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My friend Vlad is tragically misunderstood, and so is the country he leads with so much wisdom and panache. Therefore I’d like to apologise to him for having shamefully found myself among his detractors.

Many a time have I referred to Vlad as a kleptofascist dictator out to restore Russia to the former glory of Stalin’s Soviet Union, thereby making her an even greater threat to the West. That was delusions speaking, which is a clinical symptom of mental disorder.

Thankfully, Vlad brought me back to health by pointing out where I had gone wrong. We have nothing to fear from Russia, he explained.

“Only a sick man can imagine that Russia will attack Nato,” said Vlad. “And then only in his dreams.”

The Yanks are fanning the conflict in the Ukraine, he added, because “the Americans don’t fancy very much a rapprochement between Russia and Europe.” And where’s the Anglo-Saxons’ vaunted sense of fair play?

“When European countries integrate, this is [supposed to be] normal, and when we do the same in the post-Soviet space, they try to explain this as our urge to recreate some empire,” Vlad complained.

Awful injustice, that. Of course committed Russophobes might argue that, while European countries integrate of their own free will, however misguided, Russia promotes the noble cause of reunification with tanks, missiles and field artillery. But then what else can one expect from such Russia-hating vermin?

As to the “unconstitutional coup” in the Ukraine, explained Vlad further, “in the field, so to speak, it was led by either the US ambassador or the CIA station head.”

“We are moving nowhere – it’s Nato’s infrastructure that’s moving towards our borders, including the military infrastructure… We are merely responding to threats.”

Of course, silly me. Russia’s annexation of the Crimea followed by a large-scale assault on the East Ukraine was self-defence against America – just like the Soviet Union’s pre-empting the impending US occupation of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

In other words, we all – emphatically and contritely including myself – have got the situation terribly wrong. Indeed, we have nothing to fear from Russia, whereas Russia has every reason to fear the combined might of Nato, spearheaded in Europe by a rapidly remilitarising Britain.

But I hope Vlad won’t judge us too harshly, considering how we were led astray by certain developments that we woefully misread. Our subsequent overreaction was thus nothing short of emotional disorder.

When Vlad’s TV spokesman Kisiliov talked about the likely possibility of turning America to radioactive dust, only a sleeping madman could have detected a threat in that figure of speech.

When Vlad himself mentioned in passing that, had he encountered any Western resistance to the occupation of the Crimea, he would have been prepared to use nuclear weapons, he didn’t at all mean it the way it sounded. Only a dormant lunatic would be worried.

When Russian nuclear-armed bombers constantly overfly Nato countries, who but a sleepwalking maniac would see that as a factor of danger? Russia has every right to train her pilots, so wake up and smell the plutonium, you Nato warmongers.

When Russia calls up reservists and conducts endless training exercises involving massive concentrations of troops on Nato borders, this is exactly what they are – exercises. It takes a nutter to detect an aggressive intent there, and a slumbering nutter at that.

And when Russia attacks a sovereign country, annexes first one part of her territory, then another, then threatens to grab the lot, only a psychopath would fail to see that it wasn’t Russia who did all that.

It was in fact local rebels protesting against the unconstitutional coup that vexes Vlad so. Vlad, you see, is staunchly devoted to defending constitutions, Russia’s own or anyone else’s. The Yanks should keep that a mind: Vlad may decide to invade, say, Maryland should he detect a threat to that state’s or federal constitution.

Now why did American and European Russophobes provoke the bloodshed in the Ukraine in which Russia has played no part at all? Why did they go to such lengths to cast Russia in the role of international pariah?

Simple. What’s unfolding before our very eyes is a fiendish conspiracy to take the 2018 World Cup away from Russia. Hence the FIFA corruption scandal concocted by the CIA in cahoots with the Ukrainian Judaeo-Nazi Banderites.

This isn’t to say that some money didn’t change hands to strengthen Russia’s just claim to holding this great sporting event. Of course it did. But isn’t that what capitalism is all about, paying for what you get?

Those Russophobes must decide whether or not they want Russia to stay the course of capitalism, democracy – and constitution, let’s not forget that. If they do, then they have no grounds for objecting to a fair market transaction. Unless, of course, they are prepared to prove yet again that they are nothing but sleepwalking madmen.

 

P.S. Vlad isn’t the only misunderstood politician. My other friend Dave also complains that his promise to sack any minister who doesn’t want Britain to become a province of the EU was “misinterpreted”.

Indeed it was. Dave did say he’d sack “any bastard who doesn’t toe the line”. But the word ‘bastard’ means an illegitimate child. Since no government minister was born ‘on the wrong side of the blanket’, as Dave’s mother would have put it, in effect he was saying he would sack no one. Another tragically misunderstood figure, if you ask me.

 

 

 

 

Let me see: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the USA. That adds up to seven, hence G7.

