Blog

In 2000, after accusing his KGB employers of trying to kill critics of Putin, Col. Litvinenko fled to Britain, where he became one such critic. By way of counterargument, six years later they killed him.

The murder was weak as far as rhetorical devices go, but it did open up a largely redundant whodunit debate. It’s redundant because the method used by the murderers leaves no reasonable doubt of their identity.

Litvinenko was killed by a diabolical compound polonium-210, appropriately discovered by a communist, Marie Skłodowska–Curie, and named after her native country. Such weapons aren’t to be bought at a pub in South London; only some governments have access to them. And the ancient cui bono principle points at only one government with a vested interest in Col. Litvinenko’s death.

In fact, traces of polonium led investigators to another old KGB hand Andrei Lugovoy, who had had tea with his wayward colleague at a Grosvenor Square hotel shortly before Litvinenko’s horrific illness. Yet Lugovoy was unavailable for comment for he had hastily fled back to Moscow.

Half-hearted extradition requests by HMG were turned down by the KGB… sorry, how silly of me, Russia’s government is what I meant. And in the unlikely event such requests ever became more insistent, Lugovoy was ‘elected’ to the Duma, Russia’s ‘parliament’, thereby becoming eligible for parliamentary immunity. (I had to use quotation commas in the previous sentence, for no true elections are possible in Putin’s Russia, and providing a krysha for criminals is its parliament’s principal function.)

Some diplomatic tension ensued, a few diplomats were recalled, harsh words were exchanged. A couple of weeks later it was back to normal, with the Foreign Office restoring its generally benevolent stance towards Russia. ‘One of those things, old boy, what? A bit rough if you ask me, but let Russians be Russians, I say.’

But Litvinenko’s widow Marina wouldn’t let bygones be bygones. Her tireless efforts to find the truth have finally led to a full-blown inquest into her husband’s death. After all, he was a British subject murdered on British soil, and, for old times’ sake if nothing else, HMG couldn’t easily sweep the whole thing under the carpet.

At the preliminary hearing, Mrs Litvinenko’s representative Ben Emerson, QC, enunciated her belief that the Kremlin was to blame: ‘If that hypothesis were to be eventually substantiated, this would be an act of state-sponsored nuclear terrorism in the streets of London.’

Quite. It was very lawyerly of Mr Emerson to refer to the accusation as merely a hypothesis – people used to be strung up on considerably less evidence. But then his profession has its own language, based on the assumption that the shortest distance between two points is a zigzag.

Frankly, I’m not sure what the point of it all is. After all, the inquest is going to cost the taxpayer a lot of money, and nor do QCs come cheap. What kind of outcome would satisfy Mrs Litivinenko and her friends?

It’s already clear that, come what may, justice won’t be served. Lugovoy is still a member of the Duma, that krysha is still as reliable as ever, extradition will still be impossible.

Even if the inquest confirms formally the obvious fact that Col. Lugovoy laced Col. Litvinenko’s tea with polonium, Col. Putin will deny any complicity or indeed knowledge. Those aware of how things work in Russia will tell you that no such action could have been carried out without Putin’s explicit order, but no prima facie evidence of such an order will ever surface. Col. Putin’s professional training taught him to cover his tracks.

Should the inquest find for the truth, the papers will cover the story with front-page headlines. The next day the headlines will become smaller. The day after that they’ll disappear. The reading public’s indignation will be pari pasu attenuated. In a week few people will remember the story, and fewer still will care. Similarly, a few more second counsellors and third attachés will be recalled by both sides and replaced with their carbon copies. Have I left anything out?

But if the judges, driven by the same professional ethic that obligates Mr Emerson to refer to a fact as a hypothesis, fail to rule in favour of the truth, this will be a feather in Col. Putin’s peaked KGB cap. He’ll doff it and bow sarcastically in the general direction of London.

If he himself were on trial, I bet his criminal record wouldn’t be admissible. But outside the courtroom it’s useful to remember that Putin has rich form in bumping off those who disagree with him. At least 40 journalists have been murdered in Russia during his tenure, with countless others beaten within an inch of their lives.

I won’t bore you with a complete roll call, and neither shall I name the numerous human-rights campaigners, lawyers and political activists murdered or roughed up by Putin’s thugs. If I did, we’d be here all night. In any case, even those who realise anyway that Putin didn’t learn his manners from Debrett’s Etiquette for Young Ladies would shrug their shoulders. So he’s a murderous tyrant. We do business with enough of those, so what else is new?

In spite of all that, I wish Mrs Litvinenko good luck with the inquest. Don’t ask me why, I just do.

 

 

On Tuesday morning PCs Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes were ambushed and shot dead by a monster out on bail for another murder. This tragic event raises many questions, some of which are never asked and few are properly answered.

Falling in the first category are questions relating to the advisability of women discharging frontline police duties. I understand it’s all modern, progressive and egalitarian, but surely an unarmed 10-stone girl is at a disadvantage when trying to arrest a violent 15-stone thug? It’s not as if we were suffering from a dearth of able-bodied young men – just look at the unemployment figures for the 18 to 25s. I’m neither young nor particularly able-bodied, but even I’d fancy my chances against most WPCs one espies on the beat.

The presumption has to be that such girls will never have to find themselves in a mano a mano situation against men willing to perpetrate violence on them. I’m not going to argue against this assumption: the events of last Tuesday, and many similar outrages, have done the job for me.

This empirical evidence supports at least two propositions: one, policewomen should be confined to desk duty and two, police should be routinely armed.

Now the second proposition, unlike the first, has created a lively debate, in which people who agree with me are greatly outnumbered. This issue conspicuously leaves the realm of reason and enters that of superstition, something that lies out of reach for logical arguments.

Nonetheless I’ll try, if only because unarmed police is a totem attracting even such otherwise right-thinking worshippers as Stephen Glover. ‘An unarmed police is the cornerstone of our freedom,’ he writes, ‘and the key to effective policing.’

