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Few words in the modern political jargon can match ‘social justice’ for either mendacity or stupidity, depending on who uses this pernicious term and to what end.

As I wrote yesterday, words no longer convey their real meaning. Vindicating Talleyrand’s bon mot, they conceal it.

Hence, following the turmoil embroiling the Tories, everybody’s talking about our lack of social justice, as if we were short of something valuable. In fact, social justice is the last thing those people – including the newly martyred and beatified Iain Duncan Smith (IDS) – want.

My dog-eared Chambers Dictionary defines justice as “the awarding of what is due”. If our semi-literate population, corrupted into chronic idleness by the welfare state, were indeed awarded its due, a third of it would starve to death.

Yet illiteracy has been used as a weapon of mass instruction for so long that few cringe when served up ‘social justice’. In fact, ‘social justice’ is nothing but levelling, which is about as opposite to justice as one can get. Economic levelling isn’t economic justice; social levelling isn’t social justice; political levelling isn’t political justice. They’re all, however, aggressive weapons in modernity’s war on custom and decency.

Astonishingly for an ex-leader of the Conservative Party, IDS seems to believe that levelling, otherwise known as ‘social justice’, is an essential function – nay, duty – of government.

Sorry about insisting on using words in their real meaning, but the state robbing an industrious Peter to pay a loafer Paul, thereby increasing its own power over both, has nothing to do with justice.

Nor does it have anything to do with charity, as socialists like to lie. Just as levelling is the exact opposite of justice, so it is the exact opposite of charity.

Charity is an act of individual compassion and mercy that, while helping the receiver materially, also elevates the giver spiritually. The state extracting money from people on pain of imprisonment and then using public funds to create generations of parasites is something else again.

Obviously those who are genuinely unable to work and can’t provide for themselves must be offered charitable help. But this should come from individuals, not the state. What the state should do is use its taxation system to encourage acts of private charity (for example, by making donations tax-free), not discourage them, as it does now.

The state isn’t there to be charitable; that’s what individuals are for, and perhaps the church. The best thing the state can do for ‘the less fortunate’ is to create an economic environment in which there will be few of them.

(‘Less fortunate’ in the meaning of ‘poor’ is another cynical misnomer. The implication is that poverty results from bad luck. Sometimes it no doubt does. More typically, however, people in the West are poor because they don’t work hard enough.)

As has been amply demonstrated everywhere in the world, with absolutely no exceptions on record, the best way the state can create such an environment is to act as a referee in the economic game, not an active player.

That means reducing the tax burden to the absolute minimum required for the state to perform its legitimate functions, which don’t include social engineering and economic levelling.

They do include protecting individuals from external and internal evil-doers, and guaranteeing the security and sovereignty of the realm. It’s in these legitimate functions that our state is manifestly remiss.

What it does well is extorting from working people at least half of what they earn by hard toil. This puts dampeners on the productive elements in the economy, while then rechanneling the money into the conduit of ‘social justice’ that encourages the least productive elements.

The government of which IDS was a member does nothing to create a healthy economic climate, although certain measures proposed in Osborne’s budget suggest he knows what that may involve. But acting on such knowledge by, for example, reducing the state’s take to, say, 25 per cent of GDP, would be politically suicidal.

It would be so because for the better part of a century, certainly since the Second World War, the state has conducted a concerted campaign aimed at brainwashing people into equating profligate government expenditure with morality.

The ploy has been as successful as it has been cynical: most people grumble about being skinned alive by taxes, but few question the state’s right to extort a lion’s share of their income. Doing so would sound tantamount to being crassly selfish and insensitive to the plight of their fellow man.

IDS is a culprit in this morally shabby exercise and, judging by his sanctimonious pronouncements, an enthusiastic culprit at that. For what he singled out for criticism in Osborne’s budget is precisely the measures that hint, from light years away, at what must be done: rolling back the welfare state and lowering the tax burden.

No more than a hint it is, for the budget doesn’t reduce welfare handouts but merely slows down by a whisker their rate of growth – and the same can be said about taxation. It’s a virtual, spivocratic, political budget, and in this IDS is right.

However, one shudders to think what sort of budget he himself would propose given the chance. We’d all die by social justice.

 

Having abandoned all hope of ever cranking up my body into life in the morning, I try to get my mind started instead. To that end I do a couple of easy crosswords, which sometimes makes me think about our great language.

We get words second-hand, after they’ve been used by a chastening number of generations. To make verbal discourse possible, those generations had to agree on the meaning of words and stick to that agreement.

They, the generations that produced John Donne and Anthony Trollope, didn’t feel that words mean whatever the speaker wants them to mean. We, the generation that produced Don Brown and Joanna Trollope, think they must.

Well, you know what I mean, says a modern man using ‘masterful’ to mean ‘masterly’. No, I don’t, my friend. Are you sure you do?

In fact, lexical laxity is a distinguishing feature of modernity, what with its understated education and overstated solipsism. Look at one clue in today’s crossword, for example: “Essential aspects (5-6)”, with me expected to write in ‘nitty-gritty’. But that’s not what nitty-gritty means.

It means fine, basic details. Such details may be essential, but then again they may not, as anyone will agree who has ever foolishly said ‘nice car’ to a boffin and received a lecture on McPherson struts and slip differentials in return.

Here’s another clue in the same crossword: ‘Deep admiration (7)’. Would you guess that the answer is supposed to be ‘respect’?

