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French morons are at the moment blockading oil refineries, disrupting fuel supplies and bringing the country to a standstill.

The riot police are trying to disperse the mobs with tear gas and water cannon, but so far without much success. As pumps run dry, police are trying to protect petrol attendants from the wrath of stranded motorists.

One such man was hit on the head with a baseball bat, an implement that sells in hundreds of thousands in both France and England, even though no one plays baseball in either country.

Every poll shows that the majority of the French support the rioters and not the government. Alas, it’s the wrong kind of people disapproving of the government for all the wrong reasons.

So what’s the fun? – as Dickens’s Mr Jingle once asked. Well, you see, noticing that France’s economy is going to the dogs under his socially inspired tutelage, my friend François asked some of his trusted advisers what could be done about it.

They wisely didn’t mention the EU, which in France is off limits for criticism for anyone other than the kind of people who, given half the chance, would expel all the Jews. Such reticence is lamentable.

French manufacturers used to be able to compete with the Germans, but on price only. If a Peugeot costs the same as a BMW, no one will buy the French car. If, however, a Peugeot costs half as much, people may go for it.

Hence French manufacturers traditionally tried to keep unit costs under the German levels. That being a national concern, the government obliged by devaluing the franc at regular intervals.

When the EU introduced the euro, the deutschmark in disguise, that option became no longer available, and any regular visitor to France can see the results for himself. If, say, 15 years ago most cars on French roads were French-made, today one sees a predominance of German marques. The same goes for all sorts of manufactured goods.

A Frexit seems like a logical way to go but no Frenchman this side of the National Front will let such a blasphemous thought cross his mind. Hence François’s advisers focused on another fatal flaw of the economy: the growth-stifling labour laws.

One such law makes it hard to lay anyone off, turning every job practically into a lifetime guarantee. Alas, when employers can’t fire, they won’t hire: the risk is too great.

Hence France’s horrendous unemployment rate, twice as high as ours. But their actual unemployment is even higher because of another asinine labour law: the 35-hour week. Even when employees are willing to work longer hours for extra pay, the law says they can’t.

That’s why my local hairdresser can’t handle the demand around Christmas time because her only other haircutter isn’t allowed to work longer hours, much as both she and her boss want her to.

Also, the unions in France have the kind of power British unions used to have before Maggie Thatcher sorted them out. Another example from my personal experience: a two-man business a French friend of mine started some 20 years ago.

Since then he has built the company into a market leader, with 200 fulltime employees. Yet he’s no longer the boss (incidentally, few French words match patron for offensive power).

He’s obliged to have union shop stewards on his board, two 23-year-olds who know nothing about the business except the workers’ right. The pimply youngsters have the power to countermand my friend’s measures, and there’s nothing he can do to override their veto.

Such are the labour laws that the government tried to change, however timidly. What followed was a public outcry, forcing François to water the reforms down to a point where practically nothing solid remained. But it was too late.

The morons smelled blood and pounced. Union thugs, anarchists, even François’s own socialists went into action. Students and pupils rioted violently, air traffic controllers, railway workers, tube drivers and post-office workers held one-day strikes. And now the morons of the world have united to paralyse the country by blockading the oil refineries – to the masochistic cheers of most Frenchmen.

The situation is pregnant with didactic value. First, contrary to what my EU-loving French friends say, France’s political and legal traditions aren’t just different from Britain’s but are incompatible with them.

We’re law-abiding because our tradition of just and stable laws goes back to the millennium before last. The French have no such tradition, and what they do have is of recent provenance. Hence they generally hold the law in contempt, a feeling successive French governments reinforce by their contemptible policies.

This also explains their proclivity for settling political issues with riots. Alas, it’s only the morons who come out: one doesn’t see too many manifs with slogans like Down with the EU. Nique la France (f*** France) is much more popular.

Bad politics can destroy even great countries, and historically few have been as great as France. But it was one of their cherished past tyrants who pointed out the short distance separating the sublime from the ridiculous.

 

The EU debate has been reduced to number crunching, and the numbers dangled by the Remain spivs are so precise one just knows they’re lying through their teeth.

We don’t mind though. We’ve become anaesthetised to lies, accepting them as par for the course. But of course no politician is going to tell the truth – we wouldn’t expect him to. It’s all a game, isn’t it? That’s how it’s played.

Thus few people protest when that Osborne creature puts on a deceptively intelligent face and issues manifestly false forecasts on the consequences of Brexit.

House prices will fall by exactly 18 per cent – not 17 or 19, as some ignoramuses may aver. The economy will shrink by 3.6 per cent over two years, not one iota more or less. Annual wages will fall by £800, and here George missed his usual trick of avoiding round numbers. It must have taken a huge effort not to say ‘£846,87’ or some such. He was back on form with unemployment, which supposedly will rise by 2.4 per cent, and joblessness, which will grow by 820,000. And of course economic growth will be reduced by 6.2 per cent, costing each capita £4,300 in GDP. (Why not £4,299,97, George? Get your act together, lad.)

