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My affection for international organisations of any kind, never overwhelming under the best of circumstances, has just found new limits. Yesterday Russia was admitted into the World Trade Organisation.

Also admitted on the same day was that great trading nation of Vanuatu, about which I know, in broad strokes, nothing, other than that it’s somewhere in the Pacific. My knowledge of Russia is somewhat more extensive, and it seems to be more accurate than that of the WTO.

To the credit of this august organisation, it has rebuffed Russia’s attempts to join for the better part of 20 years, ever since the words ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’ first entered Western lexicons. What, one wonders, has made the WTO change its mind? Or, to put it in a different way, how has Russia changed in the last 20 years?

One of the key desiderata to which the WTO is committed is transparency, meaning, presumably, that a member’s trading practices are aboveboard, there for all to see. Well, if the consensus is that Russia satisfies this requirement better now than she did 20 years ago, the consensus is simply wrong.

Transparency International, whose very name is consonant with WTO values, has a corruption index of 182 countries. Russia is currently in the 143th place, sandwiched between Nigeria and Timor, those well-known champions of economic probity.

Way above Russia on this list are such committed practitioners of fair, transparent trade as Rwanda (49), Namibia (57) and Cuba (61), which is a good reason for a sly chuckle. But then one looks at a few other lists, and the chuckle becomes a moan.

For Russia is the world’s ninth largest economy, and no country even remotely in the same neighbourhood is as far down on the Corruption Index. If that gives you food for thought, feast on this: of the nine countries known to possess nuclear weapons, only North Korea is below Russia at Number 182. Even Pakistan (134) is above Russia, to say nothing of the UK (16), the USA (24), France (25), Israel (36), China (75) and India (95).

Russia, in other words, isn’t someone you want as a neighbour or a guest in your house. She won’t just nick the odd silver spoon – she can get a removal truck in, empty the house and then blow it up. What then are the advantages of having her in the WTO?

This organisation is supposed to grease the wheels of international trade, making both exports and imports easier and less costly. In terms of exports, one can see how China, another utterly unpleasant place, can be helped by the WTO, whose member she has been since 2001. China’s economy, after all, is all about exporting goods made cheap by the country’s vast pool of slave or near-slave labour.

But Russia already has a €100-billion trading surplus, mostly thanks to her exports of commodities, such as hydrocarbons. Of her €200 billion worth of exports to Europe, €115 billion comes from oil and gas. The prices for those are set by world markets, and Russia’s membership in any organisation isn’t going to change matters one bit. Russia also exports weapons, competing with America in this area, and vodka.

What else is she going to export in any serious volume? Her cars, the automotive answer to Chernobyl? Her stylish clothes, based on GULAG fashions? Her medicines, best described as bottled euthanasia? The answer is, nothing – if you disregard, as most people do, the brisk business she’s doing in human tissue, aborted embryos and body parts, all used in various products, including cosmetics.

Another seldom mentioned Russia’s export is ill-gotten cash, laundered gleaming white through off-shore banks, electronically transferred, flown around the world in private jets, shipped aboard 500-foot yachts, carried in suitcases bursting at the seams. To answer your likely question, it’s ill-gotten because Russia doesn’t just have a mafia economy. It’s a mafia state, where government and criminal structures are so impeccably fused that they are one and the same.

Thinking that Russia’s WTO membership will turn her into what Daniel Sandford, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent, calls a ‘much more accessible – and predictable –  market for foreign companies’ is sorely misguided. The only predictable thing about doing business in Russia is that it can be done only according to the rules of organised crime, as set by the nation’s godfather Putin and his stooges.

Since the ironclad system of kickbacks, backhanders, protection money and bribes won’t change, I even doubt that foreign imports will become much cheaper for long-suffering Russian consumers. It’s like our petrol tax, which constitutes 64 percent of the price of unleaded. That given, and we know that the tax can only ever go up, reductions in the wholesale price of oil won’t result in much cheaper fuel at the pumps. The Russians will probably lower the official customs duties now, but it’s the unofficial contributions to the Putin mafia’s favourite charity that’ll take up the slack.

Back in 1983 President Reagan described Russia as an ‘evil empire’. She’s arguably less of an empire now, but she’s definitely no less evil. Welcoming her with open arms into trading organisations and partnerships will only serve the purpose of legitimising the world’s biggest criminal gang. 

So, to answer the question I asked earlier, Russia hasn’t changed much, nor is she likely change in the future. What has changed – for the worse, it has to be said – is the West’s understanding of the evil nature of Russia’s regime. And the West’s willingness to put up even a token resistance.

We don’t have a Bushido honour code, according to which a man who has let others down should disembowel himself. And if you’re thinking this wouldn’t be a bad idea in this instance, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.

No, the suicide Dave and George should commit is only of the political kind. For, in a nation utterly corrupted by socialism, as preached and practised by all three parties, doing the right thing will bring any political career to an ignominious halt.

