pop them like Smarties do so simply because they like the taste.

Androgens also increase the body’s muscle mass and reduce its capacity to produce fat, making men look different from women much to the delight of sexist homophobic fossils who, for old times’ sake, still enjoy some of the more jutting fat deposits of a woman’s body.

However, we must deny on pain of richly merited ostracism or even, in the near future, criminal prosecution that men’s higher muscle mass, lower fat content and greater aggressiveness (another androgen function) make them stronger, faster and more competitive. It’s a pure coincidence that men outperform women in every sport (they also outperform women in chess, but let’s not go there).

In defending her case, Miss Semenya invoked the deified memory of Nelson Mandela. History’s greatest man once told her something of superhuman profundity: “sport is meant to make people feel united”.

I couldn’t agree more, even though my modest intellect can’t plumb such demiurgic depths. In any case, like many scriptural sayings, this one can work on many different levels.

Perhaps people should feel so united that they abandon sex (gender?) divisions in sports altogether and let men, women and any intermediate specimens compete against one another. After all, if men and women can use one another’s lavatories, why should they run separate races? No, not a good idea?

Fine. Then I’d like to quote another godlike champion of progress, Vladimir Lenin: “Before we unite we must firmly and decisively separate”. Applying this wisdom to the task at hand, perhaps the world’s governing sports bodies should introduce a third sex (gender?) category: Other. That would obviate the need for any testing and shut up reactionaries for good.

For the time being, all lifelong champions of progress should unite in offering Miss Semenya heartfelt congratulations on her 800m triumph. In conclusion I’d like to ask a question that’ll no doubt betray my naivety, nay ignorance, in matters hyperandrogenic:

Can Miss Semenya actually marry herself?

 

 

 

 

 

 

One is often concerned about the mental health of some of our hacks. With Christopher Booker, concern becomes a certainty.

Here’s the symptomatic title of his today’s article: Leaving the EU Can Cost Us Even More Than Staying In.

There would no grounds for contacting a psychiatrist had this piece come from a Guardian ideologue. Yet Mr Booker has for years been one of the most vociferous campaigners for leaving the EU.

Has he changed his mind? Or has he, as an honest man, revised his position in line with new facts? Have his convictions been overridden by the calculator?

He certainly does a lot of sums in his piece, which infuriates me whenever the EU is discussed. Mr Booker ought to know that the EU isn’t so much an economic as a political and ideological project.

Hence number crunching can be no more helpful in assessing Brexit than it would be in pondering good and evil, vice and virtue or justice vs. tyranny. An issue of vital political, constitutional and moral import ought to be neither decided nor even argued on such petty concerns.

But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that we’ve allowed arithmetic to take the upper hand. What do the relevant numbers tell us?

Even accomplished economists, of whom Mr Booker manifestly isn’t one, can’t possibly calculate the long-term economic effects of Brexit. Certain suppositions can be made on first economic principles, but these are well-nigh impossible to express in precise numerals.

Any attempt to do so should make any intelligent person smell a rat. And even trying to figure out the apparently obvious short-term sums is a futile task.

Mr Booker makes this patently obvious by trying to reshuffle numbers with the dexterity of a three-card Monte player. First, he singles out one economic variable only: the amount of money we pay into the EU coffers every year.

His argument is that we won’t get to keep much or any of it when we finally leave. Uninteresting if true, I’d suggest – and even if true, which it isn’t, such calculations certainly don’t justify the article’s title.

Serious economists consider not one variable but all of them, such as trade opportunities gained and lost, the cost of having to comply with regulations vs. not doing so, the benefits vs. disadvantages of setting an independent economic policy, the effect on taxation, reduced pressure on social services including medicine and education – well, I may name many such variables, but I’m not sufficiently informed to pull them all together into a cogent equation. My point is that neither is Mr Booker.

Unlike me, he doesn’t seem to be aware of his limitations. He forges ahead, putting together an argument that is holey to the point of being dishonest and primitive to the point of being inane.

First he whips out his trusted calculator and subtracts £4.9 billion (our rebate) from our annual £17.8 contribution to the EU. The difference of £12.9 billion is Mr Booker’s point of departure.

“Of this… we shall continue to spend the further £4.5 billion that goes on subsidies to farming…,” he proceeds. This statement is meaningless unless he suggests that we’ll still continue to subsidise mostly French farming, which we do under the terms of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy.

Since that won’t be the case, most of the £4.9 billion will subsidise our own agriculture. We may argue about the advisability of such practices, and valid points could be scored on either side, but that would be a different argument.

Next. “Equally guaranteed is the £1.5 billion which goes to private bodies such as universities for research.” Same argument: whose universities? New argument: when we finally leave, we won’t have to be bound by any agreements into which we entered as an EU member.

