Category: Blog

As new chairman of the European Council on Toleration and Reconciliation, Tony has been put in charge of combatting anti-Semitism in Europe.

This is like appointing Sepp Blatter to stamp out corruption in sports. For Tony is personally responsible for putting Jews in the greatest peril since 1953, when only Stalin’s death prevented Russia’s own final solution.

In 2003 Tony played top dog in the pack run by Dubya and trained by US neoconservatives. Their criminal invasion of Iraq is directly responsible for jeopardising the survival of Jews in the Middle East.

Mouthing mantras about the Muslims gagging for democracy, the Bush-Blair coalition removed the dictators who, though undemocratic, had kept a lid on the pressure cooker.

As a result, the Middle East has been plunged into blood-soaked chaos, with much of the blood coming out of the veins of Jews and Christians. And ISIS appears to be on the verge of triumph, which will put Israel in mortal danger.

Yet this isn’t the kind of danger the country can’t handle – after all, Israel has had plenty of experience defending herself against wild-eyed fanatics.

The trouble this time, now that the coalition has lost any taste for direct involvement, is that the ayatollahs are seen as the only viable counterforce to ISIS. Hence, to enlist their support, heirs to the coalition have countenanced, in all but name, Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, and no one doubts the intended target.

Blair was directly involved not only in setting these gruesome events in train. Also, as Middle East peace envoy, he did nothing whatsoever to mitigate the conflict, concentrating instead on securing astronomical fees for his company.

(Incidentally, one must compliment Tony on his fiscal acumen. The fee for this new job will be paid not to him personally, but to his corporation, which is much more tax-efficient.)

To be fair, Tony didn’t just make life harder for Middle Eastern Jews. He did what he could domestically as well.

As his eminence grise Peter Mandelson has admitted, Blair’s government deliberately imported hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants, whom Labour correctly saw as their potential voters.

This brings us to the article in today’s Times, which Blair co-wrote with the iffy Russian ‘businessman’ Moshe Kantor, now residing in Israel. (All Russian ‘businessmen’ who enriched themselves in the ‘90s are iffy.)

Among other things, the article shows that Blair has learned nothing from the Middle Eastern disaster he perpetrated. Instead he still draws inspiration from his accomplice Bush, who declared that “Islam is a religion of peace”.

Hence Blair: “It is our firm belief that it is not religion or faith per se that causes or foments conflicts. It’s the abuse of religion…”

You decide whether this statement is ignorant or mendacious. I’d suggest both.

First, no ‘religion per se’ exists. What exists is Islam per se, and the Koran contains 107 verses unequivocally calling for violence against Jews, Christians and other infidels.

Unlike most Christians and Jews, Muslims tend to obey their scripture. Thus it’s European Muslims who are mostly responsible for the sharp rise in anti-Semitic attacks that Blair-Kantor pledge to reverse.

(This isn’t to say that the indigenous non-Muslim population contains no anti-Semites. It’s just that, unlike the Muslims, they aren’t radicalised at present.)

The countermeasure Blair-Kantor suggest, criminalising Holocaust denial, is not only useless but actually harmful, in that the only tangible result of this attack on free speech will be a further increase in state power.

Rather than shutting up assorted idiots, the co-authors should look for ways to reduce the Muslim presence in Europe. They’d be amazed how precipitously the number of anti-Semitic attacks would drop.

Alas, neither Blair-Kantor nor, more important, Western governments have the brains and courage to identify the aetiology of the problem, as it exists in Europe today.  

Diagnosing the principal cause of a disease is the first step towards treating it. Yet we’re offered neither a correct diagnosis nor effective treatments, which is a guarantee that the problem will only get worse.

Instead we get Tony Blair, in yet another self-serving quango, acquiring yet another platform for assaulting us with bien pensant waffle.  

 

 

 

 

Writing for The Times, Angela Merkel has kindly explained what the G7 is actually for. An explanation was sorely needed because some cynics have expressed doubts that these occasional get-togethers actually serve a useful purpose.

Turns out they do, and Angie explained what’s what with her usual, and usually earnest, lucidity. The mission the G7 has undertaken is to make sure that every woman in the world is in gainful and equitable employment.

One would think it’s not immediately clear how, say, Germany and France or even the almighty United States can ensure that every wife of some aboriginal sultan goes to an office every morning, rather than serving her lord and master. Or, if she does go to the office, that she is treated as fairly as her male colleagues.

Come to think of it, her hubby-wubby the sultan could possibly achieve this end more quickly and effectively, if ever so slightly more violently.

But Angie’s faith in the omnipotence of international organisations is boundless, and she knows what she’s talking about. So I’ll let her speak for herself, with my comments enclosed in square brackets.

