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The title of the American film to which I’m obliquely referring, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, shows what happens when people are encouraged to express themselves outside any intellectual or linguistic discipline.

This opening of the sluice gates is supposed to make our language bigger by letting in a rush of verbal creativity. In fact it makes it smaller all the time – in this instance by fusing the Past Indefinite and Past Participle of the verb ‘to shrink’ into one illiterate locution.

Though regrettable, this is innocent enough. Much more pernicious are efforts to reduce the language in a deliberate attempt to trick the public into accepting ill-advised government action.

Such is the case with Dave’s pathetic attempts to obliterate any semantic, and therefore legal, differences between ‘tax avoidance’ and ‘tax evasion’. Until Dave assumed the role of a Latter Day Dr Johnson, the semantic distinction between the two had been clear-cut.

‘Tax avoidance’ meant variously creative legal attempts to shield from the clutches of Inland Revenue some of the income that it would otherwise claim. The government itself kindly set up quite a few tax-avoidance schemes, such as some pension contributions, ISAs, some bonds and so forth.

Such generosity on the part of our politicians is only partly explicable by their innate munificence. At least some of the motivation had to come from its congenital desire to keep our money within their expropriatory reach. Thus the first prime-ministerial action of Dave’s role model Tony was to raid pension funds to the tune of five billion pounds.

The unease modern states clearly feel about money in people’s pockets makes the people feel uneasy about taxation. No one doubts the need for fair taxes, but ‘fair’ is the operative word.

It’s manifestly unfair for the state to rob people of half of what they earn during their lifetime – and then rob them again after death by taxing the already taxed money they leave their families. It’s also unfair for the state to double-tax people’s earnings by charging 20 percent on top of the price we pay for what we buy.

Moreover, ways in which the state spends the money it extracts, or rather extorts, from us makes all taxation both unfair and detrimental to our society’s health. For the state uses our tax money chiefly to bribe into voting the right way those who won’t work and therefore don’t pay any tax.

It also uses our money to import vast numbers of grateful voters from culturally alien areas. This hits two birds with one stone, first by creating a whole class beholden to the present government and second by diluting the capacity of the rest to resist.

Therefore taxpayers try to augment the government-controlled shelters by others, legally provided by foreign governments and also by some British territories and crown dependencies. Such activities are collectively known as ‘tax avoidance schemes’, and their legality has until now been as universally accepted as the state’s extortionate taxation has been universally despised.

‘Tax evasion’, on the other hand, is an illegal failure to pay tax. Since the way we’re taxed is grossly unjust, most people will refer to evasion as malum prohibitum rather than malum in se. But one way or the other, malum it undoubtedly is.

The difference between avoidance and evasion is clear, and it’s this difference that our amateur lexicographer Dave first sought to blur and now seeks to obliterate.

His motives are obvious. Like any socialist ‘leader’, he’s incapable of devising and implementing policies that would stimulate growth, thereby expanding the tax base and increasing tax revenues.

Coming much more naturally to him and his ilk is the urge to squeeze as much as possible out of the already suffocating taxpayers – this though any half-competent economist knows that excessive taxation has exactly the opposite effect to the one professed. It frustrates workers, discourages them from trying to earn more, shrinks the tax base and thus reduces the state’s income.

Yet all their pronouncements notwithstanding, modern governments aren’t about the economy. They’re about increasing their power, and fleecing taxpayers serves this end famously: by controlling people’s money the state controls their lives, at least their physical lives.

Therefore in the apiary Dave keeps in his bonnet the bee of tax ‘evasion’, now supposed to include avoidance as well, buzzes right next to his compulsion to destroy what’s left of the institution of marriage.

To tackle what he calls ‘the scourge of tax evasion’ he has summoned every official who was likely to honour such a summons to blackmail them into docility. Specifically, next month he’ll demand that 10 territories commonly known as tax havens sign up to greater ‘tax transparency’. In other words, he wants them to spy for Inland Revenue, thereby betraying their investors and destroying their own principal livelihood.

Dave will also make this thorny issue a priority of the G8 summit he’s hosting in Northern Ireland on 17 and 18 June. This stands to reason: given the booming state of the world economy, what other priorities can there be?

Dave, one suspects, will find greater sympathy among his likeminded spivs in the G8 than in the territories that survive by providing discreet financial services. Russia is the only G8 member whose dedication to money laundering easily matches Dave’s passion for confiscatory taxation, but the Russians know they’ll find a way no matter what the summit decides.

At the same time Dave has reassured the 10 territories in his trademark mendacious way: “I respect your right to be lower tax jurisdictions. I believe passionately in lower taxes as a vital driver of growth and prosperity for all.

”Dave believes in lower taxes about as passionately as Kim Jong-un believes in democracy, Ahmadinejad in religious tolerance and Boris Johnson in marital fidelity. As passionately, actually, as he believes in using words in their time-honoured meaning.

It’s always rewarding for a writer to see his contributions triggering off wide public debate. In that spirit I’d like to thank all the readers whose intellectual curiosity was piqued by my latest piece.

Among other things, I speculated on the identity of the senior member(s) of the Wilson cabinet who supposedly chased Shirley Williams, then at her most nubile, around office furniture. According to Shirley, the prize they pursued was ‘worse than groping’ – which is to say non-consensual sex, a crime barely short of mass murder on the modern moral scale.

It’s good to see that readers have treated this attempt at forensic enquiry with the seriousness it merited. Some respondents were kind enough to offer their own suggestions, and this is exactly the type of active participation that raises an enquiry to a new high – or, depending on one’s point of view, lowers it to a new low.

One reader offered this observation: “It wouldn’t have been Crosland: he promised he would only f*** the grammar schools.”