Now any half-competent economist could show in a split second that all these figures are bovine dung, pulled out of the appropriate orifice. But of course the voting public isn’t made up of half-competent economists.

However, one hopes against hope that it’s made up of sensible individuals who know that economic forecasts are always wide of the mark. And, when they’re put forth by spivs for a specific political purpose, they aren’t even in the general vicinity of the mark. In today’s world, self-service trumps politics, and politics trumps economics.

All those forecasting lies can be countered by the only demonstrable and historically verifiable truth of economic prognoses: nobody knows for sure. Hence nothing betrays a liar more than all of those decimal points bandied about with the smug self-confidence of a cardsharp.

Obviously there will be economic consequences to Brexit, but they’ll probably be trivial one way or the other even in the short term – especially if, as seems likely, we’ll do a Norway and remain in the single market. In the long term, they’ll probably be beneficial for Britain, if only because they’ll increase our flexibility in responding to challenges as they arise.

Yet the Remain campaign has already scored a major victory by having reduced this vital, history-making argument to piddling penny-counting. For, contrary to my overly optimistic hope, our electorate isn’t made up of sensible individuals.

It’s made up of people turned into intellectual lemmings by our ‘comprehensive education’, an oxymoron that spews morons. They’re easy to trick and even easier to scare, something of which our governing wide boys are taking full advantage.

It’s a failing of the Leave campaign that it has allowed its opponents to argue the toss on such terms. In broader strokes, it’s a failing on the part of true conservatives to have accepted the Marxist premise of the primacy of economics.

In this, there’s no substantive difference between statist and free-market economists: they both define life purely by its economic aspect, far from being the only or indeed the most important one. Mr Galbraith, meet Mr Friedman, you two have a lot in common.

Since in our secular world there can be no transcendent purpose to life, the process of life illogically becomes its own purpose, with happiness the principal desideratum. And, with spiritual and even aesthetic concerns falling by the wayside, most people define happiness in terms of pound and pence. That becomes their criterion of happiness or misery, success or failure, and we’d all rather be happy and successful, wouldn’t we?

Hence the vital issue of Britain’s independence is being decided by shamefully petty haggling that people can’t get their heads around, rather than by the simple proposition even our comprehensively dumbed-down multitudes could understand:

Do you want Britain to remain a sovereign nation in charge of her own destiny and governed by her own Queen and Parliament or to become a province of a neo-totalitarian contrivance ruled by an unaccountable and utterly corrupt bureaucracy with Nazi and socialist antecedents?

And decent person will choose the former, at which point we’ll be ready to discuss specifics, economic and other. Otherwise it’s like a terminal cancer patient contemplating what to do about his in-grown toenail.

You might say that my wording of the question is hardly neutral, that it loads the pack as much as the Treasury’s economic doom-saying. Fine, I admit this is indeed so.

However, the difference is that every word in my phrase is provable beyond any doubt by factual data. And every word in their scare-mongering is a manifest lie.

Of course their lies are propped up by international support coming from the likes of the IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde. And the weight of her statements is in no way diminished by the fact that she’s about to go to prison for embezzlement.

How one wishes that Messrs Cameron and Osborne join her there. Alas, this will have to remain a cherished fantasy.

 

 

 

 

 

Gorbachev has declared to the world his support for the rape of the Crimea, surprising his less informed fans and detractors alike.

The orbis does tend to have odd ideas about Russian chieftains, including Gorbi, and none so strange as those held by the Russians themselves.

The Putinistas hate him, or rather pretend they do. They portray Gorbi as the perpetrator of “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century”, as Putin refers to the break-up of the Soviet Union, and never mind the two world wars.

Considering that the Soviet Union murdered 60 million of its own citizens in about as many years, while enslaving the rest and threatening the world with nuclear extinction, ‘catastrophe’ isn’t an ideal descriptor of its demise, but Putin’s KGB junta has its own moral compass.

At the same time, Russian ‘liberals’, those who take their cue from The Guardian and The New York Times, worship Gorbi for exactly the same reason that the ruling junta pretends to hate him: his role in the ‘collapse of communism’.

Both the liberal fools and the KGB knaves are wrong: Gorbi was and remains flesh of the USSR flesh. As one of the rulers of that hell, he’s an accomplice in all its crimes and the active agent in some.

Nor did the Soviet Union collapse: following the First Law of Thermodynamics, its evil energy was merely transformed from one type into another. Gorbi was a facilitator of that transition, and it takes utter ignorance to suggest that this role redeems the mortal sins he had committed back in the USSR.

The sins were as grave as they were multiple. Before another KGB chief, Andropov, catapulted him into the Politburo, Gorbi had lorded it over the Stavropol province, one of the most corrupt in the country, which is saying a lot.