However, watching the Sky footage of the ongoing summit, one espies an eighth party at the table: my friend Jean-Claude Juncker, who likes to go by his affectionate nickname ‘Junk’.

Exactly what got Junk a ticket to this party? He’s President of the European Commission, but the EU isn’t yet a duly constituted state, at least not de jure. And if the EU is indeed entitled to be represented at a G7 conference, then why isn’t it called G8?

Actually, that’s exactly what it was called before my other friend, Vlad, chose the Ukraine as the battlefield in Russia’s eternal war on the West. Now that Vlad has been kicked out, is it my understanding that Junk has been thrown in as a second-half substitute?

All preliminary reports suggested that Vlad’s misbehaviour was going to be the main subject for discussion at this G7-and-a-half. However, so far it seems that the main purpose of the meeting isn’t to get Russia out of the Ukraine but to keep Britain in the EU.

Junk’s interest in this project is obvious enough, as is Angie’s commitment to incorporating Britain into what only modesty prevents her from calling the Fourth Reich. But Barack Obama decided to put his oar in as well.

Britain, he orated, is America’s ally, which is why she should stay in the EU. The logic shows a bit of a non sequitur, but one can’t demand rhetorical rigour from today’s politicians.

What Barack Hussein was enunciating was America’s century-old commitment to a single world government, the shining summit to which the EU is an intermediate step. This obsession started with Woodrow Wilson and continues to this day. It’s fuelled by the underlying belief that, whatever such a unified body would be called, it would in reality be an American puppet.

Fair enough, America is entitled to look after her interests, however misconstrued. Ditto Junk. Ditto Angie. But the important thing to realise is that Dave’s commitment to keeping Britain in the EU is no less fanatical, if couched in less fire-eating terms.

In fact, as steered by Dave, Britain is clearly living up to the perfidious image she enjoys on the continent. Any honest politician, and I know that these days it’s an oxymoron, would simply declare that he’d do all he can to stay in the EU under any conditions.

But Dave had an election to win, hence his pretence to be oh so even-handed. He’d let the people decide, he promised. In a referendum, just like in 1975.

‘Just like in 1975’ suggests that the British will be fed similarly pernicious lies. Back then it was assuring the voters that free trade was the sole purpose of European integration, with nary a political objective in mind.

This, in spite of every European functionary, from Schumann and Monnet onwards, never having bothered to deny that their true aim was the creation of a United States of Europe, or some such single political entity.

If anything, Cameron outdoes Harold Wilson in perfidy. He has already revealed a whole raft of stratagems designed to swing the referendum the federalist way, and it’s early days yet.

So far, unlike Wilson in 1975, Dave has denied his 100-odd ministers (do we really need that many?) the freedom of campaigning for the No vote. My way or highway, said Dave, or words to that effect. You want to keep your political career, you campaign for the Yes vote.

Dave has also upped the limit of campaign spending by 40 per cent, as well as allowing funds being pumped in until the polling date. This means that the entire resources of Dave’s government and the EU will be committed to outspending the No campaigners by a prohibitive margin.

As any advertising man will tell you, just as God is on the side of the large battalions in war, so he is on the side of the large budgets in publicity. In a mass campaign it’s next to impossible to win when being hugely outspent by an adversary.

Dave is also lying about his intention to stay in only if the EU offered serious reforms. The catch here is that Dave reserves to himself the prerogative of deciding which reforms are serious. For example, he may declare that, say, changing the wording from ‘ever-closer union’ to ‘ever-tighter union’ is as serious as reforms come.

Britain won’t remain a sovereign nation, or rather revert to being one, while staying in the EU – it’s as simple as that. Any reform offered in the run-up to the referendum will be bogus, a dirty trick to stack the odds. Dave knows this, the EU knows this, everybody with any understanding of politics knows this.

There is one large group, however, that may be blissfully ignorant of this salient fact. It’s the British electorate, and the campaign will make sure it’ll stay that way.

 

Upon mature deliberation, doubtless helped along by the TV footage of the Middle Eastern massacres, Donald Rumsfeld has finally admitted that the idea of carrying democracy to the region was somewhat flawed.

Well, better late than never and all that, but one wishes he had reached such clarity of vision before engineering the criminally stupid (stupidly criminal?) invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Modesty prevents me from mentioning any names, but even without the benefit of hindsight any commentator with half a brain knew then how it would come out. Actually, judging by Mr Rumsfeld’s remarks, even with the aforementioned benefit he still hasn’t quite grasped the true nature of the problem.

He generously admits that the American “template of democracy” may not be “appropriate for other countries at every moment of their histories”. The implication seems to be that, had the Americans caught Iraq at a better moment, that template would have worked just fine.