Deeply shocked by the use of an expletive, even one masked by asterisks, I was about to fire off an indignant reply when I realised that my correspondent was loosely quoting Antony Crosland himself, Shirley’s predecessor as Education Secretary.

The problem therefore lies not in the turn of phrase but in the looseness of the quote. This is what Crosland actually said: “If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to destroy every f***ing grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland.” Lucky Scotland, is all one can say.

Therefore, taken literally, his statement doesn’t suggest that he himself wished to perpetrate a sex act on the grammar schools. Quite the contrary: the intensifying modifier ‘f***ing’ conveys the notion of grammar schools being an active rather than passive partner in sexual congress.

Mr Crosland therefore never treated grammar schools as sex objects, and he certainly never foreswore expanding his amorous horizons beyond this offensive educational institution. In fact, he was known at the time as quite a ladies’ man, which supposedly could make him a prime suspect in the crime of running those laps around the filing cabinets.

However, if we eschew primitive literalism and consider the net effect of Crosland’s and Williams’s attack on grammar schools, then – as a figure of speech – we would perhaps be justified in agreeing with my correspondent’s suggestions, while still sternly rebuking him for his choice of words.

Expanding the metaphor, we can perhaps imagine a threesome involving grammar schools flanked on either side by our two protagonists. However, threesomes usually presuppose three willing participants, which young Shirley self-admittedly wasn’t, and neither were the grammar schools.   

“Barbara Castle?” asks another correspondent. Implicit in this suggestion is the libellous insinuation that the two women practised what at the time was known as perversion and which, by the mercy of God, has been progressively updated to mean an alternative and equally (more?) valid lifestyle choice.

I’ll have my correspondent know that both ladies were happily married… well, married in any case. Of course, he might object that this ipso facto doesn’t preclude certain Sapphic tendencies, as the example of our greatest, or at least most progressive, writer of all time Virginia Woolf shows. However, the Barbara theory is defeated on two counts.

First, Mrs Williams, as she then was, states unequivocally that she was pursued by a senior cabinet colleague. Yet though Mrs Cartland, as she then was, did occupy a number of ministerial posts, none of them put her in a position of institutional seniority vis-à-vis Shirley. Second, since the two women were evenly matched physically, Shirley could have had a sporting chance of fighting Barbara off, rather than embarking on an obstacle race around the office.

Thanking this correspondent for his offering, I can move on to the next reader whose suggestion shows a great deal of imagination, lamentably compromised by his cavalier treatment of political correctness. “My money,” he writes, “is on David Blunkett.”

This is outrageous, especially for those familiar with the key personages of British politics. The author of this comment is referring to Mr Blunkett’s… impairment? Challenge? Handicap? As a lifelong stickler for politically inoffensive language, I’m stuck for the proper word to describe the fact that David Blunkett is blind from birth and consequently feels the urge to walk his dog at all times.

Referring to this impairment-challenge-handicap offends every fibre of my PC soul, and the offence is exacerbated by the implicit suggestion that one had to be sightless to fall for Mrs Williams’s charms. Here I have to admit that I myself may have encouraged such a reference by my ungallant comment that Mrs Williams’s photographs don’t explain the fervour of her multiple pursuers.

Now I’m man enough to admit I was wrong in trying to impose on my readers my own aesthetic preferences. But two wrongs don’t make a right, and I think my correspondent should apologise to Baroness Williams, as she now is. To set an example, I too apologise for suggesting in a personal e-mail to this writer that Shirley would have bitten David’s dog.

He must also admit to a rather slipshod treatment of historical facts. For Mr Blunkett, a considerably younger man, only entered Parliament in 1987. His ministerial career did overlap with Shirley’s in the early noughties, but she was LibDem then, rather than Labour, and therefore not Mr Blunkett’s junior colleague. Moreover, at the time she was rather past the age of consent or especially of withdrawing consent by racing around desks.

None of this is meant to discourage a free exchange of opinion on this site. On the contrary, how else can we arrive at the truth if not by approaching serious issues from every possible angle?  

Shirley Williams has come out, all guns blazing, her CV nailed to the mast, in defence of Lord Rennard, former LibDem chief executive.

Several women have accused Lord Rennard of sexual harassment, specifically of going further than ‘placing a hand on my knee,’ as one victim described the transgression. The press doesn’t report how much further, but then such details no longer matter in the general scheme of things.

It could have been placing a hand higher than a knee, it could have been rape – these days it could even be complimenting a woman on her appearance. Such misdeeds aren’t just committed against persons; they’re committed against the ethos, so the degree of severity is immaterial.

It still matters to some extent in a court of law although, given the prevailing trend, it’s hard to tell for how much longer such differentiation will persevere. But in any trial by media no extenuating circumstances are admissible. There the defendant is guilty as charged simply because he is charged.

Baroness Williams wouldn’t take it lying down, as it were. She sprang to Lord Rennard’s defence by claiming that, as Education Secretary in Wilson’s government back in the 1970s, she was regularly chased around the filing cabinets by ‘senior figures’, who were after a prize ‘worse than groping’.

She didn’t name any names, which leaves room for conjecture. Assuming that those in inferior positions wouldn’t have dared impose themselves on a senior colleague, one can limit the guessing game to a handful of players, of whom, according to the Baroness, ‘there was more than one.’ Wilson? Callaghan? One wishes old Shirley weren’t so discreet.

Running around office furniture she protested against such unwanted attentions, only to be told in no uncertain terms that ‘politics isn’t a soft business.’ By the sound of it, the business was very hard indeed. The Baroness omits any reference to the possible success or failure of any ‘senior figure’ in catching up with her, but then she’s entitled to her privacy.