That North Caucasus province acted as a conduit between the Party/Mafia gangs that ran Transcaucasia, and the Party/Mafia gangs that ran Moscow. Billions of purloined roubles and millions of dollars flowed through Stavropol, some of them straight into Gorbi’s pockets. His chosen method of doing business earned him the nickname Mishka-konvert (‘Mickey Envelope’), suggesting he was regarded as corrupt even by Stavropol standards.

Semi-literate though Gorbi was, he had the animal cunning to hitch his wagon to Andropov’s star while the KGB chief was still clawing his way to the top. Gorbi was useful to Andropov: he’d play host to Moscow dignitaries visiting his fiefdom’s resorts. Having loosened their tongues with vodka, Gorbi would then dutifully inform Andropov of any interesting findings, thus smoothing his succession to power.

Andropov expressed his gratitude by having a Politburo member knocked off in a staged accident and moving Gorbi, still largely unknown in the country, into the vacancy thus formed in the Kremlin’s inner sanctum.

Having eventually found himself at the helm, Gorbi acted in the manner of all his illustrious predecessors: lying and murdering. One example of the former was his flat denial that anything untoward had happened in Chernobyl in 1986. Had the westward winds not made Geiger counters go haywire in Scandinavia and Scotland, the disaster would have been hushed up like so many others.

When the Soviet Union began to creak, Gorbi reacted according to type. He encouraged an internecine massacre in Karabakh, 1988; created a carnage in Tbilisi, 1989; had Spetsnaz storm Baku, 1990; twice introduced troops into Moscow, 1990 and 1991; blockaded Lithuania, 1990; landed airborne troops in the middle of a peaceful demonstration in Vilnus, with entrenchment tools busting the demonstrators’ heads.

His KGB curators then put a gentle word into Gorbi’s ear, telling him to see the situation as an opportunity, not a threat. Scratch our back, Mishka, and we’ll scratch yours. Our goals are the same as yours, but the Soviet Union has outlived its usefulness as a way of achieving them. Leave it to us, and worry nought: we’ll look after you.

Gorbi then took part in the staging of the 1991 sham coup d’état, in which power was transferred from him to Yeltsyn de jure, and from the Party to the KGB/Mafia elite de facto. Gorbi got his General Secretary’s ransom in the shape of the Gorbachev Foundation, originally capitalised at $8 billion. Considering that his official monthly salary had never exceeded $600, he must have saved quite a bit by taking bag lunches.

Since then Gorbi has been basking in the reputation of the world’s senior statesman, feted by all and sundry. Much to the amusement of cultured Russians, he’s even described as an intellectual in the West, where people don’t realise he speaks with a Russian equivalent of Eliza Doolittle’s accent and syntax, pre-Higgins.

Now his KGB minders decided it was time to take Gorbi off the mothballs and have him express his admiration for Putin’s feral policies. He duly obliged, but I’d be careful if I were Gorbi.

As the true Russian god, the KGB giveth and the KGB taketh away. This god is wrathful – one wrong step and he’ll smite you. The safest way for Gorbi to live out his life in peace would have been to keep his mouth shut. But then that option might not have been on the table.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taxonomic confusion in politics reflects something more sinister: a civilisation out of joint. People, including professional analysts, take refuge in semantic caves, with political reality but a shadow on the wall. Consequently they miss the forest of catastrophe for the trees of logorrhoea.

One hears gasps all over Europe about the impending election of Norbert Hofer of the Austrian Freedom Party to his country’s presidency. He’s a neo-Nazi, scream some – didn’t he say there’s no place for Muslims in Austria? And doesn’t he pack a Glock pistol at all times?

Herr Hofer objects. Who are you calling neo-Nazis, you miserable liberals? My party, he says, is “to the left of the US Democrats”. Even if true, this isn’t a refutation of the neo-Nazi charge.

Hitler’s Nazis were also to the left of the mainstream of today’s Democratic party, with their economic and social programmes only overlapping with its extreme left. Nonetheless they were indeed Nazis, though not yet neo-Nazis.

Nor is Hofer, with his socialist economic ideas, right-wing, extreme or otherwise. I mean, Castro and Saddam Hussein both carried pistols, yet no one called them right-wing on the strength of that fact. No one referred to the Polish king Jan Sobieski as right-wing either, though mainly because the term didn’t exist at the time.

Yet Sobieski too had doubts about Muslim presence in Austria. These he expressed most tangibly by thrashing the Turks in the 1683 Battle of Vienna and no doubt hoping that this victory would settle the issue once and for all. That didn’t happen, by the looks of it.

For all I know, Hofer may indeed be a neo-Nazi. That’s insignificant one way or the other. What matters is that his movement is a constituent of a global, cross-party revolt against the post-Enlightenment political consensus.

