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The title of Niall Ferguson’s article Brexit Happy Morons Don’t Give a Damn About the Costs of Living is so self-explanatory that I’m surprised he felt the need to write any text below it.

Yet write it he did, with every word shattering the American glass house in which Prof. Ferguson lives. The house already reduced to shards, he concludes the article by saying, “Perhaps, as the old poem says, I am the one who is the moron. But I do give a damn about this country’s economic future. And when I see the risks of Brexit being glossed over in ways that would disgrace an undergraduate essay, I feel anything but happy.”

While this devotion to the economy of the country in which he hasn’t lived for years may strike some as hypocritical, the ending does elucidate the thought in the title for those with learning difficulties. But the text in between only reinforces my conviction that writers should disclose their political beliefs.

I favour a rating symbol accompanying every piece. For example, mine would be ‘C’, standing for ‘conservative’ and not for the epithet flung by some of my detractors. Other ratings could be ‘LW’ for ‘left wing’, ‘or, say, ‘NF’ for ‘neo-fascist’ (and not ‘Nigel Farage’, although his detractors can’t tell the difference).

Ferguson’s rating should definitely be ‘NC’, for ‘neocon’. He’s one of those annoying Brits who’ve pledged loyalty to probably the most objectionable and definitely the most influential movement in American politics.

The neocons have discovered the knavish trick of combining conservative-sounding phraseology with Trotskyist cravings realised through appropriate policies. (I expand on this in my book Democracy as a Neocon Trick.)

The essence of Trotskyism is ‘permanent revolution’, non-stop aggression aimed at spreading a certain ideology around the globe, thereby unifying it under the aegis of a central authority.

In Trotsky’s case, that ideology was communism; in the neocons’ case, it’s democracy, American style. In neither case does the ideology matter.

Even as the real purpose of mass murder is to murder masses, the real purpose of aggressive internationalism is aggressive internationalism. This doesn’t change whatever colour flag the aggressors run up the pole.

The neocons’ innate internationalism makes them natural champions of European federalism. This dovetails with their American jingoism.

Perhaps they feel that the global US domination they crave will be easier to achieve if Europe presented a single target. Or else they think that American trade would benefit from Europe being a single customer.

Either way, this is the context in which Ferguson’s Sunday Times article must be read. Rather than analysing a complex problem, he’s but a dummy to his neocon ventriloquists.

This unenviable role makes Ferguson drop even below his normal intellectual standards, which fall somewhat short of dizzying heights under the best of circumstances.

For example, he first correctly castigates IMF predictions for being notoriously unreliable. Then, with the absence of logic lamentable in an academic, he gives unquestioning credence to their doomsday forecasts for Brexit.

Freguson’s rationale for such childish credulity is that “the IMF’s intrinsic optimism matters because if the organisation is pessimistic about something, it is very likely to be understating the problem.” Yet what matters about both the optimism and the pessimism is that this organisation tends to be wrong and borderline incompetent.

Then he laments that the pound is 12 per cent down on the euro since November. “Could it fall further? You bet,” forecasts Ferguson, taking his cue from the optimistic-pessimistic IMF.

Such concern for the value of our currency in someone whose income is denominated in dollars betokens laudable selflessness. As someone who pays for half his life in euros, not in pounds in which my income is denominated, I grieve with Ferguson.

However, I rejoice in the knowledge that a weaker pound spells good news for our exports. This may just protect them from being totally wiped out by Brexit, which is part of the party line mouthed by Ferguson.

In general, everything he says about economics, and his argument is wholly economic, betrays both his ignorance of the subject and his willingness to march in step with his neocon Parteigenossen.

Then again, Ferguson isn’t an economist. He is an historian, which makes it odd that he’d want to base his rant on a discipline about which he knows next to nothing, rather than on one about which he’s supposed to know next to everything.

While better and more credible organisations than IMF predict mostly trivial economic effects of Brexit, one way or the other, anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge knows that EU membership puts paid to a millennium of British constitutional tradition.

As Hugh Gaitskell once put it, joining the Common Market would be “the end of a thousand years of history.” What was true then is a thousand times truer now. But Gaitskell wasn’t a professional historian. Ferguson is, and I’d be interested to hear him comment on this line of thought. But he can’t. His party discipline won’t let him.

“Perhaps, as the old poem says, I am the one who is the moron,” he says self-effacingly. Relax, Niall, you aren’t, not exactly. You’re just an immoral party hack.

An SAS hero, who served his country with distinction for 22 years, has been properly thanked – with a 15-month prison sentence.

Since most burglars get off scot-free, or perhaps with a deferred slap on the wrist, one has to assume that Albert Patterson committed a worse crime than breaking into somebody’s house and stealing everything of any resale value.

He did. All these years, he has kept in his heart the memory of his 22 comrades who died next to him in the Falklands. And, in remembrance of them, he has kept in his house a trophy pistol he took off a captured Argentine officer.

The pistol was discovered by the police investigating a burglary in the 65-year-old’s house. Had the investigation resulted in the arrest of the burglar, and the arrest in a trial (both huge statistical improbabilities), the criminal would have received a suspended sentence. But he wasn’t caught. Instead the police arrested Mr Patterson.

