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Though of all Western countries only the USA has ‘pursuit of happiness’ chiselled in stone, most modern people would see it as a worthy lapidary goal.

Few stop to think that this desideratum, if left unqualified, is fundamentally nihilistic. Few would remember that, before Jesus Christ became a superstar, it had been assumed that people should seek to attain not happiness but virtue.

There was little disagreement on what virtue was, and none at all on its being distinct from vice. ‘Happiness’, on the other hand, makes no distinction between good and sinful, which automatically elevates tolerance to the status of not just the highest virtue, but the only one.

After all, one man’s happiness may be another man’s misery. For example, putting powerful speakers into a car boot, opening it and then driving around town with ‘music’ blaring at top blast may be the driver’s way of pursuing happiness. Few others would be equally happy. Even if we were to narrow the notion of happiness down to seeking money, the same applies: we can all think of numerous situations where one man’s fiscal happiness spells another man’s destitution (Bernie Madoff, ring your office).

Divesting happiness from virtue and vice deprives its pursuit of any moral aspect. This is as close to a reasonable definition of nihilism as one can get.

‘Anything goes’ is a necessary corollary to nihilism; it would wither on the vine without it. Thus tolerance and an open mind have to be definitely the most important, and arguably the only, virtues in a society devoted to happiness über alles. The coin is two-sided: modern tolerance of vice has to be offset by intolerance of any traditional virtue.

This is supposed to be our new morality, but in fact it’s neither moral nor particularly new. Back in the 5^th century BC, Herodotus insisted on the importance of ‘respecting other people’s ancient customs’. A few pages later in the same book, he wrote: ‘Burying people alive is an ancient Persian custom.’

Today’s champions of multiculturalism would be well-advised to ponder this. Would they be prepared to accept not only couscous, but also female castration? Not only tandoori, but also suttee? If, as one suspects, most would answer no, they should then decide whether true multiculturalism, accepting all cultures as equally valid in their entirety, is either possible or indeed desirable.

Witness the Indian guru Asaram Bapu who yesterday added his rupee’s worth to the rape case currently drawing international attention. Six youngsters dragged the student Jyoti Singh Pandey and her boyfriend into a bus, where they proceeded to rape her and beat them both. The poor girl later died, and her friend suffered horrendous injuries.

The saintly man’s comment? According to him, Jyoti Singh Pandey was ‘as guilty as her rapists’. She wasn’t sufficiently kind to the murderous thugs and didn’t ask them nicely enough not to abuse her. Presumably, she also wore a revealing sari, inflaming the poor youngsters’ desire to rape and murder. The holy man refrained from specifying the guilt of the girl’s boyfriend. Were his trousers perchance too short?

One is beginning to feel that a lifetime of meditation may just fail to shape a personality in the same way as even the occasional prayer would. And then, at the risk of transgressing against modernity’s sole virtue of multi-culti tolerance, one wonders if the odd bit of intolerance, nay unequivocal rejection, may at times be acceptable.

Fair enough, both the crime and the cleric’s comments on it have caused an outrage in India, with crowds claiming that the country should review its whole culture, specifically its position on the role of women in society. Thousands are out in the streets, brandishing deeply felt but badly spelt posters. (‘Publically hang the rapists!’ – an ‘A’ for the sentiment, an ‘F’ for the orthography.)

But still, it’s hard to think offhand of a minister in any mainstream Christian confession anywhere in the West who’d be capable of making a similar statement. Nor is it easier to think that even such a sadistic rape in, say, Geneva or Bologna, would make thousands of people blame the vicious crime on the general failings of Western civilisation. That such an accusation can be made credibly in the second most populous country on earth should bring our commitment to multiculturalism into focus.

At an unguarded moment one may even suggest that other cultures, especially the more exotic ones, aren’t just different from ours but are indeed inferior to it. Therefore any attempt to toss them all into the same cauldron and boil them down into a single entity can result in one thing only: annihilating Western culture and replacing it with boldfaced, unapologetic nihilism.

All Western countries are making such giant strides towards this worthy end that one may get the impression this is the true goal of their governments, media and ‘educators’. Considering such a possibility, I can only repeat the same tearful plea as an American baseball fan directed at Joe ‘Shoeless’ Jackson, the player accused of fixing the 1919 World Series:

‘Please say it ain’t so, Joe!’

 

 

 

 

 

 

The last three centuries have witnessed numerous attempts to replace Judaeo-Christian morality with an equally effective secular code based on rational thought. The same centuries have also witnessed a comprehensive failure of every such attempt.

Immanuel Kant was neither the first nor the last thinker who postulated that, as a rational moral agent, man doesn’t need God to come up with a valid moral code. It’s just that he was a more powerful thinker than the others, and so his failure looks even more spectacular. The greater the height from which one tumbles, the more shattering the fall.

Kant proved beyond any doubt what all those Greeks had shown before him: that, though philosophy can ponder morality from every possible angle, it can’t create it. There’s so much more than reason that shapes human behaviour that rationalism is inevitably found wanting.

Kant and other philosophers dedicated their lives to finding an intellectual justification for their loss of faith. In common with other intelligent men, at some point they began to mistake their ratiocination for reality. They thus convinced themselves, and unfortunately many others, that the Judaeo-Christian code could drop its adjective and thrive as a mere noun.

That was akin to believing that an apple tree will continue to bear fruit after it has been sawn off its roots. Kant was willing to admit that the apples would be slightly different, but he was certain that they’d still have a similar taste and texture. Yet all we got was a pile of rotting wood.