Britain, along with all other Western countries, has reached a critical mass of state dependency, and, just like in an atom bomb, a loud bang is inevitable. More than half of our population depend on the state for their livelihood, and closer to three quarters in the North and the Celtic fringe. This means that no sizeable cut in taxation and government spending is possible without a truly revolutionary upheaval of the whole economy. Which party happens to be in power doesn’t matter one jot.

When I talk about cuts, I don’t mean the phoney ‘austerity’ Dave and George are flogging to our comprehensively educated populace. In fact, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the real aim of Shirley Williams’s reforms was to create a nation ready to lap up any mendacious nonsense peddled by the state.

Such, for example, as the government’s canard that a marginal slow-down in the growth of government spending constitutes a cut. In fact, our public debt as proportion of GDP (65.7 percent and climbing) is greater than it was under the utterly incompetent, not to say subversive, Labour government.

In July, overall government spending went up 5.1 percent and social-benefit payments rose 6.2 percent – truly, austerity ain’t what it’s cut out to be. At the same time the on-going recession, the worst in living memory, has pushed total tax receipts 0.8 percent down. Consequently, the Chancellor will have to borrow £30 billion more than planned. Seems like there’s no easing in quantitative easing.

We’re on a rollercoaster and, unless someone stops it, we can’t jump off without breaking our collective neck. Stopping it is precisely what any ministers acting in the nation’s interests would do – and what our ministers, acting in their own interests, will never even contemplate.

For the only way to treat the cancer of our economy is to remove – and I mean remove, not downsize or slow the growth of – the tumour of the welfare state. At the same time, the government’s take from the economy must be cut to 20-25 percent maximum. Everything else will follow.

The economy will suffer greatly for a couple of years and then a German-style economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder for short) will arise, phoenix from ashes. Tax rates will drop so low that payers won’t even have to cheat, while tax revenues will grow. People will be transformed from spongers to tax payers by going off welfare and into employment, with millions of jobs begging to be taken. We’ll need to have real, as opposed to comprehensive, education, for that’s what it takes to function in a modern economy. We’ll get rid of most red tape, acting like a garrotte over the country’s economic throat. Only immigrants who can improve our economy will be admitted. Crowds of government sinecures will be shut down, reducing expenditure and increasing the labour force in productive employment. Our EU membership will become unsustainable. Above all, the moral health of the nation will improve, as decades of serpentine corruption will be steadily reversed. People’s pride in themselves and their country will be revived.

This is what needs doing, and it can only be done in one fell swoop, not slowly, not gradually, not eventually. There are too many forces acting against economic, social and moral sanity. Given time, they’ll crush any true reform, restoring madness to its most raving.

Considering the corruption that has penetrated the nation’s pores, initially there will be hell to pay. Social unrest will be inevitable, and for a while Britain will look like a more southern land. This will have to be dealt with decisively, ruthlessly if need be. We must realise that the very existence of Britain as a sovereign country is threatened – as gravely and more irreversibly than during the Second World War. Given this situation, it’s conceivable that certain civil liberties will have to be put on hold, as they were during the war.

No British leader pushing his country through such a painful period will survive with his career intact. Even Churchill lost the first post-war election, and he could hardly be blamed for the Blitz. Adenauer and Erhard emerged as national heroes after doing that sort of thing in Germany, but the time and place were different then.

In other words, we need ministers willing to sacrifice their careers for the sake of the nation, to commit political suicide so the nation will live. We need a Churchill. We have Dave and George, with Tony or Boris waiting in the wings. You draw your own conclusions – and run for the hills.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As Boris showed during the Olympics, he’s prepared to do his own stunts. In a way, one could describe the whole Games as a contiguous Boris stunt, but I’m referring specifically to his dangling off zip wire.

Nothing short of a masterstroke, that, and Boris milked it for even more than it was worth. Supposedly dispelling rumours that he’s setting up a run for Tory leadership, Boris said, in that stand-up comic style of his, “How could anybody elect a prat who gets stuck in a zip wire?”

Quite easily, is the answer to that one, and Boris knows it. We love politicians who dangle, turn in the wind, twist around. Before long they begin to resemble weathervanes, and then we know they’re definitely going places.

Ever sensitive to the way the wind is blowing, Boris has now recorded a video in support of the ‘Out4Marriage’ campaign for homonuptials, launched by that traditional Tory publication Pink News. Speaking of the delights of married life, with which he’s only too familiar, Boris said, ‘I see absolutely no reason why that happy state should be denied to anybody in our country.’

The wind blew in a slightly different way in 2001, when Boris wrote, “If gay marriage was OK… then I saw no reason in principle why a union should not be consecrated between three men, as well as two men, or indeed three men and a dog”.

Really. Surely marriages involving more than two are too unconventional still, unless of course the extra parties are kept on the side, discreetly or at a pinch scandalously. But cross-species unions? ‘In principle’? On second thoughts, why not?

In 2000 the Dutch scientist Midas Dekker published the book Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, in which he argued that people and animals can form loving erotic relationships, just like hetero- or homosexuals. So why can’t ‘that happy state’ be pursued?