Without in any way wishing to sound discourteous, Shirley’s photos from that period give little indication of what exactly could have inflamed her colleagues’ passions to such an extent, but then politicians aren’t known for their taste. Shirley could breathe and she had a pulse – what more did they need?

All this is fascinating stuff, though it’s not immediately clear how any of it is relevant. Surely attempted rape in the past (presumably that’s what ‘worse than groping’ means) can’t be used as justification for a similar transgression at present (‘worse than placing a hand on my knee’)? Either sexual harassment is wicked or it isn’t. If it isn’t, why are we talking about it at all? And if it is, then it’s like any other crime, where numerous similar incidents throughout history in no way excuse the one under current indictment.

Nor is it relevant to the matter at hand that, according to Baroness Williams, Lord Rennard is ‘a very fine man’. When it comes to this sort of thing, many a finer man has had his superlative traits overridden by momentary passions. Character references don’t cut much ice even in court, never mind in a trial by media.

Baroness William’s defence of Lord Rennard is pathetically weak, but then logic was never her major strength. Witness the fanatical zeal with which she pursued, when not being chased around filing cabinets, the destruction of grammar schools and their replacement with the idiot factories of comprehensives.

One wonders if there is a direct link between Shirley’s suffering at the hands of ‘senior figures’ and her desire to dumb down the whole nation. In common with other Leftie politicians she must have seen herself as a victim of the establishment – without realising that she herself was the establishment.

This pervasive culture of resentment had to extend to the very people in whose name the likes of the Baroness perpetrate their outrages. After all, the people stubbornly refused to revolt against the very establishment that pursued young Shirley around the House of Commons. What better revenge could she have exacted than creating an educational system that makes it possible for people to vote the likes of Tony Blair or Dave Cameron into power?

I don’t know if this exercise in cracker-barrel psychology makes any sense. Probably not. But then nothing else about our leaders does either. Shirley’s defence of Lord Rennard, for example, is silly. And one would be frustrated trying to detect a flicker of reason in her defence of comprehensive schools:

‘I have never in any way regretted them and I still believe strongly in them. The problem was that in many places they were heavily skimmed because people kept grammar schools in place beside them.’

Let me see if I get this right. Comprehensives failed because a few real schools were still around, and people could see the difference. Had every grammar school been demolished, rather than merely 99 percent of them, no one would have known any better.

Such is Shirley Williams’s revenge on Britain. She and her libidinous likeminded colleagues made sure few voters can any longer recognise their pronouncements for what they are: utter rubbish. Old Shirley has done to the country what those ‘senior figures’ tried to do to her.

Far be it from me to suggest that all the problems of the Middle East would be instantly solved if Tony Blair were banned from visiting the region and indeed talking about it. But it would be a good start.

First a little historical background. When Tony was our PM he played lickspittle to George ‘Yo, Blair!’ Bush, who in turn was the dummy to neocon ventriloquists. In committing Britain to the harebrained attack on Iraq, Tony was thus in effect a dummy’s dummy.

That idiotic, criminal action, accompanied by the usual complement of lies, pushed the button on a delayed-action bomb in the region. Actually, the action wasn’t as delayed as all that: within a mere 10 years several secular governments collapsed, the Middle East was aflame, the rest of the world was brought to the brink of a major conflagration, the only civilised country in the neighbourhood was put in grave danger – graver even than anything Israel has had to face for the last 65 years.

One would think that the only comment Tony, one of the principal instigators of the calamity, could possibly make would be mea culpa. Now he’s a Catholic he must have heard the words that one time he attended mass with Cherie.

So do we hear an apology from him? Do we hell. All we hear is inane, illiterate bleating and yelps for attacking the last secular government standing, that of Syria’s Assad.  

The latest outpouring came through The Mail’s good offices, and I have to thank Tony for making my job much easier. In common with many intellectually challenged individuals, he’ll hoist himself with his own petard given a chance to talk. All I have to do is add a few parenthetical comments.

“Syria is in a state of accelerating disintegration. President Assad is brutally pulverising communities hostile to his regime. At least 80,000 have died.”

[How many of them have been murdered by Assad’s opponents? You know, those chaps who eat people’s internal organs on camera? Without this information the body count is meaningless.]

“The Syrian opposition is made up of many groups. The fighters are increasingly the Al Qaeda-affiliated group Jabhat al-Nusra. They are winning support, and arms and money from outside the country.”

[So does Tony want to stop this support? Au contraire, as he’d have said during his dish-washing career in Paris. He wants to give them more ‘arms and money from outside the country’. And if that doesn’t do the trick, he wants us to attack Syria. Why?]

Because “we are at the beginning of this tragedy. Its capacity to destabilise the region is clear.”

[A startling admission, that. We started ‘this tragedy’, so we might as well make it worse.]

“To the South in Egypt and across North Africa, Muslim Brotherhood parties are in power…”

[Quite. And Tony has just admitted it’s partly his fault. So what’s he going to do about it?]

“When I return to Jerusalem soon, it will be my 100th visit to the Middle East since leaving office, working to build a Palestinian state.”

[The logic is unassailable. Because ‘Muslim Brotherhood parties’ are in control elsewhere, they should be given yet another state, this one wholly their own.]

“But are we really going to examine it and find no common thread, nothing that joins these dots, no sense of an ideology driving or at least exacerbating it all?”

[Not at all, Tone. We’ve found it. It’s called Islam, the only major religion that has the murder of infidels and apostates built into its scriptural makeup. What do you say to that?]

“There is not a problem with Islam. For those of us who have studied it, there is no doubt about its true and peaceful nature. There is not a problem with Muslims in general.”

