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The closest targets are the easiest to hit, which is why jaundiced fogies like me mostly save their slings and arrows for currently active politicians.

But Sir John Major has inadvertently elucidated the historical continuity of woolly political thinking and self-destructive political action.

Sir John, whose towering intellect and steely character are only matched by his taste in women, hails Dave for his ‘courageous’ support of homomarriage. ‘Every couple should have the opportunity and the right to formalise their relationship,’ says Sir John.

Surely not every couple? What if, as a purely hypothetical example, a married man has a protracted bit on the side with a female colleague? One could argue they are a couple, and they may even be a happy couple, yet their relationship can’t be formalised this side of a Muslim harem or a Mormon church, as it used to be.

This isn’t in any way to question Sir John’s expertise on relationships. Actually, what interests me more is his take on courage. After all, when once asked to name a role model among his predecessors, he unerringly chose Neville Chamberlain, that notorious paragon of political courage, especially in foreign relations.

Emulating his paper-waving idol, it was Mr Major, as he then was, who in 1992 so bravely put his signature on the Maastricht Treaty, inaugurating 20 years of courage and intellectual honesty in our politics.

You may think I’m being facetious, but actually I do believe it takes a lot of nerve to mouth arrant nonsense with a straight face. No issue highlights this brand of courage as vividly as the EU, and we must thank Sir John for setting up this litmus test two decades ago.

One current example: Boris Johnson crossing his heart and swearing to die in support of his assertion that Dave will soon be offering ‘broadly an in/out referendum on the new terms.’ Since Johnson isn’t a stupid man, it must have taken a lot of courage for him to utter this obviously meaningless drivel.

What does ‘broadly’ mean? Or ‘the new terms’? Why such qualifiers? An in/out referendum can only be straightforward, with the people asked the simplest of questions: Do you wish to get out of the EU or not? An honest question requiring an honest yes or no answer, and Bob Schuman’s your uncle.

‘Broadly’ and ‘on the new terms’ only come in when the government wishes to con the people, not ask what they think. Exactly how the con job might work was hinted at by the former minister Dr Liam Fox, widely regarded as a ‘eurosceptic’.

Dr Fox insists that his party must offer a ‘settled position that is clear, concise and consistent’. Now what exactly might that position be?

‘If the choice is between a looser, more economic relationship and leaving, then I would choose to stay,’ explains Dr Fox. ‘I, for one, hope to see “back to a common market” as the Conservative slogan on Europe at the next general election.’

The Common Market was a ruse, Dr Fox, and every ‘eurosceptic’ ought to be aware of this. It was conceived and put into effect by the likes of Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet as a step on the ladder leading up to a single European state.

The previous step was called The European Coal and Steel Community, and its founders made no bones about its true purpose. Thus, for example, Schuman:

‘This proposal represents the first concrete step towards a European federation, imperative for the preservation of peace.’

One may argue that pooling the production of essential commodities was a good idea, and the subsequent creation of a free trading zone even a better one (this, assuming that the Common Market was indeed such a zone, rather than essentially a protectionist bloc). But such an argument is irrelevant in view of what these steps really were: tricking Europeans into accepting a gradual back-door entry of a single Leviathan dominated by Germany, with France as her stooge.

Is this what Dr Fox wishes to go back to? If so, he lacks the most basic knowledge of the process about which he’s allegedly sceptical. And his grasp of economics is hardly more secure.

There is no need to ‘stay’ in the EU to have ‘a looser, more economic relationship’. That’s not what the EU is for, as its own founders explained to us all those years ago. Dare one say it, a nation can trade with other nations without belonging to even a quasi-state union with them. Britain did reasonably well in that department before the EU and would do just as well should she leave it.

That continental Europe would stop doing business with us should we leave is a lie, and not a particularly clever one. Our politicians like to put on all-knowing faces and declare that the EU accounts for 40 percent of our trade. Full stop. They don’t feel they have to complete the thought by saying that, should we leave the EU, that trade would discontinue. Supposedly this goes without saying.

Hats off to them: it does take much bold-faced courage to utter or even imply such idiocy. The UK is the second biggest export market for the EU. Do our courageous politicians really think that the present economic situation would encourage the Germans to stop selling their BMWs to us, or the French their clarets?

Really, John Major ought to re-enter active politics – we’re lost without his courageous presence. And Dr Fox may yet find himself back on the Tory front bench if he isn’t careful.

This is the official launch of the Helena Torry for Prime Minister campaign.

Admittedly, Miss Torry has only just entered politics by standing in the Aberdeen council elections. This means she faces a steep uphill climb to Downing Street.

She’ll have to secure her seat on the council. Then she’ll have to be selected as a parliamentary candidate for a major party, preferably the one consonant with her surname. Assuming that Miss Torry ends up in Whitehall, she’ll then have to win a leadership contest, and then the national elections.

Yet she’s clearly on a fast track, something she eminently deserves. I for one am certain that Miss Torry will succeed – partly due to the campaign I’m launching, but mostly thanks to her unique credentials. Judge for yourself:

Miss Torry (I hope she won’t mind if I henceforth refer to her by her Christian name) has never advocated, and is guaranteed never to advocate, a single stupid and destructive policy.

Unlike Cameron, Johnson and Gove, to say nothing of Labour and LibDem pols, Helena will never seek cheap popularity with the Islington set by coming out in favour of homomarriage.

Unlike Blair and Brown, Helena won’t run the country into the ground.

Unlike Cameron and Osborne, Helena will never settle for cosmetic economic measures designed to score political points and guaranteed to do nothing to prevent a disaster.

Unlike Cable, his party, all of Labour and some of the Conservatives, Helena doesn’t believe that taxing the rich extortionately, and the rest of us exorbitantly, will help the economy.