Then, “It would not be wise to discontinue spending most of the £2 billion we give to 27 EU agencies, such as that which regulates medicines, because it would be more costly for us to duplicate their work ourselves.”

But we’re already duplicating this work, by regulating medicines through homespun agencies, such as NICE, MHRA and a whole alphabet soup of others. Has Mr Booker factored in the extra cost of also complying with the regulations imposed by the European Medicines Agency? Thought not.

“And if we are sensible enough to remain in the European Economic Area, giving us continued full access to the EU’s single market, we would be bound to continue contributing the £2 billion a year…”

This is a time-dishonoured logical fallacy called petitio principii (begging the question) – using what is the conclusion of the argument as a premise. We don’t necessarily need ‘full access to the EU’s single market’, and we certainly don’t need it at any price. If Mr Booker wishes to argue the opposite proposition, then by all means he should do so. Instead he presents as a fact what needs proving, which is neither grown-up nor clever.

Doing flip-flops can be fun, but care must be taken not to land on one’s head causing adverse cerebral effects. Mr Booker has neglected this simple truth.

President Obama has struck a blow for diversity by ruling that all federal buildings shall have ‘transgender’ lavatories. Yet anything the Americans can do, the Russians can do better.

To prove this unassailable truth, Ismail Berdiyev, the mufti of North Caucasus, and Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) have taken diversity one step further. Berdiyev believes that “all women should be circumcised, to have less debauchery in the world, less sexuality.”

Female genital mutilation (FGM) is practised in some villages of the mufti’s native Dagestan, but he deplores its spread being so narrow: “The Almighty created woman to bear and raise children. And circumcision has nothing to do with that. Women won’t stop giving birth because of that. But there would be less debauchery.”

All this is par for the course – one expects that sort of thing from Muslims. While in Islam FMG is still mostly tribal rather than universal, it naturally flows out of the Muslim’s somewhat utilitarian view of women.

Yet the Christian view is different, isn’t it? Well, yes. This side of ROC.

Enter Archpriest Chaplin. Fr Vsevolod isn’t any old priest and nor is he even any old archpriest. For many years he was ROC’s official spokesman, mainly on the strength of his intimate relationship with Vladimir Gundiayev, aka Patriarch Kiril, aka (in KGB dossiers) Agent Mikhailov.

Though Chaplin has been removed from his official post for tactical reasons, he remains Gundiayev’s confidante and mouthpiece, even as Gundiayev acts in a similar capacity for the KGB junta, aka the Russian government.

Ever since Peter I brought the Church under secular control, ROC has been an extension of the state. However, under the tsars most priests refused to collaborate with the secret police, resisting, for example, all pressures to divulge secrets vouchsafed in confession.

Bolshevism changed all that. First all the recalcitrant priests, 40,000 of them on Lenin’s watch, were massacred in all sorts of creative ways (I’ll spare you the lurid details). Then, when parishioners were starving to death and therefore, according to Lenin’s astute observation, too weak to resist, ROC was robbed of its valuables.

After that it was driven underground, where it stayed until the war, when Stalin came in for a rude awakening. Soldiers just wouldn’t fight for bolshevism. Instead they surrendered and deserted en masse. Hoping the people would fight for Holy Russia, Stalin then took ROC off the mothballs and wheeled it out.

A small, truly Christian, part of it remained underground, but the ROC hierarchy effectively became a department of the secret police. This fine tradition continues to this day.

Writes Lev Ponomaryov, Russian MP and Executive Director of the Russian National Movement For Human Rights: “Specific research concerning the relationship of the Church and KGB was professionally led by a member of our commission… Gleb Yakunin… [who] found the documents proving that all (!) top functionaries of Russian Orthodox Church were recruited by the KGB…”

It’s against this background that Chaplin’s bow towards diversity must be assessed. For he came out in support of the mufti’s initiative, expressing his “sympathies for the mufti, and I hope he doesn’t retreat from his position because of the howls and hysterics which will start now”.

Fr Vsevolod shares the mufti’s view on women’s purpose in life, and he agrees that FMG is a valid way of boosting the world’s morality. Chaplin does believe, however, that Russian Orthodox women should be allowed to keep their clitorises “because they don’t fornicate anyway.”

As a celibate monk, Fr Vsevolod holds a somewhat idealised view of Russian womankind, which isn’t widely shared by those with, as it were, hands-on experience in that area. Nor is it shared, say, by the Holy Fathers of Moscow’s Sretensky Monastery, who’ve turned its premises into a highly profitable bordello.

It isn’t even shared, de facto, by Chaplin’s patron and ROC’s head Gundiayev who, in spite of his celibacy, openly lives with a woman he passes for his distant cousin, a kinship for which no documentary evidence exists.

