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The other day I accused a pundit of confusing ‘patriotism with chauvinism, either of them with nationalism and all of them with tribalism’. This calls for elucidation, as nuances matter.

Patriotism may have been the last refuge of a scoundrel to Dr Johnson, and indeed many a scoundrel has used it as such. But there’s nothing wrong with loving one’s country, especially if it’s lovable. (‘For a country to be loved it ought to be lovely’ was how Burke put it.)

However, patriotism elevated to the perch previously occupied by religion is always pernicious. Here it would be useful to consider its various levels as expressed through everyday phrases reflecting them. This is best imagined as a ladder, with degrees of patriotism forming descending rungs.

‘I love my country’ sits at the top. This is an unobjectionable, indeed laudable, statement. One’s country doesn’t have to be perfect any more than a woman has to be perfect to be loved. Whether or not it’s perceived as flawed, one’s own country offers the degree of intimacy, warmth and shared historical memory that’s keenly felt. Like two siblings sharing a knowledge inaccessible to a stranger, countrymen – regardless of their individual differences – are always united by a bond as strong as it may be invisible to outsiders.

Often this doesn’t need expressing in words: Two Englishmen visiting, for example, Italy may exchange knowing smiles at the sight of some local shenanigans, say a shop shut when it should be open, people using their hands when talking, or a woman dressed to the nines just to pop out for a loaf of bread.

Such semiotic exchanges would take several pages to explain on paper, but for the two countrymen there’s no need for words: they understand each other perfectly anyway. Their mutual understanding indeed comes close to the feelings of two siblings: in that sense, brotherly love and love of one’s country are similar.

Nor is there anything wrong with regarding one’s country as unlike any other. All countries are; if they weren’t, there wouldn’t be so many countries. This is so obvious (and empirically observable, this side of Scandinavia) that one would think it hardly needs saying. But of course what matters here isn’t the text but the subtext: when people insist that their country is exceptional, they don’t mean ‘different from’, they mean ‘better than’. They’re entitled even to that opinion, though tastes may differ.

Moving down a step, ‘I love my country, right or wrong’ begins to be problematic. However, the problem isn’t insurmountable: after all, though we like for something, we love in spite of everything. A son can’t always stop loving his mother just because she’s a compulsive shoplifter. Nor will a mother stop loving her son even if he boasts a string of juvenile convictions. So perhaps Burke’s aphorism ought to be ever so slightly qualified. A country has to be lovely to be liked – loving it is something else again.

Another step down, and we overhear the statement ‘I love my country because it’s always right.’ Between this step and the previous one, a line was crossed separating patriotism from jingoism.

No country is always right. Expressing such sentiments we begin to leave behind the rivers supposedly flowing with milk and honey and approach a swamp fuming with putrid emanations. Implicit in this statement is the tribalist, what pre-PC used to be called Hottentot, morality: if I steal his cow, that’s good; if he steals my cow, that’s bad. It took several millennia of civilisation to overcome tribalism, and by the looks of it the job isn’t yet finished.

Another step down, and the morass sucks us in waist-deep. Here one hears ‘My country is always right because it’s guided by God.’ Often heard in America, this has nothing to do with any true religious spirit – after all, Christ was unequivocal in stating that his kingdom was not of this world.

America or any other country is ‘under God’ because everything is – but only for that reason. At this level American ‘manifest destiny’ is joined by the ‘third Rome’ of Russia (replaced for a few decades by even worse messianism) and the ‘Gott mit uns’ of the SS. The underlying assumption is that our actions can’t be judged by outlanders, only by God, and he has given us an open-ended endorsement. Thus anything we do is justified simply because we do it.

The lowest rung is at the bottom of the swamp, where real creepy-crawlies take refuge. Here the sentiment is ‘Because our country is guided by God, it’s our duty to impose our ways on others, whether they want it or not. Others may be either seduced or coerced, doesn’t really matter which, as long as they join the fold.’ Since no real faith in God underlines this feeling, the explanatory clause at the beginning of the sentence may at some point be dropped for being superfluous.

This brings us to the chaps who drape their windows with Union Jacks during the Olympics. One suspects that building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land isn’t their overriding objective. Their patriotism lacks the pseudo-religious fervour one often observes on the other side of Atlantic.

Yet it also differs from traditional English patriotism simply because their behaviour isn’t traditionally English. I’d go so far as to say that, by abandoning the time-honoured qualities of dignity, understatement and emotional reserve, they at best qualify as jingoists, not as true patriots. 

Hundreds of thousands have died to uphold the values symbolised by the Union Jack. Waving it at those who are clever enough to beat the doping tests, thereby qualifying for millions in endorsements, cheapens the flag – and everything it stands for. Confusing this with patriotism constitutes aiding and abetting – especially when such confusion is fostered by those who really ought to know better.  

Advocates of political correctness justify this abomination by its supposedly charitable motives. We’re supposed to mangle English because otherwise we run the risk of offending a member of one ‘community’ or another.

Well, my friends and I belong to a community too, although a tiny one. It’s made up of people who love the English language and hope it’ll retain its beauty and precision in the face of a worldwide onslaught. Now our sensibilities are offended not just every day, but practically every hour, nay every minute. Yet our ‘community’ isn’t protected by the razor wire of linguistic correctness. We’re supposed to grin and bear it.

The other day, for example, my wife sought an upgrade at a mobile-phone shop. Yet she wasted the trip due to a case of mixed identity. Her credit card identified her as Penelope Boot, but in her properly addressed bill she was Mrs Alexander Boot. The girl at the counter refused even to consider the remote possibility that the two women may be one and the same. She went so far as to point out that ‘Alexander’ was a man’s name and, as my wife was demonstrably a woman, she wasn’t entitled to it. Penelope was, in other words, a fraud.