“In talking about work, we also need to talk about the possibilities open to women around the world to establish their independence and ensure their advancement through safe and skilled labour.”

[By way of illustration here’s one hypothetical example of a woman who did just that. At first her ‘safe and skilled labour’ was vouchsafed to the East German Young Communist League, in which she advanced to a nomenklatura position. That involved working hand in glove with Stasi, but that was the way of opening the possibilities.

Then, when neither East Germany nor Stasi was any more, the hypothetical woman’s safe and skilled labour was rerouted into West German, and eventually international, politics. In that arena she advanced as far as it’s possible to go without an unstoppable panzer force.

Of course, family life had to be sacrificed to the safe and skilled labour. Our hypothetical woman was rather tasty, as anyone who has seen her youthful nude shots on the net can testify. Hence she had no difficulty attracting men, with or without the benefit of marriage. But in both her marriages she clearly couldn’t find time to produce children. After all, birth labour is neither safe nor skilled.]

“All the statistics show a reduction in poverty and inequality when more women play an active part in economic life.”

[No doubt. But do the statistics also show who brings up the children of, say, a successful woman lawyer working 90-hour weeks, when she’s not particularly busy? How much moral, spiritual and cultural guidance is she able to offer her offspring?

Statistics, you see, show all sorts of things. For example, in Western countries, where most women work, over six million abortions have been performed since 2008. This stands to reason: children tend to make safe and skilled labour a bit more difficult.]

“However, only about 50 per cent of all women are currently in gainful employment.”

[What a tragedy. But how about the children of working women who aren’t successful lawyers and therefore can’t afford nannies? Who’s going to look after them?

Marx, Angie’s countryman, gave an unequivocal, and the only logical, answer: the state. His prescription was that children should be taken away from their mothers and raised as wards of the state. Is this the ideal Angie sees in her mind’s eye? After all, she was intellectually weaned on Marxism.]

“Worse still, in many developing countries the vast majority of those women who do work are employed under precarious or informal arrangements.”

[How about the men in those same countries? Do they all draw their expense accounts in air-conditioned offices? Or do they do the kind of back-breaking, lung-blackening, blood-poisoning jobs that denizens of G7 countries will no longer do? Angie is a great champion of globalisation based on outsourcing, which turns ‘developing countries’ into vast suppliers of cheap, and often slave, labour – not the safe and skilled variety.]

“The G7 therefore wants to aim to give more girls and women in developing countries the chance of vocational training.”

[How? By conquering those countries and replacing their governments? Presumably not. I get it: Angie wants G7 members to spend more on foreign aid, even though most of it is guaranteed to end up in the Swiss bank accounts of the aboriginal sultans.

Never mind that there’s a vast dearth of usable vocational training in the G7 countries themselves, regardless of the sex of those in need of such education. Angie is dead-set on making sure that those developing ‘girls and women’ cherish the myth of safe and skilled labour, while ignoring the reality of their children opting for short but rewarding careers as suicide bombers.]

One hates to generalise, but the propensity to hector others on how they should live isn’t very low on the list of salient German characteristics. Add to this national trait Angie’s personal attainment in bossy demagoguery, and what do you get?

A perfect Times article.

 

 

The first part of the title is a direct quote from Jean-Claude Juncker, to whom I’m warming up rapidly.

The second came from my own vituperative heart, with Dave being the object of the vituperation.

My friend Jean-Claude’s detractors cite many of his drawbacks, such as a dearth of any discernible principles, the kind of amorality that’s de rigueur for a committed federast, perfidy, the intellect of a child with special needs and so forth.

All that is true. But, for the sake of balance, one must think of his redeeming qualities too. To wit: Jean-Claude is a hearty drinker, borderline alcoholic. He smokes like a soot-blocked chimney. And he can see right through Dave.

I must stress that regarding heavy consumption of booze and fags as Jean-Claude’s merits reflects my own idiosyncrasies, rather than his own intrinsic goodness. However, his perspicacity, at least in relation to Dave, is objectively laudable.

Dave, said my new friend, doesn’t want any Brexit. He wants to use the referendum “to dock his country permanently to Europe”.

Truer words have seldom been spoken, at least not since Nigel Farage questioned the advisability of spending £25,000 of our money a year to treat a recent immigrant with HIV. Dave wants precisely what Jean-Claude said he does, which is why I’m opposed to the referendum.

Alas, Jean-Claude’s statement that not only Dave but also the British people don’t want Brexit testifies to the fact that his perspicacity doesn’t extend beyond Dave’s character.

Jean-Claude understands Dave perfectly because they are cut from the same spivocratic cloth. Conversely, he doesn’t understand the British because their national character is dramatically different from his own.

Hence he’s wrong about the British not wanting to leave the EU. They do. But I doubt they will feel the same way come referendum day, after having been deluged with bucketfuls of sewage, otherwise known as federalist propaganda.