Can’t you see it? “Down, Jessie, down, there’s a good girl. Now promise Daddy you won’t bite the registrar when he pronounces us man and bitch…” Five gets you ten, if the wind changes direction towards bestiality, as it soon may, Boris will claim he was dead serious in 2001. That he indeed ‘saw no reason in principle why [such] a union should not be consecrated.’

For the time being, Boris has to restrict himself to supporting a marginally different declaration: “I now pronounce you man and man.” Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe for a second that he indeed sees ‘absolutely no reason’ to find anything wrong with the idea, a bright lad like him.

For, when Boris was at Oxford, he didn’t just join his Bullingdon mates Dave and George in getting pissed, trashing restaurants and then paying for the damage. In his free time, he also read Classics. So he must know a society is on its last legs when it first condones and then welcomes decadence in general and sexual perversion in particular. Surely he must have read Gibbon, explaining why and how Rome declined and fell?

I don’t know if he also read a bit of political science, but any scholar worthy of the name could have explained to him that, unless a society is anchored by traditional institutions, it’ll be cast adrift. And in the West, no institution is as vital as marriage, defined as a consecrated union between a man and a woman (one of each).

Families are the cells out of which the body social is made, and they also provide the model for other close-knit groups patterned after them: village, parish, guild, local government, kinship. These became all-important when the West divested itself of the Hellenic notions of res publica and privatised the individual.

Ever since, family has been a natural competitor of the mighty central state, and only the tethers of Christian morality used to prevent the state from waging an all-out war. Such tethers have now been slipped, and the war is in full swing.

Hence the government using every means at its disposal to destroy family and debauch the very idea of it. Our megalomaniac welfare state assuming the role of the provider father, thus making him redundant, is one line of attack. Another prong is our tax system that encourages cohabitation rather than marriage, and makes it necessary for most mothers to work full time.

Homomarriage is supposed to administer the coup de grâce. It’s no longer a man and a woman. It’s now a person and a person or, soon, any mammal of a person’s choice.

That’s as far as the underlying strategy is concerned. As an immediate tactical objective, the Tories want to win the 2015 election. Yet, their bloodhound’s nose smells defeat, and their eagle’s eye sees the writing on the wall. It says, ‘You’ve been tried for a few years and found pathetic.’

Whether the Tories lose to Labour or to a made-in-heaven coalition between Labour and LibDems is immaterial. One way or the other, they know they’ll lose – unless a miracle occurs, unless a St George rides in to slay the dragon.

Enter Boris, with all his little Eton twitches, stuttering gollies and gees, Have I Got News For You, zip wire, little marital infidelities, shock of discoloured hair, the lot. The Tories sense in their political bone marrow that Dave would lose and keep them out of power for the next generation. They need someone who comes across as quaint, heterodox, weird even – provided that underneath it all he’s just like Dave, an unprincipled, spivocratic mediocrity. (Oh, I’m sure Boris is clever enough. What makes him a mediocrity isn’t a deficit of brainpower but a failure of character.)

The clarion call has sounded, and Boris has answered it. Hence the zip wire for the weird bit, but hence also his support of homomarriage as a bit of just-like-Daveness. The lad is the Tories’ last ditch, and he’ll do what it takes. They, in their turn, would hail Caligula as a saviour, if only he could come back from the dead and the polls went his way.

Let’s just hope that the next opinion poll doesn’t make it imperative for Boris to make a principled stand in favour of, say, necrophilia. After all, that way a man could enjoy ‘that happy state’ without really hurting anybody. Except, of course, society, but then we all know there’s no such thing.

 

Back in July, old Barack Hussein delivered a speech that may yet lose him the presidential election. However, it ought to win him the Nobel Prize for economics, to go with the one of the peace variety he claimed in 2009.

Some naysayers, who, if you believe the American press, must all be racists or Republicans (the terms used interchangeably), were bleating at the time that Obama had done nothing to deserve the Peace Prize, coming as it did a mere month into his presidency. No doubts this time – in his ‘you didn’t build that’ speech the president made an earth-shattering discovery:

People who start a business don’t make it a success by their own efforts. Most of the credit should go to the government, led so ably by Barack Hussein himself. But forgive me for diluting the fiery message by a feeble paraphrase. Here’s what Obama actually said:

“If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

There he was, youngish, shirt-sleeved, open-collared, italicising the key words with hand gestures that must have taken months to rehearse in front of a full-length mirror – uttering a statement that one would never expect from any American, never mind a president.

A British PM, possibly. A French president, definitely. An Italian PM, you bet your bottom euro. But a US president declaring individual achievement null and void? Orating, gesticulation and all, that it’s the state that wrote every success story? Implying that the state is the senior partner in every enterprise, entitled to a lion’s share of the profits? I shake my head in disbelief, twirl my index fingers in my ears and run the video again. No, I haven’t misheard. There’s Barack again: “You didn’t build that!”