In a parallel development, she rang a computer technician for help. The ensuing surreal dialogue was utterly offensive not just to linguistic but social propriety. ‘Who am I speaking to?’ ‘This is Mrs Boot?’ ‘Eh, but what’s your name?’ ‘My name is Mrs Boot.’ ‘Yes, but what can I call you?’ ‘You can call me Mrs Boot.’

The technician was a perfectly polite and helpful young man. His was a deficit of education, not manners – he simply wasn’t aware that, unless invited not to, he ought to address formally anyone who’s not friend or family.

We cringe every time a restaurant hostess calls us  ‘you guys’. The word ‘guy’ may have entered common parlance courtesy of Guy Fawkes, but for the last two centuries at least it has been strictly American. And even in America it had until relatively recently been used to describe men only. Its unisex sub-American use in Britain isn’t just aesthetically offensive. It’s also unnecessary.

What’s wrong with ‘chap’, ‘man’, ‘lad’, ‘bloke’, ‘son’, ‘fellow’, ‘mate’? These cover the entire spectrum of class, age, regional variation, emotional colouring and colloquialism. What does ‘guy’ bring to the party, other than branding the speaker as an aurally and culturally retarded individual (there, I left ‘individual’ off my list)?

It pains me to sound derisory to our partner in the ‘special relationship’, but most such perversions come from America, more specifically from American TV shows that these days provide the principal source of enlightenment for our youngsters. Thus, when my friend, London-born and bred, rebuked his son for a minor transgression, the boy told him, ‘Don’t make a federal case out of it.’ We have no federal cases, fifth amendments or penitentiaries in this country. However, we do have them galore on TV.

Egalitarian familiarity and demotic usage convey a certain gestalt meaning in America – they spring not so much from ignorance as from ideology. Even an American who reads Virgil and Voltaire in the original will often insist on talking like someone who only ever reads text messages. By doing so he upholds the underlying mock egalitarianism of the American Idea. It is mock egalitarianism because class watersheds are as deep in America as in Britain, and much more jealously guarded.

But, in a country defined by civic, rather than ethnic or cultural, unity, people are brainwashed to convey even in their language that the towering equality of citizenship trumps the implicitly inconsequential inequalities of class, education or style. Thus schoolchildren address teachers by their Christian names, and even highly educated people slip deliberate grammatical errors into their speech.

To someone less imbued with innate egalitarianism this sort of thing jars for being at base phoney and patronising. But when the same linguistic perversions are transplanted into Britain, whose social and cultural instincts have been formed by a dramatically different history, it’s much worse. Epigones can never match up to the original.

In short, I’m offended, and so are my friends. But what recourse have we got? What are we supposed to do? Congratulate people with ‘kids’ on defying the genetic odds by having crossbred with a goat? Pretend we think ‘elevator’ means nothing but a grain storehouse? Refuse to understand ‘momentarily’, when used to mean ‘in a moment’ rather than ‘for a moment’? A fat lot of good that’s going to do us.

If you think that having a normative authority passing judgment on language may help, just look at the French Academy. Though it has been banging its head against the language wall for almost 400 years, French is now bursting with Americanisms, where they are even more incongruous.

No, the cause is well and truly lost. And, as all glorious but hopeless causes, it must therefore be supported by all worthy men. Call it Custer’s last stand… oops! I mean the charge of the Light Brigade.

 

 

Isn’t coalition politics fun? Nick is angry that those few genuine Tories still remaining in the Commons haven’t let him wreck the Lords more than it’s wrecked already. That was tat, and now comes Nick’s tit: he’ll whip his party into scuppering the Tory gerrymandering bill.

Actually, ‘gerrymandering’, with its negative connotations, is an unfair way of describing a perfectly sensible idea. As long as we’re committed to the counterintuitive notion of every vote being as weighty as any other, we must agree that every parliamentary seat should represent a constituency of roughly the same size.

That, alas, isn’t the case. At present, some of the constituencies are twice as large as some others, effectively making each vote cast in the larger groups weigh half as much. Considering Labour had its hand on the tiller for 13 years, the boundaries were drawn in such a way that Tories would need an 11-percent popular majority to win a national election, to Labour’s three percent.

The Tory bill aimed at redressing this balance is thus fair, just and constitutionally sound – which is more than one can say for most of their other recent ideas. The proposal is to reduce the number of seats from 650 to 600, each representing a similar-size electorate. Even the 600 number sounds excessive, considering that the lower chamber in the US Congress makes do with a mere 435, for a population five times the size of ours. But since, our foreign policy notwithstanding, we’re still separate from the USA, there isn’t much wrong with the boundaries bill.

This is so obvious that even Nick had to go along. In September, 2010, he thundered: “To the people we serve it is patently obvious that individuals’ votes should carry the same weight, and if that means reforming the rules for drawing boundaries, that is what we must do. That unfairness is deeply damaging to our democracy.” Spoken from the heart.

But that was two years ago, and that’s a lot of water under Westminster Bridge. Nick’s heart has changed, and what’s ‘patently obvious’ now is that he wants to blackmail his Coalition partners, and never mind the ensuing deep damage ‘to our democracy’. You see, Dave knows that without having the boundaries redrawn he’ll have to float from British to European politics or, perish the thought, private life sooner than he’d like. That makes him a soft touch for blackmail, and Nick knows it.