In a way, Kant and his fellow rationalists could be forgiven their mistake. They lived at a time when the fundamental moral tenets of Judaeo-Christianity looked eternally indestructible. Provided we were deft enough, we could separate morality from religion without any adverse effects – like a conjurer whipping the tablecloth off the table without disturbing the cups and saucers. Christianity was the cloth Kant yanked out, morality the cups, and they all ended up as shards of china on the floor.

Resulting modernity has since proved its ability to create widely spread riches beyond those Kant or Smith could even imagine. Yet, with the removal of Christianity as the social and moral focus, material wealth grew in parallel with spiritual poverty. Then, like a snake biting its tail, spiritual and moral poverty turned around and began to destroy material wealth. This, and only this, is the nature of our present economic crisis.

Even worse, when stripped bare of its moral and spiritual shrouds, reason begins to look pathetic in its nudity. Christianity prevented reason from overreaching itself by teaching that many things are, and many others ought to be, beyond reason’s reach. This institutionalised self-restraint prevented us from looking excessively stupid.

Conversely, when we set out to prove that reason is omnipotent, we only succeed in proving it’s impotent. ‘When a man stops believing in God he doesn’t believe in nothing, he believes in anything,’ said Chesterton, and he has been proved right.

Conveniently untethered and fashionably open, the modern mind can conceive of inanities that in the past would have been regarded as telltale signs of madness. Who in his right mind would, for example, have argued in favour of two men getting married? Who could have thought that one day the state would discourage hard work and reward indolence? Who would have ever thought that talentless, subversive morons would earn millions for perpetrating unspeakable obscenities on music and other arts?

No one would have come to the conclusion that such things are desirable because they would never even have been discussed. Informed by a teacher infinitely more trustworthy than any philosopher, people just knew that some things were wrong simply because… well, because they were wrong, and that was that.

If someone like Prof. Peter Singer had made his favourite argument in favour of, say, bestiality, he would have been locked up without any prior debate. ‘But it’s victimless!’ he’d scream, ‘We’re all animals and we can love one another!’ ‘Chimpanzees are practically human!’ ‘Why deny us and our pets such pleasure!?’ The only sound he’d have heard in return would have been that of leather thongs being buckled up on his straightjacket. 

When everything is valid, nothing is. As modern man holds nothing sacred, he’ll avidly destroy even everything profane. And he’ll feel good doing it, for he’ll believe he’s acting in the name of progress.

Little will he realise that he’s reverting to the pre-civilised times of hairy couples first rolling on the grass in the spirit of unbridled joy and then busting each other’s heads with stone axes.

What’s being destroyed before our eyes isn’t just a religion. It’s our basic humanity. I hope we’ll all realise this as we watch the first couple of men walk down the aisle, possibly followed by a man and his dog.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dave’s new moral crusade makes one ponder what might have been. He should have become a priest, not a politician.

By now he could be the Archbishop of Canterbury, a capable lad like him. After all, Dave possesses all the necessary qualifications: lukewarm faith, if any; lowly intellect; cavalier attitude to church tradition; support for female bishops; even stronger support for same-sex marriage; lifelong commitment to secular ‘relevance’.

All he’d have to do to make a perfect Archbish would be to don a silly white gown and shuffle around Stonehenge at summer solstice, and surely Dave could do that. Then he’d be in a perfect position to enlarge upon morality, every statement striking home with the power of a wrecking ball. In his present position, however, such jeremiads sound frankly pathetic.

In fact all politicians sound stupid whenever they invoke morals to support their purely pragmatic and usually self-serving goals. In this instance, Dave yearns to squeeze a few extra tax pennies out of us.

It’s not that this would serve any practical purpose, such as reducing the national debt. By now Dave’s advisors must have done the sums and told him this wasn’t going to happen: raising taxes doesn’t automatically mean higher revenues, and in fact it usually means the opposite.

No, Dave wants everyone to pay higher taxes to make it easier for him to court those millions of voters who’ve never worked a day in their lives, nor paid a penny in tax. The relationship is symbiotic: the welfare state over which Dave now presides creates more freeloaders; they in turn vote in spivs who promise more welfare. Job done.

Unfortunately for Dave, some mechanisms still exist that enable both individuals and corporations to pay a little less tax. As far as Dave is concerned, all such loopholes should be closed, even if that would mean cessation of most commercial activity. Ideally, he’d like corporations to pay tax as a proportion of their gross receipts, not net profit.

What could be simpler? Widget Ltd. has sales of £1 billion, pays £210 million in tax, then uses the rest to pay its staff, maintain its premises, renovate, invest, expand and so forth. What, they had to spend £1.2 billion to make £1 billion, and so operated at a loss? Well, that’s their problem, isn’t it?

Alas, Britain still being, technically speaking, a parliamentary democracy, such simplicity would require a show of hands at Westminster. Some of those hands would be irredeemably bloody-minded, either out of principle or, more likely, for purely political reasons.

So never mind the law, feel the morals. By taking advantage of legal loopholes, companies like Starbucks and Amazon have, according to Dave, demonstrated their lack of ‘moral scruples’.

But I don’t wish to steal Dave’s thunder. I think the Demosthenes of Downing Street, his depth of thought only matched by his elegance of style, should be allowed to speak for himself:

“Because some people say to me, ‘Well, it’s all within the law; you’re obeying the law, it’s okay”. Well, actually there are lots of things that are within the law [that] we don’t do because actually we have some moral scruples about them and I think we need this debate about tax too.