This is like the Pope stating ex cathedra that it wasn’t God but Darwin who created the world. For Obama committed apostasy, he blasphemed against the article of faith Americans hold as ‘self-evident’, to quote from their Declaration of Independence. It’s their unshakeable belief in the American Dream, that of starting from scratch, taking risks, working your donkey off – and becoming a rip-roaring SUCCESS. And doing so not because of the state, but in spite of it.

Thus America’s greatest essayist H.L. Mencken: “The state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.” Now Obama is claiming that, rather than being ‘the common enemy’ of such men, the state isn’t just their friend but benefactor. In one fell swoop the president turned the dream into a nightmare.

No sooner had the words left his mouth, helped on their way by manual punctuation, than Obama’s campaign flacks gasped. They, hard-nosed, dyed-in-the-wool political mechanics, knew instantly that their boss had screwed up big time. He landed the campaign in the sort of stuff that gets stuck to your shoe sole, and now it was up to them to get it out again. The flacks’ trusted pooper-scoopers then saw the light of day.

Obama didn’t mean it the way it sounded, they explained. He just got the grammar wrong by using ‘that’ instead of ‘them’. What he was trying to say was ‘If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build them’, meaning the roads and bridges in the previous sentence. Anyway, what do you expect from an alumnus of Harvard Law School? The president isn’t like those hoity-toity country-club Republican racists. Barack, he don’t give a flying buck about grammar. He’s a regular guy, speakin’ from the heart, tellin’ it like it is.

Yeah, yeah, winced Americans. Pull the other one. Obama indeed spoke from the heart, his socialist, collectivist, determinist, social-engineering heart. What he said reflects the core of the social philosophy shared by those folk who think ‘Republican’ is a synonym of ‘racist’.

At the core of this philosophy lies the hysterical denial of the doctrine of free will. People aren’t free agents; they are automata whose buttons are pushed by anything other than their individual choices. This could be their social class, if you listen to Marx. Their nature as it has evolved from a random cell, if Darwin is your source. Their desire to copulate with their Mums and kill their Dads, if Freud is your hero. The genes they’re born with, if you believe sociobiologists like Edward O. Wilson. Anything – other than the choices people make freely and of their own accord.

Collectivism follows with the certainty of night following day. Indeed, if people are but cogs in a social-evolutionary-sexual-genetic machine, they can neither claim the credit for their success nor take the blame for their failure. Both belong to some button-pushing entity, doesn’t really matter which. Barack thinks it’s the state, him specifically. And why not? In a different situation, he just as easily could’ve said society or evolution or Oedipal longings. Whatever it takes.

One would expect that Romney, now enjoying a slender lead in the polls, would waltz into the White House after this. His rival has shown his true colours, and none of them is black – they are all various tints of red. It’s as if Obama explained why his first term was so awful, why, for example, he pushed the disastrous healthcare bill through Congress.

This expectation, though natural, is ill-founded. For socialist demagogues to be run out of town, their opponent must offer a discernible – and believable – alternative. So Barack may still win a second term, thanks to the evil of two lessers. After all, our own Dave didn’t manage to score an outright victory against the worst government in British history.

But let’s not blame Dave or Romney, should he lose in November. It’s all society’s fault.

Today’s BBC website shows a young Muscovite girl protesting against the sentence passed on the Pussy Rioters. She is holding high a poster saying, in English, ‘We are Pussy Riot. We are legion.’

This is a slight paraphrase of Mark 5:9, clearly intended to show that young Russians in general and young Christians in particular don’t mind anything the Rioters did, and even praise it.

Generally I welcome Biblical references, especially when, as in this case, they are truly applicable. Alas, though this one does apply, it doesn’t do so in the way intended by the poster bearer.

Allow me to quote the verse in full, along with the previous one to set the scene. ‘For he said unto him, Come out of the man, thou unclean spirit. And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.’

The legion in other words is made up of demons, one of whom Jesus drives out of a man possessed. Or, to put it back into the context of the protest, the poster suggests that the Pussy Rioters are satanic.

The believer in me nods his enthusiastic approval. The music lover concurs. The pedant laments the pitiful standards of public education in Russia. And the political commentator remarks yet again how grossly inadequate the opposition to Putin is.

Learn your scripture, boys and girls.

 

 

 

 

The three Pussy Rioters have been sentenced to two years each, for hooliganism and blasphemy.

The ensuing protests outside the Moscow courthouse featured the great chess player Garry Kasparov carried by four policemen through the crowd, with each cop assuming responsibility for one limb. The BBC video shows the ex-champion of the world repeating non-stop ‘Why? Why? Why are you arresting me? Why?…’ By way of reply, the police later claimed Kasparov had bitten one officer during the scuffle. Perhaps he felt that was a legitimate from of political expression. Or else he was feeling peckish. Anyway, he’s in trouble for asking rhetorical questions.

The three women were found guilty of desecrating the Moscow cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which came as a huge shock to me. What’s wrong with desecrating cathedrals? We do it all the time. For example, the last time I visited Winchester Cathedral, preparations were under way to hold a rave there that night. All sorts of revolting posters were being strung across the nave, although none of them featured what the Russians call ‘non-normative’ vocabulary.