“We Orthodox Christians have different traditions – but that never stopped us respecting the traditions of neighbouring peoples,” writes Chaplin on the subject of FGM. Neither has it stopped them from bombing “neighbouring people” flat, specifically in the mufti’s region.

While commending Chaplin’s tolerance, one has to remark with some chagrin that he displays it selectively. For example, when still ROC’s official spokesman, he wrote “thank God, war is coming soon!”

His view on Stalinism is equally robust. “Some people,” explains the Holy Father, “may and must be killed,” and not just the odd criminal. “A certain proportion must be killed to educate society.” Such is “the will of God and the people, which coincides with the will of the state.”

This clarifies matters. ROC espouses not Christianity but the pagan nationalist myth of the Third Rome, which happens to be the ideology underpinning Putin’s rule.

Such sacralisation of evil secular power should give second thoughts to Western ‘useful idiots’ hailing Russia’s religious revival. There are indeed some good Christians there, if not as many as useful idiots believe. But they aren’t to be found in ROC’s hierarchy or its sponsoring organisation, Putin’s KGB junta.

 

We may be one democratic election away from the end of democratic elections, possibly for ever.

Like Hitler, who used and then eliminated the ballot box, the hard left fronted by Comrade Corbyn is close to taking over the Labour Party first and Britain second.

The same strategy almost succeeded in the 1980s, when the Labour hard left, then fronted by Ken Livingstone, came close to gaining control of the party, with the general election up for grabs.

This type of infiltration is called ‘entryism’, an idea first concocted by Comrade Trotsky, Comrade Corbyn’s idol.

Back in 1988 Corbyn was one of the backbench MPs who petitioned Parliament to demand that the Soviets restore his role model’s sterling reputation. This is what they wrote:

“That this House, in the light of the special conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in one week’s time, and of the judicial rehabilitation of Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek and Pyatakov, demands that the Russian Government goes further and gives complete rehabilitation to Leon Trotsky…”

According to a Labour source, Corbyn’s sympathies haven’t so much changed as consolidated over time: “Jeremy Corbyn has clearly been fixated by the political ideology and tactics of Leon Trotsky for some time.”

Let’s throw some light on the situation, if any is needed. All the gentlemen mentioned in 1988 are among the most monstrous ghouls ever thrown up by Satan. They, along with Lenin and Stalin, drowned Russia in blood, enslaved her whole population and tried to do the same to the rest of the world.

In 1920, having barely scraped through their own civil war, the Soviets thrust westwards, with the intention of going all the way to the Channel. But for the Poles’ heroic fight-back at Warsaw, they would have done just that, for the demob-happy West had run out of fight by then.

Trotsky, the principal inspiration behind that foray, was easily as monstrous as Lenin and Stalin. His idea of a ‘permanent revolution’ called for the Soviet state to keep pouncing on all its neighbours with the ferocity of a rabid dog. And Trotsky’s concept of domestic policy was solely based on unrestrained violence, something he practised on a scale never before encountered in history.

After Lenin’s death Trotsky was outmanoeuvred by Stalin and thrown out of Russia. When in exile, he tried to organise opposition to Stalin, who, according to Trotsky, was neither radical enough nor sufficiently flexible. Eventually the debate was settled with an ice axe, and I am not shedding any tears.

It was in exile that Trotsky enlarged on Lenin’s original idea which the syphilitic ghoul called ‘legalism’. Trotsky’s ‘entryism’ was based on the same principle: infiltrating and using civilised institutions the better to destroy them.

This devious plan was adopted and developed by others, starting with the Italian communist Gramsci, who advocated a gradual hard-left takeover of the press and cultural institutions. Coming into prominence later were Adorno, Marcuse and all the other Frankfurters who fell out of Trotsky’s buns.

Now their spiritual descendants are conspiring to ensure that Corbyn is re-elected as party leader next month, which will then enable him to purge Labour of the ‘moderate’ (marginally less subversive) elements. The stated purpose is to “pull society to the left”, presumably into the margin where Trotsky would have felt at home.

Much pull-through is coming from the loony fringe expelled from Labour but now clamouring for readmission. One such group, the Socialist Workers Party, urges industrial strife to boost Corbyn: “Strikes hit the Tories and the bosses where it hurts. We need more of them. Such a working-class movement can pull society to the left. It’s the only thing that can really defend Corbyn.”

The coalition of hard-left groups supporting Corbyn is called Momentum, which is an appropriate term, considering that the old Trotskyist has already won 83 per cent of local party nominations, more than he did when elected party leader last summer.

Momentum includes various fragments of the Militant movement of the 1980s, such as The Socialist Party of England and Wales, which demands that “The Labour Party needs to be much more welcoming to all strands of opinion, particularly on the left.”

Such fragments also include the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and even the good old Communist Party, which is touting a six-point plan encouraging their people to join Labour as individual members and boost Corbyn.