The Enlighteners, a misnomer if I’ve ever heard one, succeeded in winning the glossocratic war against actual reality, setting the terms of debate and imposing reality of the virtual kind.

That virtual reality almost drowned in the oceans of blood spilled by its most logical champions in the twentieth century. But somehow the phantom managed to shimmer ashore and hide behind the wall of pandemic indifference to politics, mixed with horror and revulsion.

The wall is now crumbling, and actual reality is beginning to punch holes in it all over the world. It’s a battering ram that’s getting heavier and heavier – the only thing that’s missing is the good hands to wield it.

For the Enlightenment current has led the Western world into a political and existential morass inhabited by encephalically challenged invertebrates, spineless nonentities. The trouble is that the West’s political mainstream flows out of the vile presuppositions of the Enlightenment, which makes it ill-equipped to reverse the flow.

What one calls those mainstream parties, and certainly what they call themselves, doesn’t matter. They all are a problem. None of them is the solution.

Yet, like any old nature, the nature of politics abhors a vacuum. If all mainstream parties are an empty space, someone is going to fill it, and that someone would have to eschew the meaningless political waffle. Once the perception that this lingo is indeed meaningless has grown beyond a certain point, people will want to hear real words addressing their real concerns.

This sounds good in theory, but in practice it only means that post-Enlightenment demagogues will be ousted by populist ones. One survival of the Enlightenment, the sacralisation of universal suffrage, precludes the possibility of good and clean hands propelling the aforementioned battering ram forward.

EU or no EU, mainstream political elites inevitably become self-contained and self-serving concerns out of touch with the very demos in whose name they govern. In that sense they are all denationalised, and various internationalist contrivances in the EU vein are but a logical extension of this process.

Such elites can only maintain their hold on power by trying to suppress, dilute or ideally destroy their demos. The Islamisation of Europe is a manifestation of this underlying urge, but it’s not the only one. Adding the cards of Eastern Europe to the Western pack and then reshuffling it to produce all sorts of random combinations is a closely related stratagem in the war against actual reality – and the demos that stubbornly clings to it.

But the demos is beginning to fight back. Alas, its leaders can only come from the margins of politics, or even from the uniform darkness beyond the margins. Thus you get your Matteo Salvininis, Geert Wilderses, Frauke Petrys, Marine Le Pens, Donald Trumps and Norbert Hofers – effective demagogues who may differ in their politics but who all exploit the vacuum left by the virtualisation of mainstream politics.

There’s nothing short of an existential revolt under way, but those of us who hate the offshoots of the Enlightenment must be careful what we wish for. We may evade the rock of totalitarian liberal democracy only to crash into the hard place of fascism.

Unfashionable as it may be to draw historical parallels, the two great existential revolts of the twentieth century, one against the ‘right’ and the other against the ‘left’, produced Bolshevism and Nazism.

God only knows what our century will bring. Meanwhile, congratulations to Herr Hofer are in order – or not, as the case may be.

EU-Leavers always say nasty things about Jean Claude Juncker, or Junk, as he likes to be known to his friends, of whom I’m proud to be one. That just goes to show how little they understand this courageous man fighting for their cause behind the scenes.

The other day Junk told me, as he was finishing his second daily bottle of Martel Cordon Bleu, “A-lex [he sexily stresses my name on the second syllable], I’ve got it all sussed out, as we say in Luxembourg. Two years now I’ve been your agent provocateur behind EU lines, and now I can guarantee a Leave vote.”

“Junk,” I said, “haven’t you had enough? You’re killing yourself, mate, and we need you.”

“Listen, you wimp,” replied Junk angrily. “I can drink you under any table any day. I’m not s**t-faced, as we say in Luxembourg. So you better listen to what I’ve got to say.”

“Fine, Junk,” I sighed. ‘Say your piece. What’s the great plan you’ve come up with?”

Junk helped himself to another snifterful of Martel and said, “You Brits used to be a nation of shopkeepers and now you’re a nation of shoplifters. But you’re still a bloody-minded bunch, aren’t you?

“If there’s one thing you chaps hate, it’s being threatened, am I wrong? If someone threatens you not to do something, you’re sure to do it, am I wrong?”

“So what’s your point, Junk?” I asked and reached for the bottle, only to find it empty.

“I’ll tell you what my point it,” said Junk. “As EU Prezzie-Wezzie, I’m going to threaten you with the Plagues of Egypt if you vote Leave. And I’ll sound so nasty that everyone will be pissed off. A-lex, you can’t be that slow on the uptake, as we say in Luxembourg. Know what I’m driving at?”

It then occurred to me that, drunk or sober, Junk can still do more for the Leave cause than ten Farages put together. “I say,” I said. “Give it a go, Junk. It just might work.”

Sure enough, early next morning, when his first bottle was still half-full, Junk spoke with his typical, if in this case expertly put-on, vigour. As usual, the published version of his speech was edited to smooth out the rough edges, but this is what he actually said:

“If you vote Leave, we’ll treat you as [expletive deleted] deserters. And you know what they do to [expletive deleted] deserters in wartime?