This whole thing raises many questions. Some of them would concern the personal qualities of our leaders, but, even if asked, such questions don’t really require answers. We all know what they would be.

More interesting are questions relating to the very nature of coalition politics. I’d suggest that coalitions in general run against the grain of first-past-the-post (FPP) elections. Just as proportional representation encourages numerous parties and therefore coalitions, FPP naturally gravitates towards elections contested by two or, at most, three main parties. In a way, by forming this coalition the two parties have put us on a slippery slope towards PR elections, so dear to every LibDem heart.

In the USA, where there are two major parties, a coalition is a self-evident theoretical impossibility, at least in peace time. In the UK, with our three major parties, it’s possible for two of them to gang up against one even under FPP. Yet in practice such a coalition can work only if the two parties are broadly similar in their fundamental principles at the grassroots.

I specify grassroots here for the leadership of all three parties manifestly have no fundamental principles other than craving for power. But for as long as we continue to play at democracy, party leaders have to pay lip service to their voters’ beliefs and sometimes, when they can’t help it, even act accordingly.

It’s reasonably clear that at least a third of the Tory parliamentary party don’t see Dave as a fellow Conservative and resent everything he stands for. They have to play ball most of the time, for they too are politicians and therefore can’t let principles get in the way of their careers. But occasionally they’ll rise in revolt, if only because they don’t want to upset their true-blue Tory constituencies enough to lose the next election.

These 100-odd MPs may feel, rightly or wrongly, that they can find common ground with most of the other Tory parliamentarians, for old times’ sake. But they haven’t got a single belief their share with Nick and his jolly friends. For them the coalition with the leftmost party in Parliament is a daily egregious insult, and they can take it only for so long.

In other words, the Coalition is unworkable. Or rather it would be if those who entered into it had been driven by anything other than the urge to form a government, any government. As it is, both parties will describe it as a marriage of convenience, even though they know it’s nearer a one-night stand.

I don’t know if the Tories can chuck the LibDems and limp to the next election as a minority government. They certainly wouldn’t be able to govern effectively. But those who think they do so now, raise your hands. No, Dave and George, you can’t vote for this one, put your hands down. So it’s unanimous: the nays have it.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When the French lose at anything, be it sports or war, it’s never because their opponent was better. It’s because they’ve been betrayed – nous sommes trahis is how they put it, in the Gallic equivalent to our ‘we wus robbed’.

In that spirit, French commentators have to ascribe the thrashing their cyclists get at the hands of the British to some dastardly cheating, or else unsporting technology. Whatever the sport, when a Frenchman loses, French commentators describe it as a ‘tragedy’. They then go into a lengthy and totally irrelevant panegyric of the loser’s sterling human qualities. He’s a nice young man who lights up every room he’s in, who works his cul off in a perfectly disinterested way, who gives his very best for the cause. The poor man is known for the charitable way in which he treats the poor, the crippled and, presumably, his opponents, who then turn around and stab him in the back. Nous sommes trahis all over again.

In short, the French are sore losers, vindicating the American maxim ‘show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.’ I’d paraphrase it to say ‘show me someone who wins or loses with equal grace, and I’ll show you a gentleman’, but this terribly outdated sentiment is neither French nor American. Nor is it really British any longer, come to think of that.

Anyway, this is all rather innocuous stuff. The nonsense perpetrated by columnists on either side of the Channel is much worse. For example, writing belatedly about the opening ceremony, the Figaro columnist Alexandre Adler first proved that there is such a thing as French conservatism, and then proved that there isn’t. (I’m talking about mainstream publications here. The French do have a conservative magazine called Nouvelles de France. Its editor is blessed with impeccable taste and deep understanding of conservatism, as witnessed by the fact that he put my grinning face on the cover of the current issue.)

According to Monsieur Adler, the opening ceremony was ‘testimony to British decadence’, a representation of the values of ‘organised proletariat’, or rather those of the ‘lower middle class entirely lacking in spirit’, complete with a ‘sub-Marxist vision of the Industrial Revolution’ and a ‘resuscitation of British communist views from the 1960s’. So far so good, all perfectly true.

But then Adler had to go and spoil it all by suggesting that instead we ought to have celebrated the ‘quiet heroism of the British aristocratic and proletarian volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.’ Those chaps, about 20,000 of them, tried, in their quietly heroic way, to deliver Spain to Stalin, which would have turned the country into a sort of Iberian Romania. A conservative would instead extol the dozen British volunteers for the other side, such as Peter Kemp, who joined the Carlists to keep Spain Spanish for the next 50 years. To make matters worse, Adler than cites Britain’s imperial past and its present of ‘turning its back on Europe’. If you don’t know the difference between Europe and the euro, Monsieur, you should look for a different line of work.

If you think this is bad, read what our Tory columnists are writing. Boris Johnson’s Telegraph column the other day showed that, Eton or no Eton, the Tories can do vulgar with the worst of them. Replete with exclamation points and laddish gasps, Boris’s article gives 20 reasons to be jubilant about this tawdry spectacle. The only convincing argument is the one he doesn’t enunciate, but rather demonstrates: politicians shouldn’t be columnists, and columnists shouldn’t be politicians. The conflict of interest is too blatant: there are too many things they can’t write for fear of letting their political side down and thereby jeopardising their cherished careers. One of the few columnists I respect once said to me that he sees his job as tossing bricks through windows. Boris has to see his as window dressing.

And he isn’t the only one. Writing for the same paper, Daniel Hannan, another pundit cum politician, says that Boris ‘is having an utterly splendid Olympics’. My impression was that Boris wasn’t competing in any of the events, but then of course this impression is wrong. Boris is competing in the race to be the next Tory leader, and I’d say he has made the semi-finals. Perhaps that’s what Mr Hannan, MEP, meant.