[‘Those of us who have studied’ Islam, which Tony manifetsly hasn’t, have seen 107 Koran verses like these: “Slay [unbelievers] wherever ye find them…” (2:91), “Take them and kill them wherever ye find them” (4:91), “Slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush” (9:5), “…If they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them…” (4:89). Just how peaceful is its nature, Tone?]

“Of course there are Christian extremists and Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu ones.” [True. These chaps are as capable as the Muslims of flying planes into buildings, attacking our allies and beheading Westerners who disagree with them. It’s sheer luck that so far they’ve refrained from doing so.]

“On the other [hand there] are the modern-minded, those who hated the old oppression by corrupt dictators and who hate the new oppression by religious fanatics. They are potentially the majority, but unfortunately they are badly organised.”

[Majorities are always badly organised, Tone. It’s fire-eating activists like you who do the damage. The Muslim world has always had to choose between the two forms of oppression, that’s the nature of the beast. We should offer tacit support to the beast that’s less likely to bite us – those same ‘corrupt dictators’ you agitate against.]

“The better idea is a modern view of religion and its place in society and politics. There has to be respect and equality between people of different faiths.”

[Splendid idea. There’s a problem though: there’s no such thing as ‘religion’. There are only different religions, of which some encourage people to erect tall buildings and some to fly planes into them. It would be unrealistic to expect Tony to think before mouthing bien-pensant twaddle, but the rest of us should realise that promoting ‘equality between people of different faiths’ can have only one practical effect: weakening the builders and strengthening the flyers.]

“We have to start with how to educate children about faith, here and abroad. That is why I started a foundation whose specific purpose is to educate children of different faiths across the world to learn about each other and live with each other.”

[But Mohammed was extremely well-educated about Christianity – he did spend several years studying it at Nestorian monasteries (in Syria, as it happens). That hasn’t prevented his followers from feeling ever so slightly hostile towards every religion other than their own.]

Give it a rest, Tone. Really, the best thing you can do at this stage is shut up. That’ll be your greatest contribution to peace in the Middle East. And to the cause of fighting nausea among normal people who have the misfortune of glancing at your articles.

 

 

Lord Mandelson seems to be irresistibly attracted to Russian oligarchs. By attraction I don’t mean the kind of love that dare not speak its name, God forbid.

No, the affection consuming Lord Mandelson in this instance is selfless, disinterested and typically requited love of money. A man of strong will, he’s always able to control his scruples about the provenance of the lucre for which he lusts so powerfully.

This commendable self-control has got Peter Mandelson into all sorts of trouble on all sorts of occasions. Several times (I’ve lost count) he was kicked out of Blair’s cabinet when well-documented doubts were cast on the probity of some of his dealings.

On the last occasion Mandelson said ‘plague on both your Houses’ to Parliament and decamped for a much more lucrative post as EU Trade Commissioner. It was in that capacity that he struck a close friendship with Russia’s aluminium king Oleg Deripaska – perhaps the richest in the line of the so-called oligarchs.

Since aluminium is one of Russia’s major exports, and Europe its biggest recipient, Deripaska’s interest in cultivating the Commissioner’s affection isn’t one of those mysteries for which Russia is so widely known. Peter’s reciprocity, I’m sure, was based on the Good-Samaritan urge to help a fellow man to make a few more billion.

To that end Peter accepted Oleg’s lavish hospitality on the latter’s yacht and, to give the affair a bipartisan feel, George Osborne tagged along. Other than a weakness for good food and drink, perhaps he was contemplating the possibility of converting to Russian Orthodoxy, to follow in the footsteps of his brother who has converted to Islam. Deripaska could be counted on to put in a good word with the Patriarch – he must know him from all those Kremlin piss-ups.

Or else George was preparing a fallback position for the time he’s no longer in government. A directorship in Deripaska’s holding company perhaps? Why on earth not? If a former Chancellor of Germany can shill for Gazprom, why not George doing the same for his new bosom friend Oleg? No reason at all.

That however is conjecture. What is fact is that Peter Mandelson has just been appointed non-resident director of Russia’s biggest publicly listed conglomerate Sistema, 62 percent of which is owned by Vladimir Evtushenkov, yet another oligarch.

It’s a marriage made in heaven – both sides stand to gain, neither has anything to lose. Peter’s gain is transparent: he’ll get $325,000 a year plus a cut of any increase in Sistema’s mammoth value.

What Evtushenkov gets out of the deal is less immediately clear, but we can try a reasonable guess. Mandelson’s connections in British and especially European circles must be valuable to a chap with a Russian name but a pan-European heart.

You see, in addition to his multifarious business interests, Evtushenkov holds the post of Honorary Consul of the Duchy of Luxembourg in Yekaterinburg, the capital of the Urals. One can understand his affection for the Duchy, a pleasantly picturesque area at the heart of Europe. Coincidentally, it’s also a money laundry compared to which Cyprus is a baby’s playpen, but surely Evtushenkov’s interest in it has nothing to do with that. Neither does Mandelson’s, I hasten to add.

All this is perfectly aboveboard. It’s also fair: Peter has been offering his political advice free of charge to any party willing to listen. It stands to reason that now he’ll be paid for his business advice, springing from his acumen and vast experience.

One just hopes he’ll watch his step: another scandal just may besmirch his already off-white reputation beyond repair. And Peter should never leave behind his long spoon when supping with the devil of Russian oligarchy. Those chaps play for keeps, and London has proved it’s not such a safe haven after all.

As a tireless campaigner for even interspecies marriages (mammals only – I’m a conservative after all), and also as a part-time resident of France, I’m ecstatic about the historic event to take place in Montpelier on Wednesday.