One has to observe with mortification that somehow, in the 1,400-odd years that Islam has graced the world with its presence, such a propitious moment has so far failed to arrive. The length of this period seems to be sufficient to lead to the conclusion that its arrival isn’t going to happen in the future either.

In other words, Mr Rumsfeld is your typical ideological American in the grip of messianic fervour. He has seen the light shining out of the burning bush of American democracy, and he has heard the booming voice telling him to go forth and proselytise, temporary setbacks notwithstanding.

He doesn’t seem to realise that, in the language I facetiously ascribed to Prince William the other day, most of the world doesn’t give a flying Donald for the American or any other template of democracy. (In the spirit of crass commercialism I may commend to your attention my book Democracy as a Neocon Trick, in which this subject is covered in detail.)

Nor does Mr Rumsfeld understand the true nature of the problem, which he identifies as ‘Islamism’. Actually no such thing exists. What exists is Islam, a militant cult that has been waging war on the West for 1,400 years, off and on.

When used this way, the suffix –ism suggests that the idea expressed in the word’s root is being perverted or at least not applied fully. Hence, the word ‘Christianism’ is often used to describe the pernicious belief that, though Christianity is manifestly untrue, it’s helpful in the role of social adhesive.

Adherents of Islam, however, don’t talk about the social utility of their religion. They are prepared to die and, which is worse, kill for it. Those who don’t feel that way aren’t vacillating Muslims, secular Muslims or moderate Muslims. They are no Muslims at all.

This may seem to be pedantic quibbling, but in fact such basic understanding is as essential to solving the problem of ISIS as the correct diagnosis is to treating a disease.

Identifying Islam qua Islam as a hostile force would naturally lead to a correct strategy not only in foreign policy but also in domestic affairs, specifically in the area of immigration. Alas, “the template of American democracy” and the tyranny of political correctness it has spawned throughout the Western world make reaching such understanding impossible.

The diktats of multi-culti diversity are such that all religions must be regarded as equal. Depending on one’s taste, they may be considered equally good or equally bad, but equal in any case.

Hence Mr Rumsfeld’s former boss Dubya declaring the day after 9/11 that “Islam is a religion of peace”, an idiotically ignorant statement that our own PM Dave saw fit to repeat recently. Hence also the fake bogeymen of ‘Islamism’ and ‘Islamofascism’ neocons use as euphemisms for Islam. And hence also the West’s pathetic inability to solve the problem of ISIS, which Mr Rumsfeld finds so vexing.

Rather than juggling the figures of Western defence budgets, he’d do much better to look into his own neocon heart in search of the real problem. The solutions will then offer themselves, for no sane government would fail to spend what’s required, or do what it takes, to repel a lethal threat.

It’s only when the threat isn’t perceived as lethal that foreign aid seems to be a more urgent item of expenditure than defence of the realm. The necessary treatment may be physical, but the diagnostic techniques are metaphysical. And it’s in this area that the West is being caught with its intellectual trousers down – largely due to “the American template of democracy”.

Rather than acting in the capacity of braces, I’m afraid the likes of Mr Rumsfeld are the dead weight exerting the downward pressure on that garment.

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

As the trailblazer and flag-bearer of modernity, the USA leads the way in advancing every modern perversion, including political correctness, fast food, baseball caps worn backwards and verbs made out of nouns.

This time it’s House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who helpfully reminded me why thinking about the kind of people who govern Western countries gives me Kafkaesque nightmares.

Receiving her richly deserved award from the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund (victory over whom, one wonders), Nancy explained that same-sex ‘marriage’ is “perfectly consistent with Catholic Christianity”.

I must say Nancy’s take on Catholicism is rather different from mine, or any Catholic’s among my friends. In fact, barring human sacrifice, euthanasia, abortion (sorry about being tautological) and the sins mentioned in the Decalogue, one can’t think offhand of a modern practice that contradicts Christian doctrine more than homomarriage.

The Judaeo-Christian approach to marriage and sexuality goes back to Genesis and is grounded in the vision of man and woman coming together “as one flesh”: “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; And the twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh.” (Mark 10: 7-8).

Straight sex in marriage is regarded as normative in both Testaments, and the Old one refers to homosexuality as ‘abomination’. Those who hold the second part of the Bible in greater esteem can find similar views in Romans 1: 26-27, 1 Corinthians 6: 9-10 and 1 Timothy 1: 9-10.

Specifically Catholicism regards transmitting life as the only valid justification for having sex, which noble aim is manifestly unachievable in homosexual intercourse – or indeed in heterosexual coupling that uses contraception or orifices free of reproductive organs.

I’m not voicing agreement or disagreement with Christian doctrine in general or Catholic teaching in particular. God knows I’ve done so often enough in other pieces. The purpose of this one is simply to show that Nancy’s statement testifies either to her total ignorance or to her mental retardation or both.