Unlike Ken Clark, most of Labour and all LibDems, Helena will never sell British independence for a mess of EU pottage.

Unlike Cameron, some of his own parliamentary party and the entirety of the other two, Helena will never try to force the C of E to accept women bishops, thereby losing all claim to being an apostolic church.

Unlike the Commons Home Affairs Committee, Helena won’t pave the way to the legalisation of drugs – and she’s guaranteed never to listen to Russell Brand’s advice on this, or any other, matter.

Unlike Clegg, Helena won’t abuse her position in national politics by openly campaigning for a job in Brussels.

Unlike MPs from all parties, Helena will never fiddle her expenses, nor commit any other fiscal impropriety.

The list can go on and on, but any sensible person would already have been persuaded that Helena Torry possesses a unique combination of sagacity, moral strength, firmness of character, self-effacement, taciturnity and commitment never to use political office for personal gain.

If this person is not only sensible but also observant, he’ll notice that the list of Helena’s sterling credentials is slightly on the negative side. It’s heavy on things she will eschew but light on those she will actually do.

One has to admit that this is something of a drawback. Yet if we extend the Hippocratic oath from physicians to politicians, then surely the first requirement is that they should do no harm. And it is this criterion that all our politicians fail to meet.

There’s a lot to be said for a government that does nothing, as we can confidently expect that if it did do something it would only be to the detriment of the country. As an example, look at Belgium which in the very recent past had no government at all for almost a year. And yet the country never missed a beat, functioning as well, or as badly, as before or since.

Yes, Helena would make a fantastic MP and the best PM we could possibly hope for. Yet one fears that her career will be cut short by one minor flaw: Helena Torry isn’t human.

You may argue that neither are most of our politicians, and, figuratively speaking, you’d be right. But Helena isn’t human in the most literal sense. She is a mannequin, a 5-foot dummy registered in Aberdeen elections by the pensioner Renee Slater.

Miss Slater has now been charged under the Representation of the People Act, and her trial is set for April. Helena Torry has been taken into police custody, where she will remain indefinitely. And we, the British public, will be deprived of a perfect candidate for high office.

We don’t have to take it lying down. For people have a voice in a democracy, and they can and must be heard. So I hope you’ll join me in my support for reinstating Helena Torry in British politics.

We really can’t do any better. And anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear will know we can do a lot worse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’ve sussed it out: both Dave and Nick support homomarriage because they want to divorce their spouses and marry each other.

It’s their secret romance that had to be behind their original political marriage – hard to think of any other reason, considering the hitherto irreconcilable differences between their parties. But two hearts, two souls, two bodies genuinely drawn to each other can’t be put asunder by inconsequential politics.

Naturally, Dave and Nicky will have to look for a reasonably liberal congregation, for more orthodox churches tend to frown on divorces and remarriages. That, however, shouldn’t present a problem, at least not within the C of E as it is these days.

As to the other obstacle, them both being biological males, this uncool barrier has already been removed de facto and is about to be removed de jure. Dave will see to it. Yet he did say magnanimously that ‘if there’s any church or any synagogue or any mosque that doesn’t want to have a gay marriage, it will not be forced to hold it.’

I’d pay good money to watch Dave trying to force an imam to marry two men, but mercifully he won’t have to. All Dave needs is just one with-it vicar ready to move with the times by joining this strictly biological man Dave and this strictly biological man Nicky in holy matrimony.

I for one would wish them many years of marital bliss only rarely marred by the kind of petty squabbles for which more traditional couples are so widely known. Why, I can see it before my eyes even as we speak.

Here are the happy couple at home, discussing their plans for the weekend. Dave is wearing a snazzy smoking jacket over his FC Chelsea home strip, while Nicky is clad in a stylish M&S house dress slit at the thigh. They sit on their Queen Anne sofa, arms around each other’s shoulders, watching a rerun of Eastenders on their 52-inch TV.

‘Oh by the way, sweetie pie’ says Dave. ‘We’re going to Tony’s tonight. He’s holding a teensy-weensy party – just him, Cherie, us and 400 of his closest friends.’

‘Now you tell me,’ pouts Nicky. ‘When was that decided?’

‘Tone rang this morning when you were drying your hair, honey-bunny. Sorry I forgot to mention it, sugar buns.’

‘But you always do this to me, you nasty person,’ says Nicky and takes his/her arm off Dave’s shoulders. ‘I’m a person too, you know. I’m not just a skivvy at his nibs’s beck and call.’

‘Please forgive me, love,’ pleads Dave. ‘I know I promised we’d make all decisions together but I thought just this once… I know you like Tone, don’t you, darling? Once or twice, before we got married, I even saw you flirt with him. Labour of love, you called it, you naughty thing.’

‘Jealous, are we? You never give me any space. I deserve some emotional autonomy, I’m not just your chattel you know.’

‘I know that, sweetie pie. But… if you have no other plans…’

‘It so happens I have,’ says Nicky petulantly, his/her face reflecting newly found self-respect. ‘I was going shopping with Angie this afternoon. Then we’ll stop for one of those yummy cream teas at Brown’s and chat about that job she says I can have if I’m a good girl.’

‘Which job, honey bunch?’ Dave sits up abruptly and lowers the volume on the remote. ‘Your job is at home, with me. I thought we’d agreed on that.’

‘Yes, well, I thought, you know, with the economy being what it is, I could bring in some extra money. Angie’s company has plenty of vacancies, it’s the only one hiring at the moment.’

‘No wife of mine will have to take a fulltime job, and that’s that,’ says Dave firmly, but then softens the impact by patting Nicky’s shapely thigh.