This is an astonishing thing to say when the bodies of two murdered WPCs are still warm. They are going neither to protect ‘the cornerstone of our freedom’ nor do any policing, effective or otherwise. They are dead.

Mr Glover’s arguments, and those of other likeminded sentimentalists, follow what seems to be a preset pattern:

1) Ever since Sir Robert Peel formed the Metropolitan police in 1829, ‘the British have been generally well disposed towards their police largely because they are unarmed.’ If they start carrying side arms, they’ll be despised and hated to a point where we’ll be terrified to ask them for directions for fear that they may shoot us.

2) If police carry guns, so will criminals, which will turn our streets into one giant OK Corral.

3) With the general increase in the number of guns, there will be more fatal accidents.

None of these arguments works. And Mr Glover himself unwittingly explains why: ‘Use of firearms by criminals has greatly increased over the past 50 years. Assault on police has become more widespread.’

How so? After all, our police have been properly and sanctimoniously unarmed all along. What has happened to that much-vaunted goodwill towards cops?

One has to come to the lamentable conclusion that today’s mores are as different from Victorian times as Dave Cameron is different from Robert Peel. Affection for police is obviously less fervent in the street than it is in the rarefied atmosphere of an editorial office or a Commons bar. I’m sure there one seldom hears our brave PCs referred to as ‘filth’ or ‘pigs’, which epithets are widely used even in the better postcodes.

In short, Point 1) is a figment of Mr Glover’s imagination. By way of trying to prove otherwise, he acknowledges that Britain is the only major country where police are unarmed. But, according to him, a holster dangling off a cop’s belt makes him ‘feared, or even hated’ in countries like France.

This is simply false. I spend half my time in France and I’ve never noticed any such thing among ‘perfectly ordinary middle-class people’. Also, as a young man I lived in America for 15 years, and I can assure Mr Glover that this demographic group is no more hostile to their police there than here.

Points 2) and 3) are both false because they are based on the belief that there’s a one-to-one correlation between gun crime and the number of legal guns in circulation. Alas, this isn’t the case.

For example, the gun-crime rate in Japan, where gun laws are among the world’s strictest, is very low. But among the large Japanese community in California, where handguns can be legally bought in any shopping mall, it’s lower still. In Switzerland, where every household is armed with automatic rifles and most with pistols as well, they don’t even keep murder statistics (‘once in a blue moon’ doesn’t qualify as such). New Hampshire has more guns per capita than any other state, yet the murder rate there is much lower than in Massachusetts, where guns are outlawed. And in Britain gun crime went up by 50 percent in the first year after handguns were banned.

This shows that propensity to do murder has nothing to do with the availability of guns. Moreover, it’s spurious to separate gun crime into a discrete category. Much more valid would be crime statistics in general: a man killed by a knife suffers as much as one killed by a bullet. As Glover correctly remarked, crime statistics, murder included, have skyrocketed since the Second World War. This points at a major cultural shift which is insensitive to the hardware carried by police.

One could offer extensive explanations, but they would be superfluous here. Let’s just say it’s a matter of empirical fact that police need to be armed now even if such a need didn’t exist in the past. As Americans say, it’s better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it.

I don’t know if the poor girls could have saved themselves had they carried guns. One of them seems to have been able to pull out her Taser, but that’s not a serious counterargument to a semiautomatic pistol. Another semiautomatic pistol might have been, especially if it had been drawn before the girls stepped into the lethal trap. We’ll never know now.

I sympathise with Mr Glover, whom I recognise as a fellow conservative. Hankering after better, more gentlemanly times of yesteryear comes naturally to us. But this noble nostalgia needs to be leavened with hardnosed realism based on empirical data.

These show that frontline police, especially if they are women, are in harm’s way now as they weren’t in any discernible past. A gun on their belt may stand between their life and death, so they must have it. Especially since arguments against this are so weak.

 

 

 

 

All this brouhaha with the presidential bid must have gone to Mitt’s head. Just listen to the unfounded, spurious, mendacious nonsense he’s spreading around.

In a secretly – and justifiably! – filmed video he says, ‘There are 47 percent who are with Barack Obama, who are dependent upon government… These are people who pay no income tax. My job is not to worry about those people.’

Is he trying to suggest that the selfless, altruistic, victimised people who derive their tax-free income from the state may vote for any candidate just because he promises more of it? Preposterous! We all know they’re guaranteed to support the candidate who says he’s going to get them off government payrolls and make them look for real jobs. Bono publico and all that, these chaps swear by it. And it’s those like Mitt whom they swear at.

And if that’s not enough, Romney then went on to spread lies – are you ready for this? – about the moderate, peace-loving, Israel-adoring people of Palestine. ‘I look at the Palestinians not wanting peace anyway, committed to the destruction of Israel…’ His nose is lengthening even as we speak.

All progressive people know for sure that every word there is a malicious falsehood. Palestinians want nothing but peace, prosperity and democracy, preferably of the American kind. The only reason they keep firing thousands of rockets at Israel is that the ghastly Israelis – led by a Likud  prime minister, may one add – want none of those things. They want war, genocide, tyranny and all those other horrible things Jews champion unless they vote for Obama.

And oh yes, every Palestinian leader from Arafat onwards has been misheard stating he wished to drive Israel into the sea. What they meant – what they actually said! – is that they’d like to drive to Israel for a sea holiday. Unplug your ears, Mitt! Now open your mouth and sing along: ‘Yasser, that’s my baby, Nasser, don’t mean maybe, Yasser, that’s my baby now.’ You know the tune.

If you think that was bad, what Mitt then had the gall to say about China really takes the fortune cookie. He implied – hell, he didn’t just imply, he said it out loud! – that Chinese workers toil in less than perfect conditions for less than princely wages. According to Romney’s slander, he was appalled by ‘…the number of hours they worked, the pittance they earned.’ And he was shamefully put off by the barbed wire surrounding the factory he visited.