Admiration and respect are two different things. For instance, I respect our cleaning lady for being honest and conscientious, but I don’t admire her.

It’s not just crosswords either, as I found today by visiting the National Portrait Gallery. Hanging on the fence was an expensively produced poster advertising an exhibition of Admiral Nelson’s portraits. It’s called Nauseous Sailor.

Now in the language of William Shakespeare ‘nauseous’ means ‘disgusting’, ‘vomit-inducing’. Surely that’s putting it too strongly, I thought. Nelson had his failings, a propensity to consort with courtesans for one, but he’s generally regarded as a decent sailor.

In fact, the square next to the Gallery is named after one of Nelson’s exploits. You know, the one in which he established that Britain was a naval power and France wasn’t, a state of affairs that lasted until Dave bought a time share on a French carrier. Could a nation really have thus honoured a ‘disgusting’ sailor?

It didn’t. By erecting Nelson’s Column, the nation honoured its great hero. Unfortunately, the same nation later did to its education what Nelson had done to Villeneuve’s navy. The broadsides were so overpowering that even today’s supposedly literate curators don’t know the difference between ‘nauseous’ and ‘nauseated’. The institution once graced by the directorship of the erudite, elegant writer Kenneth Clark is now led by ignoramuses.

Why not just call the exhibition Seasick Sailor? Sea sickness is the unambiguous description of Nelson’s affliction – after all, a sailor can be nauseated (or ‘nauseous’ in the ignoramuses’ lingo) for a variety of reasons, such as too much grog, or else constant exposure to pretentious pseuds.

All this sounds trivial, and so it would be if it weren’t a symptom of a general malaise. For anyone who uses words loosely thinks loosely, which makes him easy prey to those who use language to deceive.

Thus when a politician talks about social justice, few realise he means the injustice of dispossessing hard-working people in favour of idlers. When he mentions cooperation with Europe, few understand this means overturning 2,000 years of British political history. And when he preaches respect for different cultures, many overlook that he means destroying our own.

Much as we may despise conspiracy theories, one finds it hard to believe that our educational catastrophe is a result of honest errors. Some deliberate design is discernible behind the concerted drive to disengage people from their culture, including their language.

Our ‘leaders’ believe that stuffing the people with bread and keeping them half-catatonic with circuses will keep them docile. The blighters only ever sound alarm bells when they realise that our moron-spewing ‘education’ produces millions of unemployable savages.

All those Poles and Estonians, some of them not speaking a word of English, come here and within a few months take jobs the Britons are no longer qualified to do. Since people don’t starve to death in civilised countries, the state has to feed those underachieving Britons, which as a side benefit makes them likely to vote for those who promise to feed them better.

Our ‘leaders’ generally think this is a fair deal but, with the economy being what it is, feeding a burgeoning army of illiterate idlers lowers the standard of living for everyone else.

Since those who thereby suffer still outnumber the loafers, an electoral calamity may become a distinct possibility. It’s only at this point that politicians try to paper over the spidery cracks in our ‘education system’.

Otherwise, reducing a great nation to anomic barbarism is perfectly fine with them. That’s actually a clue in another crossword: “savage (8)”. ‘Barbarian’ is supposed to be the answer, a typically imprecise one.

Iain Duncan Smith has earned much sympathy for resigning his post as Work and Pensions Secretary on a matter of principle.

My own reaction is rather less unequivocal. After all, the two main reasons Mr Duncan Smith cites for his resignation are both dubious, as is his matter of principle.

Primarily he objects to one plank in the Chancellor’s budget: the symbolic reduction in disability benefits. This, said the man largely credited with welfare reforms, is “a cut too far”.

Actually, it’s a cut not far enough. The current roll of disability benefit recipients suggests that Britain has more cripples now than in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.

One can’t help feeling that this benefit offers even a larger potential for cheating than most others. The minuscule reduction proposed by Mr Osborne won’t even make much of a dent in the abuse and, if properly administered, won’t leave any people genuinely unable to work begging in the streets.

The second and, one suspects, real reason for Mr Duncan Smith’s action is the contempt in which he clearly holds the Chancellor. Here his motivation is hard to fault, for George Osborne is indeed contemptible.

But accusing him, as Mr Duncan Smith does, of putting forth a budget pursuing political rather than economic objectives is disingenuous. He might as well accuse Mr Osborne of being a modern politician.

Modern politicians do politics, not statesmanship. They crave personal power for its own sake, not as a vehicle to promote public good. It’s in this sense that they are all profoundly corrupt – and neither the accused nor the accuser is any different.

Occupying as they did the two key economic posts in the government, both men sold the public on the message of bogus austerity. Britain, they said, wasn’t paying its way under Labour, with politically expedient overspending financed by ruinous deficits. That was going to change under the Tories, hence the austerity in general and Duncan Smith’s much-touted welfare reforms in particular.

As an immediate result of this commitment to fiscal responsibility, Britain’s public debt has doubled under the Tories to its present level of almost two trillion pounds.

Consequently our children are being saddled with an unsupportable debt in six digits each, which may well reduce them to a lifetime of penury. Hence one has to admire the unabashed cynicism with which Osborne described his effort as “a budget for the next generation”. For screwing the next generation, is more like it.