‘Who’s talking about fulltime?’ smiles Nicky, pressing Dave’s hand against his/her thigh. ‘Don’t you know about Angie and José Manuel? The way they run their shop? All I’ll have to do for a couple of hours every other week will be walk around looking pretty and welcoming new customers.’

‘Yes, you could be good at that sort of thing, babes,’ says Dave. ‘And they’re going to pay you for that?’

‘Yes they are, and I’ll thank you for not being condescending. Actually, my pay will be better than yours, so there!’

‘Oh well, in that case… Still, I don’t see what the problem is, baby doll. Have your tea with Angie, then I’ll pick you up in town and we’ll go over to Tone’s. Haven’t seen him for at least a fortnight.’

‘That long, is it? The way you two carry on, one would think you’ve married him, not me…’

‘You’re not going jealous on me? Tone and I are strictly business, we have a few irons in the fire…’

‘Oh gosh, that reminds me,’ says Nicky slapping her forehead. ‘I need to iron your shirt for tonight…’

A true idyll if you’ve ever seen one. Wouldn’t it be cruel to deny Dave and Nicky such tranquil happiness? No wonder, Dave is ‘a massive supporter of marriage’ who doesn’t ‘want gay people to be excluded from a great institution.’

So fine, he and Nicky have a personal stake in this matter. But who are we to decide that a marriage between these two gorgeous people should be denied a church blessing? We’re nobodies.

The proportion of Muslims in youth jails now stands at 21 percent, up from 13 percent two years ago. That’s more than five times the proportion of Muslims in the population, which raises all sorts of awkward questions, including the one in the title.

But the first question is why? Why are young Muslims in Britain criminalised to such an extent? Is there something in Islam that encourages bestial behaviour?

In fact, a fourth of Muslim offenders claim that by committing crimes they follow their faith. Not being an unequivocal admirer of Islam, I still have to say they are slandering their religion. There’s nothing there that promotes everyday criminality.

For example, Turkey’s crime rate is lower by orders of magnitude than that in the USA. Even Pakistan has a lower crime rate than most Western nations, this despite the 10 years of ‘war on terror’ and the resulting black market in guns, the biggest in the world.

Why then are young Muslims five times more likely than their white neighbours to commit crimes in Britain? For the same reason that thugs would be more likely to paint-spray an obscene graffito on someone else’s front door than on their own.

Or perhaps a better analogy would be to look at the behaviour of most youngsters at home and abroad. Observing them, one has to notice that they feel even less constrained on their foreign travels than in their own neighbourhoods. The moment they land on foreign soil, all bets are off and school’s out.

It’s as if the already thin veneer of civilisation has been rubbed off them. British stag parties seem to have no compunction against trashing a bar in, say, Prague (where many bars display ‘No British’ signs), something they’d think twice about doing to their local.

This is difficult to condone but easy to understand. Not just young louts but even a perfectly respectable middle-aged gentleman takes much better care of his home than of his hotel room. The problem with youth criminality in Britain stems from just that: they simply don’t regard Britain as their home. In a similar vein, Muslim rapist gangs target white girls but hardly ever Muslim ones – white girls are alien to them, and normal civilities just don’t apply.

Why then do Muslims, even those who are British born and bred, feel like strangers in their own land? One could write a whole book on this subject, but in a short piece it’s sufficient to observe that the drive for multiculturalism has predictably produced results exactly opposite to those intended.

Rather than making all cultures and religions equally welcome, promoting thereby good will among all, multiculturalism has effectively destroyed a single, dominant culture for which others could reach tropistically. Such a culture is a sine qua non of a truly integrated society, for without it the social fabric will remain a tissue-thin patchwork, soon to be torn to tatters.

If a denizen of Bradford were to feel English first, British second, Yorkshireman third and Muslim a distant forth, he’d be less likely to treat his home town with all the loving care of a conquering vandal. Surely this is self-evident?

It is. In fact, multiculturalism can take its place in a line-up of other self-evidently criminal failures, such as the EU, the welfare state, Western countries promoting an Islamist Arab Spring. But such a line-up can only be put together on the basis of empirical evidence and common sense. Yet these are routinely overridden by ideology.

Ideology lives not in the mind, nor even in the emotions, but in some murky, swampy wasteland lying underneath those. That’s why it’s useless to argue against it: you can unload a dump lorry full of incontrovertible data showing that, say, the EU spells disaster for its members. But that would be like trying to convince a dog that chasing cats around the block is counterproductive. Fido does it not because he thinks it’s a good idea, but because of what he is.

An ideology can never be defeated by argument. It can only be defeated by the truth, supported if need be by superior force and the resolve to apply it. Given the will, it would take less than a generation to get rid of this multi-culti rubbish.

The message communicated to every resident of these Isles should be unequivocal: Britain is a Western, which means Christian, country. Her whole history, morality, laws, social and political organisation have been shaped by Christianity.

This doesn’t mean that all, or even most, Brits are expected to be practising Christians – only that they must all function within the traditional discipline of our civilisation. All prepared to do so would be welcome regardless of their religion or absence thereof and in line with a fair, reasonable immigration policy. However, those unwilling or unable to abide by the rules of civilised behaviour as defined and refined in British history will not be allowed to impose their alien standards on our society.

This is roughly how the system works in Switzerland, which has one of the highest immigration rates on the continent. Foreigners come looking for jobs, for no welfare is on offer. If they misbehave in the slightest, they are thrown out instantly, no questions asked. Those who stay, and certainly their children, become law-abiding Swiss. The country has one of the lowest crime rates in the world, and one of the highest levels of prosperity. And – are you ready for this? – it’s doing so well even without belonging to the EU.