Pittance, Mr Romney? Perhaps by the standards of your ill-gotten millions that’s what it is. Just shows how out of touch you are. Why, these people earn at least $1 a day – and every day they can buy a whole bowl of rice! Not a quarter of one, not even half! A whole bowl, and they don’t even have to share it with many children because their government cares about them and therefore allows them to have only one. And, as his Chinese hosts kindly and truthfully explained, the barbed wire isn’t there to keep the workers in, but to keep thousands of job applicants out. That’s what real humanism is all about, something this running dog of capitalism needs to get his head around.

It’s no wonder Romney’s fascist, bigoted, reactionary, racist, homophobic (well, strike that, perhaps not racist and homophobic, but definitely all the other things) remarks have caused so much outrage in the progressive community not only in the USA but everywhere.

A Palestinian spokesman said Romney’s remarks were ‘irresponsible and dangerous’. That’s putting it mildly, if you ask me. What can be more irresponsible and dangerous? Certainly nor flying airliners into tall buildings.

And Obama’s campaign manager, a man of utmost selflessness, objectivity and veracity, quite rightly said that ‘… it’s shocking for a candidate… [to suggest] that half the American people view themselves as victims entitled to handouts.’ He didn’t add that what’s even more shocking is that the statement was true, so I have to do that for Mr Messina. Telling the truth, Mitt? Call yourself a politician?

Poor Romney gets it coming and going. Even Bill Kristol, the editor of what The Times describes as ‘the arch-conservative Weekly Standard’, is irate. Let’s remark parenthetically that for publications like The Times, there’s no such thing as simply conservative. The adjective is never complete without intensifiers like ‘arch’, ‘ultra’, ‘rabidly’ or ‘extremely’. But the Weekly Standard is actually none of those things. It’s not conservative at all. It’s neoconservative, meaning mostly socialist, but with a good touch of American supremacism and expansionism.

People of this persuasion make up Romney’s foreign-policy team, and therein lies Kristol’s problem. He described Romney’s remarks as ‘arrogant and stupid’ not because he disagreed with them, God forbid, certainly not with the ones about Palestinians. It’s just that by speaking in such a forthright manner Mitt let the cat out of the bag. People all over the world are up in arms, which means Romney has hurt his chances. What’s worse, he hurt the chances of Kristol and his jolly friends to find themselves at the pinnacle of power.

Any way you look at it, Romney has committed the ultimate faux pas of politics: he said things that MUST NOT BE SAID. So what if they are all true? That makes it much, much worse. Mitt is in the business of politics, not of truth-telling. And if he doesn’t realise that the two never overlap, he’s even more ‘arrogant and stupid’ than Kristol says.

Grow up, Mitt. Tell lies, if that’s what people want to hear. And never, ever tell the truth – even if the people want to hear it. That way you’ll be a real politician. And what’s more, you may be a president, my son.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Legal used to be married to just, but they seem to be divorced now. Witness the case of Sara Catt, a 35-year-old woman who aborted her child within a week of the delivery date.

Jailing Catt for eight years, Judge Cooke said, ‘The child in the womb was so near to birth, in my judgment all right-thinking people would think this offence more serious than unintentional manslaughter.’

All right-thinking people would indeed think just that. They’d also know that ‘unintentional manslaughter’ is a tautology. Manslaughter is unintentional by definition. If it’s intentional it’s murder.

Therefore, in the judge’s legal opinion Mrs Catt is guilty of something ‘more serious’ than manslaughter, which is to say murder. Now the presence or absence of malice aforethought is one difference between manslaughter and murder. The other is the sentencing guidelines.

The sentence for manslaughter is discretionary: the judge is free to pass any sentence he sees fit. When the defendant is found guilty of murder, however, that freedom is no longer there: the law calls for a mandatory life sentence.

Mrs Catt clearly planned the termination. She had to get a prescription for the abortion drug Misoprostol, go to the chemist’s, buy the drug, take it. Even by much more exacting American standards, this would be construed as premeditation. In the UK it definitely is. Why wasn’t she sentenced to life then?

Obviously, the judge felt he had to go against the ‘judgment of all right-thinking people’, presumably including himself, to find some mitigating circumstances that brought this crime down a notch in the pecking order of unlawful homicide. I’d be curious to know what they might be, though I can guess.

The judge must have followed some guidelines according to which a baby isn’t fully human until it crawls out of the mother’s womb. One minute after this the baby is a human being. One minute before, it is – what exactly? A mineral, vegetable, animal? Well, something less than human. It’s human 395, 281 minutes after conception. After a mere 395, 279 minutes it isn’t quite.

These sums simply don’t add up on any level, medical, philosophical, logical – and we won’t even talk religious, that’s simply too uncool for words. If we define murder as premeditated homicide, then the only possible argument against abortion at any time – and certainly a week before birth – has to centre around an indefensible view of when a human life begins.

In the UK abortion is legal until 24 weeks, roughly six months. The assumption has to be that until then the foetus isn’t an autonomous entity but part of the mother’s body, like an appendix. If that’s the case, then the argument works. A woman must be as free to have her baby aborted as she is have a bothersome appendix removed.

But that assumption is patently wrong. We needn’t go into the graphic details of what a foetus looks like at six months – we’ve all seen the same pictures. We also know that a foetus at that age or even younger can grow to maturity outside the mother’s body. Nor is it a secret that the foetus already has a brisk cerebral activity and is capable of feeling anguish and pain.

True enough, if prematurely removed from the mother’s body, the baby will need constant care and medical attention to survive on its own. But that’s equally true of the retarded, the crippled, the very ill or old – and yet few this side of Dr Mengele would advocate a wholesale cull of such people, though I wouldn’t put it past our euthanasia junkies.

So when does a human life begin? The question isn’t trivial: after all, if we wrongly assume it hasn’t yet begun and terminate it, we may be killing a person, which, for old times’ sake, still isn’t considered a nice thing to do.