“I’m not asking people to pay massive rates of tax. We’ve got a low top rate of income tax now; we’ve got a low rate of corporation tax now; we are a fair tax country. But I think it’s fair then to say to business, you know, we’re playing fair by you; you’ve got to play fair by us.”

Peeling away Dave’s barely literate lingo, we arrive, I think, at a kernel of meaning. It’s true that the moral standards revealed in Exodus and St Matthew are higher than those imposed by secular laws. When the two are at odds, God’s laws should take precedence.

But not being a Biblical scholar of Dave’s obvious attainment I can’t recall where in Scripture it says that companies should pay corporate tax even if they show an operating loss – as Starbucks has done in 14 out of the 15 years it has been active in Britain. Moreover, I suspect that God left such vital details out when speaking either to Moses or to the multitudes.

So what moral law is Dave invoking when threatening to make ‘damn sure’ that foreign companies bringing employment to the UK will be squeezed dry? It has to be ‘I am the State thy Lord, and thou shalt have no Gods before me.’ Somehow this law seems to lack the universal appeal of the older, now obsolete, commandments.

Also, Britain could be regarded as ‘a fair tax country’ only by those who think that Robin Hood was fair when robbing the rich to give to the poor. Bleeding people white is guaranteed to reduce the number of the rich while increasing, at a faster rate, the number of the poor. It’s one of those economic paradoxes, Dave, that upon closer inspection turn out not to be paradoxical at all.

The corporate tax in the UK is 21 percent. Add to this Britain’s prohibitively high rents, transport, fuel and building costs, its minimum wage (about three times higher than in the USA), payroll taxes, insurance, finance cost, the cost of compliance with countless asinine regulations (most of them imposed, at a frightening rate, by the EU), and you’ll see why about 24,000 businesses fail in Britain every year.

On the positive side, the Dave and George economy show is a guarantee that their worst fear, that outside the EU Britain would become like Norway and Switzerland, won’t be realised.

Dave doesn’t think “it’s right to aim for a status like Norway or Switzerland”. I’d choose something like Zimbabwe or Timor to scare children at night. That would be really terrifying. Conversely, becoming like Dave’s two bogeymen would mean we’d have the highest quality of life in the world. No danger of that, not with the likes of  Dave in charge.

But not to worry. After the next election Dave will have plenty of time on his hands to produce a treatise on his favourite subject, morality. May I suggest the title? What’s Good for Me Is Good Morally.

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

Gérard Depardieu’s life has more twists than the plots of most films in which he has starred. The latest one comes from a terse announcement on the official Kremlin website:

‘In accordance with Point A, Article 89, of the Russian Federation Constitution, the application for citizenship in the Russian Federation by Gérard Xavier Depardieu, born in France, 1948, is hereby approved.’ What’s one to make of this?

Depardieu, as we know, has renounced his French citizenship as a reaction to François Hollande’s acting on his self-proclaimed hatred of rich people. Possessing this emotion nowadays seems to be the sole relevant qualification for leadership in any Western country, as President Obama could confirm.

Modern politicians may be intellectually challenged, but they all possess enough animal cunning to know how to encourage for their own benefit the practice of most cardinal sins, envy especially. So dislike for rich people has become widespread even in the country that has ‘pursuit of happiness’ (that is, of money) emblazoned in its founding document.

Rich is of course a relative concept, and how an egalitarian leader defines it determines how the target group will react. Obama, for example, wanted to punish anyone making more than $200,000 a year (about £123,000), which is to say 6.7 million Americans modestly successful in any field, business, professional or academic. Some horse trading with the Republicans raised that threshold to $400,000, still penalising about nine percent of the population.

Penalising too is a relative concept: America’s ‘superrich’ will still have a lower marginal tax rate than any Brit making over £35,000 a year – but hey, we aren’t talking absolutes here. In any case, considering the number of victims involved, they have to grin and bear it. They can neither hide nor run.

Hollande set his sights higher, both in the threshold and the rate. He targeted anyone making over €1,000,000 a year, which is to say about 1,500 Frenchmen. This isn’t to say that those who make less than a million get away scot-free, not in a country with the world’s highest per capita social spending.

France’s Constitutional Council has blocked the 75-percent tax rate, but its objections were purely technical. As Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici promised, the glitches will be ironed out, and the bill resubmitted in a year, to be post-dated for 2013. So Depardieu is right in saying that nothing has changed.

Still, the numbers of those to be affected are relatively small, and, though the intended extortion victims can’t hide, they can indeed run. This is what Depardieu has done.

Last year he paid about 85 percent of his income in various taxes – this before François got his confiscatory act together. Not all of Depardieu’s income came from acting; he is also a successful owner of multiple businesses, all related to food and wine.

Though he has wound down his business interests in recent years, he still employs about 80 people, who all worship him. In a country, where the word patron (boss) is pejorative, Depardieu is seen as an exception.

Not only does he pay over the odds, but he helps his employees in all sorts of ways. For example, he shuts his restaurants on weekends to make sure his people spend more time with their families. When a family breaks up, he sends the divorcee-to-be to his own lawyer, free of charge. When someone is ill, he is treated gratis by Depardieu’s own doctor.

In short, a nicer bloke you wouldn’t wish to meet, which makes it so much stranger for an outsider to observe the vitriol heaped on Depardieu after he decided to leave France with what’s left of his money.