She proceeded to shove her foot even deeper into her mouth. Nancy explained that she had taken her grandchildren to the aforementioned award ceremony because “it’s really important to see what the practice of our faith is.”

But that’s not what the practice is, which Nancy ought to know. I forgot to mention that she describes herself as a “mainstream Catholic”. If so, one wonders what the heretics and atheists are doing these days.

In any case, her grandchildren have already been taught to support homomarriage specifically because “they go to Catholic school”. What are the pupils of American secular schools taught to support? Bestiality? Polygamy? Snuff movies?

Nancy is entitled to her own opinion, but she isn’t entitled to her own facts. She doesn’t seem to realise this, hence her boldfaced lie (or, to be kinder, delusion) that Catholic catechism supports homomarriage:

“The fact is, what we’re taught is to respect people… To say that [homomarriage] endangers mainstream Christian thinking is so completely wrong.”

It’s God’s own truth that Christianity teaches to respect people. But it’s moronic ignorance to infer that it thereby teaches respect for everything people do.

In fact, St Augustine, who conceivably had a firmer grasp of Christian doctrine than Nancy does, put it with his usual precision: “Cum dilectioni hominem et odio vitorium.” Loosely translated, this usually comes across as “love the sinner, hate the sin.”

But never mind Augustine, Catholicism or Christian doctrine. Just stop to ponder the blood-chilling fact that this flaky woman exerts a major influence on American, and therefore world, politics.

Another thing worth pondering is that her drivel just may be self-fulfilling prophecy. For American ideas, both good and bad, tend to make their way to our shores within a few years of their origination.

So one wonders how long before British Catholics begin to interpret doctrine in this perverse way. My guess is that the Anglicans just may beat them to it.   

 

 

As new chairman of the European Council on Toleration and Reconciliation, Tony has been put in charge of combatting anti-Semitism in Europe.

This is like appointing Sepp Blatter to stamp out corruption in sports. For Tony is personally responsible for putting Jews in the greatest peril since 1953, when only Stalin’s death prevented Russia’s own final solution.

In 2003 Tony played top dog in the pack run by Dubya and trained by US neoconservatives. Their criminal invasion of Iraq is directly responsible for jeopardising the survival of Jews in the Middle East.

Mouthing mantras about the Muslims gagging for democracy, the Bush-Blair coalition removed the dictators who, though undemocratic, had kept a lid on the pressure cooker.

As a result, the Middle East has been plunged into blood-soaked chaos, with much of the blood coming out of the veins of Jews and Christians. And ISIS appears to be on the verge of triumph, which will put Israel in mortal danger.

Yet this isn’t the kind of danger the country can’t handle – after all, Israel has had plenty of experience defending herself against wild-eyed fanatics.

The trouble this time, now that the coalition has lost any taste for direct involvement, is that the ayatollahs are seen as the only viable counterforce to ISIS. Hence, to enlist their support, heirs to the coalition have countenanced, in all but name, Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, and no one doubts the intended target.

Blair was directly involved not only in setting these gruesome events in train. Also, as Middle East peace envoy, he did nothing whatsoever to mitigate the conflict, concentrating instead on securing astronomical fees for his company.

(Incidentally, one must compliment Tony on his fiscal acumen. The fee for this new job will be paid not to him personally, but to his corporation, which is much more tax-efficient.)

To be fair, Tony didn’t just make life harder for Middle Eastern Jews. He did what he could domestically as well.

As his eminence grise Peter Mandelson has admitted, Blair’s government deliberately imported hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants, whom Labour correctly saw as their potential voters.

This brings us to the article in today’s Times, which Blair co-wrote with the iffy Russian ‘businessman’ Moshe Kantor, now residing in Israel. (All Russian ‘businessmen’ who enriched themselves in the ‘90s are iffy.)

Among other things, the article shows that Blair has learned nothing from the Middle Eastern disaster he perpetrated. Instead he still draws inspiration from his accomplice Bush, who declared that “Islam is a religion of peace”.

Hence Blair: “It is our firm belief that it is not religion or faith per se that causes or foments conflicts. It’s the abuse of religion…”

You decide whether this statement is ignorant or mendacious. I’d suggest both.

First, no ‘religion per se’ exists. What exists is Islam per se, and the Koran contains 107 verses unequivocally calling for violence against Jews, Christians and other infidels.

Unlike most Christians and Jews, Muslims tend to obey their scripture. Thus it’s European Muslims who are mostly responsible for the sharp rise in anti-Semitic attacks that Blair-Kantor pledge to reverse.

(This isn’t to say that the indigenous non-Muslim population contains no anti-Semites. It’s just that, unlike the Muslims, they aren’t radicalised at present.)