And barely two days ago I saw sublime 13^th-century stained glass sharing the cavernous interior of Bourges Cathedral with poster-like flags in psychedelic colours. Again, no swearwords appeared, but contextually the abstract ‘art’ was nothing short of sacrilegious.

I shan’t repeat what I said on the same subject a few days ago, focusing instead on a few developments on the margins. In a show of hypocrisy seldom equalled in recent years, Putin had asked the judges ‘not to be too strict’. That’s like Stalin asking Beria to take it easy on those Polish officers at Katyn. And immediately after the verdict was announced, the Vice-Chairman of Putin’s party said he had hoped for a suspended sentence. That’s like Beria saying that he hoped the Polish officers would be shot with blanks.

The whole comedy was staged like the show trials of the 30s, with the verdicts reflecting not justice but political expediency, as seen by the bosses who had ordered the trials in the first place. Putin’s gang of thieves and money launderers wanted to be all things to all men.

On the one hand, they are tossing a bone to those Russians who genuinely think that desecrating cathedrals isn’t nice. Putin hopes, probably forlornly, that they’ll see him as an upholder of ‘the spiritual foundations of the Russian state’, as the prosecutor put it. Presumably, the venerable jurist was referring to Orthodoxy and not to thievery and money laundering, which both answer that description much more accurately.

On the other hand, Putin and Co. show to the Russians and the world that they aren’t exactly Beria’s heirs, even though they (along with the hierarchy of the Russian Church) gained their work experience in the same secret police Beria used to serve with so much distinction. The maximum sentence for the Pussy Rioters’ crime was seven years. Did the prosecutor ask for seven? Did he ask for five? Did he emulate his role model Vyshinsky, Stalin’s prosecutor, by screaming, ‘Shoot them like rabid dogs!!!’?

Vyshinsky’s heir did none of the above. He – are you ready for this? – asked for merely three years in a mildish concentration camp. And the judges saw fit – were allowed! –  to give him a year less than he had requested. Moreover, Putin may yet prove that he’s in touch with his feminine side by reducing the sentence by another few months. Even if he doesn’t, he comes across as a strict but benevolent father, just the ticket the Russians crave for their slow journey towards democracy with a clerical dimension.

I must say I’d gladly see the three unsavoury samples of femininity in prison even if they hadn’t committed their blasphemous act. Their previous behaviour, featuring public sexual intercourse among other niceties, not to mention their so-called music, would for me constitute sufficient grounds for indefinite incarceration.

It would also be poetic justice if they shared the cell with some of their Western defenders. Most notably, one would mention Madonna, whose very stage name is as egregious a blasphemy as anything the Rioters had done, while what she does on stage is a capital crime against our civilisation. A senior Russian politician has described Madonna as ‘a slag who wants to teach us morals’, and I’d agree with his assessment – if he weren’t a senior Russian politician.

This proviso is the key point. For this spectacle of a trial evokes another historical parallel, with those Nazi murderers being judged at Nuremberg by even worse Soviet murderers. Madonna teaching morality is indeed risible – but not half as much as this lot passing judgment on blasphemy. 

 

 

More than a hundred pictures of an orgy involving three men and two women have spread like a brushfire over the Chinese Internet.

What added piquancy to the sordid affair was that the men were the top Party bosses of Lujiang county in Anhui Province. In other words, depicted in flagrante delicto were three chaps who had dictatorial powers over 1,200,000 people.

The fun-seekers committed not just an indiscretion but a criminal offence, for group sex is against the law in China. So it’s understandable that the senior official involved immediately claimed the pictures were Photoshopped fakes.

His line of defence was the opposite of the one taken by the Patriarch Kiril, head of the Russian Orthodox Church. His Holiness caused a bit of a stir when he was photographed wearing a $30,000 watch, something deemed at odds with his monastic vows. Predictably, his PR people declared that the watch had been retouched onto the Patriarch’s wrist by atheists, Russophobes and Americans.

To prove their point, they released the same photograph with His Holiness’s left wrist pristinely unadorned. Alas, the glass top of the table in front of the prelate showed a clear reflection of the offending timepiece, immaculately conceived in all its $30,000 glory. The Patriarch should recruit his Photoshop artists in Germany – the Russians just don’t have enough attention to detail.

The reverse of that ecclesiastical trick could have worked for the Communist boss, had he not been shopped by another star of the show who owned up to everything. Moreover, one of the two nude ladies turned out to be married to another man featured in the photo session. Obviously the idea of sharing and sharing alike, so fundamental to the communist ethos, has penetrated China’s family life.

One wonders just how smart Chinese leaders are. After all, no hidden camera was involved. Many of the pictures are clearly posed, which means that either the sexy devils used a self-timer or else someone else was pressing the shutter. In either case, they ought to have realised that valour isn’t the only thing that discretion is the better part of. As it is, the party bosses have lost their jobs and may yet be charged with the crime of amorous collectivism.