The gun was neither loaded nor prominently displayed. It was hidden and locked away, but that didn’t matter. Back in 1998 the government introduced a handgun amnesty, which was a fancy word for confiscation. People were supposed to turn in their guns in exchange for a fraction of their value and a promise not to prosecute.

Once the amnesty expired, possessing a handgun became illegal. Serving his country abroad, as he did at the time, and then working for various NGOs in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr Patterson might not even have known about this ridiculous legislation or, if he had, it might have slipped his mind.

Yes, fine, the law is the law, and ignorance is no excuse. But there’s one aspect of jurisprudence common to all Western countries and certainly in England: our legality can be traced back to the Bible.

It originates from the laws laid down in the Old Testament and then refined in the Gospels, where severity was leavened with mercy. For example, the letter of the law said that the woman taken in adultery should be stoned to death. Yet, having invited those who were without sin to cast the first stone, Jesus simply told the woman to sin no more and sent her on her way.

That’s not to deny that some seminal Western laws have pagan Roman antecedents, or that some marginal ones aren’t Biblical in nature. But, in the West, the principle of justice leavened with mercy is the foundation of them all.

The ill-advised ban on handguns surely was designed to guarantee that weapons wouldn’t fall into wrong hands. In fact, it guaranteed that wrong hands were the only kind into which guns can now possibly fall, and wrong hands can still get a weapon with embarrassing ease. Law-abiding subjects of Her Majesty, on the other hand, have to remain unarmed in the face of a sky-rocketing crime rate.

But leaving this asinine law aside, surely this was one case in which mercy was called for, nay demanded? Presiding Judge Plunkett felt so.

He also knew, or claimed, that his feelings didn’t matter one jot. He was privileged, the Judge said, to have examined Mr Patterson’s service record, highlighting the numerous times he risked his life protecting his country.

But the law, said His Honour, left him no choice in sentencing. And, come to think of it, “In the wrong hands these weapons could lead to the death of police officers or cause all sorts of mayhem. It’s the risk that Parliament is concerned about.”

In the wrong hands, rat poison, available at any DIY store, could poison the water supply of a large city. In the wrong hands, kitchen knives one can buy at any supermarket could slash dozens of bystanders before the police could bat an eyelid. In the wrong hands, electric drills and axes, sold by any hardware shop, could become weapons of torture and murder.

Is Parliament concerned about those? Not one bit. It’s guns that stick in its craw because, in the right hands, they may act as a natural restriction on arbitrary power, which is exceedingly becoming exactly the kind of power our government exercises.

People despise laws they regard as unjust, and they break laws they regard as ludicrous. And what can be more ludicrous than pronouncing that Mr Patterson’s hands, which for 22 years fired weapons in defence of his country, are now so wrong that they can’t be trusted with antiquated trophy pistols locked away in his cabinet?

Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of our forces in Afghanistan, put it in a nutshell, calling for the veteran’s ‘immediate’ release.

“This is another example,” he said, “of our troops being persecuted by a government and courts obsessed with political correctness.

“An SAS hero who risked his life to defend his country shouldn’t be treated like a South London drug dealer… The country should be grateful for what he did.”

It is. This is how today’s Britain shows its gratitude.

 

 

 

The Polish village of Jedwabne was almost all Jewish. It isn’t any longer. On 10 July, 1941, almost its entire Jewish population, 1,600 souls in all, were murdered.

After the war a cenotaph was erected to the victims, with an inscription blaming the SS for the crime. But for once the SS wasn’t the culprit. The Jews were murdered by their Polish neighbours wielding knives, axes and clubs. The survivors were locked up in a barn and burned alive.

Such crimes were committed all over Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, the Ukraine, Byelorussia and Russia. The local populations rivalled, sometimes outdid, the Germans’ anti-Semitic atrocities.

Where the local support for the Holocaust was lower, so was the percentage of the Jews murdered. In France, regarded as Western Europe’s most anti-Semitic country, the survival rate was 75 per cent. In Poland it was 10 per cent, but then Poland isn’t in Western Europe.

It was no wonder that the Nazis sent Jews from all over Europe to the death camps built in Poland: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. They knew the Poles were more likely than even the Germans to ignore the smoke billowing out of the chimneys, to shut their eyes on the crime.

Speaking of crimes, as far as the Polish government is concerned, the Princeton professor Jan Gross has committed one punishable by three years in prison.

Prof. Gross, who is himself of Polish descent, will stand trial in Katowice for writing that during the Nazi occupation the Poles inflicted heavier losses on Jews than on Germans. That, according to the prosecution, is tantamount to “publicly insulting the nation”.

Leaving aside the understated commitment to free speech, so lamentable in our EU partner, one would still like to get to the bottom of Prof. Gross’s allegations. Are they true?

The honest answer is, I don’t know. That is, I don’t know how many Germans the Polish underground, Armia Krajowa, killed. I do know Poland had 2.5 million Jews in the 1930s, while now there are only 10,000.

Given such a low number in a country of almost 40 million, it’s no wonder that 90 per cent of Poles say they’ve never seen a Jew. But absence doesn’t always make the heart grow fonder: 63 per cent believe that a global Jewish conspiracy exists, while 23 per cent believe that Jews use Christian blood in their rituals.