The countermeasure Blair-Kantor suggest, criminalising Holocaust denial, is not only useless but actually harmful, in that the only tangible result of this attack on free speech will be a further increase in state power.

Rather than shutting up assorted idiots, the co-authors should look for ways to reduce the Muslim presence in Europe. They’d be amazed how precipitously the number of anti-Semitic attacks would drop.

Alas, neither Blair-Kantor nor, more important, Western governments have the brains and courage to identify the aetiology of the problem, as it exists in Europe today.  

Diagnosing the principal cause of a disease is the first step towards treating it. Yet we’re offered neither a correct diagnosis nor effective treatments, which is a guarantee that the problem will only get worse.

Instead we get Tony Blair, in yet another self-serving quango, acquiring yet another platform for assaulting us with bien pensant waffle.  

 

 

 

 

Writing for The Times, Angela Merkel has kindly explained what the G7 is actually for. An explanation was sorely needed because some cynics have expressed doubts that these occasional get-togethers actually serve a useful purpose.

Turns out they do, and Angie explained what’s what with her usual, and usually earnest, lucidity. The mission the G7 has undertaken is to make sure that every woman in the world is in gainful and equitable employment.

One would think it’s not immediately clear how, say, Germany and France or even the almighty United States can ensure that every wife of some aboriginal sultan goes to an office every morning, rather than serving her lord and master. Or, if she does go to the office, that she is treated as fairly as her male colleagues.

Come to think of it, her hubby-wubby the sultan could possibly achieve this end more quickly and effectively, if ever so slightly more violently.

But Angie’s faith in the omnipotence of international organisations is boundless, and she knows what she’s talking about. So I’ll let her speak for herself, with my comments enclosed in square brackets.

“In talking about work, we also need to talk about the possibilities open to women around the world to establish their independence and ensure their advancement through safe and skilled labour.”

[By way of illustration here’s one hypothetical example of a woman who did just that. At first her ‘safe and skilled labour’ was vouchsafed to the East German Young Communist League, in which she advanced to a nomenklatura position. That involved working hand in glove with Stasi, but that was the way of opening the possibilities.

Then, when neither East Germany nor Stasi was any more, the hypothetical woman’s safe and skilled labour was rerouted into West German, and eventually international, politics. In that arena she advanced as far as it’s possible to go without an unstoppable panzer force.

Of course, family life had to be sacrificed to the safe and skilled labour. Our hypothetical woman was rather tasty, as anyone who has seen her youthful nude shots on the net can testify. Hence she had no difficulty attracting men, with or without the benefit of marriage. But in both her marriages she clearly couldn’t find time to produce children. After all, birth labour is neither safe nor skilled.]

“All the statistics show a reduction in poverty and inequality when more women play an active part in economic life.”

[No doubt. But do the statistics also show who brings up the children of, say, a successful woman lawyer working 90-hour weeks, when she’s not particularly busy? How much moral, spiritual and cultural guidance is she able to offer her offspring?

Statistics, you see, show all sorts of things. For example, in Western countries, where most women work, over six million abortions have been performed since 2008. This stands to reason: children tend to make safe and skilled labour a bit more difficult.]

“However, only about 50 per cent of all women are currently in gainful employment.”

[What a tragedy. But how about the children of working women who aren’t successful lawyers and therefore can’t afford nannies? Who’s going to look after them?

Marx, Angie’s countryman, gave an unequivocal, and the only logical, answer: the state. His prescription was that children should be taken away from their mothers and raised as wards of the state. Is this the ideal Angie sees in her mind’s eye? After all, she was intellectually weaned on Marxism.]

“Worse still, in many developing countries the vast majority of those women who do work are employed under precarious or informal arrangements.”

[How about the men in those same countries? Do they all draw their expense accounts in air-conditioned offices? Or do they do the kind of back-breaking, lung-blackening, blood-poisoning jobs that denizens of G7 countries will no longer do? Angie is a great champion of globalisation based on outsourcing, which turns ‘developing countries’ into vast suppliers of cheap, and often slave, labour – not the safe and skilled variety.]

“The G7 therefore wants to aim to give more girls and women in developing countries the chance of vocational training.”

[How? By conquering those countries and replacing their governments? Presumably not. I get it: Angie wants G7 members to spend more on foreign aid, even though most of it is guaranteed to end up in the Swiss bank accounts of the aboriginal sultans.

Never mind that there’s a vast dearth of usable vocational training in the G7 countries themselves, regardless of the sex of those in need of such education. Angie is dead-set on making sure that those developing ‘girls and women’ cherish the myth of safe and skilled labour, while ignoring the reality of their children opting for short but rewarding careers as suicide bombers.]

One hates to generalise, but the propensity to hector others on how they should live isn’t very low on the list of salient German characteristics. Add to this national trait Angie’s personal attainment in bossy demagoguery, and what do you get?