“You’ll be considered a third party and one we won’t suck up to, as we say in Luxembourg. If the British leave Europe, both us and them will have to bear the consequences.

“This isn’t a threat, just a warning. So decide what you want to do, you miserable islanders. Either s**t or get off the toilet, as we say in Luxembourg. And you better not get off.”

Immediately after delivering this oration, Junk rang me on his mobile. “So do I rate the bloody Victoria Cross?” he asked. “I’ve done more for British independence than anyone I can think of.”

I was effusive in my praise. “You most certainly did, Junk. Even those who’ve been undecided now talk about sticking two fingers to the EU.”

“You bet your bottom euro, as we say in Luxembourg. And I ain’t half done yet,” said Junk, who prides himself on his mastery of English colloquialisms.

This time I was all ears. “So what’s the next step, Junk?”

“I’m going to talk a few actors into writing a truly asinine petition, saying that Brexit will spell the end of all arts in Britain. Brill, innit?”

“I don’t know, Junk,” I said. “People listen to actors these days.”

“Don’t be daft, A-lex. What’s the first job requirement for an actor?”

“Talent?”

“Yes, but where does acting talent come from?” Junk was getting impatient, suggesting to me that his secretary had forgotten to put that second bottle into his desk drawer. “They can only slip into all those different personalities because they have none of their own.

“That means stupidity is the first qualification for an actor. Everyone knows that. So people will do the opposite of what these morons say.”

“Oh well, if you say so. Worth a try, I suppose.”

Yet again Junk delivered. The very next day several film actors went public with a cosmically idiotic petition, acting as dummies to Junk’s ventriloquist. And we’re talking real A-listers here: Cumberbatch, Nighy, Scott Thomas, Bonham Carter, Law, Stevenson, Knightley.

I immediately rang Junk to congratulate him. “I say,” I said. “You did it, Junk. Let’s hope it works.”

“Hope’s cheap, as we say in Luxembourg,” croaked Junk. “I play for keeps, me old china. I’m like your Mata Hari, minus the Bristols and…”

I cut Junk short at that point, complimenting him on his knowledge of Cockney rhyming slang. Sometimes he’s just insufferable when he has had a few, which is always. But I’ll say one thing for Junk: he’s a mover and shaker. As they say in Luxembourg.

Responsible recycling being all the fashion, I’m partly reproducing here what I wrote almost four years ago. When you get to the end you’ll know why.

Why do you think we need an EU?

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

So essentially we are putting collective security above individual sovereignty?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aren’t we talking about essentially a statist economy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you, Mr…

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

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

The interviewee could have been any one of those venerable gentlemen, but wasn’t. The correct answer is f) None of the above.

Every reply to my imaginary questions came from a speech delivered in 1942 by Walther Funk, Hitler’s Economy Minister. Herr Funk spoke from the heart about the EEC, Europäische Wirtschaftsgemeinschaft for short.

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

Each one bears an uncanny resemblance to the language of every formative document of the EU. Such likeness of words must betoken at least partial, if not yet total, similarity of principle and purpose. Suffice it to say that the glittering prize Herr Funk saw in his mind’s eye, a federal Europe dominated by Germany, is a whisker away from becoming a reality.

It’s true that some of the trappings of the Third Reich, those revolving around mass murder, are so far absent from the everyday practices of the EU. However, much too often, when talking about either Reich, people concentrate on the consequences of the founding principles, rather than the principles themselves. Far be it from me to suggest that these are identical in the EU dominated by today’s Germany and wartime Europe dominated by Nazi Germany. Yet it takes a blind man, or else Lord Heseltine, not to realise that they’re remarkably similar.

That was the gist of the remarks Boris Johnson made the other day, those Lord Heseltine called ‘obscene’. I’d call them factual (decorum prevents me from telling you what I’d call Lord Heseltine). And if you don’t believe me, talk to the spirit of Walther Funk.

 

 

One wonders how Her Majesty really feels about the de facto change in her legal status. Surely she knows that a single European state makes a mockery of her sovereignty over her realm? That, should it arrive, our ancient constitution will no longer be worth the paper it isn’t written on? That, if our spivs’ frantic efforts to rig the referendum succeed, such a state definitely will arrive?

Of course she does. Of course she hated every vapid word put into her mouth by a PM with the puny intellect and petty selfishness of a child and the moral sense of a skunk – and I hope my neighbourhood skunks won’t take too much of an offence at this comparison.

How Her Majesty must have suffered delivering her Queen’s Speech just five weeks before becoming, in all likelihood, at best part of the stage set in the Ye Olde England sideshow. Leave, Remain or Other – there’s only one thing our monarch should be talking about shortly before our monarchy disappears in all but name.