Our law presumes that life starts at 24, weeks that is. Now how about 23 weeks, six days, 23 hours and 59 minutes? Are we absolutely certain that life begins in the 60 seconds separating the two moments, and not a second earlier?

Of course we are not. The 24-week cut-off is purely arbitrary – which can be demonstrated by subtracting a minute each time its advocate pushes the allowable limit back. This means that any upper limit for abortion will be arbitrary, for we can never be sure we aren’t killing a human being.

If we aren’t sure one way or the other, basic decency would demand that the legal concept of reasonable doubt be applied. The foetus must be presumed alive until proven otherwise. No rational difference between pre- and post-natal abortion exists.

The only indisputable moment at which human life begins is that of conception. Elementary morality boosted by equally elementary logic must lead to one conclusion only: ergo, abortion constitutes the taking of a human life. As with any such act, there may be redeeming circumstances, and some – such as the mother’s inevitable death unless the pregnancy is terminated – may even be regarded as adequate justification. Fair enough, similar qualifications apply to homicides. But though they apply to some, they don’t exculpate all.

This logic seems hard to refute even at the puny rationalistic level at which our laws operate. But forget about arguments against abortion as such for a second. Let’s instead get back to Sara Catt.

By any reasonable standards, this woman is guilty of murder – as she would be had she committed the same crime a week later. Her derisory eight-year sentence means that reasonable standards no longer operate.

Labour treasurer Diana Holland has supported the TUC decision to call a general strike, the first one since 1926. This is a good time for a call to disband the unions.

Trade unions first appeared during the Industrial Revolution, and at that time they had a useful role to play. New-fangled assembly lines reduced many workers to performing elementary mechanical tasks for which little qualification was required. That essentially made them interchangeable and dispensable, tipping the balance of negotiating power too much in favour of employers.

Collective bargaining was therefore an essential check, a tool for maintaining a fair equilibrium in the workplace. Hence the unions, with their ability to organise workers into a cohesive force able to use strikes as a way of ensuring equitable pay, decent working conditions, sick pay, retirement benefits and so forth.

However, it’s hard not to notice that things have changed since the 19^th century. Unlike Queen Victoria, today’s princesses are photographed naked. Unlike Disraeli, today’s politicians neither write nor, one suspects, read books. Unlike those poor tots in workhouses, today’s children spend most of their time playing with prohibitively expensive toys. And, of immediate relevance, unlike those soot-faced chaps turning nuts on conveyor belts, most of today’s labour is highly qualified.

Individual qualifications obviate the need for collective security. Qualified labour holds a cosh over employers’ heads simply by virtue of being qualified and therefore hard to replace or bully. No sane boss would underpay, mistreat or arbitrarily sack a good employee for he’d know that finding a replacement may be expensive, time-consuming and generally counterproductive.

So what exactly are the unions for? These days? They are an out-and-out anachronism, one that ought to have been phased out in parallel with the social and industrial conditions of Victorian England.

Admittedly, there still may be a few occupations where workers are interchangeable, and there some limited presence of organised labour may be desirable. But surely teachers and university professors, to name one example, don’t fall into that category? And yet even our academics have their union, proving that they are justifiably reluctant to rely on their competence as the starting point of bargaining.

Organised labour no longer has a useful role to play, which allows it to concentrate on increasing its own wealth and might. This gives inordinate power to the unions or, to be more precise, to their leaders. Not only can those chaps make the Labour party do their bidding, but they can blackmail the whole country into… what exactly? What is it that they actually want? Apart from ruling the roost?

According to a Labour source, ‘Both Ed Miliband and Ed Balls made that view very clear this week. What is vital is that the government changes course on its disastrous economic plan, which is creating huge anger across the country.’ Now, since 80 percent of Labour’s funding comes from the unions, the Eds’ views will not contradict those of the TUC. So both Labour and its paymasters want the government to stop even token cuts in public spending and revert to adding to our public debt, already over a trillion pounds. They want to solve the problem by making it worse.

In other words, not to cut too fine a point, they wish to destroy our economy and with it our liberties. For the only way for the state to keep up its suicidal policies, against fundamental economic principles and indeed common sense, is to assume total control of the economy, thus acquiring inordinate power over the individual. And since the modern state is circumscribed by the bureaucracy running it, in effect both Labour leaders and their puppet masters wish to exploit ‘huge anger across the country’ to acquire dictatorial powers.

Nothing new about that – the previous paragraph is socialism in a nutshell. Of course all three major parties are socialist nowadays but, at least at their grassroots, they aren’t socialist to the same degree. What the unions and Labour preach, and now threaten to practise, is pure, unadulterated Marxism.

In that connection, it’s useful to remember that ‘Red Ed’ Miliband acquired his nickname against the generally pink backdrop of Labour politics. He isn’t just ‘Red’ compared to Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, he’s ‘Red’ compared to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.

Ed is also refreshingly ignorant about economics, as demonstrated by his generous admission that he doesn’t ‘mind the rich as long as they get there the hard way.’ What Ed means is that he does mind those who inherit their wealth or acquire it through investments. The classic communist stance running in the Miliband family is that only toil, preferably physical, ought to be rewarded with money. Ed’s economics are different from Pol Pot’s only tactically, not in principle.

Now he and the other Ed flap their eyelashes and whisper flirtatiously that they don’t really want a crippling general strike. The best way to stop flirting and come across would be to disavow their party treasurer in no uncertain terms and sack her, effective immediately.

But they are neither willing nor able to do anything like that. Holland, after all, is a career union stooge, whose links with the TUC may be even stronger than the Eds’. On top of her day job, she’s assistant general secretary of Unite (something that may be regarded as conflict of interest in some quarters). And, as the party’s treasurer, she’s the one who knocks on the unions’ door with her hand outstretched. That makes her well-nigh untouchable.

Only strong, resolute, union-busting action on the part of the government can prevent the national catastrophe the Marxists are trying to perpetrate so wickedly and irresponsibly. Such action could only be taken by a strong, resolute government, which is rather the opposite of the one we are cursed with. Margaret Thatcher, where are you when we need you?