That would suggest that the Poles were less horrified than the Germans when the Holocaust made them look deep into their own hearts after the war. The Germans tried to atone for their sin as best they could; the Poles didn’t even acknowledge they had sinned.

This raises many interesting questions, among them that of collective guilt. Interestingly, those Poles who deny such a thing exists, don’t mind emphasising their nation’s collective heroism in confronting Nazism. Come on chaps, you can’t have it both ways. If you feel no collective guilt, you aren’t entitled to collective pride.

Yet there’s much to be proud about. Poland fought against the German aggression more heroically than any other European nation until the winter of 1941, when the Russians stopped surrendering in their millions and began to fight back.

In fact, once the Polish army got entrenched on the eastern side of the Vistula, the German juggernaut began to run out of steam, and the Poles only succumbed when knifed in the back by the Russians on 17 September, 1939.

During the war, Armia Krajowa mounted a real resistance from the first days of the occupation, as opposed to, say, France, where serious resistance only began when the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt.

Armia Krajowa, however, offered only a limited support to the uprising in the Warsaw Jewish ghetto in April-May, 1943. When Armia Krajowa staged its own Warsaw uprising in August, 1944, the Soviet army didn’t lift a finger to help – tempting one to think about poetic justice.

However, we shouldn’t forget that many pilots who won the Battle of Britain were Polish – or that, unlike Norway, Poland didn’t have a Quisling government and, unlike France, Holland, Belgium and the Ukraine, she didn’t form national SS divisions.

However, denying any possibility of collective guilt doesn’t come naturally to someone who, like me, believes in original sin. Of course, there were many Poles who, risking their own lives, saved Jews. Such heroes are of course exempt from any collective responsibility.

But that, however, doesn’t mean that no collective responsibility exists. God was willing to spare Sodom if he could find 10 righteous men there and only destroyed the city when the required number wasn’t reached. But he did spare the righteous man Lot and his daughters.

I’m not suggesting that Poland should be destroyed or that she deserved the suffering she received at the hands of the Germans and Russians during the war, or the Russians and her own communists after it.

However, our joy at having all those Polish plumbers should be tempered by the awareness of the cultural differences between Britain and Poland, or Eastern Europe in general. Although we’re all residually Christian, I’d suggest the differences outweigh the similarities.

A single European state, anyone?

Jeremy Corbyn kicked off his belated speech in favour of staying in the EU by claiming that the party he leads backs it “overwhelmingly”.

He didn’t cite any statistics to support this claim, expecting us to take it on faith.

Being a credulous sort, I’m prepared to do just that – even though this assertion somewhat bucks the historical trend.

For example, Hugh Gaitskell, the last sensible Labour leader (1955-1963) argued against Britain joining the EEC (as it then was) by correctly stating that this would mean “the end of a thousand years of history”.

He then died under mysterious circumstances, with both the ex-MI6 man Peter Wright and the Soviet defector Anatoly Golitsyn claiming foul play on the part of the KGB, eager to replace Gaitskell with its putative agent Harold Wilson.

More recently, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Labour was more Eurosceptic than the Tories, with more anti-EEC MPs and a more coherent European policy. And Labour’s patron saint Tony Benn made strong arguments against European federalism, as strong as anything Nigel Farage has come up with so far, which is saying a lot.

Incidentally it was then that the cub MP Jeremy Corbyn showed the good judgement of voting against joining the Common Market – an impression of solidity he then spoiled by having a fling with Diane Abbott, whose physique was never any more attractive than her personality or indeed her politics.

Those who foolishly expect consistent views from politicians on any subject other than their unquenchable power-lust will notice that old Jeremy had been opposed, if somewhat tepidly, to EU membership up until the moment his arm was twisted into making today’s speech. This he acknowledged, possibly without realising he was acknowledging it (Jeremy, in case you’re wondering, isn’t particularly bright).

After all, he explained, the Labour party and its paymasters, the trade unions, have decided to back EU membership “and that’s the party I lead and that’s the position I am putting forward.”

In other words, Jeremy’s personal principles and beliefs don’t really come into it. What comes into it is his determination to hang on to power at all costs, something that would be in peril if the union bosses got upset.

Fair enough, serious people would never expect anything different from a career politician, whatever the colour of the rosette he pins to his lapel. I mean, you don’t really think that Dave has a carefully thought-through political philosophy he is prepared to uphold at any cost to his political career, do you?

Jeremy made another unwitting admission one has to welcome – or applaud if it wasn’t really unwitting: “There is,” he said, “a strong socialist case for staying in the European Union.”

This is absolutely true, and it would be God’s own truth had he modified ‘a strong socialist case’ with the intensifier ‘only’. For European federalism has always been nothing but the nightmarish socialist dream of a single European, ideally world, government.

This is how this thought was expressed in The Communist Manifesto, the founding document that inspired both international and national socialism:

“The working men have no country… Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national… National differences and antagonisms between peoples are vanishing gradually from day to day, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster.”

Actually, working men tend to be more patriotic than chattering idlers. But never mind, European federalism flows as naturally out of this passage as Krug champagne out of the bottle at a Labour fund raiser. Since ‘supremacy of the proletariat’ is insane rubbish bearing no resemblance to any conceivable reality, it has always been interpreted as the supremacy of a supranational elite towering above national cultures, traditions and politics.