He then came up with a proposition that ought to earn him an honorary gold medal in verbal gymnastics. All those Union flags adorning so many windows are to him proof that ‘the Olympics are a victory for patriotism and common British values.’ These values are very common indeed. Mr Hannan in general tends to confuse patriotism with chauvinism, either of them with nationalism and all of them with tribalism. London 2012 has brought this confusion into focus: what he’s extolling has nothing to do with true patriotism. It’s nearer the sentiment displayed by a football lout wearing Union Jack shorts, a T-shirt saying ‘two World Wars, one World Cup, so f*** off’, and screaming ‘if it wasn’t for Ingerland, you’d all be krauts’ at the visiting fans.

Boris, according to Daniel, is playing a blinder because he declared that ‘kids around the country are seeing that the more you put in, the more you get out — which is a wonderful Conservative lesson in life.’ A better Conservative lesson would be to eschew ‘kids’ in favour of ‘children’. As to the ‘kids’ needing the Olympics to realise that it takes a lot of training to run fast, this may suggest that they’re retarded to begin with, and therefore unlikely to benefit from this lesson. Nor is it conservative to devote one’s life to achieving something as useless and trivial as sporting success.

Down, boys, down, would be my advice to our politico-pundits. Save your effusive enthusiasm for worthier causes.

 

 

 

Tory MP Louise Mensch has resigned her parliamentary seat for family reasons. She wishes to spend more time with her second husband and her three children by the first one.

“I have been struggling for some time to find the best outcome for my family life,” she wrote in her letter of resignation, displaying the command of style we now expect from our rulers. ‘The best outcome’ is to be found in New York where her present husband manages some of the nastier rock bands.

Far be it from me to offer avuncular advice on bringing up children, or ‘kids’ as we’re now supposed to call them. Actually I always thought that in order to have a kid one had to have sex with a goat, but apparently not: Mrs Mensch’s offspring are undoubtedly human. Therefore, on general principle, perhaps the drug-sodden rock world isn’t the best backdrop for rearing them.

I’m not suggesting that Mr Mensch is anything other than an upstanding role model (or ‘stand-up guy’, in the patois his wife will soon have to master), but his chosen field of endeavour brings him, and vicariously his family, in close daily contact with what one has to describe as the scum of the earth. Even if neither he nor his wife takes drugs, his stepchildren will be growing up deafened by the kind of cacophony that can only be produced by acid heads, some of whom will be frequent guests in the Mensch household.

Mrs Mensch’s personal experience with drugs would have been in the past regarded as atypical for Tory MPs. In her 20s she self-admittedly was a heavy user of Class A substances, a fact she now professes to regret: “I messed with my brain… It’s had long-term mental health effects on me.”

She doesn’t specify which Class A drugs she took, and neither does she admit to having been a heavy and prolonged user. But one has to be that to suffer long-term cerebral effects, as Mrs Mensch describes them. Now she’s naturally reformed: “Drugs are incredibly addictive, they destroy lives”.

The second half of the statement is undoubtedly true; the first, only with reservations. The only two drugs known to cause serious physiological addiction are barbiturates and alcohol. Neither cocaine nor opiates produce this sort of addiction, though both can create a craving for the pleasurable sensation. Nor are withdrawal symptoms as horrific as they are described by those who lack the willpower to give up.

I wonder whether the ‘long-term mental health effects’ affected Mrs Mensch’s subsequent career, first as an author of bestselling trash novels and then as a highly opportunistic politician. One suspicious telltale sign is that in 1996 she switched to the Labour Party, because she believed Tony Blair to be ‘socially liberal but an economic Tory.’ He was in fact neither, as anyone whose brain hadn’t been ‘messed with’ would have known. Another dubious sign is that the next year she came back into the Tory fold – surely Tony couldn’t have done anything in the intervening months that he hadn’t done many times before.

Such firm convictions and sterling credentials, coupled, it must be said, with highly photogenic looks, had to put the future Mrs Mensch on the short track to Westminster. The new Conservative party was acquiring what’s now called a social conscience, but what could be more accurately described as a cynical and irresponsible urge to win elections by promoting candidates chosen strictly for demographic reasons.

Elective politics in Britain, and everywhere else, has become nothing but a power game. Any major political party in the West, and certainly in Westminster, would field nothing but convicted murderers if such a line-up could guarantee votes. Compared to such an extreme scenario, making a parliamentary party reflect faithfully the nation’s demographic makeup is child’s play.

Hence the candidate’s moral and intellectual suitability for office first stopped being the sole requirement for selection, and then faded out as a requirement at all. What matters now is solely the ability to seduce the electorate into casting votes. If people who never studied anything much at school feel we must have a certain percentage of women in parliament, then so be it. No other criteria will apply.

No sane person would mind a 100-percent female parliament if all 650 women were the most qualified candidates for the job. Conversely, no such hypothetical individual ought to object if such an uncompromising approach would produce a men-only House of Commons, or any imaginable mix of men and women.

Louise Mensch has bravely shown by her own example what happens when a political party selects candidates for silly reasons: it gets silly candidates. Moreover, it gets spivs who enter the Commons to serve themselves, not their constituency, and certainly not their country. When self-service comes in conflict with the job, they just up and leave for the greener pastures, such as New York’s world of hard rock.