 

 

 

 

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are suing the French magazine Closer for publishing topless photos of the duchess. Considering France’s privacy laws, they’re likely to win the case. But in a case like this there really can be no winners.

‘These photos are not in the least shocking,’ claimed the magazine spokesman. ‘They show a young woman sunbathing topless, like the millions of women you see on beaches.’

In general one ought to be wary of French publications bearing English names. The theatre supplement of Le Figaro, for example, is most unfortunately called Le Clap, casting aspersion on the entire thespian profession in the country. But this time the hack was right: that’s exactly what the pictures show.

Similarly, earlier shots showed Prince Harry cavorting at a nude orgy – like millions of other young men you see in any city, and certainly in Las Vegas.

Still earlier shots showed Princess Michael of Kent sharing a romantic weekend in Venice with a much younger Russian ‘businessman’ – like millions of other older women you see enjoying out-of-town trysts with toy boys.

Also, Kate’s late mother-in-law was photographed bikini-clad in the company of her cokehead lover – like millions of other women attracted to rich playboys of questionable reputation.

And let’s not forget the Sun pictures of the Duchess of York having her toes sucked by an athletic American – like millions of other women with lovelorn feet and love-hungry boyfriends.

You may also remember Kate’s husband, then her fiancé, snapped glassy-eyed with his shirt hanging out, as he was staggering out of a nightclub at 4 am – like millions of other young men who go clubbing, with passers-by hoping it’s not them the youngsters will club.

Then, after all these recollections, let’s remind ourselves that the royals aren’t like millions of others. Their lives aren’t entirely theirs; they belong to the nation they serve. They are born, or marry, into a life of great privilege and luxury – but also one of unique responsibility.

Part of that responsibility is to behave with dignity and restraint at all times, even at home or when visiting family and friends. For the royals aren’t private individuals, certainly not merely that. Inasmuch as they represent the reigning dynasty, they act as public symbols of the realm.

This is an exceptionally hard task, and it takes an outstanding person like Her Majesty, God bless her, to pull it off with such epic élan over the better part of a century. In the 60 years since her accession, the Queen has been implicated neither in a single scandal nor even in a whiff of an indiscretion, no matter how minor.

That takes extraordinary strength of character, and the younger royals have a shining example to follow. They must learn that valour isn’t the only thing that discretion is the better part of.

From what one can tell, Kate can make an excellent Queen when her time comes, which is more than one could say for her late mother-in-law. Though not born in the purple, the duchess has so far worn it well.

Nevertheless, contrary to what the Closer hack says, these pictures are shocking. They don’t show the manipulative exhibitionism displayed by some other royals in the past, but they do betoken a certain lack of care.

Announcing the lawsuit for invasion of privacy, a Clarence House spokesman said the incident is ‘reminiscent of the worst excesses of the press and paparazzi during the life of Diana’. Indeed it is. But surely because unscrupulous hacks have done this many times before, the royal couple should have envisaged the possibility that they’d do it again.

Surely they must know that, the moment their engagement was announced, the hunting season was open, with them the game and paparazzi the hunters. These reptilian creatures shouldn’t exist. But they do, and they are what they are.

I don’t know if Kate was indeed ‘visible from the street,’ as Closer’s editor claimed. But she was certainly visible to modern photographic technology, which now can even be mounted on drones. If the surface of Mars can be photographed with astonishing resolution, then the princess’s body can be safely presumed to be within reach at almost any time she’s outdoors, or even indoors with windows open.

Kate and Will are modern young people, and they are well aware of the technological progress of which modernity is so proud. But they represent an institution that isn’t modern but rather eternal, one that links generations past with those present and future. This means they’ve relinquished the right to behave the way millions of other modern young men and women do.

This is a big sacrifice on their part, and it’s made up of many small sacrifices, such as having to put up with bikini lines. But it’s something we can not only expect but indeed demand. They will one day become our King and Queen, filling the throne occupied with so much honour and distinction by Her Majesty. Given the swell of republican sentiment in the country, unless they’re careful they may not have a throne to occupy.

That would be their loss, and, even more so, ours. I do hope they care – enough to keep some garments on when they are within reach of spying cameras.

 

 

 

Jose Manuel Barroso’s call for creating a ‘federation of nation states’ distinctly lacked novelty appeal. He did float a specific timeline for this, 2014, but that didn’t come across as something chiselled in stone. At a pinch, the federasts could wait another year – what’s a few months among friends?

As to the inexorable drive towards a single European state, the only amazing thing is the incredulous reaction to it. The idea has been bandied about since Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet first began to talk about Europe pooling its resources. At first, it was all backstage nudges and winks: they think it’s all about coal and steel, but bright chaps like us know better, don’t we, Robert? Mais bien sûr, Jean.

Gradually, the federasts became more forthright about their aspirations, and these were in any case evident from their actions: ‘Ye shall know them by their fruits’. The latest fruit falling off that rotten tree is the banking union announced last week. It doesn’t take a political genius of Machiavellian proportions to realise that a combination of monetary and banking union presupposes a single state. So what’s the big surprise?

The Trotskyite French newspaper La Liberation (described in our press as ‘respected’ – by whom?) proudly revealed its great scoop: Dave has privately warned François that any change in the existing EU treaties will force him to call a referendum. ‘In order for him to win it, and for his country to stay in the EU,’ say the comrades, we had better tread softly, ‘starting from the principle that not everyone in a Europe of 30 or 35 will do the same thing.’

Of course they won’t – why should the Fourth Reich be any different from the Third? The Germans will drive the lorry, the French collabos will navigate, everyone else will bounce up and down on the flatbed, occasionally falling out through the tailgate. Nothing new there, but, assuming the comrades didn’t invent the whole thing, which they’re eminently capable of, the story is still interesting.