It has to be said that this action somewhat lacks in novelty appeal. Hundreds of thousands of successful Frenchmen have left the country in recent years, many of them settling in Britain, which proves how desperate they are. French tennis stars, for example, have been populating Monaco for years. So why single out Depardieu?

Well, you see, Depardieu is perceived to be rightwing, and he even campaigned for Sarkozy in the last election. As far as Le Monde is concerned, this is one sin that can never be absolved. Right is always wrong.

In parallel with attacking Depardieu’s personality, the press still insists he’s the best actor in the world. Actually, one could name enough thespians with a wider expressive range than Depardieu’s to contest this claim. At most, he’s the best actor in France, but of course for the French this is tantamount to the same thing.

Anyway, here’s a talented, kind, generous man who, in common with all worthy individuals, likes his wine, food and women. Alas he’s also an actor, which probably means he’s not excessively bright. (Having grown up in an actor’s family, I feel entitled to make such sweeping generalisations.)

Hence his extended flirtation with Russia, where he has opened a branch of his wine business. He’s also the spokesman for Sovietsky Bank, and his famous face adorns its home page. And it’s not just business – it’s personal. Col. Putin tends to describe Depardieu as a friend, which may well become a polonium chalice.

Putin’s affections tend to be fickle, and Depardieu would be well-advised to give the colonel’s Russia a wide berth. If he doesn’t, before long he’ll be told that his business is in need of a few silent partners claiming a lion’s share of the proceeds. And if he proves obstreperous, the response could be more muscular than the French PM calling Depardieu ‘pathetic’.

Stick to Belgium, Gérard. It may be dull, but it’s safe. The food isn’t bad, and the beer is the best in the world. Importing vast amounts of French wine will be easier, and you won’t even have to pay protection money. Nor will you have to do a Socrates and drink a cup of hemlock. Or rather Polonium-200, its advanced modern equivalent. A no-brainer, this.

 

The word is harsh but fair. All major Western countries are now governed by the sort of people who a mere 100 years ago wouldn’t have been elected proverbial dog catcher.

This is merely an empirical observation involving no thought. The starting point of thought is the question ‘why?’, not ‘what?’

So why is one-man-one-vote democracy so manifestly failing to elevate to government those fit to govern? Why do they all lack in qualities regarded throughout history as essential job requirements?

When incompetent leaders overlap in time with a crisis, a disaster beckons. In the past, Westerners knew this and, when in trouble, usually replaced inoffensive mediocrities with men previously considered too abrasive for high office.

For instance, Admiral Ernest King was being quietly pushed into retirement during the interbellum period. Yet after Pearl Harbour he was immediately elevated to the second highest position in the US Navy. ‘When the shooting starts,’ he quipped, ‘they send for the sons-of-bitches.’

On the first day of the war Britain too replaced the generally inadequate Neville Chamberlain (John Major’s proclaimed role model) with our own son of a bitch, Winston Churchill. The West still had a self-preservation instinct then, and knew how to express it through specific measures.

I won’t bore you with a long list of reasons for believing that today’s situation is as pregnant with disaster as 70-odd years ago. These are self-evident to anyone whose judgement isn’t compromised by ideological afflatus.

And yet the sons-of-bitches haven’t been sent for – we don’t even know who they are. Instead we persevere with our Baracks, Daves and Françoises whose only strategy for getting the West out of a hole is to keep digging (feel free to substitute your own nincompoops – the conclusion will be the same).

We could discuss this problem in every conceivable detail, and in fact many do. Few commentators, however, have the courage to accept what to me looks obvious: a democracy in which reaching a barely post-pubescent age is the sole requirement for voting, and one that’s not counterbalanced by other forms of government, is fundamentally flawed. In medical parlance, the problem is systemic, not symptomatic.

The philosophical premise of democracy is two-fold. First, it’s based on the assumption that most people will be able to comprehend public good and vote accordingly, even if this means some self-denial. Second, if the first assumption doesn’t quite work out, and people insist on casting their vote for purely selfish reasons, then a multiple of private selfishness will somehow still produce public goodness.

When applied to millions of people, the second assumption is dubious and the first is downright wrong. For in the absence of a powerful spiritual and moral adhesive, otherwise known in the West as Christianity, people will never put bono publico before bono privato. To expect otherwise would be to ignore human nature, and this error never goes unpunished.

In other words, by demanding an unrealistic degree of selfless sophistication from the electorate, unlimited democracy turns into a purely theoretical construct, an ideology in other words. It may swagger for a while, but it won’t survive a prolonged clash with human nature.

For human nature will sooner or later trump any ideology – it will prevail over the democratic premise as surely as it will vanquish communist chiliasm. In practical terms, this means that a ballot cast by a self-serving voter can be bought by a self-serving politician.

A typical OAP promised a higher pension won’t stop to think where the money is going to come from – he’ll cast a yes-please vote. A recently naturalised immigrant won’t hesitate to vote for a candidate who promises unlimited immigration. Someone whose livelihood derives from the state won’t vote for a candidate promising to reduce its size.

Hence, coming to the fore isn’t a candidate who can do all the right things for the country, but one who can offer all the right bribes to the electorate. 

This corrupts the voters and the politicians equally: the former expect bribes, the latter are all too willing to offer them. And no statehood wholly dependent upon corruption will last – for confirmation just scan Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.