Vincent Austin and Bruno Boileau will become wife/husband and husband/wife, with the socialist mayor officiating at the ceremony.

Alas, my wedding invitation got lost in the post, so I can’t share with you some of the important details. Such as, is it Vincent or Bruno who’ll be the blushing bride? I had to double-designate both, but that’s ignorance speaking.

The photographs don’t throw light on the matter. Vincent is taller, so one would think that for the purposes of the glorious occasion he’ll be the bridegroom. He’s also 10 years older, which would traditionally cast him in the role of husband, even though the couple’s parents have made it clear that this once they won’t necessarily stand on tradition.

However, Vincent also looks somewhat more effeminate, which may suggest that he’ll be the bride and it’ll be Bruno carrying him across the threshold of the bridal suite, not vice versa. Or perhaps they’ll just hold hands and tiptoe into the room together.

And speaking of vice, you might think I’m being unnecessarily inquisitive and pedantic, but as a veteran attendee of many weddings, including a few of my own, I know that details can make or break the festivities.

For example, I hope the happy couple won’t forgo the traditional nuptial attire. Vincent will look gorgeous in a white dress, with the train carried by the bridesmaids (of any of the three sexes). Fleur d’oranger and a gossamer veil are also a must, what with France being a conservative country.

At the same time Bruno will look dashing in a pink morning coat and red-striped, tight-fitting trousers. I’ll leave up to him the choice of a flower for his buttonhole, but a pansy would match the coat to perfection.

We all know how music can add grandeur to any ceremony, and in this instance especially so, given the ground-breaking nature of the event. It’s not up to me to make suggestions but, fancying myself a connoisseur, I shall anyway.

The choice, I’m convinced, should reflect both the traditional union being entered into and also the slightly – every so slightly! almost imperceptibly! – modern spin on the tradition. To that end, nothing would accompany the event better than Tom Robinson’s immortal classic Sing If You’re Glad to Be Gay – performed on a Baroque pipe organ. I mean, aren’t you tired of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March?

And speaking of organs – no, I’m not going to say anything salacious, you pervert. Who do you think I am? I was going to talk about a few concerns voiced by France’s organs of law enforcement.

You see, there’s a very distinct possibility that some of the uninvited guests may be throwing at the newlyweds things other than rice and confetti. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear, but Molotov cocktail isn’t a drink with which to raise a toast to the happy couple.

To prevent such outrages, it’s predicted that les flics will outnumber the guests about three to one – especially since François Hollande has blessed the happy couple by warning that he wouldn’t tolerate any terrorist acts. (François is beautiful when he’s angry, by the way.)

Admittedly, the presence of so many policemen may diminish the solemnity of the wedding, but the least they can do to maintain stylistic integrity would be to attach pansies to their batons, pistols and Taser guns.

I do hope the ceremony will go without a hitch. And I’m proud of the French legal system, whose speed of action puts ours to shame. After all, Vincent and Bruno will tie the knot just days after such unions were given a green, or rather rainbow-coloured, light. None of this toing and froing that’s delaying the onset of happiness in Britain.

Are you listening, your Lordships? Are you taking notes? I do hope you are – and I know you’ll vote the right way when the equal-happiness bill goes through your House.

 

 

 

 

 

The EU’s decision to drop the embargo on the sale of weapons to Syria, or more precisely to those lovely chaps fighting for democracy, is yet another instalment in the ongoing saga of folly.

Characteristically, the cause of arming the chaps who like to dine on human organs was championed by European leaders with an enthusiasm whose ardour was in inverse proportion to their fortunes at home.

Thus Angela Merkel, who retains a realistic hope of winning the next election, was luke-warm on the idea. Conversely, Hollande, whose own popularity with his voters has just dropped below Heinrich Himmler’s, was all gung-ho – as was Dave, who’s loathed by his own party cordially and by the others institutionally.

Instigating or escalating an armed conflict is a time-honoured way for modern governments to get out of trouble, either political or economic. Thus it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that these ‘leaders’, along with Obama, see the current conflict as a way of reversing their own and their countries’ fortunes.

Nor is it impossible to imagine that the conflict’s spilling over to the whole region is exactly the development they seek – the more the merrier.

Russia too has a stake in the area, which she demonstrated by agreeing to deliver S-300 AA missiles to Syria. This decision lacks novelty appeal, for the missiles are part of the $1-billion-plus military contracts Russia has with Assad, her long-term client. Apart from the traditional compulsion of rubbing the West the wrong way, Putin has strategic interests involved as well: Russia’s naval facility at Tartus is her sole Mediterranean base.

By relatively new-fangled contrast, the West’s interests in Syria are almost entirely ideological, springing from the neocon domination of foreign policy in the USA and increasingly here.

Acting as the crusading arm of the American self-worshipping religion, the neocons agitate for war whenever this can be plausibly sold to the public. In this instance, they instigated and continue to scream for America’s blatant aggression against sovereign Middle Eastern states.

This is justified by incessant references to the dangers of Islamism, Muslim fundamentalism and terrorism. If the neocons really believe this, they are silly and ignorant. If they don’t and still say it, they’re devious. In all likelihood, they’re both.

As always, wrong ideas lead to wrong actions – such as the last decade of the West’s doomed attempts to refashion the Middle East in its own image. For the warmongers operate under a PC discipline that prevents them from seeing whence the danger really comes. That is, not from Islamism but from Islam.

The God of PC demands that we regard all religions as equal, and if one is to be denied an equal status it can only be Christianity. Yet Islam is an inherently and doctrinally aggressive creed that has been waging war on the West for the last 1,400 years. The actual physical manifestations of the conflict have been intermittent, as they always are in such prolonged confrontations. The 100 Years’ War, for example, didn’t feature 100 years of non-stop fighting – there were flare-ups followed by lulls. At the moment we’re living through a period of peak passions in the Islamic world.