Yet, instead of our right to sovereignty, she talked about our right to high-speed broadband.

Instead of lamenting her leaderless government, she hailed the advent of driverless cars.

Instead of protecting our borders from aliens, she talked about protecting our children from porn.

Instead of regaining full control of our taxes, she talked about the vital importance of introducing a tax on foods deemed harmful this week.

Instead of putting criminals in prison, she talked about giving week-long releases to those already in.

Instead of stopping the influx of millions of migrants, she talked about charging some of them for some public services.

And oh yes, she did mention “taking steps” toward replacing Blair’s EU-imposed Human Rights Act with a British Bill of Rights. That’s another Dave gimmick inspired by the EU, akin to replacing the European Constitution with the Lisbon Treaty: a cosmetic change in words masking essentially the same message.

In fact any such act, whether originated by the EU or its British quislings, would be redundant and therefore potentially tyrannical, as all unnecessary laws are. For the way our rights have been protected by our ancient laws stacks up rather well against the record of continental Europe.

Since 1688, when the English constitution adopted its modern shape, France has been ruled by several variously carnivorous monarchies (constitutional or otherwise), an ad hoc revolutionary committee, a Directory, a military dictatorship, an emperor, five different republics and, from 1940 to 1944, by the Nazis, first de facto and then de jure. And Germany… well, we all know about her. Throughout that time, England’s legal system, her sage, moderate and balanced constitution, was the envy of the world, including such Enlightenment figures as Montesquieu and Voltaire.

Signposting the organic development of England’s constitution have been written documents, such as the 1215 Magna Carta, the 1679 Habeas Corpus Act, the 1689 Bill of Rights (that inspired a similar American addendum to their constitution), the 1701 Act of Settlement — well, this isn’t the place to get into the minutiae of constitutional history. This is a place, however, to suggest that we don’t need another document, inspired as it’ll have to be by foreign powers whose record in the area ill-qualifies them for providing such inspiration.

The Speech did include a few reasonable housekeeping details, but no one should be concerned about reducing the gas bill when his house is about to be repossessed. For a house to be kept, it has to be there, and ours is about to be taken away.

I haven’t had the honour of meeting Her Majesty and, should such an unlikely get-together occur, she wouldn’t divulge her innermost thoughts anyway. But it doesn’t take an expert psychologist to guess what they must be.

Instead of acting as the dignified regal personage she is, she came across as a woman forced to do something she abhors. My heart goes out to her.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contrary to the old adage, some records aren’t there to be broken. The overall number of annual abortions is one of them, and the abortion rate within various age groups is another.

Yet these records get broken with regularity. The latest one to go is the abortion rate among British women aged 35 or over – this against the backdrop of a hike to 185,824 in all age groups.

Our abortion clinics are working overtime, but they still haven’t caught up with Russia’s million abortions a year – the highest number of any country surveyed by the UN. And there I was, thinking, courtesy of Messrs Hitchens, Booker et al, that Putin’s Russia is undergoing a religious revival en route to collective sainthood.

So far our lasses don’t think of abortion as their preferred method of contraception; this cognitive shift is yet to come. For the time being, our papers still point out matter-of-factly that some women have as many as four abortions over a lifetime. This only goes to show that, while the gap with Russia is closing, it’s still rather large.

I know a Russian woman who emigrated to the US and went to see a gynaecologist. The doctor took one look at her scarred insides and went all sanctimonious. “How many abortions have you had?” he demanded. “Eight,” admitted the woman demurely. “Are you crazy?!?” exploded the doctor. “Don’t you know how dangerous this is?”

The patient was appropriately contrite. Especially since in fact she had had not eight but 28, by no means an unusual number, if on the high side. Most Russian women had their abortions running into double figures, and the issue seemed to be free of any moral implications.

But Russia was, and China still is, a communist country, with a particular take on morality: whatever is good for the state is moral and vice versa. In China they have the problem of overpopulation, hence the state prescribes aborting children, especially girls. The Soviets encouraged abortions because they didn’t want women to stay at home and look after their brood. They wanted them to toil at the lathe or down in the coalmines.

In other words, unsavoury regimes, and we can mention Nazi Germany in that category, use abortion or infanticide for nefarious political purposes. This has been going on since God was young.

In ancient Rome, where our progressive abortion techniques were unknown, unwanted babies, especially girls, were born and simply dumped in the woods to be torn apart by wild beasts. And the oldest surviving Greek letter, written by a soldier to his pregnant wife back home, said: “If it’s a boy, keep it. If it’s a girl, get rid of it.”

The political situation in those days called for swarms of soldiers, which is to say boys. And in both Greece and Rome, the family was seen in strictly utilitarian terms, as the state’s breeding farm.

It would be a mistake to think that today’s situation in Britain is fundamentally different from that in the pagan states of Hellenic antiquity or modern barbarism. Here too the issue of abortion is as free of moral implications as it’s replete with political ones.