Thus all modern politicians effectively act as agents of destruction – they represent a mutation following a steady, and at times barely perceptible, accumulation of petty corruption until it begets a giant fire-sputtering ogre.

This explains the seemingly suicidal policies followed by every Western government, from the $16-trillion debt amassed by America to the asinine thinking behind the EU, from practically unlimited immigration of cultural aliens into all Western countries to extortionate taxes sucking the blood out of economies just as they exsanguinate anyway.

Democratic romanticism is in fact utopianism – just as capitalist romanticism, pace Adam Smith, is. There is an important difference though.

Smith et al believed in the redemptive moral value of an economy based on private enterprise. This belief is counterintuitive: pursuit of naked self-interest, even when multiplied by millions, isn’t going to produce virtue – this too goes against human nature. What private enterprise demonstrably can produce is a dynamic economy offering opportunities to those capable of grasping them.

Hence an expectation of prosperity in a capitalist society is empirically sound, and this is certainly preferable to any known alternative. For, if expectations are managed, capitalism works. Not always, not equally for all, and not in gaining the high moral ground postulated by Smith – but it does work in achieving purely pragmatic goals.

Democracy resembles capitalism only superficially, in that it too strives to attain a sum of virtue that’s greater than its parts. The basic difference is that, having failed to produce a moral El Dorado, capitalism can still defend itself by claiming empirical benefits.

This fallback is denied to democracy, for achieving secular virtue is its ultimate raison d’être. An unprincipled, self-serving businessman can still make a valid claim to empirical redemption, for example by referring to the jobs he has created or the money he has saved consumers. An unprincipled, self-serving politician has no such claim: his very existence undermines the system he’s supposed to serve.

His only hope is to ensure self-perpetuation – not just for himself but for his own kind. This has become the sole desideratum of the political elite from which all our leaders are drawn, and, their own corruption augmented by the electorate’s, they all pursue it with manic single-mindedness.

This explains why Americans have re-elected their truly catastrophic president – he spread enough baksheesh around to surf in on the wave of bought loyalties. This also explains why the Republicans seem to be chronically unable to come up with a valid candidate – or why, for that matter, we’ve had four awful prime ministers in a row and are sure to get a fifth.

The situation is only going to get worse, for all Western societies have reached the critical mass of moral and intellectual corruption. An explosion is likely, and we can only pray that it won’t be too violent. You may think this prognosis is too pessimistic – but one man’s pessimist is another man’s realist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Proper illumination adds so much to festivities, especially at Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Come this glorious season, London, New York, Rome, Paris and countless smaller places playfully wink at the world with millions of flickering lights arranged in elaborate and often beautiful patterns.

One can almost suspend a gagging effect at the sight of those hideous Ferris wheels in London’s South Bank or Paris’s Tuileries – even they look pretty all lit up. And behind the Tuileries, the Eiffel Tower, normally so ugly and intrusive, has every bone and rib beautifully silhouetted in high-wattage lamps.

The French do have a highly developed aesthetic sense. That’s probably why the tradition of lighting things up on New Year’s Eve is faithfully maintained throughout the country, Interior Minister Manuel Valls proudly declared yesterday.

Specifically, 1,193 cars were burned on 31 December, 2012, painting the sky in various shades of red and yellow, thereby providing a welcome contrast to midnight-blue.

How does this number compare with last year’s? We don’t know, for former president Nicolas Sarcozy decided not to publish such figures. He thus adopted the Soviet stratagem for dealing with crime statistics: keep them under wraps, and Boris is your uncle – no figures, no crime.

The last time this particular statistic was made public was on New Year’s Eve 2009, when 1,147 vehicles were burned. The number of torched cars has thus grown at roughly the same rate as the French economy during the same period. It takes a deeper and more knowledgeable economic thinker than I am to establish exactly why the two curves move in parallel. It’s sufficient for my purposes to observe that they do.

It has to be said that the French don’t always burn cars simply to add to the festivity of an occasion. Sometimes they do so to express displeasure with something or other.

For example in the autumn of 2005 youngsters from housing estates burned 8,810 cars in less than three weeks because… well, you tell me. My guess is that they were simply looking for something to do, what with the idea of getting a job never crossing their minds. To be fair, given France’s labour laws, their chances of finding employment would have been close to zero anyway.

If the same burning rate were maintained throughout the year, France would be tastefully decorated with 153,000 vehicular torches per annum. The side benefit would be less road congestion, but alas that isn’t to be. The fact that only about 40,000 such torches are lit testifies to the laudable restraint of France’s youths and an equally praiseworthy vigilance of its police.

This time the record for the greatest number of torches is proudly claimed – surprise, surprise! – by the Paris suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, which is by pure coincidence home to a large North African community. There is, I hasten to add, no causal relationship between the two facts whatsoever, and if you think there is I’ll report you to both the Deuxième Bureau and Scotland Yard.

In any case, we all know the poor youngsters aren’t to blame for this rather unorthodox way of celebrating New Year’s Eve. It’s all society’s fault or rather, if you listen to Sarkozy’s spokesman Bruno Beschizza, the fault of the present government.

To be more exact, he blamed the government not for this year’s auto-da-fé but for paving the way for future activities along the same lines. Publishing the figures this year, he said, was a tragic mistake, for this will encourage youngsters to outdo this year’s exploits in 2013.

Gangs, according to Mr Beschizza, compete with one another in many categories, including the number of cars they manage to set alight. Now that the government has established the target figure, they’ll be able to set their sights even higher.