Their little frolic has thus turned out to be costly, and it could cost even more if no contraception was used. In China, the state allows couples one child free of charge – every subsequent offspring carries a steep price tag, affordable only to the rich. I don’t know if party leaders fall into that category, but if not, let’s hope they either protected themselves or the ladies weren’t ovulating at the time.

No such worries for our saintly Olympic athletes, who had 150,000 condoms kindly provided by the organisers of the Games and, vicariously, by the British taxpayers. That amounted to 15 each, and some pundits who can’t do sums had their fun suggesting this isn’t too many considering that the Games lasted 17 days.

How wrong they are. Since most athletes were confined to the Olympic village, much of the sex involved Olympic athletes only. Now if an American swimmer hooks up with a Ukrainian sprinter, they bring a total of 30 condoms to the party. We’re now looking at an average of almost two person/couplings a day, which is beginning to look respectable, if falling short of Olympic standards.

But wait a minute, our calculations aren’t finished. Some female athletes, such as, hypothetically, those steroid-enhanced shot-putters, could have had the kind of sex that can’t for biological reasons result in pregnancy, if you catch my drift. Some of their male counterparts could have also eschewed protection if they indulged in a practice that minimises the risk of AIDS (details needn’t detain us here).

Add to these the athletes who stayed in the competition until the last days and therefore had to abstain from conflicting energy-sapping activities, and the average of daily safe couplings per person is beginning to creep into impressive figures. And by all accounts, our cherished Olympians took full advantage of the numerical possibilities.

According to variously pornographic reports, the Olympic village was turned into a den of iniquity, compared to which those Chinese shenanigans look like an infantile game of doctors and nurses. Athletes switching partners through the night, rolling on the grass between buildings, cutting a swathe through one national team after another – bed hopping and sexual gymnastics were truly the unofficial Olympic events.

Apparently, Ukrainian, American and Polish athletes led the field by a wide margin, while track, beach volleyball (surprise, surprise) and swimming were the sports most widely represented in these parallel games. Aren’t you proud that London provided the site for this festival of youthful exuberance? Boris is.

Wanna see some feelthy pictures? Sorry, you’ll have to do your own net search. With luck, you won’t even have to learn Chinese.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a Daily Mail extract from his new book, Daniel Hannan, MEP, makes a case against the EU. Not yet having read the whole book, I don’t know every angle of attack Mr Hannan chooses, though I suspect he doesn’t limit himself to just one or two.

But in the extract his principal objection to this hideous Leviathan is that it’s undemocratic. Hannan states that, as no pan-European demos exists, no pan-European democracy is possible by definition. Yet, though true, this is barely relevant.

“The EU’s founding fathers had mixed feelings about democracy,” writes Hannan. “In their minds, too much democracy was associated with demagoguery and fascism.”

If that’s indeed what they thought, then I agree with them, as I do with the claim by  Jose Manuel Durao Barroso that “decisions taken by the most democratic institutions in the world are very often wrong.”

Barroso’s remark would be even more unassailable had he replaced ‘the most democratic institutions in the world’ by ‘every institution we’ve ever known.’ We aren’t in this world blessed by perfect institutions – errare humanum est, as Mr Hannan, with his multilingual erudition, would probably say. And he’d be right.

But then so are ‘the EU’s founding fathers’: too much democracy does lead to demagoguery and fascism, if we agree that state-enforced PC diktats are precisely the latter. In fact, too much of any form of government is a guarantee of tyranny, be that of one man, a small minority or, pace Tocqueville, the majority.

Moreover, this had been known for roughly 2,500 years before the world was blessed by the arrival of Messrs Schuman and Monnet. No less known was the only effective remedy against too much of anything: checks and balances, separation of power among various estates and branches of government.

This isn’t ideally achievable either: humans, and therefore institutions, are fallible. But it was Britain in the 18^th and 19^th centuries that came closer to the ideal than any other country ever has. So much closer in fact that the notion of checks and balances entered the political DNA of most Anglophones as it did not, for instance, of the Francophones or the people of Mitteleuropa.

The British genetic slate is being rapidly wiped clean of such sagacity. We too are vindicating the worst fears of those who realised that too much democracy was at least as dangerous as too little.

In common with most Western politicians, regardless of their ideological hue, Hannan too is conditioned to worship at the altar of democracy. Yet, as if in spite of himself, he pinpoints the real problem: “The EU is run, extraordinarily, by a body that combines legislative and executive power. The European Commission is not only the EU’s ‘government’, it is also the only body that can propose legislation in most fields of policy.”

There’s nothing ‘extraordinary’ about this. Continental European countries are viscerally alien to separation of powers, even though most practise it after a fashion. Yet such separation is not at all synonymous with our present democracy run riot, whereby every barely post-pubescent citizen is deemed fit to play an active part in the political process by casting a vote. Those who win a plurality, no matter how infinitesimal, of such votes then claim the kind of mandate that no British politician could claim 150 years ago.

No wonder this, in reality unchecked, system leads to government by demagoguery that so vexed ‘the EU’s founding fathers.’ I refer to such government as spivocracy, the rule of self-serving bureaucrats whose only discernible skill lies in their ability to put blocs of votes together by lying about their plans.