If there’s anything to commend in Osborne’s budget, it’s precisely his cosmetic attempt to reduce the disability benefits and raise the threshold for the 40 per cent tax rate. These are the measures Duncan Smith cites as reasons for his resignation.

The language he used came right out of the lexicon favoured by Jeremy Corbyn and other Labour Trotskyists. This budget, he thundered, favours the rich at the expense of the poor.

Evidently he shares the socialist canard that anybody with an income of over £45,000 a year (the new threshold for the 40 per cent tax rate) qualifies as rich. Mr Duncan Smith ought to check out how much it costs to have a half-decent life in Britain. After all, not everyone has parliamentary expenses to fiddle.

Where all our politicians are fundamentally dishonest is in their attempt to peddle the belief that a little bit of tweaking can actually cure our terminally ill economy. A little nip here, a little tuck there, and we’ll be in the black by the time of the next election (as Mr Osborne promised with characteristic mendacity).

The real problem with our economy is systemic, not symptomatic. Like the NHS, which the present budget ring-fences from even cosmetic cuts, its problems spring not from poor administration but from the corrupt principles on which it’s based.

Modern democracy creates the conditions for politicians to gain power by buying their votes with our money. This is clouded by emetically sanctimonious verbiage that comes from Marx either directly, as it does with openly socialist parties, such as our Labour, or surreptitiously, as with cryptosocialist parties, such as our Tories.

As a standard ploy, they elevate suicidal borrowing to a high moral ground, claiming they are driven by genuine empathy for the poor. In fact, the amount of poverty in a country is directly proportionate to the amount of socialism in the economy – to the extent to which the government is prepared to bolster state power by creating a class dependent on the state.

By spending money we don’t have on the welfare state, we create a pyramid-scheme economy and, which is worse, a vast underclass of those unwilling and by now unable to work. The ruinous effects aren’t just economic – they are moral.

While corrupting the populace, the likes of Messrs Osborne, Duncan Smith et al also corrupt themselves and indeed the very idea of public service. In their able hands public service becomes personal self-service surely and ineluctably.

One suspects that, on balance, Mr Duncan Smith is a more decent man than Mr Osborne, who’s basically a jumped up spiv with overblown ambitions. But there isn’t as much there as some people believe. They are both modern politicians, aren’t they?

 

 

 

 

A few months ago I commented on Dave’s foolhardy commitment to admitting Turkey into the EU, even though the county is only five per cent European geographically, and less so otherwise.

Yesterday Cameron repeated this madcap idea, and in response I can only repeat what I said then. Neither Dave not I ever change.

Since Turkey boasts 75 million inhabitants, it’s a fair bet that Dave and his jolly friends are ready to welcome as many Turks as will care to come. I can’t even venture a guess at the possible number – I can’t count as high as that.

Because it’s an article of Dave’s faith that immigrants make invaluable cultural contributions to the panoply of British life, it follows logically that the more Turks come here, the better off we’ll be culturally.

While it’s impossible, or at least ill-advised, to refute this assertion, or to doubt its evidential base, one may still wish to cast the briefest of glances at the behavioural patterns of the 500,000 Turks who are already here.

Most of them keep a low profile, but those who don’t make life interesting in the areas they grace with their presence. They certainly exemplify the benefits of multi-culti diversity, that central prong in the trident of Dave’s faith, staying in the EU and homomarriage being the other two.

The case in point is the feud between two rival import organisations, known in the more refined circles as the Tottenham Boys and the Hackney Bombers. Leaving aside for a second the enriching contributions the two groups make to British culture, let’s just say that the commodity these gentlemen import isn’t listed in the Financial Times.

To be specific, it’s heroin, which makes the two groups not so much import organisations as gangs. To be fair, Turkish or other migrants don’t hold exclusive rights to organised crime in London. The East End had its Krays, South London had its Richardsons, and I’m sure there are some worthy successors operating today.

Those chaps couldn’t be confused with choirboys either, and things like torture and murder were their stock in trade. They didn’t need any lessons in violence from Turks or anyone else but, since it’s cultural inputs we’re talking about, they went about their business in a, well, British way. It was a pragmatic fight for territory, both figuratively and literally speaking.

If their business interests clashed, bloodletting ensued. If a member of the Krays’ gang showed his face in the Richardsons’ patch, it was all his life was worth. Nor could a Richardson venturing into the Krays’ domain count on serious life expectancy. The lines were clearly drawn, and it was all quite rational, within certain limits.

The Turks, on the other hand, go about their affairs the Turkish way or rather the Muslim way, with blood feuds neither dying nor fading away. They are a gift that keeps on giving, and rational considerations need not apply.

Hence a little punch-up outside a Finsbury Park snooker club back in 2009 has escalated over the next six years into a string of 30 violent incidents, including several murders.

One of the parties to the snooker fisticuffs was a member of the Tottenham Boys, otherwise known as Tottenham Turks, while the other proudly belonged to the Hackney Bombers. Whichever gentleman came off the poor second in the exchange of slaps vowed revenge, which solemn oath automatically involved all his heroin-importing colleagues.

Their friend’s honour was offended and blood alone could rinse the affront away. Sure enough, blood was spilled, which put the boot on the other foot. The avengers became the target of vengeance, and so forth, with the pendulum swinging ad infinitum.

The last or, more precisely, latest incident occurred when two of the Tottenham Boys were being taken to Wood Green Crown Court to be sentenced for attempted hits on various Hackney Bombers (one wonders how they got their name).