The British en masse will be deaf to the only absolutely irrefutable argument in favour of getting out: that relinquishing our sovereignty destroys the 1,000-year political tradition of our nation, thereby destroying the nation.

Two generations of oxymoronic ‘comprehensive education’ have rendered our population ignorant of both our political heritage and its key formative influence on the nation at large.

As part of that ‘education’, the nation has been fed the materialist lie, preached by both socialists and libertarians (including, one is sad to say, the sainted Lady Thatcher). Both groups insist that virtue be judged strictly in economic terms, and they differ only on which roads they propose to take to the fiscal Shangri-la.

Hence the whole issue of in or out will be pitched in strictly economic terms. The EU and Dave’s government will spend millions, not to say billions, lying that the country will be prosperous within the EU and pauperised outside it.

Their task won’t be difficult. Economic facts pass the criterion of truthfulness on which logical positivists insist: they are falsifiable. Moreover, they are easily falsifiable.

By the time the British go to the voting booths, they will have been exposed to endless columns of figures proving that Brexit will mean mass unemployment, starvation and their wives leaving them for swarthy foreigners.

Some token concessions that Juncker’s friends will have offered in the nick of time will be presented as real game changers. The overall message will be that, by staying in the EU, we’ll multiply our wealth and keep all our sovereignty.

(This, incidentally, was the message I recently received from a young lady blessed with a philosophy degree from a decent university. If EU propaganda, still in low gear, had such an effect on her, imagine what it’ll do going at full pelt to the masses barely able to sign their names.)

And, once the Yes vote has been cast, there will be no going back – unlike with the barely possible No vote, which, in the good tradition of the EU, will be held invalid.

This is exactly the outcome Dave wants, and Jean-Claude cottoned on to this in one of his rare lucid moments. Immediately thereafter, the booze got the best of my new friend and he began muttering incoherent football analogies of which he’s fond when in his cups.

On the issue of Brexit, he said, “the Commission is neither an attacker nor a defender. It’s the ‘libero’ who distributes the ball… it’s like a training camp, because there are a lot of balls. At the end there is only one ball – and you have to get it into the goal…”

A lot of balls indeed. But I’d suggest, using the same football idiom so beloved of Jean-Claude, that the Commission is none of those things. It’s a crooked bettor slipping a few quid to a team to throw a match and stack the odds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you think it’s time to revive the idea of gassing the Jews? Our Home Secretary and Justice Secretary certainly do. That’s why they advocate Britain’s departure from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Such is the learned judgement of Prof. François Crépeau, UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. Who am I to argue?

Prof. Crépeau’s list of degrees is longer than mine, and he has been blessed by the laying on of UN hands. Hence he knows how to argue by sticking the thin end of a wedge in and twisting it for maximum effect.

Here’s a sample of his profound thought: “We have to remember the 1930s and how the rights of the Jews were restricted in Germany and then the rights of the whole German people. I mean, countries that go down the path of reducing the rights of one category of people usually don’t stop there.”

They certainly don’t. They go on to build gas chambers and burn corpses in concentration-camp crematoriums. And this, according to Prof. Crépeau, is exactly the slippery slope on which Britain would step – unwittingly or otherwise – if she were to withdraw from the ECHR.

Can you find any flaw in the good professor’s sequential thought? I can’t. It makes perfect sense, at least in some quarters. Such as the UN, the EU, the European Court and your friendly local loony bin.

However, this side of those venerable institutions such moronic, hysterical animadversions are pure Crépeau. One wonders what they teach at McGill and University of Paris, where this savant learned his rhetoric, logic and international law. Do they demand basic literacy before issuing advanced degrees?

The ECHR isn’t about human or any other rights. It’s about transferring legal authority from individual nations to the foul abortion known as the EU, thereby increasing its power and eventually making its supremacy irreversible. C’est tout, as they say at the University of Paris.

It takes a late stage of mental retardation to equate human rights with various international charters bearing that name. Being a UN trouble-shooter, my friend François ought to ponder the fact that the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights was signed by such authorities on the subject as Stalin’s Russia.

The EU, along with all the stillborn embryos of its offshoots, isn’t really a European Union. In all but a few technicalities it’s a union between Germany and France.

I hope my French friends, of whom I have many, and German friends, of whom I have none, won’t be offended, but England has nothing to learn about law in general and human rights in particular from either nation.

In my parents’ lifetime, the Germans committed, and the French abetted, the very atrocities that excite François so. Their Eastern European hangers-on were also active perpetrators then, and for the next 50 years or so they continued the fine tradition of concentration camps, this time with a red rather than brown tint.