If they quote correctly, Dave has abandoned the last pretence of being even a mild, wishy-washy eurosceptic. Should a referendum be called, he would regard as a victory Britain’s staying in the EU, even if she doesn’t ‘do the same thing’ as the Übermenschen.

True enough, Dave has stated on numerous occasions that on his watch Britain will stay in the EU no matter what. It’s from this position that he expects to negotiate with the Euro powers that be.

The position is weak to the point of being untenable. If the option of withdrawal were on the table, Dave could start by saying, ‘If you want us to remain in the EU, here’s what you must do…’ As it is, he has given the federasts the power to say, ‘If you want to remain in the EU, here’s what you must do…’ Note to Dave: Don’t ever play no-limit poker, mate. You’ll lose your custom-made shirt.

This of course hints at the kind of referendum we’ll get, if indeed we ever get one. I’d bet my bottom euro that the question put to the electorate will be nothing as straightforward as ‘in or out?’. In a slightly expanded form, this question could run something like ‘Should Britain leave the EU now that it is turning into a single federated state?’ Much more likely is a typical Dave prevarication along the lines of ‘Should we or should we not insist that more powers be repatriated to Britain?’

In the first example, a ‘yes’ vote would take us out of the EU. In the second, a ‘yes’ vote would mean a square root of zero. It goes without saying or voting that all countries within a EUSSR would retain some measure of local control.

For example, when half of European Russia was part of the Third Reich, local government was almost entirely in the hands of Russian collaborators – the Germans had only a few thousand men scattered around an area the size of Western Europe, clearly not enough to do anything other than provide the overall direction. But there was still no doubt as to who was in charge and who called the strategic shots.

In the closest, though not close enough, parallel, all American states have a great deal of autonomy within the federation. But when in 1860 some of them chose to push it to the logical extreme of secession, we all know what happened. Since then, the central government has been in total control whenever it chose to exercise it.

That’s how it’ll be should Dave succeed in keeping Britain at the outskirts of the European Federation. What’s worse, he knows it and doesn’t care. All he wants is for the federasts to toss him a bone he could then hold up, claiming it’s a fillet steak.

The very fabric of the EU is a tissue of lies, and has been from the beginning. We can’t expect the truth now; things have gone too far. What we must do is realise how grave the situation is and use every means at our disposal to put pressure on Dave and his likeminded colleagues in the other two parties.

We don’t want just any old referendum, the message should be. In the absence of a government capable of taking the right decisions without resorting to plebiscite, we want a clear-cut choice: do we or do we not want to be but a province in a federal Europe. How do you reckon the vote would go?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The American ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three consular officials were murdered in Beghazi. The diplomats didn’t deserve their tragic fate. The country that sent them did.

The asinine efforts by the US to introduce ‘democracy’ in the Middle East and indulge in ‘nation building’ have been backfiring on American and British soldiers for 10 years. Now it’s the diplomats’ turn.

In any country at any time, the murder of ambassadors has been treated as an instant casus belli. Even Genghis Khan’s boys would usually spare the population of any town they captured – unless their envoys had been killed there. Because the Mongols regarded such an act as unforgivable treachery, they would then slaughter everybody within the town walls: men, women, children, even domestic animals. In a less remote and more Western example, the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo triggered the First World War.

This time the US administration, speaking through Hilary Clinton, hastened to declare that nothing of the sort is on the cards. ‘This was an attack by a small and savage group, not the people and government of Libya,’ she said. That may be true. But then Ferdinand too was only murdered by Gavrilo Princip, not the people and government of Bosnia.

Actually, though undoubtedly savage, the group wasn’t all that small. The attack succeeded thanks to a coordinated diversion created by a hundreds-strong mob, screaming Islamist slogans, trying to scale the embassy walls and set the building on fire. The well-rehearsed protesters acted as beaters on a shoot: they drew the embassy staff out. Led by Mr Stevens, they tried to seek safety outside the compound and walked straight into the terrorists’ guns and rockets.

In parallel, there was widespread, precisely timed mob action in Tunisia, Algeria, Sudan, Egypt and in Palestine. Frenzied crowds burned US flags, screaming sweet endearments, such as ‘Obama, Obama, we are here for the triumph of Islam’ and ‘We are all Osama.’

There was a ring of truth to these statements, and yet it’s unlikely that the Obama administration will take the murderers’ accomplices at their word. The official line, enunciated by Mrs Clinton, is that they aren’t ‘all Osama’. They’re rather lamentably misguided persons who haven’t yet realised they’re all democrats at heart.

Acting in the capacity of psychoanalyst, America is there to help the wild-eyed fanatics get in touch with their inner pro-democracy selves. Hiding in the innermost crevices of the murderers’ souls, their gentle, feminine egos will then emerge out of their inflamed innards and go to work for the good of the world.

One has to admit, with sadness, that 9/11 scrambled what passes for the brains of those in charge of US foreign policy. They simply don’t have the mental wherewithal to put the events of the last decade into the context of the previous 1,400 years of history. This has been marked by Islam’s ever-present, unrelenting hostility to the West and everything it holds dear. What has changed from time to time is ways in which this hostility was manifested.

These have depended mainly on the relative strength of the two adversaries, and also on the amount of passion they could bring to bear on the historical moment. When the pendulum swung the Muslims’ way, they conquered the southern half of Europe. A swing to the other end brought about the Crusades. And so it went, back and forth, for almost a millennium and a half.

It’s only to obtuse ignorance that one can ascribe the urge to convert Islam to Western pluralism. And when ignorance is fortified by proselytising activism, a catastrophe beckons. These are impossible premises from which a sensible policy could be worked out.

The only sane way for the West to handle the Muslim threat is to acknowledge that it is indeed a threat. The very nature of Islam runs against the grain of our religion, culture, philosophy, politics, general aspirations.

Islam demands docile obedience and precludes free enquiry. If the Muslims were allowed the same latitude we have in the West, Islam would instantly collapse as a social and political force. The Muslims are perfectly aware of this, which is why their world can’t be reformed, transformed or even mollified. It should be left to its own vices and devices.