The police van was attacked, and in the ensuing shootout the Turkish population of London was reduced by one gunslinger. His death diminishes us all, to paraphrase John Donne, for the cultural contribution of the Turkish community becomes less.

Anticipating the de rigueur objection that only a small proportion of the London Turks indulge in murder and heroin pushing, that’s doubtless true. Yet what interests me now isn’t so much percentages as absolute numbers.

Without leaving the realm of mathematical probability, one could venture a guess that, when the Turkish population of Britain grows, say, four-fold, so will the number of people flouting British laws and indeed the British ways of going through life.

Actually, the growth in crime rate will probably outpace the numerical increase, for at present most Turkish people in Britain come not from Turkey but from Cyprus, which is considerably more civilised than, for example, Anatolia.

Hence, if Dave and his EU friends get their wish and Turkey joins this wicked contrivance, we have a veritable carnage to look forward to. That, however, will be offset by the massive enrichment of our cultural life.

Specifically, one could mention… well, all sorts of things. None springs to mind offhand, but I’ll catch you later.

 

Apparently the comedian Rowan Atkinson based his Mr Bean character on his hapless, humourless and – truth be told – not very bright brother Rodney.

Having had the dubious pleasure of meeting Rodney quite a few years ago, I can personally attest to his ideal suitability to act as Mr Bean’s prototype. Why, this professional EU baiter even gives this good cause a bad name.

But at least when ranting about the wiles of Brussels, Rodney gives the impression of being in command of his facts and vaguely knowing what he’s talking about. When venturing outside his sole area of expertise, however, he makes his tragic failings patently obvious.

The case in point is his article Just Back From Russia – Prosperous, Capitalist, Nationist, Democratic, Christian, reflecting on Rodney’s vast experience of spending a few days in Krasnodar, a city in southern Russia.

Every adjective in the title is a lie, which will be instantly obvious to anyone with even cursory knowledge of Russia. The word ‘nationist’ isn’t a lie; it simply doesn’t exist in English. Is it the same as ‘nationalist’? Clearly, Rodney invented this word, just as he invented his facts.

Instead of relying on the impressions gathered during a flying visit to a country about which he knows nothing, Rodney should have looked at Russia’s international ratings in every category that matters – that way he could have avoided what the Russians call ‘lying like an eyewitness’.

In human rights, rule of law, democracy, quality of life – well, everything – Russia consistently places close to the bottom, sharing that neighbourhood with assorted Third World hellholes.

For example, Rodney has the gall to praise Russia’s health service, comparing it favourably to our NHS. That the NHS is awful doesn’t make Russia’s health service, a veritable murder factory, any better.

Russia’s mortality rate stands at 15 from the bottom, next to Lesotho’s. The country’s male life expectancy is under 60, and every Russian who has two pennies to rub together gets treated abroad. I myself have arranged London medical appointments for my Russian friends, who saw this as a lifesaver.

And prosperous? According to the information issued by the ruling KGB junta itself, 15.9 per cent of the population are living below the poverty line, higher than in such economic powerhouses as Albania, Sri Lanka and Tunisia. And the poverty line in Russia is drawn at a monthly income of less than £100.

Democratic? Doesn’t Rodney know that the Duma is a rubber-stamping irrelevance, a Potemkin village put up by the kleptofascist junta to make itself presentable to the outside world? Can’t he see that Russia is ruled by arbitrary diktat? No, apparently not.

Capitalist? Russia’s two principal economic activities are plundering the country’s natural resources and laundering the resulting gains through Western banks.

It’s the only sizeable country in the world where government and organised crime are fused into one, and where proximity to the ‘leader’ is a sine qua non of prosperity. When he has some free time from writing drivel, Rodney ought to look up the list of Putin’s cronies who’ve become billionaires on his watch, all those Rutenbergs, Timchenkos et al.

Another captivating read would be the list of businessmen, lawyers, journalists and political opponents murdered by Putin’s junta. Has Rodney ever heard of Magnitsky? Politkovskaia? Nemtsov? Starovoitova? Litvinenko?

Christian? “Vladimir Putin was brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith,” writes Rodney, “and the churches are packed with people of all ages at all times of the day.”

Actually, regular church attendance in Russia is under one per cent, lower than in England, though it’s possible that the couple of churches to which Rodney was taken by his Krasnodar minders happened to be full at the time.

And Putin was brought up in one faith only, the KGB his deity. He began to be associated with that sinister organisation while still at school, and it takes cosmic ignorance not to know that even a hint of faith precluded any KGB career.

In fact, Putin’s first job involved harassing dissidents, including religious dissidents, defined at the time as people who practised their faith openly. When piety became fashionable, Putin and his jolly men began to cross themselves publicly, except that it took them a while to learn that the Orthodox do so right to left, not left to right, as Mafiosi do in American films.

Rodney’s ignorance (or else mendacity) is staggering. For example he extols Russia’s income tax rate of 13 per cent, ignoring the 30 per cent Social Security rate on top of that. And the 20 per cent corporate tax is typically augmented by protection charges imposed by organised crime.

All this wouldn’t be worth writing about if Rodney’s gibberish weren’t so characteristic of the less intelligent (or more ideological) fringe on the right of the political spectrum.