I don’t know what he’s complaining about. Personally, I’m happy to see that the competitive spirit, so manifestly dormant in the mainstream economy, is still alive in France. To prove this point, four armed robbers broke into the Apple shop in the centre of Paris and stole €1,000,000 worth of gadgets. The police were busy watching the festivities in the Champs Elysées, thus creating a window of business opportunity, of which the robbers took such profitable advantage. There’s hope for the country yet.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Life, especially of the civilised variety, would be impossible without a little subterfuge every now and then.

We wish a good day to someone we’d joyously see rot in hell, we compliment an ugly woman on how fetching she looks this morning, we tell our boss how much we love our tedious job. As a tactful person, I’m not going to mention fibs we tell to spouses, traffic cops or the Inland Revenue, but he who is without sin…

Some porkies are perfectly innocent, some are less so, yet all are part of what is in hackneyed English called the rich panoply of life. Take them away and it won’t be honesty that prevails but social chaos.

Another thing that unites all these little lies is that they are indeed little. Most of us speak the truth most of the time, which is why lies, when uncovered, become so noticeable by contrast. Nevertheless, they do only limited damage, outnumbered as they are by truths.

If, on the other hand, lies act as the base on which a giant structure is erected, then catastrophe beckons. A house divided may not stand, but one built on such a foundation will certainly collapse, as Bernie Madoff could tell you.

An Egyptian pyramid is still upright because it was built the right way up. Had it been balanced on its tip, it would have been reduced to rubble millennia ago, much to the chagrin of Egypt’s Tourist Board.

Western polity started out as a solid pyramid tapering up towards the sky, but it has since been turned upside down. The tip of thin lies is straining to support the giant structure, but it’s tottering. Even a gentle push can bring it down at any time.

Examples? One doesn’t know where to start.

Well, off the top, look at America’s ‘fiscal cliff’. New Year’s Eve negotiations spearheaded by Vice President Joe Biden are being hailed as last-ditch salvation. That is, not to cut too fine a point, a lie.

Joe of course has all the right credentials. When running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, he plagiarised a speech by Neil Kinnock, that heir to the laurels of Demosthenes, Cicero and history’s other great orators. I mean, who in his right mind would plagiarise Neil Kinnock? Not only is Joe a bit short on veracity, he can’t be excessively bright either.

A perfect man then to fashion a mendacious agreement with the Republicans, which is being treated as a firm hand not letting America fall off that proverbial cliff. What actually happened was that the country has been left teetering at the very edge. A fall hasn’t been prevented, it has been deferred.

Even assuming that tomorrow the House of Representatives passes the bill agreed in the Senate, and this is a big assumption, the effect on America’s $16-trillion debt (that’s 16 followed by 12 zeroes, in case you’re wondering) will be barely noticeable. While tax increases for middle-class families earning more than $450,000 will go into effect within days, along with new taxes on inheritance, capital and capital gains (all potentially more destructive than even higher income taxes), any specific spending cuts will have to be renegotiated in about three months – meaning that the same stumbling block will remain as firmly lodged as before.

At the same time, whatever minimal debt reductions could be achieved by raising taxes, and they are very minimal indeed, will be offset by extending unemployment benefits for a year.

In short, what we are seeing isn’t an exercise in decisive statesmanship but an attempt to flog a PR lie to the public. Come to think of it, this is what politics has become all over the world: a tissue of lies covering up a rotting body politic.

Crossing the Atlantic, the EU is an even more blatant example of an institution built on lies and sustained exclusively by them. When the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957, the signatories pretended, for public consumption, that they were founding nothing but a free-trade zone called the Common Market.

That was a lie. It’s just that the originators of eurofederalism, all those Monnets and Schumans, realised that a single European state was such a monstrous idea that the public would never swallow it in one fell swoop. Piecemeal drip-feed was the best they could hope for Europeans to digest.

To that effect they set up a systematic deception programme designed to claim one little power after another, until one day they’d all come together into a giant, irreversible entity. Starting like a python devouring its prey bit by bit, the entity would become like death: what it claimed it would never relinquish. 

Thus, treaty by mendacious treaty, the Common Market became the European Economic Community in 1986, the European Union in 1992 and, in all likelihood, will become a United States of Europe in a year or two. Throughout, assorted federasts, like our own Edward Heath, were begging Brussels not to let the cat out of the bag. The ‘f’ word, as in federalism, wouldn’t be uttered until subterfuge was no longer necessary.

Now we are being fed another lie, that we must remain within the EU, if only in a Norway-like associate status, for otherwise we wouldn’t be able to trade with the 27. The public, anaesthetised to lies, doesn’t ask the most obvious question: why? Why must we abide by every law and regulation of another country in order to do business with it? Or perhaps the public is just too exhausted to ask such questions, for it knows that all it’ll get in response will be more lies.

This is the world we live in, ladies and gentlemen. So Happy New Year to all. May your wildest dreams, rather than your realistic expectations, come true.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those of you who have earned my gratitude by reading this blog regularly have seen me make the same counter-argument over and over.

Reiteration is of course the essential tool of polemics, just as repetition is the mother of learning, but excessive repetitiveness can become very boring indeed. Hence I generally tend to eschew it, and would do so in this instance – except that the idiot fringe keeps mouthing the same nonsense in exactly the same words. The best one can do in reply is to paraphrase one’s own response, without changing its essence.