A spivocracy rules not by equity and consent, which was the prescription of our deepest political thinker Edmund Burke, but by making false promises and effectively buying voters with handouts. Replace ‘voters’ with ‘countries’, and this is precisely how the same principle is extrapolated to the supranational government of the EU.

That’s why, in Hannan’s words, “we now have the tyranny of a self-perpetuating, self-serving elite, all wedded by self-interest to the European project.” But we have it not ‘in place of democracy’, as he suggests, but in place of well-balanced national institutions governing by true consent freely given by the people, rather than tricked out of them.

Hannan obviously thinks that these are one and the same. Yet the Western political history of modernity shows that they are more nearly antithetical. True equity and consent, as Burke knew but we’ve forgotten, are only achievable in a state where the power of the people, projected through their elected representatives, is counterbalanced by the hereditary power of aristocracy and the unelected power of the monarch.

Referring to such a state as a democracy may be terminologically concise and popularly appealing, but it’s fundamentally wrong. And reducing it to unchecked democracy, as the West has shown, does lead to all sorts of unsavoury consequences.

Arguing against the truly awful EU from such a premise lays someone who, like Mr Hannan, is correct in his anti-EU animus, open to the pseudo-Burkean arguments by spivocracts like Blair. Hannan quotes him as saying, “The British people are sensible enough to know that, even if they have a certain prejudice about Europe, they don’t expect their government necessarily to share it or act upon it.”

The government, wrote Burke, is supposed to act according to the people’s interests, not necessarily their wishes. Tony and his ilk act according to neither – they pursue their own interests only. The way to make them act in the people’s interests is to have in parallel two powerful branches of national government not beholden to any party-political interests.

Such a government is impossible within the pan-European abomination even in theory, just as democracy is impossible there in practice. ‘The EU’s founding fathers’ knew this and yet used every subterfuge to trick or bribe 27 European nations into acquiescence. It’s for this reason, and not because they had reservations about democracy, that they were wicked. As is the Leviathan they’ve extruded out of their intellectual bowels.

Anyone who argues against the EU, even if he doesn’t do so quite precisely, ought to be encouraged. That’s why I’m going to get Daniel Hannan’s book (A Doomed Marriage, Notting Hill Books). After all, to paraphrase a hugely compromised adage, pas d’ennemis a droite.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Paralympics is upon us, as if to prove that the heights of vulgarity scaled by the Olympics aren’t the highest peaks possible.

This sick spectacle is supposed to testify to the triumph of the unconquerable spirit over somewhat abbreviated flesh. In reality it testifies to something completely different.

The whole thing reminds one of Victorian county fairs, where people paid good money to look at bearded ladies or boys with two heads. Most of the time there were some tricks involved then: the beard was glued on, and the other head was made of papier-mâché. But the Paralympics is for real.

We’re supposed to cheer and applaud those poor deluded people who put themselves on show to cater to the PC idea that they are no different from those with a full complement of limbs. They are different though. These people have all suffered a terrible tragedy, and they deserve our sympathy and prayers. One of the prayers, perhaps the only one, would be that God grant them the strength to bear their misfortune with dignity.

Yet dignity is precisely what the Paralympics deprives them of, and it also diminishes the voyeurs whose bad taste is likely to be indulged by the sight of double amputees trying to outrun one another. Add to this the crass commercialism that inevitably accompanies sporting extravaganzas, the trumped-up enthusiasm of the TV presenters, the glued-on smiles of the sponsors, and the emetic effect becomes uncontainable.

It takes much strength of character to refuse to be kept down by physical deformity, whether of recent origin or innate. If these Paralympians did all the same things in private, one’s hat would be off to them – they’ve refused to wallow in self-pity, proving that the human spirit can triumph over physical incidentals.

But when they appear in a stadium to the accompaniment of a marching band, one’s hat remains firmly in place. Suddenly respect gives way to pity and discomfort – surely not the emotion these poor people expect to elicit.

Imagine a concert pianist who loses both hands in a terrible accident. He then acquires prosthetic hands and, after years of persistent toil, learns to play simple tunes to the standard of a child just beginning to attend music school. The pianist deserves respect, admiration and applause from his family and friends. He’d deserve none of those if he then hired Wigmore Hall, had a PR company do a massive promotional campaign and played a recital to an audience of listeners who don’t really care about music but love a titillating oddity.

Similarly, people who watch a tennis match between two wheelchair-bound players aren’t there to admire the tennis. If asked why they’re attending, they’ll give you the usual mantra of bien-pensant jargon they’ve absorbed from ambient air. So it’s better not to ask, for you’ll never get the real answer: they are there to have their nerve endings tickled by what deep down they see as a freak show or, to be more charitable, a circus act.