Obviously not every Muslim is a terrorist or even a West-hater. My guess is that most aren’t. But by the same token, no revolution in modern history was perpetrated by ‘the people’ as such – it was always carried out by a small cadre of a radical elite, typically intellectuals.

‘The people’ not only never promoted those revolutions actively, but they often withdrew even their tacit support. This goes for the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, the American and French ones of the eighteenth or the Russian and German ones of the twentieth.

Most Muslims may or may not sympathise with the radical elite acting in their name, but in either case they play no active role in the atrocities it commits. That, however, doesn’t exculpate Islam any more than the relatively small numbers of Bolshevik or Nazi revolutionaries exculpated their cannibalistic ideologies.

As a result of the West’s profound failure to assess the situation properly, it’s committing one gross folly upon another – all in the name of democracy, that bull’s head sitting on top of the neocon totem pole. All any group of wild-eyed murderers has to do to rate the West’s support is to declare its undying love for democracy.

It’s hard not to notice that throughout the so-called liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring and the current anti-Assad strife, such protestations happily co-existed with Islamist radicalism of the most fire-eating kind. By giving benevolently equal treatment to Islam and decrying Islamism, the West is actively complicit in strengthening the former by empowering the latter.

If, on the other hand, our leaders had enough brains and historical nous to realise how the pitta crumbles, they’d let the warring Islamic sects, the Sunni and the Shiite, get on with it. The more they fight one another, regardless of the slogans they inscribe on their green banners, the weaker Islam becomes – and the more secure we’ll feel.

As it is, the West has used the most radical Islamic elements to unseat the most secular, and therefore least Islamic, governments in the Middle East, those of Iraq, Egypt, Libya – with Syria soon to follow. That all the deposed governments were utterly disgusting doesn’t mask the stupidity of assuming that their ousters are any better.

In fact, we’ll soon find out that they’re much worse. Meanwhile, congratulations to Messrs Cameron and Hollande for their political victory. Or, to be more precise, for their defeat of sanity.  

 

 

 

 

Dickens made this worthy gentleman demur when told that “the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction.” Undaunted, Mr Bumble replies, “If the law supposes that … the law is a ass.”

This shows that even in Victorian times laws governing relations between the sexes were fraught with dissent. I wonder how those corseted ladies and top-hatted gentlemen would feel about today’s Walpurgisnacht.

One can venture a guess how Nick Ross feels about it. Befuddled and scared, would be a safe bet.

For many years Mr Ross presented BBC’s popular show Crimewatch, and he wisely used the time to gather much material for his book Crime, which is just out. No doubt he expected laudatory or at least decent reviews. What he got instead was tarring and feathering, a punishment so severe that one would think Mr Ross had committed the eponymous offence.

Indeed he has, if we regard any display of common sense as a crime. Here’s what Mr Ross wrote: “Half of all women who have had penetrative sex unwillingly do not think they were raped… they led him on, they went too far, it wasn’t forcible, they didn’t make themselves clear… They feel it is a long way removed from being systematically violated or snatched off the street.”

Sounds sensible, but not to Jo Woods, a trustee of Rape Crisis: “I feel absolute fury.” And not to Jacqui Hames, who co-presented Crimewatch with Ross for 16 years: “…struggling to match the man I know with the comments!!!! What on earth is going on?”

I can tell you exactly what’s going on, Jacqui: a man has shown a modicum of sanity in a mad world. Tarred and feathered? Why, the culprit must be put away for life, and then only because we no longer have the death penalty.

Yet if we all took a pill and recovered our mental faculties we’d see that, according to the shrill critics, rape is the only crime that’s supposed to have no gradations whatsoever. This is indeed a startling addition to the history of jurisprudence.

Just look at other crimes against the human body. If, for example, a chap throws a couple of punches at another chap in the King’s Head, the offence would probably be classified as affray.

If one of the punches closes the victim’s eye and the other knocks a tooth out, it’s ABH (Actual Bodily Harm).

If the victim falls awkwardly and breaks his arm, the pugilist is looking at GBH (Grievous Bodily Harm).

If instead of throwing punches, the first chap grabs a knife off the bar and plunges it into the other chap’s belly, it’s attempted homicide.

If the victim actually dies, it’s unlawful killing.

If the attacker doesn’t use the knife immediately but waits for the other chap in the car park and then kills him, it’s murder.

The lawyers among you may question a point or two, but not the general idea. Which is, there’s assault and there’s assault. They’re not all the same.

This goes for any other crime I can think of: for instance, a burglar breaking into an old woman’s flat and nicking her hearing aid won’t be treated in law with the same severity as a burglar who breaks into The National Gallery and steals a Vermeer.

Yet here we are, expected to believe that a man who gets into bed with his girlfriend and after some inventive foreplay fails to realise that this once her ‘no’ actually means ‘no, is as culpable as two degenerates who snatch a woman off a bus, rape and beat her viciously and leave her for dead. One would think that nobody would be so stupid as to put forth this proposition.

Nobody is. Stupidity has nothing to do with it – the problem, alas, is much deeper than that.

Any modern state desperately wants to conquer, which is why it wants to divide. And destroying the traditional interplay between the sexes is the most important part of this divisive strategy.

Dickens’s contemporaries would be appalled at the tricks today’s state employs to this end, those same tricks we’ve been brainwashed to take for granted.