This isn’t to say that those places haven’t redeemed themselves since then. It’s just that their conversion to the side of the angels is too recent to give them the right to impose their twisted notions of international legality on a country where individual rights have been protected by law for at least a millennium.

Even without resorting to François’s own demagogic trick of dragging the Holocaust in, thereby vulgarising one of the greatest tragedies in history, only an ideologised ignoramus would fail to observe that, at practically any moment in the last several centuries, it’s England that has been in a position to teach the continentals the basics of individual rights, not the other way around.

Repealing the ECHR would mean repatriating the enforcement of human rights to the country where they have traditionally been secure, and away from a legally and morally pernicious supranational organisation within which the Vichy-like Franco-German alliance would subjugate Europe – this time including Britain.

Anyway, François needn’t have bothered his intellectually challenged head with such matters. Dave has just ridden roughshod over our Justice and Home Secretaries by ruling out the very withdrawal that gives my friend François nightmares of gas chambers.

“Withdrawal is not going to happen,” says a Downing Street source. “David Cameron is clear this is off the table… The British bill of rights could mitigate the worst excesses of the Human Rights Act but it won’t change the fundamentals.”

The most important fundamental Dave cherishes is that Britain must become, by hook or by crook, a gau in the Fourth Reich, otherwise known as the EU. Perhaps François Crépeau should apply for the job of gauleiter. He has all the credentials: stupidity, ignorance, immorality and – most important – the talent to express himself at a hysterical pitch.

 

 

 

The other day, when my friend Will and I were having a couple of pints at the King’s Head, I complimented him on his interview with Gary Lineker.

Will succeeded, I said, in sounding as if he had finally divested himself of the stigma of his shamefully high birth. Why, he even refers to beer as ‘pig’.

This is what he told me in response:

“Ta, Alex, me old china.

“You may think I’m well posh, being a prince and all. But when I had that chinwag with me mate Gary, he knew I was a regular bloke who don’t like nothing more than going down the pub with me Brummie mates and watching Villa on the box.

“I even wrote me own Villa song, Claret ‘n Blue, One Loves You. Sang it to me trouble, but she stuck her fingers into her shell-likes.

“Me missus, she’s different, see. Coz she wasn’t brung up posh from birth, like, she has them aspirations, djahmean? Me, I don’t mind coming across like a prole, to make Gary feel at home.

“Sat in the box during the match, like a goodun, but wish I was with me Brummie mates. Villa, see, got a good kick up the bottle, and everyone in the box rooted for Arsenal, so they were well chuffed. Right berks, the lot of them.

“They like looked at me strange when the ref didn’t give us a stonewall pen and I jumped up and screamed ‘Ref is a wan…’ Stopped myself in time though, coz I was on that big screen and any bleedin’ lip reader would know what I was saying, djahmean?

“This etiquette is a load of old Jacksons, if you follow me meaning. I got me Geoff from St Andrew’s so I know how to talk posh when I have to. But me old lady, she now tries to talk all the time like she got an umbrella up her khyber.

“When I met her, she wasn’t like that. She was a good time girl, see. Swore like a trooper, drank pints of pig, shook her bristols down the pub, even talked chitty chitty.

“Now she got a pair of dustbins, she wants to be a proper royal trouble, she says. Me Nan, she always smiles sly when Kate says ‘one’ instead of ‘me’.

“The other day she told me ‘I rather think Katherine overemphasises the royalty bit, Will. One fears people may laugh.’ And I say ‘Cheers Nan. I been telling her that meself.’

“Now I’m so full of this pig, me back teeth are floating. Order us a couple of mahatmas, will you, Al?”

As I was shouldering my way through the crowd at the bar, I reminded myself that in the royal rhyming slang ‘mahatma’ stands for ‘brandy’. These days one has to take a crash course in chitty chitty (the Cockney rhyming slang for Cockney rhyming slang) to be able to understand what some royals are saying.

But then, as my friend Tony Blair once put it to such great political effect, Prince William’s late mother was a ‘people’s princess’. That, one supposes, makes him a people’s prince.

If you’ve led a shamefully sheltered life, you probably don’t realise that the title of this piece is actually a variation on the first line of a popular football chant, used by the fans of a winning team to taunt their opposite numbers.

Decorum prohibits my quoting the second line verbatim, but the gist of it is that those losers have nothing to sing about. However, in Sepp’s case, the answer is a resounding yes.

For Sepp managed to get himself re-elected as head of FIFA, world football’s governing body. This in spite of a whole platoon of his closest associates being indicted in America for various degrees and types of corruption, from bribery to tax evasion.

Moreover, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch is confidently predicting that there’s more to follow, for only the surface of the football fraud has been scratched. Since the fraudulent sum already mentioned is $150 million, before long the total amount to have changed hands will approach the combined wealth of all the Russian oligarchs who, like Abramovich, have a direct stake in football.