One only wishes we were spared spurious and self-righteous explanations. Just tell it like it is, Louise: you think you’ll be better off out of Parliament than in it. That would be honest and also kind, for such a frank admission would let us nod and say that we’ll be better off too.   

 

 

 

 

 

The other day the Games claimed their first victim: an official Olympic bus ferrying journalists hit and killed the 28-year-old cyclist Dan Harris.

Mr Harris chose that mode of transportation to avoid the traffic around the Olympic village close to which he lived. In fact his house in Hackney is near the Olympic velodrome, and if that’s not a gruesome coincidence, I don’t know what is.

The first reaction is to lament the young man’s death and to pray for his soul. The second one is to ponder the whole cycling fad, its death toll and how easy it is to prevent. So far this year, 60 cyclists have been killed in Britain, most of them in big cities, particularly in London. In fact, the staff at St Thomas’s hospital refer to cyclists as ‘organ donors’. It’s easy to see why.

If you’re a driver, recall all the times you’ve been tapped, touched or bumped by other cars. You’ve had a couple of such scrapes, haven’t you? A little scratch here, a tiny dent there, nothing worth bothering the insurance company about, and you do have your no-claims bonus to consider. Well, had you been riding a bike in London, every one of those little pats could have been fatal.

By contrast, only about six Amsterdam cyclists are killed in a year, on average. Of course, Amsterdam is a much smaller place than London, but then 35 percent of all journeys there are taken by bike, compared to only two percent in London.

Two conclusions immediately suggest themselves: first, London isn’t as suited to cycling as Amsterdam is; second, anyone who cycles through London must have his head examined – this regardless of how good a cyclist he is.

Bradley Wiggins isn’t much of a royalist, but he’s a fairly useful biker, as I think you’ll agree. His comments on the fatal accident started with the irrefutable observation that ‘London is a busy city and there’s a lot of traffic…’ And then came a startling admission: ‘I got knocked off several times.’ Being knocked off a bicycle in London constitutes a near-fatal accident, and it’s the world’s best road cyclist we’re talking about. Has Stirling Moss had many such accidents in London, in the centre of which he lives? Has Lewis Hamilton?

So why would reasonably intelligent and responsible people endanger their lives by riding their bikes in a city manifestly not designed for this mode of locomotion? Some do so because they can’t afford to travel in any other way, though one suspects that, for all of Dave’s and George’s efforts, such paupers are few. Some may feel they need the exercise for their health, so if a chap ends up on a morgue slab, at least his corpse will be in prime shape.

But most do so out of sanctimonious self-righteousness, as if pressing their holier-than-thou environmental credentials. Politicians, such as Dave and our jolly-hockey-sticks mayor, have the extra motivation of appearing cool and populist, thereby hoping to counteract their vote-losing Bullingdon past, but this is a separate subject.

As one moves through London by sensible transportation, especially motorcar, one detects the smug look on the face of every cyclist one overtakes. You may be travelling in safety and comfort, he seems to be saying, but I’m striking a blow for the cause dear to every progressive heart.

As with most champions of progressive causes, smugness seamlessly gives way to self-centred rudeness. Cyclists routinely ignore pedestrian crossings, traffic lights, stop signs, lane discipline – and they do so with impunity. After all, they won’t get points off their licence for they haven’t got one. Nor will their insurance premiums go up if they cause an accident – they don’t pay any in the first place.

Neither do they pay any road tax or congestion charges, and yet politicians bend over backwards to accommodate these freeloaders at the expense of drivers, who pay hundreds of pounds for the privilege of being patronised by bikers. For example, the Embankment, which used to be the quickest way of travelling from Chelsea to Westminster, has been reduced to one lane each way to make room for the new bicycle lane, wide enough for three bikers to hold hands as they ride.

Wiggins’s solution to the problem? Same as Dave’s: ‘Make helmets compulsory.’ I’m amazed neither intellectual giant has suggested that cyclists carry a government health warning. Neither of them seems to realise that laws should be instituted to protect people against others, not against their own irresponsibility. A cyclist not wearing a helmet (and most do) endangers no one other than himself, so it’s really none of the state’s business.

However, this doesn’t mean there’s nothing the state can do. Cyclists must be made to take a test, both written and on the road. They must have a licence that can be withdrawn after a specified number of  transgressions. They must carry third-party insurance. And they must pay for the privilege of using the roads. I suspect that under such conditions the number of cyclists in London will go down drastically. As will the number of lives taken so needlessly and for such spurious reasons.

Oh well, back to the real world now, one governed by political correctness and self-serving politicians. Dan Harris, RIP.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The other day I received a circular from a British organisation called Christian Voice. It was a true cri de coeur, loud enough to draw attention to another massacre in the making.

“If Mr Hague has his way and Assad falls, the Christians in Syria (10% of its population) will face a bloodbath. The signs are there right now, and only Russian and Chinese resistance to ‘the West’ is keeping the Syrian church from complete extermination,” says the circular, adding, “Thank God for the Russians.”

Right analysis, wrong conclusion. The Russians and the Chinese aren’t out to save Middle Eastern Christians – they’re pursuing their own interests, and these are in the long run even deadlier to Christendom, what’s left of it.

But one can understand those who are desperate to avert a catastrophe. Betrayed by their own government, not knowing where to turn, they’d form a pact with the devil, not just the Russians, if this could save the lives of Christians and Jews.

As ever, the root of the problem is close to home. The asinine policy inspired by American neocons and avidly pursued by the US government, with Britain in the role of the proverbial poodle, is encouraging the radicalisation of Islam, a religion that doesn’t really need such prodding.