But our politics are different, designed to assist the state’s general quest to dominate every aspect of individual lives. Since England’s historical tradition doesn’t easily provide precedents for the primacy of the state, the state seeks to destroy tradition, wherever it manifests itself: politics, social structure, morality, family, relations between (or should we now say ‘among’?) the sexes, economy – you name it.

It’s only in this context that our PC culture can be properly understood. It’s an arrow shot by the modern state at traditional life. Hence what I call ‘glossocracy’, the state’s concerted effort to gain control over language and therefore thought. Orwell prophesied this sort of thing, but he believed it could only be imposed by violent coercion. He didn’t give modernity enough credit – today’s spivs use subtler means to achieve the same end.

Feminism is another arrow in the quiver of modernity, and it hits its target with nothing short of Robin Hood accuracy. The state uses every legislative means at its disposal supposedly to empower and liberate women, but in fact to increase its own power over both sexes.

Thus abortion is put in the context of a woman’s ‘right’ to have complete sovereignty over her body, of which a foetus is seen as an inanimate part, a bit like the appendix. Pregnancy effectively becomes akin to appendicitis: both can and therefore must be treated surgically.

This desideratum trumps the outdated notion of the sanctity of human life, in fact the sanctity of anything. The state is the Lord thy God and thou shalt have no other gods before it.

In that sense, if you’ll forgive three neologisms in one sentence, political abortunism is akin to homosocialism and other manifestations of sexual democracy. This is supposed to liberate, but in fact it enslaves.

 

 

 

Now that the Royal College of Midwives has supported the idea of scrapping legal time limits on abortion, it’s time to start thinking logically.

No limit means up to the day before delivery, doesn’t it? Of course it does. If it didn’t, the RCM would have specified some cut-off point prior to that momentous occasion.

Now, being a simple sort, I can’t for the life of me see any valid medical, physiological or, for old times’ sake, moral difference between a baby one day before climbing out of his mother’s womb and one day after. Some women are a bit early, some a bit late, but their babies look similar to me. If it’s permissible to kill one, there’s no reason not to kill the other, should his birth be inconvenient or undesirable.

Logic would then suggest that there’s a serious argument to be made in favour of infanticide at any age at all. For example, why not abort Dave Cameron post-natally? His mind certainly hasn’t advanced beyond foetal stage, although his deviousness is very grown-up.

More to the point, why not abort Cathy Warwick, the RCM chief executive and the driving force behind this monstrous initiative? Surely she’ll be happy to go to her death upholding the logical extension of her innermost convictions. Her cause, like so many others, needs martyrs to be widely persuasive.

It’s not as if the present legal limit of 24 weeks is all that limiting. In most European countries, for example, it’s 12 weeks, and most European countries are hardly paragons of virtue. Even in Holland, a country twinned with Sodom and Gomorra, it’s 21 weeks, with Dutchmen’s lives thus protected from that age to about 70 years, when doctors are encouraged to kill them, ideally with, but at a pinch without, permission.

Our higher limit is based on the notion of viability, the foetus’s ability to survive outside the womb. This is simply window-dressing, for some foetuses survive if born at 22 weeks and 80 per cent do at 25 weeks.

Also, the medical science advances so fast, if in all sorts of wrong directions, that before long – and I’m talking in terms of a couple of years – it will be possible to conceive and grow a baby with no womb involved at all. The viability principle no longer applicable, does this mean abortion will then be outlawed? I wouldn’t hold my breath, if I were you.

Viability is a wrong criterion anyway, as all materialistic criteria are in anything involving life and death. For example, terminally ill persons, who may live only for another few months, aren’t very viable either, but this side of Holland the passion for finishing them off quickly is lukewarm at best.

Back in the old days we would have said that it’s God who determines viability. Being ‘with-it’ progressive people, we now wouldn’t dare say any such patently reactionary thing that goes against everything Richard Dawkins holds dear. So let’s just say that, when it comes to viability, doctors can make mistakes.

Much as one hates to get personal, 11 years ago a Scottish doctor with the whole alphabet after his name told me that my prognosis was ‘pure’. Having made a mental allowance for his godawful accent, I realised he meant ‘poor’, and there was nothing medicine could do.

According to extremely expert medical opinion then, I was considerably less viable than a foetus at 25 weeks. Yet here I am, writing my vituperative prose 11 years later, having been told yesterday that there’s really no more need for regular check-ups.

I’ve argued before and I’ll argue again that viability is nonsense – not just morally but also medically. The only logically tenable criterion is the moment at which human life begins. Only one such moment can be ascertained without any doubt: that of conception. And if there’s any doubt, then surely we shouldn’t err on the side of infanticide.