But there ought to be an important proviso: we’ll leave them alone only if they reciprocate. If they choose instead to act out their murderous anti-Western fantasies, they must be punished for it, pure and simple. And if the punishment is to have any deterrent value, it ought to be suitably apocalyptic.

Thus military force shouldn’t be used to build nations, introduce democracy and encourage the Muslims to think along the lines of mum and apple pie. It must be used for punitive and educational purposes only. Spare the Tomahawks and spoil the Muslims, should be the guiding principle.

Forget about encouraging the mythical moderate elements within the Islamic world. The only suitable response to the murder of the US ambassador is to unleash hell on the country in which this crime was committed. The two US carrier groups parked in the Gulf, along with other forces, possess every tactical means to, say, reduce Beghazi to rubble.

Then a message must be sent to the Muslim orbi et urbi: Any hostile action against Western lives and property, inside or outside the Middle East, will automatically lead to the destruction of the entire infrastructure of the country implicated, no matter how obliquely, in such action.

The US will then no longer have to police the Middle East – it’ll police itself. A few massive raids would encourage its own law enforcement to arab-spring into action. Moreover, any collateral damage would be negligible compared to the decade of war stupidly waged by Americans, and to the more decades certain to follow.

That’s how governments led by statesmen would act. But Obama won’t let such trivialities distract him from the presidential campaign. Romney will of course try to make political capital out of  the incident, but, should he become president, he’ll immediately begin his own campaign for a second term. The foreign-policy part of it will be driven by the democracy-seekers and nation-builders in his entourage, so no clear understanding of the situation is likely to emerge.

Meanwhile, Americans and other Westerners, in or out of uniform, will continue to die. To quote Seneca, ‘None of it can be prevented; all of it can be despised.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This year marks the bicentenary of the 1812 war, and the other day three Americans, aged 14, 12 and 10, assured me they knew all about it.

Yet some gentle probing revealed that to them 1812 meant the conflict between the USA and Britain, not Russia’s victory over Napoleon. The youngsters were vague about which event inspired the celebrated Overture, and words like Borodino and Berezina drew blank stares.

This isn’t to imply criticism. At their age I hadn’t even heard about the first war, though I knew quite a bit about the second. My excuse is that I grew up in the wrong country, but then so did they.

The anniversary should remind us how imprecise a science history is. Ideology tends to obscure facts with fiction, and facts fade away. History becomes retrospective politics, with even the issue of who won a battle or a war often a matter of subjective opinion.

Thus Americans regard their 1812 as a moral victory in a second war of liberation. In fact, a tiny fragment of the British army, the bulk of which was otherwise engaged in the Iberian Peninsula, valiantly kept Canada from adding a few more stars to the American flag. Repelling American northward expansion may not have constituted a moral victory, but it certainly was a strategic one.

Today’s American schoolchildren study the war as an essential part of their history. British pupils, with some exceptions, have never even heard of it.

Russian children, by contrast, are inundated with information about their own 1812. Alas, much of it has been systematically falsified. This isn’t surprising for its principal source isn’t historical but literary. In this, 1812 resembles the Trojan War, and indeed Tolstoy’s War And Peace has been compared favourably to Homer’s Iliad, mostly by Count Leo himself.

Considering that the Napoleonic wars are about 22 centuries closer to our time, one would think that Russian history teachers shouldn’t have to rely on fiction. Sure enough, there’s no dearth of scholarly sources on 1812. But fiction is such an integral part of Russian historiography that a frankly jingoistic novelist is seen as a sufficiently reliable source.

Tolstoy describes all German officers fighting the Russian corner as pedantic bunglers and nincompoops. This took much fancy footwork, since that group included such internationally respected warriors as Wittgenstein, Bennigsen, Barclay de Tolly and Stein. But then Tolstoy even tags Napoleon as a military nonentity.

The writer glosses over the fact that three of the four supreme commanders of Russian armies during the Napoleonic wars were German (Barclay de Tolly, Wittgenstein, Bennigsen) and only Kutuzov was a simon-pure Russian. It was actually the German Scot Barclay, not the senile Commander-in-Chief Kutuzov, who was chiefly responsible for saving what was left of the army after the Russians’ defeat in the only major battle of the war.

Yet Tolstoy extols Kutuzov as a military genius, a sort of Antaeus deriving his strength from Russia’s saintly soil. Serious historians beg to differ.

In their eyes, Kutuzov’s do-nothing campaign could easily have ended in disaster. It was because of his passivity that the battle of Austerlitz had been lost, and as hostilities shifted into Russia proper Kutuzov lost at Borodino, surrendering Moscow as a result. Muscovites, probably led by their mayor, then set fire to the capital, leaving the French without supplies and quarters during a particularly inclement winter. That desperate act, unprecedented in modern war history, drove the French out, but this had nothing to do with Kutuzov.

Even then he missed the easiest of chances to finish off the French army in full flight, capture Napoleon and end the war a couple of years earlier. However, Tolstoy argues that even the Borodino battle, in which Russian casualties were 60 percent higher than French, was a victory because Napoleon lost the war in the end. That’s like saying that the French defeated Hitler in 1940 because de Gaulle triumphantly entered Paris in 1944.

Tolstoy lovingly describes how Kutuzov snored through the Military Council at which the momentous decision to surrender Moscow was taken. In some quarters such somnolence could have been regarded as criminal negligence, but Kutuzov could do no wrong according to Tolstoy.

What mattered to him was that, as an ethnic Russian, Kutuzov was in touch with the mysterious forces governing matters martial with no contribution from any human agency. It was irrelevant that at least 40 percent of all senior officers were of foreign origin, and even many of those regarded as native were indeed of Moldavian, Georgian, Lithuanian, Armenian, Tartar or other non-Slavic descent.