What do the Swiss have that we haven’t? The power of their convictions, which alone can create the necessary will to protect society from evil. We, on the other hand, have hardly any convictions left, and precious little power. All we have is loudmouthed pressure groups screaming their divisive slogans at an inert, dispirited, acquiescent populace. So let’s hear it for a multi-culti Britain. It’s the one we deserve.

 

 

When British papers are out of my reach, I prefer Sky News to the BBC – partly because the Beeb makes Al Jazeera sound objective (even on the subject of the Middle East) and partly because of Eamonn Holmes.

These days one is neither enlightened nor even informed by TV, but occasionally one can expect to be entertained, an expectation Holmes seldom frustrates. A jolly, rotund chappy with a pleasant Irish burr and a nice sense of humour, he exudes homespun common sense. Even better, he never pretends to have much more than that, which sets him apart from his robotic colleagues with all-knowing smiles permanently pasted on.

Admittedly, some of his female colleagues look much better than Eamonn, but most of them have problems reading the teleprompter. Eamonn, on the other hand, has excellent reading skills. Moreover, he often delivers off-the-cuff remarks that teeter just on the edge of political correctness. One can tell that over a pint or two Eamonn can be oodles of fun.

This preface has been necessary because I’m now going to criticise Mr Holmes, and I wish to pre-empt any suspicion that there’s personal animosity behind the criticism. So, all disclaimers firmly in place, here it comes.

Yesterday Holmes was exchanging good-natured, mildly amusing remarks with a man and a woman who were reviewing the papers. One story dealt with the Chancellor’s intention of cutting quite a few public-sector jobs. George had claimed, not unreasonably, that this would relieve pressure on the Exchequer, put some pow into the economy and create many jobs in the private sector.

‘I don’t understand,’ commented Eamonn, for once dead serious. ‘They’re going to cut some jobs to create others. What’s the benefit of that?’

The commentator was stunned, and so was I. As I said, old Eamonn has never pretended to possess a far-reaching, academically honed intellect. But he has bags of common sense, and surely that rare faculty should have been sufficient for him to answer his own question, or indeed not to have asked it in the first place.

Now in case he really doesn’t understand – and feigning such economic illiteracy just may be an ideological stance, either his own or his network’s – the answer is so elementary that one is almost embarrassed to have to provide it.

Most of the 6,000,000 public jobs are unnecessary, starting with about 900,000 of them created by Tony’s government as the groundwork for future Labour victories. Even before Labour began to pay for their votes with our money, the public sector had been bloated to bursting point. The bubble has since burst, even though not everybody realises it.

Those paid out of our taxes or by the printing press make up about 20 percent of all those in employment, who in turn add up to just under half the population. To put it so that Eamonn can understand, half of us work to support the other half, with HMG acting as a middleman with megalomania. But in fact one in five of the working half are themselves paid by the Exchequer, handsomely, and that makes the situation far worse.

The Chancellor is widely, and rightly, castigated for failing to meet his targets on public borrowing and debt reduction. Yet there is one compelling reason why neither he nor any of his successors will ever be able to hit such targets.

The reason is people like Eamonn Holmes who don’t understand, or pretend not to understand, the difference between jobs in the public sector and the private one. The difference is clear-cut: the former deplete the economy, the latter keep it going.

Thus cutting public jobs to create private ones is absolutely essential, and it’s not the zero-sum game Eamonn thinks it is. Getting rid, as a minimum, of the spongers whose jobs hadn’t existed before Dave’s role model Tony went on a rampage would be a good start. But it shouldn’t end there.

Just look at one department, that of the Navy. The Royal Navy has dwindled away to almost nothing, with only about 34,000 sailors currently serving to fly the British flag at sea. That means that Britain no longer has the wherewithal to launch, say, another South Atlantic operation, never mind to fight a major war.

Yet the Department of the Navy boasts almost as many employees as there are sailors, about 30,000. In the nineteenth century, when Britannia ruled the waves, exactly the same job was done by 3,000 and they didn’t even have computers to help them along.

Would it be out of order to suggest that the staff of this department could easily be cut by 90 percent without in any way reducing its effectiveness? Could we then extrapolate to the other departments and suggest that they too could easily be lightened up by at least half?

Putting all those sacked onto the Jobseekers’ Allowance would be considerably cheaper than paying their salaries, pensions and expenses, even assuming – and that’s an unrealistic assumption – that they’ll stop cheating on those. The arithmetic is quite simple there, easy even for Eamonn to grasp.

So what is it that he doesn’t understand? Once again, we’re talking about a clever man there, one with an IQ probably way above average. The problem is that the good British public, of which Eamonn Holmes is a mouthpiece, has been trained, or rather corrupted, not to understand such elementary maths.

Public jobs to them are as good as any other. They are no longer capable of seeing the bloated public sector for what it really is, a millstone around the economy’s neck. If this situation doesn’t change quickly, and I’m not holding my breath, we’ll all drown.

There, Eamonn, do you understand now?     

Running is a dangerous sport, especially when its practitioner runs from Russia.

Alexander Perepelichny, a Russian Mafioso turned grass to Swiss police, showed just how dangerous. He went for his customary jog near his mansion in Weybridge, then suddenly collapsed and died.

He fell victim, a fourth one, to an epidemic of sudden cardiac arrests afflicting those who testify against Russian crime syndicates in what is usually referred to as the Magnitsky case.

By way of background information, what our papers call ‘crime syndicate’ is the timid shorthand for Putin’s government and him personally. All big business in Russia is transacted by this crime group either directly or by proxy, through smaller Mafias erroneously described as companies in the press. Hence my description of Perepelichny as a Mafioso – if he was Russian and rich, then he was either a world-famous musician or a criminal, and he never performed at the South Bank.

Perepelichny is actually known to have belonged to the deadly Klyuev gang, which he crossed and against which he agreed to testify in the Swiss investigation of money laundering. But, as far as information goes, this knowledge is merely the icing on the cake.