That is how the concept was understood both by the Bolsheviks and the Nazis. And this is how it was understood by the German and French bureaucrats who in the days of the Nazi occupation and Vichy discovered affinity for one another.

The Third Reich was committed to pan-Europeanism, and in fact the Nazis organised a conference on united Europe chaired by that great European Alfred Rosenberg. When it became clear after El Alamein and Stalingrad that the Third Reich would last rather less time than the promised thousand years, Nazi and Vichy bureaucrats banged their heads together and came up with a plan for post-war cooperation now going by the name of the EU.

I do hope the Leave campaign will make its case clear, explaining to hoi polloi the pernicious provenance of the EU and its profoundly anti-British, anti-historical and indeed anti-European aims.

But if I were a door-to-door Brexit campaigner, I’d reduce the whole argument to a simple message: Jeremy Corbyn wants us to stay in the EU. What better reason do you need for voting to leave?

Now that a Caravaggio painting worth zillions has been discovered in a Toulouse attic with a leaky roof, the painter is in the news again.

To be fair, he has never left the news, or at least art appreciation classes, for at least a century. So high is his status that it’s easy to forget that for roughly 400 years after his death art lovers hardly knew who Caravaggio was.

Until the 20 century, in which more people were killed than in all previous centuries combined, the world hadn’t been quite ready for Caravaggio because it hadn’t been quite ready for modernity.

Artists forgotten for four centuries seldom make a comeback – unless their old art tickles our new sensibilities. So what sensibilities are tickled by Caravaggio’s soulless, violent and perverse art?

The answer lies in the adjectives modifying the word ‘art’ in the previous sentence. This is what modernity sees when looking at itself in the mirror of Caravaggio’s paintings. This is what modernity likes.

A few years ago an Amsterdam museum made a terrible mistake. It put together a joint exhibition of Rembrandt and Caravaggio, two painters the curators thought were umbilically linked.

The link was purely formal, but then pure formalism is all that matters nowadays. Caravaggio turned chiaroscuro, widely used by others, into tenebrism. That’s essentially more of the same thing, with little transition between an exaggerated shadow and an equally exaggerated light.

Several 17^th-century giants, such as Zurbarán and Rembrandt, also used the technique, which is supposed to make them Caravaggio’s disciples.

The write-up on the sublime Zurbarán’s painting of St Francis at the National Gallery says so in as many words: Zurbarán was influenced by Caravaggio. I’d be tempted to say that Zurbarán was influenced by St Francis or, to be more exact, by Jesus Christ.

When looking at a work of art, I first ask the hopelessly outdated question ‘what?’, rather than the fashionably upbeat ‘how?’ Technique is important only inasmuch as it’s adequate to the artist’s treatment of his subject.

Yet by the time the 20^th century arrived, the soul of our civilisation had been ripped out. Hence paintings were no longer seen as vehicles carrying a divine, or any deep, meaning. They had become merely combinations of colours and shapes, with painting not stepping outside itself in search of meaning. Art became endogenous rather than exogenous.

As that process gathered speed, the combinations of colours and shapes became too esoteric for anyone to understand without help from critics. Art again became exogenous, stepping outside itself – except that this time it looked for inspiration not in God or any of His creations but in literature, specifically the genre of art criticism.

Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay about this, The Painted Word, but that was long before those Amsterdam curators decided it would be instructive to juxtapose Rembrandt and Caravaggio.

Actually, instructive it was, but not the way they meant it. They were hoping to show that the two painters were so closely related that they were practically twins. Instead the exhibition showed they weren’t even the same species.

Rembrandt loved human nature, understood it, and was able to convey it better than most artists in history. He didn’t portray his sitters’ features. He portrayed their souls.

That was an alien concept to Caravaggio. What functioned as his own soul was a combination of various perversions, social, sexual and psychological.

This is exactly what appeals to a modernity trained to appreciate form more than content, and the artist more than his art. Everything about Caravaggio fits.

His formal innovativeness trumps his empty soullessness. His sanguinary naturalism excites the public weaned on horror movies. And let’s not forget his life, so reminiscent, mutatis mutandis, of the lives of today’s pop celebrities.

When not busy painting or pursuing nubile boys, Caravaggio wandered around Rome drunk, his hand on the hilt of his sword, looking for someone to kill. Eventually he did murder a young man and had to flee Rome under a sentence of death – what’s there not to love for our desensitised, voyeuristic public?

Blood flows liberally in Caravaggio’s paintings, and he was obsessed with decapitation, both tendencies clearly springing from his own murderous past and the likely punishment for it.

The newly found painting, Judith Beheading Holofernes, is another such revelling in beheading. The expert who authenticated the work commented that “this isn’t the kind of painting you’d want to hang in your living room”.

True. I don’t see how anyone, other than the chaps who teach art appreciation, would even want to look at it in a museum. Most of us are never satisfied by technical mastery alone.

No doubt Caravaggio was technically proficient. But a walk through any major museum will be rewarded by demonstrations of technical mastery galore. I doubt one would find any incompetent works of art there.

But great artists offer so much more than just that. They have the ability to move us by reminding us of the sublime heights to which the human spirit can soar.