Here is the nonsense popping up in today’s Telegraph, this time enunciated by Andrew Gilligan. The opening passages of his article The EU: Where Did It All Go Wrong? show an unfortunate tendency towards platitudinous thinking, but at least they are broadly correct.

Gilligan comments on our economic grievances against the EU and by and large he doesn’t say anything objectionable. The gist is that back in the sixties and seventies Europe looked like a good club to join. It was doing so much better than Britain in every economic category that the Brits were losing all national self-confidence. Jumping on the bandwagon seemed like a better idea than being run over by it.

However, things have changed, and the British economy now looks more robust, largely thanks to our staying out of the euro. So it’s only with a jaundiced eye that the Brits look at any attempts to draw the country any deeper into the clutches of the EU.

All this is only partially true, and Gilligan’s forays into economics are too superficial to be utterly convincing. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that he, along with so many others, tries to reduce the whole issue to its economic aspect.

For obvious reasons those residing in the idiot fringe can no longer pretend that the EU is a rip-roaring economic success. But even if it were, and even if further integration would make us prosper beyond Rumpy-Pumpy’s wildest and wettest dreams, I’d still oppose it with the same venom as I do now.

The real argument against the EU is that it is by definition bankrupt historically, philosophically and, above all, morally. It constitutes an attempt by a corrupt, ill-educated, power-hungry and usually marginalised elite to expunge two millennia of European history by destroying everything that has gone into it: religion, culture, nationhood, ethnic differences.

The European slate is supposed to be wiped clean of all those, so that the self-appointed elite can then scribble upon the slate its own subversive message, largely based on the defunct socialist dream of a single world government. A total calamity is the only possible outcome of such an endeavour.

A house built on termite-ridden foundations will ultimately collapse, with an economic decline the most visible but far from the most significant disaster. Reducing the whole cosmic complexity of the disease to its economic symptoms is like using laxatives to treat stomach cancer.

Judging by Mr Gilligan’s corpus of work, he is a man of modest abilities who can’t be expected to grasp any serious issue in all its ramifications. But it shouldn’t be beyond even him not to write the sort of harebrained drivel with which he ends his piece:

‘Yet the British impetus for full withdrawal may be dangerous: in the modern world, the very idea of “UK independence”, as promoted by the eponymous Eurosceptic party, is surely an illusion. Even if we left, given the amount of trade we do with the EU, we would still have to follow most of its rules – while no longer having any role in setting them.’ This is a rehashing of the idiot fringe’s tired old argument, so I can’t help rehashing my response.

True, if we left the EU, we’d no longer ‘have any role in setting’ its laws. Neither do we have any role in setting the laws or rules governing the USA, China, India, Switzerland, Brazil – in short, all our partners outside the EU that collectively account for 60 percent of our trade. This doesn’t prevent us from doing profitable business with them.

Britain doesn’t have to become America’s 51^st state or Switzerland’s 27^th canton in order to exchange our whisky and financial services for their computers and wristwatches. Nor do we have to accept foreign, and distinctly alien, laws or God-awful Social Charters in order to trade with the EU. Surely even Andrew Gilligan must see this?

It’s a sorry state of affairs when columnists writing for our supposedly conservative papers fail to understand the elementary truths that even Jacques Delors has got his head around. All knowledge being, according to Aristotle, comparative, my new affection for old Jacques is growing by the minute.

For the first time since I first heard of Jacques Delors I feel like buying him a drink. And I wouldn’t even try to lace it with cyanide.

Moreover, now that this sage man of impeccable moral character has effectively applied for UKIP membership, I wish to make an admittedly unauthorised apology on behalf of Britain for that unfortunate 1992 Sun headline (UP YOURS DELORS).

At the time I thought this was one of the three best tabloid front-pagers ever. For the record, the second was also from The Sun (ARGY-BARGY!, in response to the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands war) and the third came from The New York Post (HEADLESS BODY FOUND IN TOPLESS BAR).

Of course back in 1992 Jacques was still a bad boy. He was trying to bully Mrs Thatcher, as she then was, into granting him dictatorial powers over Britain. All he got in response was the headline for which I’m now apologising.

It takes a bright man to realise the error of his ways and a strong one to make a public admission to that effect. This Monsieur Delors has now done by reiterating all the same arguments dyed-in-the-wool conservatives like me have been making since I was young (that is to say for a hell of a long time).

Britain, said Jacques in an interview to a German newspaper, would be better off out of the EU. And – shock, horror! – her exit would not lead to an instant severing of all trade relations, as Messrs Cameron and Clegg would have us believe.

‘If the British do not follow the tendency towards more integration in the European Union,’ said my new mate Jacques, ‘we can anyway stay friends, but in another way.’ One obvious other way, he suggested, would be for Britain to sign a ‘free trade agreement’, and wiser words have never been spoken, not even by Nigel Farage.

Much as one would like to believe that Jacques has washed his hands of the whole euro-fiasco, or become an Anglophile, or else repudiated his socialist convictions, this is probably not the case. It’s just that he agrees with Rumpy-Pumpy, who currently leads the European Commission, that Britain can’t be allowed to ‘cherry-pick’ the bits of the EU she likes and dump those she hates.

He and Rumpy-Pumpy must have sat down together, split a bottle of something bubbly, and decided that the EU would be better off shot of Britain’s malevolent presence. But one way or the other, he has shown more common sense than our so-called leaders have displayed so far, if ever.