A creed founded not by a crucified martyr but by a warrior, Islamic civilisation is by its very nature radical and aggressive. It has to be those things for it’s doctrinally committed to proselytising, and history has taught Muslims that the only way they can spread their faith is by violence. Like all other civilisations, Islam has its peaks and troughs: at some times it’s more impassioned, and therefore radical, than at others. This is all basic.

What’s less so is the West’s response at this time, when the amplitude of Islamic passion is clearly at its peak. As a direct manifestation of this, Christians are being persecuted all over the Muslim world.

Sri Lanka is about to make Christian conversion a criminal offence. Christianity is illegal in Saudi Arabia, and anyone caught with a Bible, or with the Cross around his neck will be thrown into prison.

In Pakistan, churches are burned down every week. Recently, a thirteen year old girl was taunted for being a Christian by five Muslim youths who then raped her. The rapists were not charged.

A man is currently on trial for his life in Egypt for converting to Christianity. In Sudan, Somalia, Mali, Nigeria – all over Africa – Christians are being dispossessed and slaughtered. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt aims to wipe out all the Coptic Christians who have been there since the second century.

And the Western – or, to give credit where it’s due, American – response? To mastermind and engineer the fall of those Middle Eastern regimes that are all of them unsavoury but none of them Islamic radical. The Americans, with us in tow, commit this criminal outrage in the name of democracy – even though in this context ‘democracy’ is wholly synonymous with ‘Islamic radicalism’ and all it entails.

Fundamental to our response to this is the understanding that, when conducting their policy of democracy über alles, the Americans don’t really mean it. ‘Democracy’ for them is a desemanticised equivalent of our own erstwhile ‘white man’s burden’, something to inscribe on the banners of a budding global empire. Americans too are proselytisers, and, when Coke and McDonald’s don’t quite do the job, their ‘democracy’ acquires a laser-guided aspect. In short, ‘democracy’ has become nothing but a neocon trick.

As I write this, ‘Arab Spring’ is in real danger of turning into nuclear winter. Radical Islamic regimes of wild-eyed fanatics committed to the destruction of Israel and the massacre of Christians and Jews, have taken over in North Africa and Iraq, and are about to do so in Afghanistan. Assad is tottering, and Messrs Obama and Cameron are only too happy to provide the final push. Once they’re victorious, the so-called ‘rebels’ will unleash a tribal and religious civil war and, should chemical weapons fall in their hands, will be perfectly willing to use them.

Middle Eastern Christians and Israel, the only recognisably civilised and genuinely pro-Western country in the region, are in grave danger of a holocaust. Israel, the only country in the world denied by the progressivist consensus the right to defend itself, will respond to such a menace with every means at its disposal, nuclear weapons if need be. Is this what the State Department and the Foreign Office want? Possibly; I woudn’t put anything past them.

If the Middle Eastern Christians and Jews are indeed massacred, their blood won’t just be on the hands of Muslim fanatics. Our own governments won’t come out unsullied either. They are selling the Judaeo-Christian soul for a mess of pottage, or, to be more up-to-date about it, a barrel of oil. And all we can do is scream off the rooftops, hoping our voice will be heard. 

 

 

 

You must feel proud that the Russian punk-rock group, now on trial in Moscow, has chosen such an elegant English name for itself. This shows how generously the Anglophone world shares its cultural achievements with all nations.

In February this year, as if to prove that they had absorbed the spirit of our pop culture, not just its form, three Pussy Rioters delivered a disgustingly blasphemous performance at the altar of Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.

Penetrating the area reserved in the Orthodox church for the clergy only, the three girls performed a mockery of the hymn Sanctus, begging the Virgin to ‘kick Putin out’. They also referred to the Patriarch as ‘a bitch’ (the Russian word suka can be profitably used to describe a member of either sex) and, instead of ‘holy, holy, holy, Lord God’, sang what Wikipedia wrongly translates as ‘shit, shit, shit of Lord God’. In fact, the Russian word sram only means ‘shame’, with no faecal implications whatsoever. Still, the act was indisputably blasphemous both to the church and to the national leader it venerates. The three women are now on trial, facing a maximum sentence of seven years in a concentration camp.

On general principle, I’m in favour of locking up all pop ‘musicians’ and, if they have committed blasphemy, throwing away the key. But such principles don’t apply in this instance, for the trial raises graver issues.

The prosecution has declared that the Pussy Rioters ‘undermine the state’s spiritual foundations’, presumably meaning Christianity. Here I have to disagree. Putin’s KGB state is founded, spiritually, not on religion but on thievery and money laundering. In a show of hypocrisy infinitely more offensive than anything perpetrated by the Pussies, Putin and his gang these days attend church services with the same pious expressions they sported at party rallies not so long ago. But their Father isn’t in heaven: he’s at KGB headquarters and in offshore banks, where the gang keeps its ill-gotten laundry.

The church hierarchy, ably led by Patriarch Kiril, KGB codename ‘Mikhailov’, belongs to the same gang. His Holiness, a lifelong KGB agent, recently won a court case against his neighbour whose refurbishment work had allegedly caused $1.7 million worth of dust damage to the Patriarch’s flat. As a monk, ‘Mikhailov’ took a vow of chastity and poverty, which doesn’t prevent him from sharing his palatial quarters with a woman who was at first described as his ‘sister’, then became his ‘cousin’, then his ‘distant relation’. He gets away with such ill-concealed cynicism because the upper echelons of the church are his moral twins. For instance, both priests who contested the patriarchal elections against Kiril were KGB agents too.