Caravaggio uses his skill to remind us, unwittingly, of the putrid depths to which the human spirit can sink. That does make him the ideal artist for modernity, rejoicing in the lower depths of the human spirit.

 

Conservatives are intuitively opposed to big central government. After all, the bigger and more centralised the government, the more it’ll confer the kind of absolute power that, according to Lord Acton, corrupts absolutely.

That’s as true, if not to the same extent, of our so-called democracies as of openly totalitarian regimes. Hence conservatives favour transferring as much power as possible to small local government.

Such is the theory, and by and large it holds true. But then someone like Aysegul Gurbuz turns up, and a huge hole is punched right through the middle of the seemingly irrefutable theory.

Miss Gurbuz is a Labour councillor in Luton, which makes her a member of local government and supposedly an embodiment of a conservative ideal. However, she’s also a Muslim and merely 20 years old, with neither characteristic likely to appeal either to conservatives or to generally intelligent people.

Luton’s population being about 25 per cent Muslim, there can be no valid demographic objection to its council members espousing Islam. There are however, valid cultural and historical objections to any British city being 25 per cent Muslim.

After all, it’s far from certain that a devout Muslim can be trusted to uphold the founding principles of the realm, such as pluralism. Of course many Muslims are Muslim in name only, but, as you’ll see, Miss Gurbuz is a pious Muslim devoted to every tenet of her creed, including the less appealing ones.

Her age is another problem. It should be clear to anyone that a 20-year-old is too young to qualify for a government post. I’d also go so far as to suggest that 20-year-olds shouldn’t even vote, for the simple physiological reason that the human brain isn’t even wired properly until age 25 or so.

As a man who loves to see his prejudices confirmed, I’m grateful to Miss Gurbuz for validating both of my reservations about her suitability to be a councillor, even a Labour one, even in Luton.

As a pious Muslim, she’s a virulent, visceral anti-Semite who’s pining for another Holocaust. As a 20-year-old, she’s too stupid to conceal this.

On the contrary, she proudly tweets hatred urbi et orbi. “The Jews,” says one tweet, “are so powerful in the US, it’s disgusting.”

Miss Gurbuz is active in every pro-Palestinian cause under the sun, and her analysis of the situation in that volatile region reflects her slight partiality and a keen sense of history: “If it wasn’t for my man Hitler these Jews would’ve wiped Palestine years ago. Sorry but it’s a fact. Not hating on Jews btw.”

‘Not hating Jews’ would have made the last sentence more grammatical, if no more credible. It should also have been ‘wiped out’, not ‘wiped’, for surely the dastardly Jews want to destroy ‘Palestine’, not keep it clean (from what I’ve heard of the state of hygiene there, the former task would be easier to achieve).

Some punctuation would have helped too, if only to dispel the impression that Miss Gurbuz isn’t a native speaker of English or, if she is, a functionally illiterate one.

Anyway, since Muslims owe such a debt to ‘my man Hitler’, it stands to reason that in another tweet Miss Gurbuz describes her idol as “the greatest man in history”.

Labour is so sick of one anti-Semitic scandal after another, starting with the cordial friendship the party leader shares with Hamaz chieftains, that it reacted with unusual alacrity, suspending the precocious youngster from the party.

One can sympathise with Labour. First Oxford University Labour Club’s co-chairman had to resign because “a large proportion” of its members had “some kind of problem with Jews”.

Then the party twice had to suspend another functionary, Vicky Byrne, for tweeting anti-Semitic rants. Then Khadim Hussain, former Lord Mayor of Bradford, was suspended for lamenting the undue emphasis our education places on “Anne Frank and the six million Zionists that were killed by Hitler.” (For this lot ‘Zionist’ is synonymous with ‘Jew’.

And now this, a Muslim Nazi. Really, before long one could begin to doubt the socialists’ dedication to racial equality. Then one recalls that Hitler was a socialist too, and doubts become a certainty.

 

 

Almost four years ago I wrote The Gospel According to Dave, in which I mocked Cameron’s sanctimonious pronouncements on tax avoidance:

“And Dave opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit tax evasion: But I say unto you that whosoever committeth avoidance hath committed evasion already in his heart; his is hell fire.”

This became a recurrent theme in Dave’s orations. Yes, tax evasion is illegal, while tax avoidance isn’t. But let’s not be sticklers for casuistry. At issue here is morality, not legal technicalities.

Now, when chaps who’d prostitute their underage daughters for better poll ratings start talking morality, warning bells should sound.

For it’s not the government’s job to preach morality. Its job is to protect the realm and uphold its constitutional principles. Whenever government officials start mouthing moral platitudes, we can be certain they’re remiss in their legitimate duties.

According to their gospel truths, our money isn’t really ours. By right it belongs to the state – even if the state can’t yet claim it all because of property rights and other archaic iniquities built into the law.

People get angry when deprived of their rightful property, and our spivs are no exception. Yes, the state extorts half of what the middle classes earn. But it’s the other half that’s so irksome to the spivs that they can’t contain their rage.

They sputter spittle whenever some money bypasses their coffers, ending up in the pockets of those who actually earn it. Offshore tax shelters stick in the craw, irrespective of their legality. Parents’ money gifts to children, ditto: there’s a chance the youngsters will thereby pay less inheritance tax.