At any moment after conception, abortion constitutes an arbitrary taking of a human life. If we find something wrong with the latter, we must find something wrong with the former, it’s as simple as that. All else confusion, as Lord Tennyson would say (actually did say in relation to a different and equally non-PC idea: “Man to command and woman to obey…”)

To their credit, 200 midwives have signed a letter of protest against this barbaric proposal. I think that, after Cathy Warwick has been post-natally aborted, the rest of them should be struck off. Most of them are foreign anyway, so we can always import another trainload. There are, no doubt, more where these ones came from.

Boris Johnson, one of the leaders of the Leave campaign, has committed a sin that never goes unpunished in today’s politics. He displayed some knowledge of history and common sense.

Not much, mind you – he merely said something any average schoolboy knew when I was young: that the EEC/EU isn’t the first attempt to force Europe into a single state.

Following the example set by the Roman Empire, quite a few individuals, most of them unsavoury, have tried to recreate what they erroneously saw as the ideal towards which to strive.

The Holy Roman Empire, which Boris didn’t mention, was one such attempt and, contrary to Voltaire’s typically lightweight quip, it was indeed holy, Roman and an empire. The Carolingian dispensation represents the only benign attempt I’m aware of to glue Europe together. It was benign because the adhesive it used was Christianity, not nationalism, internationalism or any other ideology of conquest.

Another attempt Boris left out was that by the Soviets, which is a serious omission. The national escutcheon of the Soviet Union showed its institutional symbols superimposed on the whole globe, with no national boundaries anywhere in sight. That was more than just artistic licence.

The goal of global conquest was formulated by Lenin, and he tried to put it into practice by attacking Poland in 1920. Even now historians sometimes describe that war as a local conflict, ignoring the famous Order No.1423 issued by the Red Army commander M. Tukhachevsky: ‘Soldiers of the proletarian revolution! Direct your eyes towards the west. It is in the west that the fate of the world revolution is being decided. The way towards a world fire lies through the corpse of White Poland. On our bayonets we are taking happiness and peace to workers of the world. Westwards – march!’ So Poland was a step along the way, not the final destination.

That particular mission failed, but Stalin picked up the banner of world conquest and ran with it. By enslaving, terrorising and starving the whole population, he managed to create an army that outgunned in most categories the rest of the world combined.

In 1941 the Soviet force of 23,000 tanks, for example, not only outnumbered all the belligerents put together in the sheer number of tanks but also was two generations ahead of them in the machines’ characteristics. The same can be said for the Red artillery and air force – to say nothing of the numerical strength of the army.

All that was put together for the explicit purpose of striking at Stalin’s Nazi allies from the rear and conquering all of Europe, to begin with. Only Hitler’s preemptive strike, which beat Stalin to the punch by days and downgraded the Soviet army dramatically, made Stalin eventually satisfy himself with only the eastern part of Europe.

However, Boris did mention Napoleon and Hitler as Angie Merkel’s typological predecessors, which was enough to cause an apoplectic fit on the Left of the political spectrum, where the Remainers reside. The shrill shrieks of protest are breaking through newspaper pages, tearing them, and our eardrums, to shreds. How dare he!

How dare he what exactly? Draw historical parallels? Nothing wrong about that, as far as it goes. No one, and certainly not Boris, has suggested that Angie is like either Napoleon or Hitler in every detail.

But Germany does dominate the EU, and the EU is indeed an attempt to erase all the national frontiers under the aegis of a single state dominated by the Union’s most virile member – in this sense Merkel is an exact replica of Bony, Adolph and those other megalomaniacs Boris didn’t mention.

Hence the parallel is entirely legitimate, provided one doesn’t run to the other extreme of claiming that Angie plans to recreate Auschwitz and start murdering Jews en masse. In choosing the methods of uniting the continent, that objectionable woman follows not Hitler but an earlier, smaller-scale model established by Prussia in the 19^th century.

Seeking to unite all German principalities under their aegis, the Prussians created a mechanism called the Zollverein, officially a customs union but in fact a way of either bribing or blackmailing the weaker provinces into compliance. Military force saw the light of day only once, when Schleswig-Holstein proved recalcitrant.

But the Zollverein taught an historical lesson that the Germans have learned well: the mark, whether it’s called Reichsthaler, simply the mark, Reichsmark, Deutschmark or the euro is an effective weapon in a campaign for European unification. The bank can succeed where the tank can’t.

This is all demonstrable and verifiable fact, but the Remain hysteria isn’t about facts. It’s about ideology fuelled by latent hatred for what Europe traditionally is. Unfortunately our population has been house-trained to respond to hysterical sloganeering with nothing short of lemming alacrity.

So off with Boris’s head, along with the heads of those who have read a history book or two and learned to draw legitimate parallels. As Descartes once said, all knowledge comes from comparing two or more things.

Boris did just that, but his opponents aren’t about Cartesian epistemology. They’re about enforcing an ideology that’s best conducive to their dreams of self-aggrandisement. Prepare yourself for more hysterical gasps in the run-up to 23 June.