It’s Tolstoy’s fiction that has become canonised in history books. Any Russian pupil will tell you that Kutuzov was a giant among military pigmies, and Borodino was a Russian victory. Similarly, most commentators – amazingly even in the West – accept Tolstoy’s idealised portrayal of pitchfork-wielding peasants as real.

It’s true that Russia was saved not only by the fire of Moscow and -40 temperatures, for which Napoleon’s army was ill-prepared, but also by partisan warfare. But this wasn’t quite the spontaneous expression of the folk spirit of Tolstoy’s fancy. The idea for it had come from aristocratic officers, such as Denis Davydov (appearing as Denisov in War And Peace) and Alexander Figner. They were the ones who ran the guerrilla war, using regular cavalry units as the core of partisan forces.

At first Kutuzov fought their proposals tooth and nail, but then reluctantly sanctioned guerrilla action behind enemy lines. Perhaps he was persuaded by the success of such warfare in Spain. Or, more likely, he felt sleepy, as he did most of the time, and couldn’t be bothered to argue any longer.

For all that, the bicentenary of 1812 is eminently worth celebrating, even though Russia conceivably could have benefited more from losing. This may also be a good occasion for history to oust fiction, if such a thing is ever possible in Russia.

 

 

 

 

Ed Balls and Vince Cable have finally come out and admitted to a close relationship. No, not of the kind that would soon make them eligible for holy matrimony. Neither is that way inclined, and Vince is past the age of consent anyway. Their relationship is that of ideological brothers, with both dead set on getting ahead by turning Britain into Greece.

An undertaking of this magnitude is too big for one man, and the brothers know it. ‘I could work with Vince,’ said Ed, snuggling up closer to Cable on the sofa in the BBC studio. ‘Vince should be listened to on banking reform and on the economy.’

I agree. It is indeed an outrage that we haven’t listened to Vince attentively enough. Had we done so we’d know that his economic ideas are akin to those of an arsonist who pretends to be dousing a fire by pouring lighter fluid on it.

His notion of growth is the state spending more and taxing more. ‘I have not been embarrassed to call myself a person of the centre left,’ declared Vince with pride – and excessive modesty. I get terribly tangled up in all those political soubriquets, but if this is centre left, I’d like to know what hard left is. How, specifically, are Vince’s notions different from – take your pick: a) Scargill’s, b) Livingstone’s, c) Castro’s?

While Vince lacks the honesty to echo François Hollande’s admission that he hates the rich, every pronouncement he makes, every measure he proposes screams hatred and envy. This isn’t counterbalanced by any affection for the poor, unless tireless toil to multiply their number qualifies as such.

To Vince, taxation is for taxation’s sake, not for the sake of having more money to give to those who won’t work for it. He knows, for example, that the 50-percent tax bracket resulted in less government revenue, not more. No matter. The higher rate ‘sent an important message’, of the kind François has enunciated with such charming frankness.

Make no mistake about it: it’s our socialist policies, not some global force majeure, that have got our economy into its present state. A burgeoning welfare state is not only ruinous economically but also corrupting morally – which in turn exacerbates its deleterious effect on the economy. An economy bustling with industry and creative energy could perhaps absorb this abomination for a while and still keep the books balanced. An economy such as ours ends up running up a trillion-pound debt.

Apart from being a millstone around our neck, such a catastrophic debt negates the very democratic principles by which our politicians swear. Implicit in such principles is that a development of this magnitude should require consent from the people who are going to bear its brunt. These are mostly generations not yet born and therefore by definition not in a position to express their consent at the voting booth or otherwise.

Vince’s solution? More taxation, more spending, more borrowing, more money printing, more debt, more stifling of wealth production, more tape whose colour matches his politics. This criminally asinine ideology comfortably coexists in Vince’s breast with a knack for political intrigue that puts Machiavelli to shame.

If you listen to the Andrew Marr interview carefully, the love-in between Ed and Vince laid bare their joint strategy, and they aren’t even bright enough to keep it under wraps until it’s time to strike. Ed went Balls to the wall promoting Vince as Nick’s replacement at the head of the LibDems. Cable had ‘distinguished himself,’ went the message, and Ed would be ‘very surprised if Nick Clegg fights the next election.’

One would think that a prominent member of one party should keep his mouth shut on a possible leadership contest in another. Common tact would demand this, but then Ed is a politician, and a bullying leftie at that.

In response, Vince confirmed that his accession to party leadership is indeed the first leg of the joint Labour-LibDem strategy: ‘I am very happy with Nick, he will continue in the job,’ he said. If you are insufficiently fluent in political, allow me to translate. What Vince said means ‘I hate Nick with unmitigated passion and will do all I can to knife him in the back at the first opportunity.’

And the second leg? Ed was just as forthcoming as his new-found brother: ‘I am not somebody who is thinking to myself I want a [Labour-LibDem] coalition for the future. I want a Labour majority government elected in 2015.’ Of course he does. But should by some miracle the polls suggest that the ideal is unachievable, such a coalition would work nicely.

Vince then gave his ringing endorsement: ‘I have no ambitions.’ It takes truly refreshing effrontery for any politician, and especially for one as conniving and nakedly ambitious as Cable, to utter such words. However, he didn’t mean it the way it sounded, though he did say something he meant: ‘But I do have perfectly businesslike, amicable relationships with members of the Labour Party and other parties.’ And, ‘I’m happy to talk to Ed.’

No translation necessary this time. Vince has endorsed the possibility of a coalition with Labour, should it miraculously fail to score an outright victory in 2015. And if Labour does form the next government, Vince will probably be a member of it – a short walk across the aisle is all that’ll take, along with some prior groundwork behind the back of his current coalition partners.

Labour and LibDems are united in their visceral urge to take revenge on those who make themselves and others independent of the state. They are both likely to regard the subsequent collapse of the economy as acceptable collateral damage. The only possible obstacle on the way to their joining forces would be the personal hubris of the parties’ leaders. That’s why Ed and Vince went to such lengths to reassure themselves and their parties that an equitable accommodation can be found.

Job done. Shame about the country.