For no one can make a large fortune in Russia without either belonging to the Putin Mafia or at least staying on its good side, typically by paying it off in money or in kind. I’m sure the distinction would be important in an independent court, but from any ethical standpoint it’s irrelevant. We can safely assume that any extremely rich Russian is a criminal, be that as an active perpetrator or abettor.

Bill Browder (whose grandfather co-founded Communist Party USA) was allowed to run his Hermitage hedge fund and make his billions in Russia for as long as he was Putin’s friend. When the friendship went sour, and nothing is more fickle than a tyrant’s affection, he was kicked out of the country and his company was robbed of £140 million. Sergei Magnistky, a Hermitage lawyer, chose to stay behind and expose the crime, whose proceeds were mostly laundered through Swiss banks.

To encourage the others, Magnitsky was arrested and subsequently tortured to death, but some of the others weren’t sufficiently encouraged. Perepelichny was one of those slow on the uptake, possibly because his link with the Magnitsky case featured one or two degrees of separation.

The Swiss of course take money laundering as seriously as a priest would treat a desecration of his altar. Heirs to William Tell have a pure, disinterested love of money, and they hate to see the object of their affection abused.

They are prepared, just, to tolerate on their soil companies like Guvnor International, a shady Russian oil-trading concern of which Putin is rumoured to be a shadow owner. After all, no prima facie evidence of wrongdoing exists, and, even though every Russian knows what’s going on, the Swiss tacitly agree to feign innocence.

But the scam Perepelichny was exposing provided ample prima facie evidence, so his previously healthy 44-year-old heart had to give way on a routine morning jog. All our police are saying at the moment is that murder can’t be ruled out. I’d say it has to be most emphatically ruled in, considering the Russians’ form.

Having said that, the police may eventually prove me wrong and ascribe Perepelichny’s death to natural causes. What is absolutely impossible is that either the police or I or anybody else should say it’s unlikely that Russian ‘businessmen’ or government officials or Putin personally would underwrite a murder.

Once again, Russia as a country is being run like a Mafia family. Those who are ‘made’ become rich; those who aren’t eke out a modest living if they are lucky or starve if they are not. It’s as simple as that.

What is truly upsetting is our acquiescence in all this. If money didn’t smell of effluvia to Emperor Vespasian, to our government it smells of roses. Provided it’s big enough, it’s always welcome to Britain whatever its provenance.

Those who made their fortunes in, putting it mildly, dubious ways, are greeted with open arms in London. They are then allowed to go legit by buying up not only mansions and yachts, but also venerable British institutions: businesses, newspapers, old football clubs. Once ensconced, they use our courts to settle their differences, the way their American equivalents used to rely on Tommy guns. When that’s impossible, they dispose of one another in all sorts of ways, ranging from old-fashioned bullets to nuclear-age polonium.

And yet we welcome them – who else will be shelling tens of millions for yachts to keep our leaking economy afloat? When the underlying immorality of this is pointed out to our MPs, they shrug their shoulders and deliver themselves of platitudes, along the lines of ‘innocent until proven guilty’.

Chaps, read my lips, for I’m repeating this for the last time: no rich Russian is simon-pure, for it’s impossible to make billions there in honest ways. They can’t, nor should be, convicted of any crime without being found guilty beyond reasonable doubt. But they can, and should be, kept out of Britain for purely ecological reasons.

To paraphrase a 1569 court ruling, England is still too pure an air for a Russian billionaire to breathe.

 

 

Comrades! The march of progress shall not be stopped! All must toe the line! Or else!

To make this point abundantly clear, DfE has issued a diktat: from 2013 all ‘free’ schools in England, including religious ones, must teach evolution as ‘a comprehensive and coherent scientific theory.’

Failure to do so will incur ‘swift action which could result in execution…’ Sorry, I’m jumping the gun, as it were. The diktat still only threatens ‘the termination of that funding agreement’, but the overall tendency is clear enough.

Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, is ‘delighted’: ‘The new clause… should ensure that all pupils at free schools have the opportunity to learn about evolution as an extensively evidenced theory and one of the most fundamentally important tenets of modern biology.’

Judging by the style of Sir Paul’s comments, while Darwinism will be compulsory, English will remain optional. After all, pupils must feel free to use elegant phrases like ‘evidenced theory’.

It’s this kind of politicised nonsense that makes our education the laughingstock of Europe. The French, for example, can’t understand the febrile dedication les Anglo-Saxons pledge to this half-baked theory. They are taught enough modern science to know Darwinism is neither ‘comprehensive’ nor ‘coherent’ nor ‘extensively evidenced’.

So, I bet, do Sir Paul and DfE. But for them it doesn’t matter, for Darwinism has long since left the domain of science to enter the world of shrill political propaganda centred around vulgar materialism. Appearing roughly at the same time as Marxism, it has always served the same destructive purpose – and has been just as comprehensively debunked.

Cosmology shows that our material world hasn’t existed for ever; it appeared more or less instantaneously at the beginning of time.

Physics can’t always differentiate forms of matter (particles and field). Their material characteristics are now often seen as secondary to their metaphysical properties describable in terms of information only.

Palaeontologists have studied millions of fossilised remains and yet discovered practically no transitional forms in the development of species. Scientists know that, if data collected over 150 years show no evidence of macroevolution (one species turning into another), no such evidence exists. In fact, experiments with bacteria (whose lightning-fast propagation rates make it possible to replicate within a few decades the millions of generations associated with the length of life on earth) show no macroevolutionary developments whatsoever.

Genetics demonstrates that the amount of information in a single DNA molecule is so vast that it couldn’t have been accidentally created even in the time exceeding by trillions of years the most optimistic assessments of the age of our universe.