While the KGB represents a modern phenomenon, the Russian church has been an extension of the state since at least the reign of Peter I (1682-1725). Moreover, it has always enjoyed a cosy relationship with the secret police. A law Peter’s Synod passed in 1722 obligated all priests, on pain of death, to report to the authorities any suspicious statement vouchsafed at confession. The penny dropped, and priests (with many exceptions, to be sure) continued to inform on their parishioners for the next two and a half centuries.

In fact, looking at Russian history, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the church has always been probably the most reactionary, and certainly the most anti-Western, estate. It has always toed the line drawn by the government, but it has done so with particular fervour whenever the state pursued rabid anti-Western policies.

Thus the church was more than ready to seek the protection of heathen Mongol invaders against the Western Christian orders. Its relationship with the doctrinally godless but refreshingly anti-Western Bolshevik regime was also ambivalent to say the least. Thus its adoration of the increasingly anti-Western Putin government follows a time-honoured trend.

Putin loathes the West not just viscerally, but also pragmatically. Having established his kleptocratic regime by larcenous means, he knows that any serious liberal opposition invoking legality can unseat him. That’s why Putin has to appeal to the reactionary masses spearheaded by the church. And reconfirming his anti-Western credentials is an essential part of that appeal.

It’s mostly for this reason that the kleptocracy consistently champions any regime in conflict with the West, including the most hideous ones. Putin knows, for example, that Assad is a lost cause, but he’ll continue to support him until the final fall of the axe. The kleptocrats sense their spiritual kinship with Assad, and fear that his demise could lead to their own, one domino knocking the others down.

Such fears too have historical roots, best exemplified by Peter’s father, Tsar Alexei, responding to the execution of Charles I in England. When the English Muscovy Company, which had enjoyed a near monopoly on Russian trade since Elizabethan times, applied for an extension of its licence, it was floored by the short uppercut of the tsar’s ukase: ‘Inasmuch as the said Anglic Germans have slaughtered their own King Carolus to death, we hereby decree that none of the said Anglic Germans shall henceforth be admitted to Russia’s land.’

It’s not just the ‘Anglic Germans’, but the West in general that Russian rulers variably, and the Russian church invariably, have always wished to keep out. This includes the West at its best and also at its worst, the end so pathetically represented by Pussy Riot.

Much as I find the ladies highly objectionable, I think we should all campaign for their release – the months they’ve already spent, and will spend, in custody until the end of the trial is punishment enough. A state truly committed to the protection of Christianity would have the moral right to impose a harsher sentence. But Putin’s murderous thugs have no such right – any verdict they pass is unjust because they’re the ones who pass it.

 

 

 

 

The Greco-Romans held their Olympics to celebrate the beauty of the human form, in the hope that a sound body will produce a sound mind. Mens sana in corpore sano, was how Juvenal put it, adding that this was a prayer, not a confident expectation.

The sideshow created in modern times celebrates the deformity of body and mind. The only intellectual attainment on display is that of chemists and pharmacologists serving the debasement of man, as practised by immoral states.   

In that regard, I was extremely impressed by the 16-year-old Chinese girl who swam her 50m freestyle faster than the male gold-medal winner in the same event. In doing so, she beat her own best time by a full five seconds.

Ye Shewen then passed the obligatory drug test, and more power to her. Yet experts in the sport have nonetheless suggested that the poor girl’s achievement wasn’t just physical but also chemical. If that’s so, and China has form in that sort of thing, then all I can do is congratulate the Chinese pharmacologists involved in developing the substance that can produce such sporting excellence while remaining undetectable.

In general, chemists, pharmacologists and drug companies are the unsung heroes of the Games, and I do hope they’ll get the acclaim they deserve. I mean, anyone can build a girl up on steroids, then pump her full of speed, break an ampoule of amyl nitrate under her nose and point her in the direction of the swimming pool. But that sort of thing would be instantly found out by the simplest of tests. Something much more sophisticated may have been concocted, so three cheers for modern science in the service of excellence.

Such pharmacological achievement goes back a long time. I remember those East German swimmers, females with male bodies and voices to match. When this was pointed out to their coach, he responded wittily that his girls were swimmers, not singers. In fact they were neither. They were actually freaks created by totalitarian Frankensteins to further their propaganda objectives.

Another recollection: star female gymnasts, such as Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci, were as flat as washboards while they competed, only to grow to what I’d estimate as a respectable Size 34C a couple of years after retiring at age 20 or so. Somehow I don’t think their previously masculine physiques were shaped entirely by diet and exercise.

Sound bodies? Just look at the freaky weightlifters, especially the female ones. Or how about the cyclist Robert Forstemann’s thighs, each thicker than his waist and five times as thick as his calves? If this is testimony to beauty, then modern aesthetic standards need revising. Or read the harrowing stories of those East German girls disabled for life by steroids, unable to have children (one of them, a perfectly normal girl, actually turned into a man and had to have a transsex operation).

As to the sound minds, the poor creatures, especially those coming from totalitarian countries like China, have no chance of developing them – even assuming that they possess the requisite ability and motivation. They train day in, day out, going through a body-breaking regimen and being force-fed like geese supplying foie gras. At least in reasonably free countries the children and their parents have the choice of opting for normal development. In China and North Korea they don’t.

But it’s not just the evil regimes that are to blame for this obscene spectacle. We all have a charge to answer to – that of agreeing to play the game by the rules set by monsters.

For we too encourage and finance children to turn into professional freaks at a time when they ought to be learning how to read decent books, listen to real music and replace x and y variables with numbers. We seem to accept the standards of achievement first laid down by Nazi Germany in 1936 and then pushed to foul extremes by the Soviets and their spawns.