Comrade Corbyn, who inherited Comrade Trotsky’s urge to orate if not his gift of the gab, is rabble-rousing with the best of them, trying to galvanise the hard left. On Monday he shared a platform with members of the Socialist party, preaching the delights of immigration at a black, Asian and ethnic-minority rally.

Labour’s Blairites are quaking in their boots. We too should be afraid.

For a clear path has opened up for the communists (whatever they call themselves) to destroy Britain in line with Trotsky’s blueprints. Should a recession, possibly promoted by paralysing general strikes, coincide with the next election, this lot may well find themselves in power.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,” as the saying goes. So what are we going to do?

The results of a recent study give me that nice, warm feeling the Germans call Schadenfreude, a word Anglophones use too for lack of their own.

Not only does the study show that vegetarians are less healthy than carnivores, but it also puts a dent into many claims touted by health junkies. If such claims were true, vegetarians would be walking pictures of health.

They consume less cholesterol and saturated fat. They eat plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables. They drink less and exercise more. They’re less likely to smoke. Few of them are overweight. And yet the study concludes that vegetarians “are less healthy (in terms of cancer, allergies and mental health disorders), have a lower quality of life, and also require more medical treatment.”

Can’t say I’m surprised, especially about the mental health part. Purely empirical observation does suggest that many vegetarians are prone to depression, or at least mood swings, and they tend to be morose loners.

Not being a psychiatrist, I can’t even speculate what causes eating disorders, of which vegetarianism is clearly one. Yet, displaying the self-confidence of an untrained amateur, I’m convinced that most incidences of this particular disorder do fall into the domain of psychiatry – depression and vegetarianism just may be different manifestations of the same underlying cause.

That’s nothing to be ashamed of: most of us have our own quirks. For example, I have a fear of heights, while one of my best friends develops facial tics whenever he’s contradicted, which means most of the time we’re together.

However, there’s a difference between my friend and me on the one hand and vegetarians on the other. We don’t use my acrophobia and his NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder) to claim a high moral ground, while they use their eating disorder for just that purpose.

Not all of them do so blatantly. Most offer seemingly rational explanations, such as having watched abattoirs on television or actually visiting them. In the first case, one wonders if their TV sets had only one channel and couldn’t even be turned off. In the second case, one wonders what morbid interest made them visit a slaughterhouse in the first place. I mean, abattoirs aren’t everyone’s idea of a tourist destination.

Some others claim health benefits, which is why we should applaud the results of the study, hoping they’ll be confirmed by further research. Still others say they simply don’t like the taste of meat, poultry and game, which would suggest an atrophy of taste buds and an underdeveloped aesthetic sense.

Most Western vegetarians I’ve met are either atheists or fans of some dubious Eastern creeds (which amounts to the same thing). That’s hardly surprising either, because Judaeo-Christianity precludes anthropomorphism, which is an essential part of many Eastern faiths.

In our anthropocentric civilisation, killing animals doesn’t constitute murder, as the more crazed vegetarians claim. In fact, the Western position on carnivorism was manifestly laid down in Genesis: “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.”

We no longer follow Biblical prescriptions, but they’ve seeped into the genetic make-up of our civilisation. Therefore even those unaware of the scriptural origin of their everyday practices unwittingly follow them every day. Vegetarians don’t, not this practice anyway, implicitly denying the spiritual provenance of our civilisation.

Some of God’s creatures are herbivorous, some are carnivorous, and man is both. Only man has the ability to choose which he wants to be, but exercising it means throwing half of what God so kindly gave us to eat back into his face. Those who do so have no claim to any moral ascendancy.

St Paul explicitly denied that vegetarianism occupies a higher moral ground than meat eating: “Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth: for God hath received him.”

Some saints, notably St Augustine, did become vegetarians as part of their overall asceticism. But the practices of the greatest saints in history aren’t something even they themselves expected most people to follow. Those who can’t even approach the spiritual or intellectual heights reached by St Augustine ought not to single out his asceticism, the least consequential part of his heritage. Let’s start with The City of God, shall we?

St Francis stands apart from other saints in his attitude to fauna. He preached to animals and called them ‘brother’ and ‘sister’, which is why most painters from Giotto onwards depicted him surrounded by every manner of beast. However, in spite of his eerie anthropomorphism, St Francis wasn’t a vegetarian. So even regarding animals as man’s relations in God doesn’t necessarily preclude having some protein in our diet.

Today up to a third of all pupils in Britain’s top public schools cringe at the thought of eating meat. They’ve been brainwashed by history’s greatest propaganda campaign called modernity. Like most such campaigns it’s primarily destructive.

The purpose is to wipe out the traditional presuppositions of our civilisation, creating a tabula rasa on which modernity can inscribe its incendiary message. Vegetarianism is a small part of it, but a part nevertheless.