Geology is presumed to teach that the sequence of geological layers testifies to the gradual development of life. Then how is it that we observe sharply defined layers at all, rather than the evidence of smooth evolution of species? How is it that specimens of new species always appear in fossil records instantly and in huge numbers, fully formed and lacking any obvious predecessors?

Microbiology accepts irreducible complexity as fact: myriads of extremely complex biological systems could not have existed in a simpler form at all, which means they appeared ready-made, rather than evolving from a more primitive stage.

And we haven’t really begun to discuss the mystery of man. Psychologists and neurophysiologists have spent billions trying to understand the human mind. Yet, after all those Decades of the Brain and Genome Projects, they still don’t even know what the mind is, how it works, what produces and constitutes a thought, or whether consciousness ever will be wholly describable in any physical or biological terms.

In other words, the neuroscientists have neither begun to acquire the most rudimentary knowledge of their object of study nor given any indication that they will ever do so. What they do know is that Darwinism doesn’t even begin to explain man. No amount of purely evolutionary development can turn a single-cell organism into a homo sapiens, even one as tragically flawed as Sir Paul Nurse.

Sir Paul should apply his training in analytical techniques to his own feelings. Then he’ll realise that his animus comes from an irrational, all-consuming hatred of what he calls ‘the creationist myth’.

This is apparently shared by Dr Berry Billingsley of Reading University: ‘Evolution is a fantastic theory and explains so much how humans come to be here.’ For once I agree – this theory is indeed fantastic, in the real sense of the word. Apart from that, the statement displays little of the intellectual rigour associated with scientists.

Before things evolve, Dr Billingsley, they have to be. Ignorance of elementary philosophy, especially when matched by ignorance of modern science, is a wrong premise from which to make highfalutin pronouncements. These chaps use words without even understanding their meaning.

None of this is to suggest that Darwinism shouldn’t be taught at all. It’s an important part of scientific history, and pupils ought to learn about it side by side with other ‘fantastic’ theories, such as geocentric universe, flat earth and four humours. If the teachers wish to do so, they can put forth the evidence pro and con, challenging the pupils to weigh it in the balance.

Nor do I think that ‘creationism’ should be taught in science classes, even though it’s infinitely better supported by scientific evidence than Darwinism. Just as Darwinism is less than science, Genesis is more than science. Scripture belongs in courses on theology and philosophy, perhaps metaphysics – all higher disciplines than biology or chemistry.

School education can be all sorts of things. One thing it must never be is hysterical, unscientific propaganda aiming to destroy the very foundations of our civilisation. Otherwise those of us who have experienced Soviet Agitprop first hand will feel very uncomfortable indeed.

A quick question is in order. DfE is headed by Michael Gove, universally regarded as our most sensible and conservative minister. So what outrages will soon be perpetrated by departments headed by lesser men?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s not the Labour victories in Middlesbrough, Rotherham and Croydon North by-elections that spell big trouble for the Tories. It’s that UKIP polled second in two of them.

‘Whichever way you look at it, UKIP is on the rise,’ commented Nigel Farage. Well, not the way Matthew D’Ancona looks at it, or rather would like to.

On the eve of the Tory debacle d’Ancona wrote a typical harangue, yet again emphasising not so much UKIP weaknesses as his own vacuity and ignorance. 

The ignorance begins to shine through in the very title of his Evening Standard article: ‘UKIP is a state of mind, not a party.’ This is true, or rather a truism. All political parties are, or at least originally were, based on principles reflecting a certain state of mind.

It’s only when a party’s leaders and their hangers-on have neither any principles nor much of a mind that it becomes something else, usually an electoral basket case. Today’s Tories are a bright, well, not very bright, example of this.

If d’Ancona means that, unlike other parties, UKIP reflects a wrong state of mind, then by all means he should say so. And then, to be considered anything other than a chap with learning difficulties, he should show convincingly where UKIP’s mindset is wanting.

Actually, he does take a stab at it, after a fashion. According to d’Ancona, ‘What it [UKIP] objects to is modernity: the pluralist, globalised, fast-changing world in which we all live.’ Such an objection constitutes an irredeemable vice – God forbid we find anything wrong with modernity, as defined by d’Ancona. His definition can be gleaned from his own cultural preferences.

When he was still editor of the Spectator, he once flew to Los Angeles to attend a party thrown by Elton John, that crystallisation of modernity. This really tells you all you need to know, for someone with a modicum of intelligence and taste wouldn’t cross the street, never mind the world, to rub shoulders with that lot. Why, even Tony Blair attends Elton’s parties.

If that’s what modernity is all about, then d’Ancona is welcome to it. But what about its specific features that are supposed to vex UKIP so?

Even though it no longer is a single-issue party, UKIP is undoubtedly a central-issue one. The central issue is that the UK should govern itself, rather than submitting to an utterly corrupt and tyrannical foreign body.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this is misguided. But not ‘pluralist’? The last time I looked, 60 percent of Brits agree with UKIP on this. A seditious thought crosses my mind that d’Ancona and his ilk have their own, more tightly defined, concept of pluralism. The word, according to them, means general acceptance in Notting Hill, Islington and Hampstead.

Their denizens, as a rule securely protected from economic vicissitudes by their parents’ trust funds, don’t mind our entire constitutional history being debauched by countries whose own constitutional history is at best patchy.

Nor do they pay much attention to the purely empirical evidence for the economic, social, political and cultural disaster summed up by the initials EU. What matters is that they can use the EU good offices to move themselves from the margins of British society to the rotten core of a bigger entity. Their little minds are scared of the soubriquet ‘Little Englanders’. ‘Big Europeans’ sounds so much better – so much cooler. Cool Britannia, in the Tony Blair, Elton John sense, can only happen within cool Europe, they have no doubt on that score.