The Russians have been supporting Blatter unequivocally, bringing to mind the proverb about birds of a feather. With their unerring nose for conspiracies aimed at them (this nasal sensitivity is otherwise known as paranoia), they’ve declared that all the charges have been trumped up specifically for the purpose of taking the 2018 World Cup away from Russia.

According to the Russian media, as part of that incredibly intricate plot, the FBI informer within FIFA not so much blew the whistle on the corruption as organised it himself. As Putin’s RT mouthpiece Soloviov put it, addressing the perfidious Yanks: “If you really installed your mole [into FIFA], this raises the question: Did you investigate the corruption or perpetrate it?” Indeed. No other question could possibly cross anyone’s mind.

The same gentleman screamed hysterically: “Corruption in FIFA? And when they talk about it [on Western TV], they show footage of Blatter and Putin chatting. Even though neither one has been implicated!”

Neither one has been arrested, rather. As to not being implicated, this is, how shall I put it kindly, not quite so.

Blatter is implicated by association at least. Just imagine what would happen to the president of, say, BP if seven of his vice presidents were arrested for fraud and seven more were expected to be nabbed within days. He’d be in a mad rush to tender his resignation before being sacked and, most likely, indicted.

As to Putin, while the US action is attracting all the attention, few have noticed an even more important parallel development. For the Swiss Prosecutor’s office has started criminal proceedings against “a group of unspecified persons linked to irregularities in selecting the countries to host the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.” In other words, Russia and Qatar. Interestingly, in this instance FIFA is mentioned as the victim rather than the perpetrator.

For old times’ sake we must presume that the two countries are innocent until proven guilty. But between us boys, does anyone really think there was nothing untoward about the selection?

One can just see it, the FIFA chaps pondering the possible options in a totally objective and disinterested way. England? No, too misty. France? No, too many temptations for the players to stuff themselves. America? No, what do they know about football?

And suddenly, as if out of the burning bush, comes the epiphany: “I have an idea! Why don’t we award the first one to Russia and the second one to Qatar?”

Everyone gets up, a spontaneous ovation breaks out. Why didn’t they think of that? Russia, with her corruption rating of 156 out of 175 countries, and Qatar, with its summertime temperatures around 50C. Unbeatable choices, both.

As if to prove their sterling credentials to host such events, the Russian Duma is about to pass a law calling for the use of slave labour in the construction of the World Cup sites. And Qatar is already using slaves for the same purpose, de facto, if not yet de jure.

Officially, their construction workers are visitors from India, Nepal and Bangladesh. Unofficially, as if to remind footballers of what can happen when people overexert themselves in extreme heat, they are dying at a rate of one a day. So far the death toll stands at about 1,000, but then it’s early days yet.

As to Russia, the sports establishment in that country is known for its corruption levels far exceeding those considered par for the course in one of the world’s most corrupt countries. Thus about $20 billion of the funds raised for the Sochi Olympics was pilfered by Putin’s cronies with hardly an eyebrow raised anywhere.

Anyway, let’s not be churlish about it. I hope you’ll join me in congratulating Mr Blatter on his re-election. Well-done and well deserved, Sepp!  

 

 

 

Dave is currently on a trick-or-treat junket to Europe, or rather treat-and-trick. He wants the EU to treat him to a few ploys enabling him to trick us into voting Yes in the referendum.

As any marketing man will tell you, respondents in any survey find it much easier to say Yes than No. Hence, by wording the big question as ‘Do you want to stay in the EU?’, rather than ‘Do you want to get out?’, Dave feels he’s already halfway there to the result he craves.

Now he wants the EU to help him with the other half, by agreeing to seemingly attractive but in fact purely cosmetic changes to the existing arrangement, which changes can at any rate be withdrawn after the referendum.

After all, if the plebiscite returns the desired outcome, we aren’t going to be asked to vote again, are we? It’s only when nations vote wrong that the EU tells them to do it again and get it right this time.

The only problem is that the EU is playing hard to get. Dave may have failed to communicate his real objective lucidly enough, or else the federasts are genuinely afraid of the domino effect. What if, following Britain’s example, others start getting ideas above their station? Das ist ausgeschlossen, in the language of the EU metropolis.

One way or the other, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius explained the facts of life to Dave, choosing the language he felt even un sale Anglo-Saxon could understand:

“Mon petit David,” he said. “Britain joined a football club, but no? Zey cannot now say in ze middle of ze match zat zey want to play rugby. It’s one sing or anozzer. What part of non don’t you understand, mon ami?”

Mr Fabius probably didn’t realise how well his metaphor works. For, if what’s going on is a simulacrum of an international football match, then the EU acts in the capacity of FIFA, with all that this entails.