A perfect Times article.

 

 

The first part of the title is a direct quote from Jean-Claude Juncker, to whom I’m warming up rapidly.

The second came from my own vituperative heart, with Dave being the object of the vituperation.

My friend Jean-Claude’s detractors cite many of his drawbacks, such as a dearth of any discernible principles, the kind of amorality that’s de rigueur for a committed federast, perfidy, the intellect of a child with special needs and so forth.

All that is true. But, for the sake of balance, one must think of his redeeming qualities too. To wit: Jean-Claude is a hearty drinker, borderline alcoholic. He smokes like a soot-blocked chimney. And he can see right through Dave.

I must stress that regarding heavy consumption of booze and fags as Jean-Claude’s merits reflects my own idiosyncrasies, rather than his own intrinsic goodness. However, his perspicacity, at least in relation to Dave, is objectively laudable.

Dave, said my new friend, doesn’t want any Brexit. He wants to use the referendum “to dock his country permanently to Europe”.

Truer words have seldom been spoken, at least not since Nigel Farage questioned the advisability of spending £25,000 of our money a year to treat a recent immigrant with HIV. Dave wants precisely what Jean-Claude said he does, which is why I’m opposed to the referendum.

Alas, Jean-Claude’s statement that not only Dave but also the British people don’t want Brexit testifies to the fact that his perspicacity doesn’t extend beyond Dave’s character.

Jean-Claude understands Dave perfectly because they are cut from the same spivocratic cloth. Conversely, he doesn’t understand the British because their national character is dramatically different from his own.

Hence he’s wrong about the British not wanting to leave the EU. They do. But I doubt they will feel the same way come referendum day, after having been deluged with bucketfuls of sewage, otherwise known as federalist propaganda.

The British en masse will be deaf to the only absolutely irrefutable argument in favour of getting out: that relinquishing our sovereignty destroys the 1,000-year political tradition of our nation, thereby destroying the nation.

Two generations of oxymoronic ‘comprehensive education’ have rendered our population ignorant of both our political heritage and its key formative influence on the nation at large.

As part of that ‘education’, the nation has been fed the materialist lie, preached by both socialists and libertarians (including, one is sad to say, the sainted Lady Thatcher). Both groups insist that virtue be judged strictly in economic terms, and they differ only on which roads they propose to take to the fiscal Shangri-la.

Hence the whole issue of in or out will be pitched in strictly economic terms. The EU and Dave’s government will spend millions, not to say billions, lying that the country will be prosperous within the EU and pauperised outside it.

Their task won’t be difficult. Economic facts pass the criterion of truthfulness on which logical positivists insist: they are falsifiable. Moreover, they are easily falsifiable.

By the time the British go to the voting booths, they will have been exposed to endless columns of figures proving that Brexit will mean mass unemployment, starvation and their wives leaving them for swarthy foreigners.

Some token concessions that Juncker’s friends will have offered in the nick of time will be presented as real game changers. The overall message will be that, by staying in the EU, we’ll multiply our wealth and keep all our sovereignty.

(This, incidentally, was the message I recently received from a young lady blessed with a philosophy degree from a decent university. If EU propaganda, still in low gear, had such an effect on her, imagine what it’ll do going at full pelt to the masses barely able to sign their names.)

And, once the Yes vote has been cast, there will be no going back – unlike with the barely possible No vote, which, in the good tradition of the EU, will be held invalid.

This is exactly the outcome Dave wants, and Jean-Claude cottoned on to this in one of his rare lucid moments. Immediately thereafter, the booze got the best of my new friend and he began muttering incoherent football analogies of which he’s fond when in his cups.

On the issue of Brexit, he said, “the Commission is neither an attacker nor a defender. It’s the ‘libero’ who distributes the ball… it’s like a training camp, because there are a lot of balls. At the end there is only one ball – and you have to get it into the goal…”

A lot of balls indeed. But I’d suggest, using the same football idiom so beloved of Jean-Claude, that the Commission is none of those things. It’s a crooked bettor slipping a few quid to a team to throw a match and stack the odds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you think it’s time to revive the idea of gassing the Jews? Our Home Secretary and Justice Secretary certainly do. That’s why they advocate Britain’s departure from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Such is the learned judgement of Prof. François Crépeau, UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. Who am I to argue?

Prof. Crépeau’s list of degrees is longer than mine, and he has been blessed by the laying on of UN hands. Hence he knows how to argue by sticking the thin end of a wedge in and twisting it for maximum effect.

Here’s a sample of his profound thought: “We have to remember the 1930s and how the rights of the Jews were restricted in Germany and then the rights of the whole German people. I mean, countries that go down the path of reducing the rights of one category of people usually don’t stop there.”