Abortion on demand (and on the taxpayer), encouragement of cohabitation, regarding homosexuality as not just legal but as a perfectly valid choice, no injunction against public displays of secondary (and sometimes primary) sexual characteristics, same-sex marriage, test-tube babies eventually making a man redundant, eagerly awaited human cloning making both a man and a woman redundant, acceptance and encouragement of out-of-wedlock births – what would Mr Bumble say?

Regarding any sex without permission as equally criminal falls into the same category. A drunk man copulating with a drunk woman, with neither of them remembering much of it the next morning, may or may not have committed a crime against the woman – it’s a matter of opinion.

What is a matter of fact is that the man has committed a crime against the state, by transgressing against the ethos the state is trying to impose. Such crimes are always punished with greater certainty and severity than any crime against an individual.

Thus a serial burglar who has burgled 100 houses and got caught on the 101^st, having stolen £1,000,000 worth of goods all told, is likely to get off with a slap on his wrists. A man who has evaded the same amount’s worth of tax will surely go to prison for a long time.

Affray motivated by sheer thuggery will earn the perpetrator a fine, at worst. The same action accompanied by racial or religious invective will land him in prison. Why, since the victim’s nose would bleed just as profusely in both instances? The answer is simple: in the first instance the thug strikes a man in the face; in the second, he strikes against the state’s ethos and therefore the state.

It’s the same everywhere. In New York, for example, only the killing of a policeman is classified as first-degree murder. In the old days, when a human life had an absolute value, murder was murder, regardless of the victim’s occupation.

Nick Ross has betrayed himself as a normal, sensible man. Such a crime never goes unpunished these days – the state can tolerate burglaries, muggings and car crime. It’s only appeals to sanity that are seen as a direct threat to its power.

Tony Blair devoted his life to fighting ‘the forces of conservatism’. Not literally of course: everyone knows that Tony devoted his life only to Tony. However, there’s no denying that hatred of conservatives came closer than anything else to what may be loosely described as Tony’s heart.

It is in this sense that Dave is truly, and not just self-admittedly, ‘heir to Blair’. A slight problem is caused by the minor inconvenience of Dave leading the Tory party and not, like Tony, Labour. As a true heir to Blair, therefore, Dave detests every belief residing in the viscera of his party.

This was bound to create some tension with the party faithful, and so it has proved. Predictably Dave’s feelings for conservatives are most heartily reciprocated.

Writing in The Times, Matthew Parris put his finger right on it. Real conservatives “loathe the leader of their party: loathe him for personal as well as ideological reasons. It’s no exaggeration to say that these people would rather see their party lose an election than win under Mr Cameron’s leadership.”

One suspects it is a bit of an exaggeration. But the first part of the sentence does represent insightful analysis, for which Mr Parris isn’t widely known. However, if he’s right in the second part as well, then such lack of party loyalty is most regrettable.

By inference, Dave himself unfailingly puts party interests before his own. If the only way for the Tories to win an election would be a coalition with UKIP, and if Farage persists in saying that this isn’t on for as long as Dave is the leader, Dave would selflessly step aside. Wouldn’t he? Of course he would. And pigs will fly, tactfully giving a wide berth to Muslim neighbourhoods.

The conundrum is unsolvable: Dave is at odds with most of those who have traditionally voted for his party. It’s as if two tectonic plates have slammed together and a crack is widening at the fault line.  

There’s little doubt which side Mr Parris supports. To make this perfectly clear he writes that traditional Tories represent the ‘forces of darkness’, while “David Cameron’s Tory modernisers [are] the ‘forces of light’.” Mr Mani, ring your office. Your sect has just claimed another member.

From then on Parris abandons Manichaean terminology and deploys the language of either a detective investigating a dastardly conspiracy, or else that of a military man plotting the rout of enemy forces.

As a paid-up, card-carrying member of the nutters, swivel-eyed loons and fruitcakes lurking in the shadows, I may sum up what makes us such forces of darkness – specifically the areas in which we’re at odds with the light shining out of Dave’s various orifices.

We believe that Britain should be a sovereign country, just as it has been since time immemorial.

We also think it should pay its way, encourage all Brits to do the same – and, more important, discourage them from not doing so.

We support the idea that everyone should obey the law, and that those who don’t must be severely punished. The laws we obey should come from God and our own government, not from any other political entity and not from any religion foreign to these Isles.

We believe marriage is a union between a man and a woman, not between any two arbitrarily selected mammals.

We think that medicine and education should tend, respectively, to people’s bodies and minds, rather than acting as a laboratory for social engineering.

We believe the flood of immigration should be reduced and that of cultural aliens stopped altogether – and preferably reversed.

In short, the forces of darkness are made up of those who believe everything the likes of Matt and Dave abhor. The duo sense with the unerring instinct of Pavlovian dogs that in a Britain run by such forces the ‘forces of light’ would form a tiny halo on the margins. It’s a matter of life or death – the life of the country, the death of vacuous, trendy, lefty posturing devoid of any intellectual or moral substance.

How does one protect Matt-and-Dave’s bailiwick? “The Admiral Byng strategy, I fear,” suggests Mr Parris. “A handful must be shot pour encourager les autres.” Now Byng was shot literally, for failing ‘to do his utmost’ in the battle of Minorca. Parris is longing for conservatives to be shot, one hopes only figuratively at this stage, for, well, being conservative. Quoting Voltaire in this context is apposite, although Lenin would be even better.

What should be the battle plan in the war against the forces of darkness? “Pretext must be found to single one or two rebels for extraordinary punishment: the sacking of a minister… the removal of the whip from a backbencher who starts crowing about deals with UKIP…”

And consequently, though Parris doesn’t say this, the effective disfranchising of every conservative in the country. Now that we bandy French phrases about, à la guerre comme à la guerre.