Justifiably driven to distraction by our own spivocratic, dishonest, self-serving, ineffectual government, they begin to look for greener pastures elsewhere – including the most putrid political swamps of the world.

This is practised even by the likes of Hitchens and Booker, Rodney’s intellectual superiors (not that this description unduly narrows the field). Those people ought to be ashamed of themselves: they should know better. The Rodneys of this world should just shut up.

Putin’s announcement of withdrawing ‘the main part’ of Russian forces from Syria has caused a reaction out of proportion to the significance of the event.

Once again Putin has caught Western intelligence unawares, which immediately produced a choir of self-laceration in our media, harmonised with barely concealed admiration for the KGB thug.

That Western intelligence services have always been inept when gathering and processing information about Russia is true. Not a single important post-1917 development (indeed the 1917 Bolshevik coup itself) has been predicted. Not a single one has been properly understood. For example, the all-important Nazi-Soviet pact was discarded as even a remote possibility until the day after it happened.

Closer to our own time, Western intelligence services failed to predict Soviet acquisition of nuclear weapons, Khrushchev’s faux de-Stalinisation, Soviet interventions in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, the launch of the first satellite, the installation of missiles on Cuba, the whole ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ offensive, the ‘collapse’ of the Soviet Union.

And since the KGB junta fronted by Col. Putin took over Russia and began acting with the perfidy characteristic of history’s most murderous organisation, our intelligence services have consistently been caught with their trousers down.

Putin’s attack on Georgia came out of the blue, as did his anschluss of the Crimea, aggression against the Ukraine and, more relevant to yesterday’s announcement, his move into Syria. His supposed move out of Syria unsurprisingly wasn’t predicted either.

Yet everything about the withdrawal smacks of KGB disinformation. For example, ‘the main part’ of the Russian force in Syria means nothing unless we know how many Russian soldiers there are in the country and how many of them are leaving.

Since we don’t possess this information, the withdrawal may well be as bogus as the supposed withdrawal of some Soviet forces out of Afghanistan six months after the incursion began. It later turned out that going home were only AA and missile units, which had been found unnecessary. The remaining forces were strong enough to kill about a million Afghans before retreating.

Since Russian ground forces are only a few thousand strong, they perform mostly police and training functions. The bulk of Putin’s operations are bombing raids, and those can proceed unabated from Russian bases in Dagestan or, if cruise missiles are used, Russia herself.

Putin declared victory. The Russian troops, he announced, had achieved all their objectives. Again, we don’t know what the objectives were, and various guesses have already been proved wrong.

Even accurate observations haven’t led to credible conclusions. For example, it was hard even for Western intelligence not to notice that the Russians pounded mostly not ISIS positions but the so-called ‘moderate’ Arab areas (I met a moderate Muslim once. His name was Asif.).

And unlike Allied forces, the Russians aren’t using primarily precision weapons. Their stock in trade is indiscriminate bombings of schools, hospitals and private dwellings. Hence their claim of having killed 2,000 militants is outright mendacious. What did they do, check the IDs of the patients killed in hospital wards?

So was propping up Assad the strategic objective now fulfilled? Clearly not. Assad’s troops, with the Russians playing the role of his air force, have only made modest gains. For example they’ve failed to capture Aleppo, which advance was already touted as a major future success.

Over the last year Syrian troops have made practically no territorial gains at the expense of ISIS in Syria. ISIS lost territory mainly in the parts of Iraq inhabited by the Kurds, and encouraging Kurdish separatism clearly is one of Putin’s objectives.

There are many others, yet none of them has anything to do with his supposed commitment to Assad much mooted in our press. Syria will become Russia’s client state now no matter who’s nominally in charge there, Assad or anyone else. Reconstruction contracts will all go to Russian firms, what with Syria already owing Russia some $100 billion.

At the same time, Russia has secured massive contracts in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, mostly armaments but also the odd nuclear plant. Playing both ends against the middle with the sleight of hand well drilled at the KGB academy, the Russians are also arming Iran, sworn enemy of Sunnite powers.

The same stratagem is used towards Israel, whose actions against Hezbollah are coordinated with the Russians, while the latter are training and arming the very same terrorists.

It’s also conceivable that the Russians are twisting the Saudis’ arm to curb their oil output, thereby ratcheting up the prices whose low levels are destroying what’s left of Russia’s economy.

So why the withdrawal? For one thing, Russia’s apparent aim of creating a separatist Kurdish area has already brought her in conflict with Turkey and potentially NATO, whose member Turkey is. For all his bellicose language Putin isn’t ready to take NATO on in a standing battle, and he’d rather not risk one.

Then again, the withdrawal was timed with the opening of Geneva peace talks, in which Putin wants to play a major role, while retaining maximum flexibility in continuing his bombing campaign if necessary.

Above all, the KGB colonel wants to re-establish himself as a major player on the world arena, rather than the street bully he really is. This objective has to be at odds with the West’s, for readmitting a manifestly evil regime to a seat at the civilised table will befoul the table irredeemably.

This is what’s worth talking about, not the cynical and probably bogus PR exercise that the withdrawal of some Russian troops really is.

 

 

 

We’re often so hung up about the specks of difference among various ‘isms’ that we ignore the motes of similarity.

Fascism, Nazism and bolshevism, for example, are all logical developments of socialism, which should become instantly clear to anyone capable of stripping socialism of its bien pensant sloganeering.