They certainly don’t. They go on to build gas chambers and burn corpses in concentration-camp crematoriums. And this, according to Prof. Crépeau, is exactly the slippery slope on which Britain would step – unwittingly or otherwise – if she were to withdraw from the ECHR.

Can you find any flaw in the good professor’s sequential thought? I can’t. It makes perfect sense, at least in some quarters. Such as the UN, the EU, the European Court and your friendly local loony bin.

However, this side of those venerable institutions such moronic, hysterical animadversions are pure Crépeau. One wonders what they teach at McGill and University of Paris, where this savant learned his rhetoric, logic and international law. Do they demand basic literacy before issuing advanced degrees?

The ECHR isn’t about human or any other rights. It’s about transferring legal authority from individual nations to the foul abortion known as the EU, thereby increasing its power and eventually making its supremacy irreversible. C’est tout, as they say at the University of Paris.

It takes a late stage of mental retardation to equate human rights with various international charters bearing that name. Being a UN trouble-shooter, my friend François ought to ponder the fact that the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights was signed by such authorities on the subject as Stalin’s Russia.

The EU, along with all the stillborn embryos of its offshoots, isn’t really a European Union. In all but a few technicalities it’s a union between Germany and France.

I hope my French friends, of whom I have many, and German friends, of whom I have none, won’t be offended, but England has nothing to learn about law in general and human rights in particular from either nation.

In my parents’ lifetime, the Germans committed, and the French abetted, the very atrocities that excite François so. Their Eastern European hangers-on were also active perpetrators then, and for the next 50 years or so they continued the fine tradition of concentration camps, this time with a red rather than brown tint.

This isn’t to say that those places haven’t redeemed themselves since then. It’s just that their conversion to the side of the angels is too recent to give them the right to impose their twisted notions of international legality on a country where individual rights have been protected by law for at least a millennium.

Even without resorting to François’s own demagogic trick of dragging the Holocaust in, thereby vulgarising one of the greatest tragedies in history, only an ideologised ignoramus would fail to observe that, at practically any moment in the last several centuries, it’s England that has been in a position to teach the continentals the basics of individual rights, not the other way around.

Repealing the ECHR would mean repatriating the enforcement of human rights to the country where they have traditionally been secure, and away from a legally and morally pernicious supranational organisation within which the Vichy-like Franco-German alliance would subjugate Europe – this time including Britain.

Anyway, François needn’t have bothered his intellectually challenged head with such matters. Dave has just ridden roughshod over our Justice and Home Secretaries by ruling out the very withdrawal that gives my friend François nightmares of gas chambers.

“Withdrawal is not going to happen,” says a Downing Street source. “David Cameron is clear this is off the table… The British bill of rights could mitigate the worst excesses of the Human Rights Act but it won’t change the fundamentals.”

The most important fundamental Dave cherishes is that Britain must become, by hook or by crook, a gau in the Fourth Reich, otherwise known as the EU. Perhaps François Crépeau should apply for the job of gauleiter. He has all the credentials: stupidity, ignorance, immorality and – most important – the talent to express himself at a hysterical pitch.

 

 

 

The other day, when my friend Will and I were having a couple of pints at the King’s Head, I complimented him on his interview with Gary Lineker.

Will succeeded, I said, in sounding as if he had finally divested himself of the stigma of his shamefully high birth. Why, he even refers to beer as ‘pig’.

This is what he told me in response:

“Ta, Alex, me old china.

“You may think I’m well posh, being a prince and all. But when I had that chinwag with me mate Gary, he knew I was a regular bloke who don’t like nothing more than going down the pub with me Brummie mates and watching Villa on the box.

“I even wrote me own Villa song, Claret ‘n Blue, One Loves You. Sang it to me trouble, but she stuck her fingers into her shell-likes.

“Me missus, she’s different, see. Coz she wasn’t brung up posh from birth, like, she has them aspirations, djahmean? Me, I don’t mind coming across like a prole, to make Gary feel at home.

“Sat in the box during the match, like a goodun, but wish I was with me Brummie mates. Villa, see, got a good kick up the bottle, and everyone in the box rooted for Arsenal, so they were well chuffed. Right berks, the lot of them.

“They like looked at me strange when the ref didn’t give us a stonewall pen and I jumped up and screamed ‘Ref is a wan…’ Stopped myself in time though, coz I was on that big screen and any bleedin’ lip reader would know what I was saying, djahmean?

“This etiquette is a load of old Jacksons, if you follow me meaning. I got me Geoff from St Andrew’s so I know how to talk posh when I have to. But me old lady, she now tries to talk all the time like she got an umbrella up her khyber.

“When I met her, she wasn’t like that. She was a good time girl, see. Swore like a trooper, drank pints of pig, shook her bristols down the pub, even talked chitty chitty.