It never occurs to the spivs, or to the people brainwashed by them, to question the morality of the inheritance tax in the first place. After all, the money bequeathed has already been taxed every which way. It’s unjust to tax it again, but justice doesn’t come into it.

That family money should stay in the family is a bugbear of socialists, regardless of what they call themselves. As far as they’re concerned, the state should confiscate all the money the deceased made during a lifetime of toil, and if that impoverishes his family, not to worry. The state will step in and look after the newly indigent, thereby gaining control over them.

The 40 per cent inheritance tax is a step in that direction. Hence the gift loophole is seen as a backward step on the road to the bright socialist future.

I like the gift rule. When an ageing British parent gives some money to a child, the gift only becomes tax-free if the parent lives another seven years. Hence this loophole indirectly fosters the good side of human nature: it stops greedy children from hoping the parent will die soon.

In general, it’s the moral duty of every person to avoid giving money to the state as much as legally possible. After all, most of the tax revenue will be wasted or, worse still, used for nefarious purposes, such as corrupting society by creating a vast class of dependent freeloaders, many of them coming from hostile cultures.

Hence Dave’s sermons are mendacious. Now it turns out they’re also hypocritical.

For Dave’s father had an offshore fund, from which Dave profited to the tune of £30,000. Cameron père also gave the apple of his eye £300,000 as a gift, and Mrs Cameron aggravated matters by giving him another £200,000.

Now, these amounts are trivial compared to those earned by Russian cellists or indeed to the value of just about any London flat, never mind a house, bequeathed to the grateful offspring. But numbers don’t affect the principle, and Dave seems to be saying to his flock “Don’t do as I do, do as I say”.

What has followed is clamour for Dave’s resignation as a minimum. As a maximum, Ken Livingston, the hard-left thug whose links with the Soviet Union were never properly investigated, has called for Dave to be imprisoned.

Ken forgets that Britain is still different from the socialist paradise of his dreams in that one has to break the law to be sent down, and Dave hasn’t done that.

I’m sympathetic to the idea of the likes of Dave being kicked out of government, but not for this non-reason. And I do think he belongs in jail, for his treasonous efforts to undermine Britain’s constitution by dissolving her sovereignty. But this a different matter.

Any honest man would state publicly that he has done nothing illegal, meaning that his financial affairs are none of anyone else’s business. Either produce evidence of illegality or shut up, would be the message.

But, forgetting that he lives in a glass house, Dave has been throwing stones for the last four years at least. Now he has had to go through the pathetically humiliating and grovelling exercise of revealing his tax returns for public scrutiny.

This has intensified the class war in which there’s never any truce. To our public, corrupted by socialist propaganda, being wealthy is borderline criminal in itself. One wishes this were the only crime our spivs commit.

 

 

This statement by Bruce Springsteen, explaining why he cancelled a gig in North Carolina, shook me to the core.

There I was, thinking that nothing in life could possibly be more important than watching several superannuated, tattooed, booze-sodden, drug-addled morons performing an anti-musical pagan rite that goes by the misnomer of music.

What could be more important than thousands of culturally challenged infants of all ages responding to the shamanistic ritual with the coordinated enthusiasm of a Nuremberg rally and the erotic passion of an orgy?

It has to be something of cosmic significance to be more important than incoherent shrieks of the audience to muffle the incoherent, electronically enhanced shrieks of the morons on stage, accompanied by a jungle drum beat and the same three chords repeated ad nauseam.

Music as an extension of pharmacology, a psychedelic symbiosis between an audience yearning to abandon whatever little humanity it had in the first place and cynical operators who know how to scream anti-capitalist invective all the way to the capitalist bank – what could possibly be more important than that?

Turns out some things are. Such as Bruce Springsteen’s flaming social conscience, born in the USA. (That’s one of his greatest hits, in case you don’t know, which I sincerely hope you don’t.)

And Bruce’s conscience says that North Carolina has forfeited the privilege of being regaled with such delectations as Born in the USA, Murder Incorporated and My Hometown.

This backward state has passed a law that, according to Springsteen, “is an attempt by people who cannot stand the progress our country has made in recognising the human rights of all our citizens to overturn that progress.”

Excuse me? I realise that eloquence beyond the fluent use of four-letter words isn’t a job requirement in Mr Springsteen’s profession, but still. It took me a while to realise that he doesn’t actually wish to strike a blow for the rights of all citizens to overturn the progress the country has made in attempting to recognise the progress of the people who cannot stand progress.

No, old Bruce is actually registering a protest against a law passed by people who cannot stand progress. The law doesn’t call for the slaughter of every firstborn boy, although I for one would give such a bill serious consideration if it could prevent the propagation of Bruce Springsteens.

No, the law that riled Mr Springsteen so is one his official statement describes as “the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act, [which] dictates which bathrooms transgender people are permitted to use.”

‘Bathrooms’, in Americans usage, include public lavatories, changing rooms and dressing rooms. And the offensive North Carolina law simply states that transsexuals must use such facilities according to the sex specified in their birth certificates, rather than the one they have chosen for themselves.

Mr Springsteen, born as he is in the USA, is entitled to play or not to play wherever he wishes. What he’s not entitled to – or wouldn’t be in a sane world – is having an understanding audience for his ignorant and idiotic views.