Socialism isn’t about sharing and caring. It’s about the state controlling every aspect of life, robbing the individual of his liberty, supplanting his God-given free will with the will of the state.

As such, socialism isn’t Christianity without Christ, which was a popular fallacy back in the ’60s. It’s the Antichrist, someone able to put on benign expressions and utter kindly phrases while pursuing evil ends.

All socialist states, whether ‘democratic’, ‘fascist’, ‘international’ or ‘national’ have more traits that unite them than those setting them apart.

My favourite exercise, for example, is comparing Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, Hitler’s Four-Year Plan and Roosevelt’s New Deal. All three documents are so identical that they might have been written by the same men (the last two actually were to a great extent, but that’s a different story).

Some socialists are more carnivorous than others, but none of them deserve a reputation for goodness, something fostered by most Western papers and accepted by their less intelligent readers.

On the contrary, we should never be surprised when even so-called ‘democratic’ socialists display evil traits normally associated with their ‘national’ cousins. Such as anti-Semitism, which is supposed to be the prerogative of conservatives.

True, some tweedy, clubbable gentlemen would rather not see Jews at their oak-walled Pall Mall hangouts. But over the last century or so the worst anti-Semitic atrocities have been committed by socialists, of various red and brown hues.

This ought to be kept in mind by anyone who raises an eyebrow at the news that the Labour party welcomes activists whose attitude to Jews isn’t a million miles away from Julius Streicher’s.

Such as Vicky Kirby, who was suspended in 2014 for speaking her mind a tad too loudly and unequivocally. Here are a few examples of her tweets:

“I will never forget and I will make sure my kids teach their children how evil Israel is.”

“Anyone thought of asking [ISIS] why they aren’t attacking the real oppressors, Israel?”

“Who is the Zionist God? I’m starting to think it’s Hitler.”

But of course. Hitler is worshipped in every synagogue all over the world, but especially in Israel. We have Miss Kirby to thank for bringing this to our attention.

Lest one might think that Miss Kirby is merely anti-Zionist rather than anti-Semitic, she added another tweet: “What do you know about Jews? They’ve got big noses and support Spurs.”

Some of us also know that six million Jews were murdered by people with Miss Kirby’s mindset, but she did point out the most salient facts. (‘Spurs’, for the outlanders among you, are Tottenham Hotspur, a football team affectionately called ‘Yids’ in some circles. Tottenham is a poor area in North London, where many Jews live, hence the nickname.)

The amazing (or rather predictable) fact about Miss Kirby isn’t that she was suspended in 2014, but that she has just been readmitted — and appointed vice chairman of her party association.

This is to be expected in a party whose leader, Jeremy Corbyn, numbers Hamas murderers among his friends and never bothers to conceal his sympathy for their cause.

Nor are such sentiments reserved for the less educated Labour members. For example, the Oxford University Labour Club is currently being investigated for anti-Semitism.

Actually, the only surprising thing about these revelations is that so many people are surprised. They’ve fallen victim to socialist propaganda.

For socialism is an ideology of envy and therefore of hatred. And Marx, the patron saint of this evil creed, showed in his own warped personality how naturally hatred of the rich segues into hatred of the Jews.

Jews, even the manifestly poor ones living in Tottenham, are all filthy rich, aren’t they? Hence a socialist gets two hate objects for the price of one. And one doesn’t have to be Jewish to be unable to resist such a good deal.

 

 

Barack Hussein looked at Europe and saw it was good.

Crowds of rather feral-looking individuals, many of them his namesakes, are overrunning every high-rent country on the continent. Though they all flee from something or other, they sagely choose rich places to flee to, not the Albanias or Kosovos of this world.

That shows the same enterprising spirit as that displayed by the first American settlers, and also subsequent arrivals from places like Nigeria. Of course the first settlers had to live in a wasteland but, given the option, they wouldn’t have.

Yet, lo and behold, some Europeans, especially those who, if qualified, would vote for Trump in the US elections, want to put an end to the arrangement enabling many Baracks, Husseins and Barack Husseins to practise Sharia law in a society they dislike, the way Obama himself would have practised US law had he not chosen to become a community organiser in Illinois.

Hot damn, thought Barack Hussein, those folks don’t know what’s good for them. But trust the good old US of A to give them the lowdown. It’s the American mission in the world, and hence Barack Hussein’s personal mission, to teach wayward nations the facts of life — for their own good, natch.

If a continent-wide federation worked for the US of A, then, hot damn, there ain’t no reason it can’t work for Europe. Mind you, Barack Hussein is no square from Delaware, or for that matter Nigeria. He knows that the folks in, say, Greece and Holland are more different than the folks in Illinois and Michigan.

But then American folks from Nigeria aren’t the same as them Minnesota Swedes or Pennsylvania Dutch either. Yet look at them, one happy family. Playing together, staying together and being kind enough to teach the rest of the world how to live. For its own good, natch.

Them uppity Brits are especially in need of a good lesson on the benefits of a US of E (Geddit? US of E, like the US of A.). When it comes to oppressing folks in Nigeria, them Brits don’t mind being international. It’s only when it comes to belonging to the good ole US of E that they go all little England.

But Barack Hussein will sort’em out. To that end he’ll touch base with the Brits next month to tell’em what’s what. He called it having ‘a big, public reach-out’, like in that commercial for the phone company, ‘Reach out, reach out and touch someone…’ Barack Hussein is a real American, not some Nigerian, so he likes quoting ads. That’s what real Americans do.