“Now she got a pair of dustbins, she wants to be a proper royal trouble, she says. Me Nan, she always smiles sly when Kate says ‘one’ instead of ‘me’.

“The other day she told me ‘I rather think Katherine overemphasises the royalty bit, Will. One fears people may laugh.’ And I say ‘Cheers Nan. I been telling her that meself.’

“Now I’m so full of this pig, me back teeth are floating. Order us a couple of mahatmas, will you, Al?”

As I was shouldering my way through the crowd at the bar, I reminded myself that in the royal rhyming slang ‘mahatma’ stands for ‘brandy’. These days one has to take a crash course in chitty chitty (the Cockney rhyming slang for Cockney rhyming slang) to be able to understand what some royals are saying.

But then, as my friend Tony Blair once put it to such great political effect, Prince William’s late mother was a ‘people’s princess’. That, one supposes, makes him a people’s prince.

If you’ve led a shamefully sheltered life, you probably don’t realise that the title of this piece is actually a variation on the first line of a popular football chant, used by the fans of a winning team to taunt their opposite numbers.

Decorum prohibits my quoting the second line verbatim, but the gist of it is that those losers have nothing to sing about. However, in Sepp’s case, the answer is a resounding yes.

For Sepp managed to get himself re-elected as head of FIFA, world football’s governing body. This in spite of a whole platoon of his closest associates being indicted in America for various degrees and types of corruption, from bribery to tax evasion.

Moreover, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch is confidently predicting that there’s more to follow, for only the surface of the football fraud has been scratched. Since the fraudulent sum already mentioned is $150 million, before long the total amount to have changed hands will approach the combined wealth of all the Russian oligarchs who, like Abramovich, have a direct stake in football.

The Russians have been supporting Blatter unequivocally, bringing to mind the proverb about birds of a feather. With their unerring nose for conspiracies aimed at them (this nasal sensitivity is otherwise known as paranoia), they’ve declared that all the charges have been trumped up specifically for the purpose of taking the 2018 World Cup away from Russia.

According to the Russian media, as part of that incredibly intricate plot, the FBI informer within FIFA not so much blew the whistle on the corruption as organised it himself. As Putin’s RT mouthpiece Soloviov put it, addressing the perfidious Yanks: “If you really installed your mole [into FIFA], this raises the question: Did you investigate the corruption or perpetrate it?” Indeed. No other question could possibly cross anyone’s mind.

The same gentleman screamed hysterically: “Corruption in FIFA? And when they talk about it [on Western TV], they show footage of Blatter and Putin chatting. Even though neither one has been implicated!”

Neither one has been arrested, rather. As to not being implicated, this is, how shall I put it kindly, not quite so.

Blatter is implicated by association at least. Just imagine what would happen to the president of, say, BP if seven of his vice presidents were arrested for fraud and seven more were expected to be nabbed within days. He’d be in a mad rush to tender his resignation before being sacked and, most likely, indicted.

As to Putin, while the US action is attracting all the attention, few have noticed an even more important parallel development. For the Swiss Prosecutor’s office has started criminal proceedings against “a group of unspecified persons linked to irregularities in selecting the countries to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.” In other words, Russia and Qatar. Interestingly, in this instance FIFA is mentioned as the victim rather than the perpetrator.

For old times’ sake we must presume that the two countries are innocent until proven guilty. But between us boys, does anyone really think there was nothing untoward about the selection?

One can just see it, the FIFA chaps pondering the possible options in a totally objective and disinterested way. England? No, too misty. France? No, too many temptations for the players to stuff themselves. America? No, what do they know about football?

And suddenly, as if out of the burning bush, comes the epiphany: “I have an idea! Why don’t we award the first one to Russia and the second one to Qatar?”

Everyone gets up, a spontaneous ovation breaks out. Why didn’t they think of that? Russia, with her corruption rating of 156 out of 175 countries, and Qatar, with its summertime temperatures around 50C. Unbeatable choices, both.

As if to prove their sterling credentials to host such events, the Russian Duma is about to pass a law calling for the use of slave labour in the construction of the World Cup sites. And Qatar is already using slaves for the same purpose, de facto, if not yet de jure.

Officially, their construction workers are visitors from India, Nepal and Bangladesh. Unofficially, as if to remind footballers of what can happen when people overexert themselves in extreme heat, they are dying at a rate of one a day. So far the death toll stands at about 1,000, but then it’s early days yet.

As to Russia, the sports establishment in that country is known for its corruption levels far exceeding those considered par for the course in one of the world’s most corrupt countries. Thus about $20 billion of the funds raised for the Sochi Olympics was pilfered by Putin’s cronies with hardly an eyebrow raised anywhere.

Anyway, let’s not be churlish about it. I hope you’ll join me in congratulating Mr Blatter on his re-election. Well-done and well deserved, Sepp!