What do you do all day, little Vania? I jump over a plank and train to be able to set the plank higher. All day? Yes, of course, for if I waste an hour or two on books, a capitalist will jump higher, making my country look bad and depriving my family of their flat in a prefabricated block.

What a miserable, dehumanising existence that is. And the only way to put an end to it would be for all supposedly decent governments to refuse to subsidise potential Olympians, as India has done. If parents want to fund the budding javelin-thrower, then by all means they should do so, in the knowledge that they’re consigning their child to a lopsided existence, retarded development and extremely uncertain rewards.

Tennis parents do that sort of thing, hoping that the child will eventually earn a decent living on the professional circuit, where even a Number 70 or 80 can become wealthy. What about a Number 80, or even Number 2, javelin-thrower? That poor child would have to sacrifice normal life for his country’s success, not his own. And any half-decent country should tell him in no uncertain terms that it neither needs his sacrifice nor will pay for it.

The greatest show on earth? More like the most corrupt, the most mendacious, the most dishonest. I mean, you don’t believe the hundreds of thousands US ‘college’ athletes receive really are ‘scholarships’, do you?

Let’s return the Olympics to the pre-Nazi, pre-Commie, pre ‘college’ days of true amateurism. And if the likes of China still insist on cheating and turning children into ghastly dehumanised automata, then let them have their own Games and compete against North Korea. Good luck to them. 

 

 

 

All of us sports fans are bitterly divided. Which Olympic event is the most exciting of all? Cycling? 100m finals? Heavyweight boxing?

I say balls to all that. Volleyballs, to be exact. Beach volleyballs, to be even more exact. Beach volleyball gets real sports fans excited the way no other sport does, if you get my meaning.

It’s all about the technical brilliance and deep strategic insights demonstrated by practically naked girls throwing themselves on the sand and then patting each other on their jutting assets. The sport becomes especially exciting when, in a dazzling demonstration of their athleticism and a couple of other things, the girls fling themselves sideways towards the fans, their mastery of the sport for all to see.

The British Olympian Denise Johns claims that the uniform consisting of two narrow strips of fabric is intended to be ‘sexy’ and to draw attention. How little she understands her own sport – off with her head. What does ‘sexy’ have to do with anything? It’s all about the triumph of… well, you know what I mean. 

And how appropriate it is that, like Aphrodite out of the sea foam, this most exciting of sports should emerge out of clouds of marijuana smoke at Santa Monica, California, and migrate to Horse Guards Parade. At this ideal venue it can be watched not only by panting fans but also by the stone eyes of Field Marshals Kitchener and Roberts, looking on from their plinths. They too achieved something in their day; now it’s the girls’ turn. It’s as if a relay baton has been passed from the backward past to our shining present.

But why are we talking about girls only? You may think I’m sexist, and if sexism isn’t an imprisonable offence yet, it will be soon. Before my collar is felt, I hasten to add that men play the sport too, and many people, among whom I regretfully can’t number myself, find the male version even more exciting. It was largely thanks to the beach-volleyball sequence that the 1986 film Top Gun became a ‘gay icon’, and don’t you just love this word combination?

Remember the scene? Tom Cruise misses a hot date with a beautiful girl because he’s too engrossed in fondling the glistening muscles of his partner each time the chap spikes the ball into the golden sand. In an inspired bit of casting, a notorious lesbian played the role of the temporarily jilted girl, thus adding a background hint, nudge and wink for those slow on the uptake.

Citius, Altius, Fortius – Swifter, Higher, Stronger – says the Olympic motto. Why such limitations? What’s wrong with ‘bigger’, ‘rounder’, ‘firmer’? And why did the IOC have to wait until 1996 to make beach volleyball an Olympic sport? Those dinosaurs are behind the times, and something must be done to drag them into our beloved 21^st century.

To their credit, they do add new sports to the Games all the time. Curling, for example, is a relatively recent valuable addition – where would the winter Olympics be without it? In the doldrums, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

But this time the IOC missed a trick. They failed to include two international sports rivalling beach volleyball for sheer excitement: mud wrestling and pole dancing. Appropriate venues would have suggested themselves: the Cenotaph in Whitehall or, more daringly, the flag on the roof of Buckingham Palace could function as the pole, while St Pauls’s Cathedral would be a perfect site for the mud pit.

Moreover – are you ready for this? – not only could these sports provide an arena for displaying individual brilliance, but they could all come together with beach volleyball to form a new, truly progressive triathlon. Admittedly some details would need to be worked out, for the two proposed sports tend to be played as singles, while beach volleyball is a doubles game.

Perhaps, and I welcome your suggestions, the two new sports can be doubles as well. We already have synchronised swimming, why not synchronised pole dancing? No reason at all. And who’s to say that four naked girls rolling in the dirt wouldn’t be twice as exciting as two? In a purely athletic sense of course? Nobody.

That’s the problem with members of the Olympic Committee – they don’t possess the same imagination our own Danny Boyle displayed in masterminding the glorious opening ceremony. It wouldn’t have occurred to them, as it did to Danny Boy, to have Her Majesty, her petticoat flapping in the wind, parachuting in upon the Games. So all right, everyone knew it wasn’t really the Queen doing the skydiving, but ingenious make-believe can be more real than reality. And nothing like jumping out of a chopper to bring a monarch, and monarchy, down to earth. It’s this famed British humour, see? Foreigners just don’t get it.

But forget about humour for now. My suggestion of adding two new sports (actually three, if you include the triathlon) is as serious as they come. Oops, wrong choice of word. Call it a Freudian slip.