Our whole way of life these days both encourages and rewards exhibitionism. Grown-up people don’t hesitate to reveal to a million-strong TV audience their innermost problems, of the kind that in the past they wouldn’t have divulged even to a best friend. Uncountable millions watch morons copulate and discharge bodily functions on camera. Youngsters scream for attention by disfiguring themselves with tattoos and facial metal. Fat old women wear miniskirts and tank tops, old men with varicose legs sport tight shorts and wraparound sunglasses. Men and women go to group therapy and let it all hang out: “I’m John, and I’m sleeping with my daughter…,” “I’m Jane, and I can’t stop sniffing glue…”

The Paralympics parade a different sort of exhibitionism, and yet not all that different. The competitors put their deformities on show, knowing that they’ll always find willing dupes eager to watch. Suddenly we realise that they’ve succeeded in their professed aim of showing they are no different from healthy athletes or indeed from most modern people. Suffering, which in the past could be counted upon to strengthen a person’s character and enable him to plumb greater spiritual depths, now has no such effect. Seeking to prove they’re as good as anybody, the Paralympians have wasted the chance to become better than others.

Suffering or no suffering, we’re all expected to function to exactly the same laws of vulgarity and rotten taste. Such laws will never be repealed. They are here to stay.    

You can argue against a man’s opinions, judgments, logic, conclusions and you can even question his facts. But it’s no point arguing against his secular faith – this is something that’s held on the other side of reason.

Case in point: yesterday I had lunch with a truly formidable Frenchman. Formerly one of France’s top diplomats, he was an important figure in leading the country towards being a province in the EU. Now in his late 80s, yet still an intellectual force to be reckoned with, he publishes a book a year, along with numerous articles in some of France’s weightier journals. And he still uses first person singular when talking about the EU government.

Since this wasn’t the first time we’d locked horns on the EU, I had decided to stay off the subject, concentrating instead on our host’s excellent claret. But the old man wouldn’t let me remain neutral – he demanded to know how I’d vote in the unlikely event we got a referendum. Upon hearing my predictable reply, he attacked me with a vigour belying his age.

I couldn’t match his energy with my own, and every word I tried to get in edgewise was bounced back into my rapidly masticating face. When I did manage to take issue with a point, the heir to Talleyrand would simply backtrack and repeat exactly what he had said before. In the end, the combination of the wine and my natural bloody-mindedness led me to using words like ‘nonsense’, which I now regret – no matter how severely provoked, one ought not to be rude to one’s elders.

Some of our point-counterpoints are worth citing, if only because my venerable interlocutor’s arguments are exactly the same as those I’ve heard from every French advocate of European federalism, and from some of their British co-religionists. I wonder if there’s some finishing school where they are all trained in the art of verbal jousting with recalcitrant infidels.

“You’d suffer outside the EU.” In what way? 

“If you leave the EU, I won’t trade with you.” How would you go about it?

“I’ll introduce protectionist measures.” Protectionism begets protectionism. The EU has a positive trade balance with us, and therefore more to lose in a trade war.

“You’ll be in the same trading position in Europe as China and the USA.” They seem to be doing reasonably well.

“You won’t. I won’t let you remain a true trading nation.” England had been a trading nation even before the EU. For about a millennium.

“Not for much longer. You’ll need a visa to come here.” Even if so, this is a small price to pay for maintaining our national sovereignty.

“You’ve already surrendered your national sovereignty. To NATO.” NATO isn’t a federal state. It’s a military alliance. These have existed since the beginning of time.

“You’ve surrendered your sovereignty because you’ve accepted foreign command over your forces.” First, this only applies when our forces operate under the NATO flag. Second, someone has to lead, and it’s only natural that the supreme command should rest with the biggest contingent.

“You should be thankful to the EU for having kept peace in Europe since 1945.” The EU has existed only since 1993. It had been the EEC until then. An important distinction.

“I know this better than you do; I was there.” Fine. Then you must also know that what kept peace in Europe wasn’t the EU but NATO, in particular the American nuclear umbrella.

“The EU has kept Europe prosperous all these years.” And look how well it’s doing now.

A few more exchanges in the same vein, and the word ‘nonsense’ crossed my lips, after which the old ambassador stopped talking to me, and quite right too. I had committed two faux pas: first, I had forgotten my manners; second, I had tried to argue rationally against an irrational faith.

Monsieur l’Ambassadeur is an intelligent and accomplished man. The astounding thing, however, is that I’ve heard exactly the same ‘arguments’ from Frenchmen who are neither. One begins to think that the justification for the EU resides in the infra range way below intellect, or else in the ultra range above it. It’s as if the French have assigned transcendence to the EU, thereby filling the vacuum formed by their disastrous laïcité, the state-enforced secularisation of society.

Even devout Catholics, such as my interlocutor, seem to accept that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob needs help from a parallel deity, the EU demiurge. Alas, they are in for a letdown: people won’t pray to this God, they won’t worship it and they won’t die for it. However, they may – much as I hate to be a prophet of doom – die because of it.

The EU is a highly seismic area, made so by the blind, irrational and usually wicked superstitions of its denizens. And when pressure breaks through the fault lines, it’s not balm or myrrh that splashes out. If you don’t believe me, just look at Pompeii.