Manifestly absent from Jacques’s interview were any traditional harangues packaged with veiled threats that, should Britain leave the EU, she would languish in the economic doldrums. He didn’t even mention the 40 percent of our trade that comes from the 27 EU members. Perhaps he didn’t want to hear the stock response that the USA alone accounts for 30 percent. Or else he chose not to sound stupid by implying that this 40 percent would be gone faster than you can say ‘embargo’.

Such disingenuous idiocy he left to Dave and Nick. What Jacques actually said was that if Britain did leave the EU, she would still be a ‘partner’, because she is ‘strategically and economically important’. Just so.

Perhaps Jacques really should be made an honorary member of UKIP. Considering the alternatives, I wouldn’t even mind seeing him as British prime minister, provided he learns to speak English properly. But neither of those decisions is mine to make.

All I can say is, ‘What are you having, Jacques?’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few days ago I wondered, in Dave Gets Baracked, exactly how special our relationship with the United States is. New files released under the 30-year rule are unequivocal: not very, is the answer to that one.

Backtracking 30 years takes us to the Maggie-Ronnie love-in, with the two statesmen routinely bracketed together. Seen as joint leaders of a freedom crusade, they were close not just politically but also personally.

Both held conservative beliefs, as the term is understood these days. And both acted accordingly by introducing wise economic policies. (One may question the wisdom of Reagan’s policies considering that the federal debt almost tripled during his tenure, but that would be nitpicking, wouldn’t it?)

Under their aegis the relationship between the two countries was supposed to be at its most special – and yet Reagan did all he could to torpedo the South Atlantic operation (I’ve used this verb advisedly).

Since 1823, when the Munroe Doctrine was introduced, the United States has regarded the Western hemisphere as its own bailiwick. European intrusions of any kind have been seen as implicit aggression and discouraged in every possible way.

These days the US relies mostly on the carrot of diplomacy and economic leverage to get its way in the hemisphere, with the military stick held behind its back but still visible. Argentina, along with Brazil, is the most important player in the game the USA plays in South America, which explains Reagan’s response to Britain’s attempt to reclaim the Falklands to the crown.

To keep the Argentines sweet, the USA had to be seen as playing no favourites, which de facto meant endorsing Argentina’s aggression. To that end Reagan was going to inform the Argentines about the exact time and location of the first British landing, on South Georgia. Fair’s fair, as far as Maggie’s best friend Ronnie was concerned.

Gen. Haig, Reagan’s Secretary of State, explained the situation with soldierly directness: ‘If the Americans acted in this way they would be able to show even-handedness to the Argentines and this would enable them to continue their role as go-between.’

The result of this Munroe-inspired fairness could have been the routing of the British task force: the Argentines would have been forewarned and therefore forearmed. It took a most resolute stand on the part of HMG, and Thatcher personally, to prevent the Americans from acting on this treacherous intent.

Much is made, mostly by Americans, of the help with intelligence and logistics Britain received from the USA during the war. Less publicised is the fact that Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger went against Reagan’s wishes and made a single-handed decision to help, effectively sticking his own neck out.

The president, on the other hand, was doing all he could to keep the Falklands in Argentine hands. Throughout the war he kept pushing for a negotiated settlement, which would have denied Britain the fruits of her hard-won victory. The great wartime leader Margaret Thatcher would have none of that: ‘As Britain had had to go into the islands alone, with no outside help, she could not now let the invader gain from his aggression.’

Another great wartime leader, Winston Churchill, had his own problems with the special relationship, which he correctly saw as a trifle one-sided. These days any American will happily tell you that, when all is said and done, it was the USA that won the Battle of Britain, or at least greatly contributed to victory by providing a steady flow of supplies.

In fact, the tactical value of US shipments was negligible, as opposed to the disastrous effect they had on the British economy. For the help wasn’t offered from one friend to the other, with the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing. All shipments were supplied on a cash-and-carry basis, and Britain had to sell, at knockdown prices, all her overseas investments to pay. In fact, the last instalment was paid only eight years ago.

Just as America was claiming Britain’s last £50 million worth of gold, Churchill sent a desperate message to Roosevelt: ‘…after the victory was won with our blood and sweat, and civilisation saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone. Such a course would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries.’

Churchill had to say those things, but he probably knew he was being too kind. The demise of the British Empire was an important secondary objective pursued by America in the Second World War. And it was largely British cash that enabled America to overcome the effects of the Great Depression and emerge from the war hugely in the black. So ‘such a course’ was very much in America’s ‘economic interests’. As to ‘moral interests’, the less said about those, the better.

The special relationship proceeded apace after the war. Just as the 1956 Anglo-French action against Egypt was about to claim victory, President Eisenhower stopped it in its tracks. Worried about the growing Soviet influence in a region awash with oil, the president felt he had to cater to Khrushchev’s affection for Nasser. British interests weren’t even considered, much less accommodated.

Then again, at least the Americans didn’t arm Nasser’s army with missiles, which is a welcome contrast to what our other NATO friends did during the Falklands war.

The French had kindly supplied to the Argentines Exocet missiles and Super Etendard aircraft, and it was an Exocet fired from a Super Etendard that sank HMS Sheffield. It was only after Thatcher threatened Mitterand with ‘a devastating effect on the relationship between our two countries’ that the French refrained from arming the Argentines with more Exocets.

On the plus side, at least the French were honest enough not to claim any special affection for Britain, which is more than can be said for the Americans.

‘There are no friends in politics,’ said Cicero. No friends, only interests. We should remember that.