Of course in some quarters such ‘reaching out’ may be called interfering with the internal politics of another country, but hot damn — as far as Barack Hussein is concerned, there ain’t no internal affairs anywhere that ain’t America’s business — and there haven’t been since 1832, when another president, James Monroe, told the world how it was.

Barack Hussein, he don’t want those Nigeria-oppressing Brits to quit the US of E and leave behind the same ‘s**t show’ they left behind in Lybia or, for that matter, Nigeria. No sirree, Bob. (At this point, Barack Hussein made a note for his speechwriters to update his slang. They make him sound like some Nigerian who learned his ‘merican from old novels.)

You’d think them Brits would be grateful to Barack Hussein for giving them a hand in sorting out their affairs. But those perfidious folks are up in arms, like they were back in the 1770s (Note to speechwriters: look up the exact goddam dates).

Some 15,000 of them have already signed a petition saying they can decide on such matters themselves, thanks very much, Barack Hussein. They’ve launched a campaign on the UK Parliament website called ‘Prevent Obama From Speaking In Westminster Regarding the In/Out Referendum.’

Who do those folks think they are? And they can’t even find snappy names for their campaigns, like ‘reach out and touch someone’ or ‘It’s Miller time’. (Note to speechwriters: find a snappy name for Barack Hussein’s visit, like ‘Obama way is OK’. Note to the Joint Chiefs: can we do an Iraq to them Brits, but without having to hang Cameron? Dave, he’s a regular stand-up guy, sees things Barack Hussein’s way.)

No, Barack Hussein will put federal fire in the Brits’ belly, like JFK did in Germany with his ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’, and a good job he wasn’t speaking in Frankfurt or Hamburg. Barack Hussein can do that sort of thing too.

‘I am British of Nigerian descent!’ Note to speechwriters: find a snappier phrase. This one may upset some folks back stateside.

 

 

 

Every time I travel, all sorts of dishevelled thoughts overlap with scattered questions in my head.First a question, and I do hope someone can provide an answer. I’m in Verona now, a large city in the north of Italy. Comparing it to Newcastle, a similarly large city in the north of England, one can’t help noticing that Verona is much more beautiful.

In fact, it’s much more beautiful than any British city (I’ve never been to Glasgow, but something tells me a visit there wouldn’t change this assessment). Why?

Verona is an old city, but then Newcastle too goes back to Roman times.

Strategically, Newcastle was in the Middle Ages even more important to Northumbria than Verona was to Veneto.

Economically, both cities have had ups and downs but, averaged over a millennium, their fortunes have been roughly the same. And at present Italy is supposed to be an economic basket case, while England is presumably thriving.

So why does Verona have impeccable architecture filling every perfectly proportioned street and square, and Newcastle, well, doesn’t? And why is Verona full of buildings going back 700-1,000 years, and Newcastle isn’t? Where did they all go? Was nothing built there for 18 centuries?

Both cities have fought their fair share of battles over the last millennium, so war damage wouldn’t be a satisfactory answer.

Neither can I accept easily the argument that the Italians are more aesthetically gifted than the English, or that they knew how to build structures that would last centuries at a time when the English didn’t. I’m not saying this isn’t the case; only that I can’t accept this argument easily.

But forget the Middle Ages. Why is even the relatively new residential architecture in Verona so much more pleasant than in Newcastle? In fact, one seldom sees an ugly house in Verona, while in Newcastle… well, one does.

Could it be that the Italians in charge of such matters love their city more than the Tynesiders love theirs? Could it be that they take more pride in the way their city looks?

And another thing. In the five days I’ve been roaming the streets of Verona, I haven’t seen a single tattoo parlour, nor a single tattooed individual.

Here any question why would be rhetorical. This side of Easter Island, the number of tattoos in a place is inversely proportional to its civilisation. This is a tell-tale sign that’s both necessary and sufficient.

But, comparing Verona and Newcastle, one instantly detects other signs as well, such as the way people are dressed. Fine, that there are infinitely more elegant people in Verona could be put down to the Italians’ obsession with bella figura, keeping up appearances.

But also, while I’ve seen many well-dressed people filling numerous bars and restaurants to the brim, not a single drunk has reeled into my line of vision. Hand to heart, would that be the case over five days in Newcastle? Including a whole weekend?

Neither has any Veronese inquired what I was looking at or referred to me as ‘sunshine’ (Cosa stai guardando, luce del sole just isn’t heard much in Italian streets) — nor metonymically described me by the crude word typically reserved for a certain part of the female anatomy. This in spite of my absentminded tendency to bump into people accidentally. Do you know why?

But enough questions; it’s observation time now. Apart from the cathedral, the two most prominent churches in Verona are the Romanesque St Zeno basilica and the Gothic St Anastasia, both highly ornate.

Less than two centuries separate the two buildings: St Zeno was completed in the 13th century, St Anastasia in the 15th, at the height of the Renaissance. Presumably in the intervening 150 years the Veronese didn’t lose their aesthetic sense — why, they still haven’t lost it, by the looks of it.

Moreover, I have a particular distaste for ornate interiors, which is why I hate Baroque buildings, especially those in Italy. For example, I couldn’t spend more than five minutes in Rome’s basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, whose interior is disfigured by horrendous Baroque excesses.