That UKIP rejects the destructive aspects of globalisation is no doubt true. Yet one finds it hard to cast the first stone in view of the current global catastrophe perpetrated by the very people who worship at the altar of internationalism. Are the Islington set even aware of this? Do they care?

D’Ancona’s affection for ‘fast change’ is generally symptomatic of people who assume that all change is for the better. This is a fallacy, and a destructive one at that. To cite one example, a change to a society where Elton John represents the acme of cultural attainment isn’t progressive. It’s regression to our pagan past.

Back in the seventeenth century, Lucius Cary, 2^nd Viscount Falkland, encapsulated the essence of conservatism before the word was even invented: ‘Where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.’ This is ‘the state of mind’ that has defined conservative thought ever since.

Discounting the likely possibility that d’Ancona may regard a change from William Byrd to Elton John as necessary, there is nothing conservative about a party that champions the cause of progressivism. Because this cause is so dear to the hearts of d’Ancona and the Tory spivocracy he adores, British conservatives have been effectively disfranchised. That’s why UKIP, with its consistently conservative position on every issue that counts, is doing so well.

One problem with d’Ancona and other Dave cronies is that they aren’t very bright. Just listen to d’Ancona’s spirited defence of Rotherham Council, which took away three adopted children from a couple because they are both UKIP members.

‘Given UKIP’s strong position on immigration generally, and EU migration particularly — was it wise to place the three EU migrant children with two of its members? The chance of something going wrong was small — but appreciable.’

D’Ancona is too stupid to realise that, rather than castigating UKIP, he’s praising it. This generous, self-sacrificial couple gave a loving family to three children because the little ones were human beings in distress. This charitable act rises above any political considerations; it shows that UKIP members are driven by noble impulses, not petty animosities. That is more than can be said for the monstrous Council or indeed for the pathetic d’Ancona.

He proceeds from the same logic as those who claim that people who are opposed to the EU hate Europeans. In this instance d’Ancona’s underlying claim is that those who wish for Britain to remain Britain do so because they hate foreigners. The Rotherham couple has proved him wrong, not that he’s capable of realising it.

With mouthpieces like this, no wonder the Tory party is reeling. They sense that in the next election people will vote for Labour Full Strength, rather than their own Lite version. The only way for them, and the country, to avert this disaster is to listen to the only sensible voices out there, the true conservatives. These are increasingly to be found only within the ranks of UKIP.       

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t recall Mr Bumble and his immortal ‘the law is a ass.’ Dickens probably didn’t think he was uttering a prophecy, but that’s exactly what it has proved to be.

I had the chance to mutter the Bumblian phrase yesterday, when taking my car in for a routine check. Now most people can talk your ear off with horror stories inspired by garages and mechanics. I can chip in with a few of my own, but they all go back at least 20 years.

Since then, ever since we moved to Fulham, I’ve been going to a local garage just down the street, and the experience has always been pleasant.

The business was started some 40 years ago, and the founder has never missed a full workday on Saturday, never mind the rest of the week. His son is also always there, and he’s as hard-working, knowledgeable and obliging as his father, though without the old man’s hard edge normally associated with self-made businessmen.

I doubt the two of them have ever taken a course in customer relations, but I’m certain they’d be qualified to teach one. They make the customer feel comfortable in the knowledge that the job will be done well and quickly. If a repair is unnecessary, they’ll say so. And the price they charge will always be fair.

Moreover, they routinely provide free services. Not just checking one’s levels and tyre pressure – most garages will do that. But once the old man spent an hour applying some mystery compound to a few scratches on my paintwork and then refused to accept any payment. His son, as outgoing as the old man is grumpy, gives me invariably useful automotive advice and once, when I was looking for a new car, gave me several issues of What Car? for free, to save me a walk to a newsagent’s.

Yesterday I met an 18-year-old youngster, the third generation of the same family, who has just started working in the garage. But his grandfather isn’t there to witness this generation shift. A month ago he was murdered by a burglar, in the house where his son and grandson grew up.

I had read about the murder in the papers, but without realising I knew the victim. When Mark, his son, told me about it I was shaken, while he bore his grief with traditional English stoicism, something rapidly falling out of fashion. ‘A burglary gone wrong,’ he quoted the police.

That statement presupposes that some burglaries go right, according to form, all perfectly civilised. A vicious criminal breaks into a house, helps himself to whatever he fancies and walks out whistling a merry tune. The owner offers no resistance, smiles benignly, thanks the burglar for his custom, then calls his insurance company first and, if he has nothing better to do, the police second.

Of course things don’t always go according to plan, and some burglars may fancy not just a few electronic gadgets but, say, the woman of the house, or perhaps the man if they practise an alternative and equally valid lifestyle. Occasionally, they may fancy a bit of nonsexual violence. Some of them may be homicidal maniacs. Others may be so drugged up that they can kill just for the fun of it.

So the occasion is replete with possibilities one doesn’t normally expect from other social encounters, such as having tea with the vicar. That’s why some people resist burglars – this without realising that they’re in fact resisting the modern ethos.

This was inadvertently made clear to me by an erstwhile colleague who reacted indignantly to my offhand remark that, if I found a burglar in my house, I’d do all I could to kill him. ‘How can you say that? The man is just doing his job!’ was my colleague’s reaction. Right. Just doing his job. Like a butcher, a baker and a candlestick maker. No moral difference – and increasingly no legal one.

The ratio of burglaries to arrests is about fifty to one, and burglaries to convictions hundreds to one. That means that the police make only nominal attempts to solve such crimes, and the judges only token efforts to punish them.