Here’s a touch of sanity, to establish the proper framework for assessing Mr Springsteen’s protest.

First, a man who wants to refashion himself as a woman has, in the technical medical parlance, a screw loose.

Second, scientists have demonstrated beyond any shadow of doubt that a man cannot become a woman. He can only become a man shot full of oestrogen and with his bits cut off. His chromosomes remain XY, which makes him male in any other than a psychiatric sense.

Third, jurisprudence scholars raise serious doubts about the legal legitimacy of such a conversion. A man may fancy himself as a woman, a dog or a tree, but for all legal purposes he must still be regarded as a man.

Conversely, a woman, which is a Homo Sapiens born with XX chromosomes, may shoot herself full of testosterones and attach a dildo to her nether regions, but she’ll become a man no more than she can become, say, a pony (which some women no doubt fancy themselves to be).

In that context, protesting against the law that says men mustn’t be forced to share urinals with women, and crazy women at that, doesn’t strike me as one that ‘overturns progress’. What it does overturn is collective insanity that these days goes by the name of progress.

As part of this insanity, show business or pop celebrities are routinely accepted as authorities in areas outside their immediate expertise, such as it is. For example, as part of a day of special live programming, the BBC has invited the actress Angelina Jolie to act as keynote speaker on the global refugee crisis.

“Above all,” says Miss Jolie, “we need to address the conflict and insecurity that are the root causes of the mass movement of refugees.” Yes, but only in our virtual world is it possible to believe that a movie star, best known for her pouting lips, is ideally suited to ‘address’ such issues.

Perhaps Miss Jolie should get together with Mr Springsteen and see whose inanities are more inane. Who knows, a romance may blossom and they’ll concentrate on each other so much that they’ll spare us their profundities.

His detractors may claim that my friend Vlad lacks any morality. Shame on them!

Vlad has morality coming out of his… well, ears. And he has the courage of his convictions. To wit: he attended a live TV forum, knowing in advance that Panama would come up.

Sure enough, he was asked to comment on “the so-called Panama dossier, featuring the musician Roldugin, who’s your friend”.

A lesser man would have dismissed the implicit ugly rumours as a lie. Vlad’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov chose that very tack when asked whether his Olympic skater wife indeed had vast offshore accounts.

Absolutely not, said Dmitry, pulling his shirt cuff over the £400,000 watch his wife is supposed to have given him as a wedding present. Alas, The Guardian published facsimiles of the documents verifying the skater’s ownership of offshore laundries, making a red-faced Dmitry ask questions like “Oh, you mean those accounts?”

Vlad is too big a man to demean himself by lying. Instead he attacked the insinuations head on.

Well, perhaps ‘head on’ isn’t exactly accurate. Actually, after saying “I’ll try to be brief”, Vlad took six minutes before getting to the actual question.

That was time well spent. For Vlad explained how Russia’s enemies have always tried to push her down to her knees.

He touched upon, in a non sequitur kind of way, the ‘90s “when everyone liked to supply us with potatoes and use Russia in their interests”. From there it was an easy transition to the West’s disapproval of Yeltsin over his policy on Yugoslavia, the current Western invective over the Ukraine and the Crimea, and Putin’s refusal to extradite Snowden.

Russia’s enemies, explained Vlad, are envious of her economic success – even though there seems to be little to envy. In fact, the size of Russia’s economy has doubled since the ‘90s, and Russia’s armed forces are ready to challenge the global monopoly America takes for granted.

“Events in Syria,” said Vlad, “have demonstrated Russia’s ability to solve problems… far from our own borders”. True, Russia has achieved the improbable feat of both withdrawing her army from Syria and launching a massive build-up there.

Vlad, however, was too modest to point this out. Instead, after four minutes of meandering through recent history, he took tentative steps towards answering the question about Russia’s heir to Pablo Casals.

‘Tentative’ is the operative word, for Vlad approached the issue from the angle of geopolitical psychology: “Our opponents are mostly worried about the unity of the Russian nation. In that connection, attempts are made to rock us from inside… to undermine society’s trust in the organs of power…”

Contextually the Panama scandal represented one such attempt, but Vlad didn’t say the Panama papers were forged. His KGB training told him it’s impossible to falsify 11 million documents. Instead, referring to himself as ‘yours truly’, he highlighted the absence of his own name from any of them.

“So there’s nothing to talk about,” concluded Vlad. Not quite. That’s like saying that, since the defendant wasn’t caught with a smoking gun, no amount of circumstantial evidence would suffice to convict. In fact, people have been hanged on one tenth the evidence against Vlad.

His close friends and family have been busily laundering bribery money, raising the question of which public official in Russia could command bribes in the billions.

The bribes are mostly indirect: buying equities and then selling them the next day at a huge profit; signing an equity contract, then immediately breaking it and paying a $750,000 penalty; getting $600 million credits with no collateral or repayment; buying shares worth $25 million for $100,000. Yet crypto-bribes all these are, and only Putin handles enough funds to justify such palm-greasing.

After this six-minute preamble, Vlad finally got around to Roldugin whom he’s “proud to call a friend”.

This was my favourite part, for Vlad not only offered a highly plausible, nay irrefutable, explanation but also showed a subtle understanding of artistic creativity.