And yet, while St Anastasia reinforced this idiosyncrasy of mine, St Zeno punched a hole in it. For while St Anastasia’s interior is to my taste an ugly eyesore, the equally ornate St Zeno is one of the most beautiful churches I’ve ever seen.

An observation like this leads to a generalisation: with a few exceptions here and there, the earlier the architecture, the better it is. Here I wouldn’t mind suggesting an explanation, though I know many will disagree.

Pre-Renaissance architecture was produced to the glory of God; Renaissance architecture began to celebrate the glory of man. The earlier builders and stonemasons glorified Him; the later ones glorified mostly themselves.

That alone was sufficient to produce an aesthetic gap: where the artist starts largely determines where he finishes. True enough, the Renaissance did produce many fine paintings, though again — with notable exceptions — the earlier, the better. But architecture preceded painting as the quintessential expression of out civilisation. Hence it suffered attrition much earlier.

Well, there we are. Observations, questions and precious few answers. Blame this on Amarone, the devilishly strong local wine. Someone ought to tell these people that 15 per cent is ridiculous for a table wine.

 

 

Never in the history of sociology has so much been made of so little by so many.

I’m abroad at the moment, but I can hear triumphant noises thundering from our press as if they came from around the corner. Apparently University of Nottingham researchers staged a rather crude experiment proving that the Brits are the most honest people in His Creation.

About 2,500 students from different countries were locked up in a room with some dice and told to roll them. The higher the score, the greater the cash reward they would receive. Unbeknown to the guinea pigs, they were secretly videoed for the researchers to see if they were lying about their roll.

British students, just ahead of those from Sweden, Germany and Italy, were found to be the most honest, while those from Tanzania, China, Morocco and Vietnam the most cheating.

So far so good. Alas, the conclusions drawn from this exercise weren’t so much far-reaching as far-fetched.

Honesty, said the researchers with that Eureka smugness that’s their stock in trade, isn’t a universal trait. It depends on the corruption level in the country’s government. The more corrupt the politicians, the more dishonest the populace, and vice versa.

Actually, the presence of Italians among the most honest people should have alerted the academics to the foul-smelling rat somewhere. After all, in Italy the dividing line between government and organised crime is more smudged than anywhere else in Europe, this side of Russia.

But this is a minor matter. Much more worrying is the researchers’ obvious ignorance of what constitutes corruption in politics. They, along with even such respectable pundits as Tom Utley, seem to think that politicians who don’t take backhanders aren’t ipso facto corrupt.

By those standards, Edmund Burke, one of our history’s greatest parliamentarians and political thinkers, was crooked as a corkscrew — he accepted large donations for raising questions in Parliament. So large, in fact, that he could afford a sizeable estate in Buckinghamshire solely from the proceeds.

And Benjamin Disraeli was even worse: his aristocratic patrons actually gave him an estate down the road from Burke’s so that he could be gentlemanly enough to found the Conservative Party.

At the same time, a respectable pundit like Tom Utley is cloyingly proud that, with the possible exception of Tony Blair, our politicians are exemplars of incorruptibility. If only it were so.

If only Messrs Cameron, Osborne, Hague and their ilk practised fiscal corruption and no other. If only they could take a few quid here and there while discharging their duties with statesmanlike integrity, we’d be so much better off.

Even on the most elementary of levels, can you name off-hand a politician who, when in office, does all he promises when campaigning? Surely going back on a promise constitutes lying, which is rather the opposite of honesty?

I won’t bore you with the list of campaign promises and pledges all our PMs, including the present one, broke. The list would be way too long for this space.

But even that isn’t as bad as their corruption goes. For every day of their miserable lives they corrupt the very constitutional integrity of the realm in their charge.

They routinely corrupt Britain’s sovereignty, an effort of which Cameron’s cynically mendacious IN campaign is a glaring example.

They corrupt Britain’s financial integrity, saddling future generations with a ruinous debt that can never be repaid and that already costs us more than our defence budget to service.

They corrupt Britain’s security by refusing to spend enough on defence, laying the country bare to attack.

They corrupt British families by creating a welfare system that makes the father redundant, by encouraging cohabitation instead of marriage and by promoting homosexual marriage that destroys the very notion of matrimony.

They corrupt Britain’s education by failing to teach children to read and write, while stuffing their heads full of subversive, egalitarian, multi-culti rubbish.

They corrupt Britain’s ancient institutions by destroying the Lords and reducing Parliament to the dictatorship of the Commons, stuffed to the gunwales with unprincipled spivocrats.

They, with their Midas touch in reverse, corrupt everything they can — and our pundits, including such respectable ones as Tom Utley, scream hosannas because our spivs don’t take bribes, thereby allegedly setting a shining example of incorruptibility for us all.

I wonder how many of those British students who didn’t lie about their dice rolls think it’s perfectly fine for the state to marginalise the church, to operate its finances as a pyramid scheme, to turn Her Majesty the Queen into merely an EU citizen, to teach pupils how to use condoms instead of how to add up, to have an army barely fit to perform police duties, to legalise homosexual marriage, to abort hundreds of thousands of foetuses every year, to admit millions of cultural aliens, to… well, this can go on indefinitely.

My bet is that most of them do, because these are the sort of things they learn from our ‘incorruptible’ politicians and our respectable pundits. If this is honesty, I’ll take corruption any day. And twice on Sundays.