Clearly they act under instructions from government officials, who also regard burglary as just another job. Their  motives are clear enough.

Though I know one aristocrat who once did time for knocking off a corner shop, it’s a safe, if non-PC, assumption that most burglars come from the underclass created and cultivated by our spivocracy to ensure its own self-perpetuation. All that good work would go to waste if the government went all out to punish burglars. Let’s put it this way: welfare recipients deliver more votes than Fulham house owners.

God forbid someone would resist a burglar, perhaps even injure him. It’s the house owner who’ll go to prison, not the brutal criminal. The spivocrats know which side their bread is buttered.

The old man must have resisted. I’m sure it wasn’t the thought of losing his TV that made him so obstreperous. It was probably a sense of injustice: he started from very humble beginnings, worked hard every day of his life to make a good life for his family and to be able to afford a few expensive trinkets.

And now he was supposed to hand them over meekly to some worthless scum who has never worked a day in his life. The law offered him little protection, so he had to protect himself. And he died for it.

Since the burglary had ‘gone wrong’, as opposed to just right, the police actually caught the murderer. ‘He’s a 19-year-old south European,’ was how Mark described him. He didn’t specify the exact origin, but – call me a bigot and report me to our thought police – I’d bet a small sum the murderer is more likely to be Rumanian or Bulgarian than French or Italian. Nothing wrong about those people of course – the law, which is to say the EU law, says all are equally welcome.

You know what Mr Bumble would say about our laws, domestic or foreign-imposed, so I shan’t repeat it. Mr Griffiths at Shelby Motors, RIP.

Yet again Russia teaches the West a valuable economic lesson, which one hopes will soon be heeded.

The first lesson was that when the state nationalises the economy, it had better murder everyone who disagrees, for otherwise this commendable effort will fail (François Hollande, ring your office).

The second lesson was that when the state denationalises the economy, its reins should be passed to a frankly criminalised elite. Otherwise the state will lose control first and face second, when trying to regain control by violent means.

And now a new, up-to-date lesson for our incoming Bank governor: the amount of quantitative easing (queasing for short) should be denominated not in monetary units but in metric tonnes. That way we won’t know what’s going on and will persist in the misapprehension that our rulers do.

The Russians have shown the way by printing 240 tonnes of Syrian banknotes and shipping the lot over to help Assad pay his bills. Some of the bills have been presented by the army, and it would be imprudent not to honour these at this particular time. How many piastres to a tonne? Until we calculate the answer, we’ll remain blissfully in the dark about the true scale of cooperation between the two fraternal regimes.

It has to be said that the Russians have form when it comes to printing currency other than their own. In fact, while Lenin (d. 1924) was still alive his secret police founded two laboratories, one of poisons, the other of counterfeiting.

The first has been in business ever since, producing for the needs of its idealistic state a broad range of educational tools, from bog-standard cyanide to sophisticated polonium. The latter compound was in 2006 used to highly publicised effect in the centre of London, reminding the world of the Russians’ continuing commitment to innovation.

The other laboratory is presumed dormant, but only because the evidence for its ongoing efforts is mostly circumstantial. For example, after the advent of simon-pure democracy in 1991, and especially after the collapse of the rouble in 1998, most business in Russia has been transacted in cash-and-carry dollars.

Now it ought to be remembered that before the advent of simon-pure democracy, possession of even a minute amount of foreign currency was an instantly imprisonable offence. Possession of cosmically high amounts, say $10,000, was grounds for a death sentence, usually carried out hours after being passed.

It therefore stands to reason that until 1991 only trivial amounts of foreign tender were in private hands. Suddenly a lot of green appeared out of the blue: overnight, billions of dollar banknotes began circulating through Russia’s anaemic economy. Where did they come from? Part of me, the cynical part, has to think that the second KGB lab had something to with it.

This time the Russians have used their time-honoured expertise to prop up Assad’s regime for which they feel an affection that’s only partly attributable to the billion-dollar defence contracts they get from Syria. It’s of course a law of human nature that most states feel kinship for governments that resemble them.

Thus Westerners, the less switched-on ones, have this warm feeling for any democracy, no matter how manifestly bogus or predictably short-lived. The Russians too have displayed this kind of emotion throughout their history.

For example, Russian tsars were inveterate supporters of monarchs anywhere in the world. Under Peter the Great, a derogatory remark not only about him but also about any foreign monarch was a capital offence. And his father, Tsar Alexei, expressed his unequivocal support for Charles I, then recently beheaded.

When the English Muscovy Company, which had enjoyed a near monopoly on Russian trade since Elizabethan times, applied for an extension of its licence, it was floored by the short uppercut of the tsar’s ukase: ‘Inasmuch as the said Anglic Germans have slaughtered their own King Carolus to death, we hereby decree that none of the said Anglic Germans shall henceforth be admitted to Russia’s land.’

The Bolsheviks also felt more affinity for either Mussolini or Hitler than for any democratic statesmen. That’s partly why they entered the Second World War as Hitler’s allies by attacking Poland 17 days after the Germans. Ribbentrop summed up this friendship neatly when declaring at a Kremlin banquet that he felt as if he was among his own Parteigenossen. Stalin replied by saying, ‘I know how much the German people love their Führer. I’d like to drink to his health.’

Continuing this fine tradition, the Russians still support every tyrant in the world, your Hugo Chavez or Hamas types. That by itself is par for the course. But their recent money airlift to Assad introduces something new, yet another useful lesson Russia teaches the world.

Forget those puny wheelbarrows full of useless Weimar banknotes. As queasing shifts up through the gears, money should be measured out in plane loads. Admittedly, this would necessitate certain adjustments to our language, such as introducing the phrase ‘You look like a 100-weight of dollars.’ But it would be a small price to pay for a truly advanced economy.