Roldugin, explained Vlad, “is a creative person”. That judgement is hard to fault, assuming that the cellist came up with the Panamanian trickery all on his own.

But Vlad meant something else. “Many creative people… try their hand at business.”

Now I’ve lived my life surrounded by creative people, and in my experience most of them are rubbish at business, or certainly not good enough to make $2 billion.

But then, according to Vlad, Roldugin isn’t so much a businessman as a benefactor. “He has spent almost every penny he made on buying musical instruments abroad and bringing them to Russia. Expensive things… He donates them to various state institutions.”

Those ‘things’ have to be jolly expensive to cost $2 billion, which is the documented amount of funds passing through the creative cellist’s hands. Irreverent Russians are already quipping about Stradivarius drums and Guarneri drumsticks, which just goes to show that Vlad hasn’t yet succeeded in curing his countrymen of cynicism.

I for one accept Vlad’s explanation. As a sort of creative person myself, I understand the urge to donate $2 billion’s worth of musical instruments to the KGB.

One wonders how many of the other 2,000 of Putin’s known launderers boast the cellist’s creativity. Why oh why didn’t I take cello lessons when a child in Moscow?

 

 

Apart from their spitting sibilants (or shpitting shibilants, as they are known locally) the Dutch are defined by their compulsion to produce and consume mountains of mediocre cheese.

So how is it possible to penalise an activity so seminal to nationhood?

Here I must own up to playing a trick to catch your attention. The Dutch haven’t penalised buying cheese. I made this up to highlight the ridiculousness of something that did happen.

For, in an act of similar iconoclasm, the French parliament yesterday passed a law imposing fines on men paying for sex.

I don’t know what else the French are going to cut off to spite their national tradition, but this is ridiculous. Edward VII, a great patron of Paris bordellos, must be spinning in his grave.

Actually brothels were outlawed in France as far back as in 1946, doubtless to punish the owners for having done brisk business during the occupation. But never mind the ban on brothels. Yesterday’s legislation is much more pernicious than that, for it reverses the 2003 law penalising solicitation.

Or, to be more exact, that law banned ‘passive’ solicitation, that is wearing revealing clothes in a public place of ill repute. (If we had a similar law in England, the entire female population under 30 would be fined every weekend.)

However, blaming prostitutes for what they do isn’t consonant with the modern understanding of man. People are no longer seen as free agents, responsible for their actions. They’re pawns moved around by the invisible hand of circumstance.

If the hand moves them towards objectionable acts, they aren’t the wrongdoers. They are the victims.

Hence those young ladies hustling passers-by in Rue Saint-Denis and Place Pigalle are neither immoral nor greedy. They are victims of factors beyond their control, and the chap buying their services is one such factor.

In other words, a prostitute hired in Paris is deemed to be involved in the transaction the same way as a slab of Gouda bought in Amsterdam.

Nothing that an estimated 40,000 French prostitutes can do will ever come close to this act of degradation, reducing human beings to automata, rather than recognising them as God’s creatures endowed with free will.

A technically different but philosophically identical development is under way in Sweden. There men who report paedophilic fantasies are seen as patients requiring treatment.

About five per cent of all men are estimated to have paedophilic thoughts. Assuming that only a small proportion of such dreamers act on their fantasies, those who do must be working overtime: 10 per cent of girls are supposed to have been sexually abused.

My advice to men who dream of children in those terms would be to shut up about it and sort themselves out. My advice to courts dealing with paedophilic acts would be to punish them with deterrent severity, possibly including castration.

But such a cut and dried approach doesn’t agree with the progressive ethos, of which Sweden is the greatest champion. The progressive ethos says that every aberration must be medicalised.

Thus having impure thoughts about children is seen as a problem for doctors to treat, rather than an urge for the man himself to control. This again denies man’s free will, in this case his power not to turn silly fantasies into criminal acts.

Let’s face it, we all have fantasies acting on which would land us in prison. For example, I used to daydream about killing my first mother-in-law, who nonetheless died a natural death.

Part of the modern ethos is for the authorities to act as thought police. Fair enough, if we’re denied any responsibility for our own actions, then a criminal thought is practically indistinguishable from a criminal deed. No restraining mechanism exists: today I dream of killing my mother-in-law, tomorrow the hatchet sees the light of day.

Hence Swedes who love children the wrong way are brainwashed to seek treatment, regardless of whether or not they’ve actually abused anyone. And they do – even though the treatment on offer is the same chemical castration proposed as punishment in some quarters.

A drug that achieves such an effect by stopping the production of testosterone is currently on trial. Dr Christoffer Rham, the leading researcher claims that “a substantial number of patients with paedophilic disorder actually want help”.

They want to be castrated not to act on their fantasies? That’s as if I had sought jail for my fantasies about my mother-in-law.

What’s happening is a programme aimed at penalising thought as if it were deed, and a programme for which, in another modern perversion, huge state funds are being demanded.

Instead of offering castration as treatment for fantasies, it should be threatened as punishment for acts. On the assumption that most paedophiles wouldn’t seek castration voluntarily, this would reduce the incidence of child abuse more effectively.

But that’s not the purpose of the exercise. The purpose of what’s going on in France and Sweden and everywhere else is for modernity to put its leaden foot down, to impose its view of life. And what a puny view it is.