Specifically, it entails corruption on a Putinesque scale, routine bribery, a phoney democracy that is in fact a crypto-dictatorship, contracts going to the boys willing to play ball, blackmailing recalcitrant members – the lot.

My friend Dave winced at both such an unfortunate turn of phrase and an even more unfortunate failure to understand his true goals. He decided to follow suit and resort to the football idiom too.

“Laurent,” he said. “You are being unreasonable. You must realise that unless the ref’s decisions, the least important ones, go our way, we may have to take an early bath.”

That incensed Mr Fabius even more because he was unfamiliar with the expression and decided Dave was rudely referring to the recent survey showing that half the French don’t wash regularly. The conversation rapidly went downhill, and both parties felt the final whistle couldn’t come too soon.

Dave missed an open goal yet again because he failed to realise the goalposts are fixed and can’t be moved. Or else he was caught offside yet again – choose your own football jargon.

What I find intriguing is the way Dave explains the situation to the Europeans. Unless we get what he asks for – and God knows he’s not asking much – Britain may have to leave the EU, he keeps repeating.

And there I was, thinking that the whole point of the referendum is letting the people decide. Since our decision hasn’t yet been made public, how does Dave know whether we’ll vote Yes or No, concessions or no concessions?

He can only feel so prescient if he’s certain he can manipulate the referendum to get the result he wants. He probably can, with a little help from his EU friends, and it’s refreshing to hear a politician in general and Dave in particular tell the truth. If only inadvertently.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Congratulations to the whole region. It will henceforth be spared Tony’s malevolent presence to which the Middle East owes much of its present ordeal.

Had Mrs Leo Blair suffered a miscarriage 63 years ago, the Middle East might have been spared the Walpurgisnacht of Isis, while Europe wouldn’t be besieged by swarms of refugees risking watery death to flee from Libya.

Israel would also be safer, although, with the ‘Palestinians’ expertly playing on the West’s post-colonial guilt and perverse attraction to Third World diversity, she wouldn’t be completely safe.

But at least the threat of crazed nuclear-armed ayatollahs would be counterbalanced by Saddam’s Iraq and Gaddafi’s Libya, with Assad’s Syria sitting on the fence. Now, with those major players off the field, Iran is emerging as the region’s strongman.

America has withdrawn from the mess, having first started it under Dubya in collusion with our miscarriage manqué. Once bitten by the fiasco of the ill-conceived and illegal invasion, she is now twice shy to do something about Iran’s nuclear threat – other than tacitly encouraging it.

We’ll have to suffer Obama’s sanctimonious waffles for another couple of years, but at least we stand a good chance of not being exposed to the smug noises produced by arguably the most hideous character ever to occupy 10 Downing Street.

Tony had a good thing going while it lasted. First he went along with Dubya on his criminal aggression against Iraq. Then, when that went sour, he asked his American accomplice to put in a good word for him with the self-appointed Quartet of the UN, EU, US and Russia (!), which was looking for a front man.

“Yo, Blair,” said Dubya. “You scratched my back, I’ll scratch yours. Count on me, boy. And get me a refill, will ya?”

Bush was as good as his word. Tony ‘Yo’ Blair got the job of peace envoy and made it a resounding success. For himself, that is.

He could now go through the motions of global politics, while focusing his undivided attention on building his business empire, much of it made possible by his contacts with Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and other Emirates, not to mention the Palestinian mobile phone company he got together with another one of his clients, JP Morgan.

As to his supposed day job, he brought to it the defunct notions he shared with the US neoconservatives. According to Tony, all problems in the Middle East spring from the conflict between Israel and the ‘Palestinians’.

As Tony’s sponsor Dubya said, Islam is a religion of peace (Tony’s successor Dave saw fit to repeat this idiocy, but then he’s the self-described ‘heir to Blair’). Let those poor Palestinians, happily displaced for three generations, have their state, and Islam will return to its normal peaceful self.

A worthy goal towards which to strive, or rather it would be if it were true. In fact, the briefest of looks at some of the world’s flashpoints over the last 20 years will show that most of them involved Muslims – and had nothing to do with Israel.

Specifically one could mention the conflicts between Bosnian Muslims and Christians, Côte d’Ivoire Muslims and Christians, Cyprus Muslims and Christians, East Timor Muslims and Christians, Indonesian Muslims and Christians in Ambon island, Kashmir Muslims and Hindus, Kosovo Muslims and Christians, Macedonian Muslims and Christians, Nigeria Muslims and both Christians and Animists, Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims throughout the Islamic world, Muslims and Christians in the Philippines, Chechen Muslims and Russians, Azeri Muslims and Armenian Christians, Sri Lanka Tamils and Buddhists, Thailand’s Muslims and Buddhists in the Pattani province, Muslim Bengalis and Buddhists in Bangladesh, Muslims and Protestant, Chaldean Catholic and Assyrian Orthodox Christians in Kurdistan.