“Not another yard, Prime Minister, not another inch,” Parris blows his beagle – sorry, I meant bugle, or whatever else these people blow. “Attack!”

Do attack, Dave. The forces of light, whose line of battle traverses Holland Park and Islington, will salute you – and, one hopes, will perish together with you. Just like those Roman gladiators shouting morituri te salutant. And if you don’t know what this means, your military advisor Matthew ‘Mani’ Parris will be happy to translate.

As our sensibilities become more acute and our sense of propriety more heightened, we refine and broaden our notion of racial slurs.

What in the recent past would have been considered an innocent joke is well on its way to becoming an imprisonable offence. In a parallel development, what used to be treated as an imprisonable offence, incitement to terrorism, has become a valid expression of diversity.

Yet as our keen sensibilities gently waft up to cloud cuckoo land, there’s Russia to remind us of the times olden and golden. The times when a racially offensive remark was longing for genocide, rather than a simple acknowledgement that certain indigenous racial characteristics do exist.

As an example of the earth-bound gravitational pull exerted by Russia, witness the current scandal involving decorative items made out of human skin. As an example of the gravity-defying, airy-fairy motion in the opposite direction, observe the Western race scandal revolving around the stereotypical dietary habits of American blacks.

The latter is closer to home, so let’s start with that. Two golfers, Sergio García (white) from Spain and Tiger Woods (half-black) from the USA have a history of bad blood. I don’t know what caused the original rift, but everyone who follows golf knows the two men can’t stand each other.

Building on this common knowledge, a humorous interviewer asked Mr García if he was planning to invite Mr Woods to dinner. Yes, replied the golfer, and I’ll serve fried chicken.

That delicacy is a staple in the southern states, and has been since time immemorial. Since black slaves were originally brought to that part of America, they too developed a taste for chicken pieces deep-fried in batter. This affection is by no means exclusive to them – the KFC chain was started by an impeccably white Kentucky Colonel Sanders, and it’s widely, if incomprehensibly, popular all over the world.

Still, Mr García was unmistakeably referring to Mr Wood’s complexion. Even so, the supposed insult doesn’t register very high on the seismic scale of racial invective. Suppose for argument’s sake that the roles were reversed and Mr Woods would say that he’d serve paella to Mr García. Would the ensuing outcry reach the same decibel level?

Certain racial stereotypes exist – and persist – because there’s an element of truth to them. The Jews are associated with chicken soup, the Italians with pasta, the North Africans with couscous, the French with frogs’ legs, the Russians with vodka. A reference to their culinary preferences would normally fall somewhere between ethnic awareness and an innocent jibe.

In the past that sort of thing wouldn’t even have registered, never mind caused a worldwide scandal. Yet our times are far from normal, and the way Mr García is being treated in the press makes it hard to distinguish between him and a cross-burning Ku-Klux-Klan member clad in a white bed sheet.

George O’Grady, the chief executive of the European tour, fanned a flickering flame into a brush fire. Trying to stick up for Mr García, he vouchsafed that the golfer has many ‘coloured athletes’ among his friends. What ignited passions wasn’t the echo of the old line ‘some of my best friends are Jewish’ but the word ‘coloured’.

Mr O’Grady meant well, but he got his modifiers terribly confused. In no way wishing to exculpate this egregious affront to human decency, family values and moral fibre, one still has to suggest that it’s not always easy to keep all those adjectives straight.

Our language is fluid, and what one day is considered a stylistically neutral description may the next day become a criminal insult. For example, when I was a child the word ‘Negro’ had no stylistic colouring whatever, as it were. Conversely, the word ‘black’ was regarded as a racist insult. The word ‘coloured’ was a colloquial and anodyne counterpart to ‘Negro’. These days Americans are supposed to say ‘Afro-American’, with the British favouring ‘Afro-Caribbean’.

Add to this a full repertoire of undeniably pejorative terms, and our vocabulary becomes a veritable minefield strewn with charges ready to go off. Messrs García and O’Grady stepped on a mine, and pieces of their hides are being blown all over our press, that vigilant guardian of probity.

Now compare this scandal to the one making news in Russia. Commenting on a film about Smersh, Soviet wartime counterintelligence, the liberal commentator Leonid Gozman took exception to the portrayal of those butchers as selfless heroes. On any moral level, he suggested, they were no different from the SS.

Now, thanks largely to Smersh’s good offices, 157,000 Soviet soldiers were executed by military tribunals during the war – often for such awful offences as telling a joke about Stalin or suggesting that German planes weren’t bad. Add to this at least twice as many shot out of hand without the benefit of even a kangaroo trial, and the casualties inflicted by Smersh on its own army outstrip those suffered by the US military in four years of desperate fighting against the Germans and the Japanese.

A comparison to the SS thus doesn’t sound particularly far-fetched, does it? Not so, according to the columnist Uliana Skoybeda. Writing for Russia’s highest-circulation daily, she expressed a heart-felt regret that the Germans hadn’t ‘made lampshades out of all the ancestors of today’s liberals’ – such as Mr Gozman, whose name is Jewish.

It has to be said that the Germans made a pretty good fist of that, though not, according to Skoybeda, good enough. They only managed to murder half the European Jews, with the other half left to procreate and eventually produce venomous snakes like Gozman with his libellous comparisons.

Now that’s what I call a racial slur (a Jew in Russia is a racial, not religious, entity). That’s how it was taken by the tiny Russian liberal press, while the dominant voice screamed all over the country that Gozman had only himself to blame – just as the Jews were largely responsible for their own holocaust.

We ought to be thankful to the Russians for reminding us what racism really is. So let’s just compare the two scandals and ask ourselves a rhetorical question, ‘Have we all gone mad?’