But moral and intellectual integrity mean nothing to our Tony. What matters is maintaining his image of the global dove of peace, while feathering his nest to the tune of hundreds of millions.

I don’t know the Hebrew, Arabic or Farsi for good riddance to bad rubbish. But whatever it is, the Middle Easterners should be saying it. There’s hope for them yet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vlad and his trained cronies are the best travelling circus in the world. Its travel from Petersburg to Moscow is particularly entertaining.

When Vlad moved from his post as Petersburg’s deputy mayor to bigger and better things in Moscow, he brought his whole gang… sorry, I mean team, with him. Most members were Vlad’s comrades-at-arms in the KGB, so mutual understanding wasn’t a problem.

Those who are curious about the team’s shenanigans should Google Marina Salye, the Petersburg politician who a few years ago published a dossier implicating Putin et al in pilfering on a massive scale, to the tune of $100 million-plus.

But one always seeks fresh material, and this was provided a few days ago. The Petersburg businessman Freidzon gave an interview to Radio Liberty, in which he elucidated the team’s modus operandi.

He had to accept Putin as a silent partner in his firm, and Vlad was satisfied with a modest four per cent share. The unspoken understanding was that he’d take either a piece of the action or a piece out of Mr Freidzon, who was wise enough to make the right choice.

In addition, he had to keep greasing Vlad’s palm with whatever amounts Vlad thought fair, usually $10,000 at a time. Mr Freidzon stresses that Putin, being royalty in the making, never sullied his hands with the folding stuff. Instead he’d just summon Mr Freidzon for a chat, during which he’d absent-mindedly jot down a numeral on a pad. The businessman would then pass the specified sum to Alexei Miller on his way out.

Vlad thereby showed that KGB tradecraft was useful in covering one’s tracks. As a KGB case officer, he also knew how to be loyal to his assets. Hence, when Vlad became national leader, he not only brought Miller with him to Moscow, but put him in charge of Gazprom, the world’s largest gas producer.

One hand washes the other and all that, so Miller was happy to do a Freidzon and hand over to Vlad a piece of the Gazprom action as well, and, if rumours are to be believed, a considerably larger chunk than a paltry four per cent. I wish I could put a monetary value on Vlad’s reputed 15 per cent share, but my counting ability doesn’t go that high.

Sergei Ivanov is another one of Vlad’s colleagues from the good old days of the Petersburg KGB, in which he actually outranked Vlad. He now heads Vlad’s personal administration, and it’s his job to put out fires – such as the one conflagrated by the Freidzon interview.

Apparently the fire spread to Western media, with an unspecified London newspaper and an American news channel daring to ask Gen. Ivanov for a clarification.

What they got instead was a torrent of abuse. Speaking on Russia Today, the good General waxed indignant about “the libellous statements about the circle of Russia’s head of state which often appear in foreign press.”

“Some articles appearing in Western media maintain that President Putin and his retinue are utterly corrupt and are concealing their huge wealth; even accusations of links with the criminal underworld sometimes slip in.”

Crikey. Just goes to show how deep Western media have sunk. Why, those running dogs of Wall Street and the City of London dare not only to read incriminating evidence but even to publish it.

Clarification? There’s nothing to clarify. And if you insist there is, read up on the cases of Messrs Litvinenko, Perepelichny, Berezovsky et al. Remember what happened to them?

Don’t know about Western media, but Mr Freidzon’s memory is in working order, and his interview was removed from the Radio Liberty site the day after it appeared. The text was replaced with an apology, to the effect that it had been removed on the interviewee’s request, as he is concerned about his safety. Obviously, Vlad’s KGB colleagues had dropped a quiet word into Mr Freidzon’s shell-like.

Meanwhile, the state of Russia’s economy is such that some responsible citizens are concerned about the cost of staging the 2018 World Cup. Not to worry, according to Vlad’s trained MP Alexander Khinstein.

He has pointed out that prisoners aren’t being used as effectively as in Stalin’s days. Why not use them, for example, to do logging in the Siberian taiga? Anyone who has read The Gulag Archipelago could have answered that question, but there was no need. It was rhetorical.

However, by way of concrete immediate proposal, Deputy Khinstein has tabled a bill solving the fiscal problems of hosting the World Cup. According to this legislation, all the necessary facilities could be built by prisoners, otherwise known as slave labour.

This cost-cutting measure is expected to sail through the legislative process, such as it is in Russia. No doubt it’ll be warmly and loudly welcomed by the population at large, about half of whom confess to nostalgia for Stalin’s way of running the country.

I, on the other hand, detect a spot of KGB perfidy in this idea. Vlad has used his Duma mouthpiece to make sure Russia finally wins a World Cup.

Since most countries in the world are still squeamish enough to boycott any event made possible by slaves, only North Korea is likely to take part. The organisers would thus be able to dispense with time-consuming preliminaries and proceed straight to the Russia-North Korea final.

Vlad’s bailiwick would be the odds-on favourite in such a confrontation, thereby demonstrating to the world the strength of Vlad’s leadership. Perhaps Peter Hitchens would like to present the trophy.

 

 

 

 

Amnesty International has written an open letter to our Lord Chancellor, begging him not to scrap the Human Rights Act.

The document has been published as an advertisement, signed and paid for by over 1,000 people. Well, there’s one born every minute.

They aren’t idiots simply because they support this hideous document – we are all occasionally misguided and misinformed. Errare humanum est and all that.

They are, however, idiots because they argue their case in an irredeemably imbecilic way. This starts from the title: Don’t Scrap Our Human Rights.

I’m not aware of RT Hon Michael Gove hatching a fiendish plan to do away with human rights, and I’m sure that neither are the signatories. Even should Mr Gove harbour such dastardly intentions, it’s a safe bet he wouldn’t be able to act on them.

In other words, the authors of the letter confuse human rights with the document featuring these words in its name. This is like believing that abolishing the inheritance tax would deprive us all of the right to inherit or that no one would have the right to buy in the absence of a corresponding law.

The argument starts from that low point and rapidly goes downhill: “A government cannot give human rights or take them away, nor can it decide who is entitled to human rights and who isn’t.”

Quite. I couldn’t agree more. A government can do no such thing – which is precisely why we in England don’t need a written document codifying human rights. This, regardless of whether the document is issued by our own government or especially the political, moral and legal abortion calling itself the European Union.

In this country – unlike on the continent – it’s not the government that traditionally imposes its laws on the people, but rather the other way around. Such is the difference between our venerable common law and the so-called positive law practised elsewhere in Europe.

Imposing EU diktats on Britain can only serve the opposite purpose to the one professed by the signatories: it’s bound to diminish the rights Englishmen have enjoyed for centuries.

Really, the 1,000 idiots who signed the petition should take a remedial course in historical, political and legal literacy before bothering themselves with such matters.

However, they obviously don’t need a remedial course in demagoguery: “Human rights are universal – they apply to all of us simply because we are human.”

The first time this worthy idea was expressed in this kind of language was in 1789, and the language was French (actually, the Americans were first, but they had got the idea from the philosophes). By way of punctuation, nearly a million Frenchmen were then murdered, tens of thousands of churches were razed or defaced, and France began to pounce on everyone within reach, losing another two million people in a succession of aggressive wars.

This isn’t a case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc, but a causal progression. For whenever a government seeks to enforce the universal rights protecting the congenital goodness of its subjects, it inevitably acquires the urge to kill them all.

People always fall short of the loftier expectations, and operating the guillotine is an excellent way to express one’s disappointment.

I’d suggest another remedial course for the 1,000-odd idiots: theology. They’d benefit from learning how related issues were handled in various books that have evidently escaped their attention, from the Bible to Summa Theologiae. Alternatively, Google natural law, chaps. See if it rings a bell.

“[The Human Rights Act] protects women fleeing from domestic violence,” proceeds the letter. In other words, before 1998, when this pernicious act was passed, a bleeding woman running down the street with her thuggish husband in hot pursuit had no protection whatsoever.

A policeman, should he have happened to observe the scene, would have been powerless to intercede. “Sorry, love,” he would have said. “You’re on your own. We haven’t yet signed the Human Rights Act. So run faster.”

“It makes it safer to be gay…” Same situation here. Presumably until 1998 it had been legal to pummel homosexuals into a bloody pulp. It’s only thanks to the Act that they can now walk the aisle in perfect safety. It’s amazing that Britain managed to legalise homosexuality in 1967, all on her own.

“The Human Rights Act brought home to us the rights we have under the European Convention on Human Rights, enabling us to hold public authorities to account in our own country.” Absolutely. Until 1998 public authorities in England had been blissfully unaccountable.

The authors clearly haven’t heard of the great ancient charters aimed to protect the individual from the despotism of the rulers. The Charter of Liberties (1100) and Magna Carta (1215) were only the culmination of this development; its beginnings go back centuries earlier.

I suggest that on 15 June, when the rest of us celebrate the 800^th anniversary of Magna Carta, the signatories to this letter raise a glass to the Human Rights Act instead. May I suggest bromide as the beverage? These people are much too excitable for their own good.

“We urge you not to roll back our hard-won human rights,” they plead at the end. Well, by the looks of it, the right to idiocy is still held sacred in some quarters.