Category: Blog

The other day the BBC’s Norman Smith, when talking about Nigel Farage’s ‘personality cult’, mispronounced the second word in a rather unfortunate way.

Apparently though, the resulting inadvertent epithet is being bandied about quite a lot at Ukip’s headquarters, with no slip of the tongue involved.

This looks like a most ungainly squabble, accompanied by the bump-bump sound of heads rolling. Two of Farage’s closest staffers have been sacked, he himself first announced his resignation, then came back because the ‘overwhelming support’ within the party ranks just couldn’t be ignored, then again faced eminently ignorable calls for his resignation.

Now, even though I know quite a few Ukippers, including some senior ones, I have neither much knowledge of the rough-and-tumble of party in-fighting nor any interest in it.

I do have an interest in Ukip survival though, because I see it as the only political force in the country that has a fighting chance of developing into a real conservative opposition to our mainstream spivocrats. And it’s that very survival that seems to be in jeopardy.

Mainstream parties, those with vast staffs, generous funding, and millions of supporters cultivated over decades if not centuries, can accommodate a bit of factional disunity without collapsing. Outsiders fighting guerrilla action can’t.

Only by acting – or at least presenting the image of acting – as a monolith can such parties survive temporary setbacks or capitalise on (just as temporary) successes.

This general election delivered to Ukip both failure and success, although in my view considerably more of the latter. The failure is obvious: the party not only didn’t build on the number of the two parliamentary seats it had, but in fact lost one of them.

This presented a shocking contrast to some of the optimistic predictions, ranging from a cloud-cuckoo-land 100 seats some six months ago to a dozen a month before the election to half a dozen on its eve.

But looking on the bright side, this was the first time Ukip secured a seat in a general election. It also enjoyed the support of almost four million voters, making it in that respect our third party by some distance.

The vagaries of our FPTP electoral system are such that this massive support wasn’t translated into a commensurate parliamentary representation, but such is life. I won’t repeat what I said about the FPTP a few days ago, which in broad strokes was that, for all its unavoidable unfairness, it’s still the best possible system.

One way or the other, this is the way politics is played in Britain, and it’s no good crying foul and complaining about the rules just because one lost the game.

It is undeniable, however, that, even though Ukip’s parliamentary presence doesn’t reflect the party’s popularity, its influence comes closer to being such a prism.

The threat of Ukip clearly pushed the Tories further to the right than they are naturally inclined to go, as Dave’s jolly men tried to prevent a split in the right vote. This term is inaccurate, wrongly presupposing as it does that the Tories are a party of the right. In fact, Ukip couldn’t split the right vote. It was the right vote, and it made its voice heard.

As party leader, Nigel Farage can both claim the credit for Ukip’s success and take the blame for its failures. I realise that opinions may differ on which outcome was more skewed by his personality, and I have none of my own to offer.

However, it wouldn’t be illogical to suggest that perhaps more could have been done to parlay Ukip’s popular support, greater than that of the LibDems and the SNP combined, into a comparable number of MPs.

We now know – and some of us knew all along – that Ukip’s support mostly came from those fundamentally conservative voters who wouldn’t vote Labour on pain of death and yet didn’t feel their views would be represented by the Tories.

Many of such disaffected individuals included intuitive Tories like me who felt betrayed by Dave’s take on conservatism. The only difference between him and Blair is that Dave fights against ‘the forces of conservatism’ surreptitiously rather than explicitly.

Such intuitive conservatives didn’t get their way in some Labour constituencies because, unlike me, many of them just couldn’t vote against the Tory party they had supported all their lives. Hence in such constituencies it wasn’t so much the Tory vote that was split by Ukip, but vice versa.

The way to prevent such an outcome would have been to form an electoral pact with the Tories. As a result, the Tories wouldn’t have contested the election wherever they trailed Ukip and a serious threat of a Labour victory existed – with Ukip repaying the favour.

It’s a safe bet that, if allowed to fight Labour one on one in, say, a hundred constituencies, Ukip would have gained more than one parliamentary seat at Labour’s, not the Tories’, expense.

Yet, as I predicted in the 29 September, 2014, article Conservatism in Crisis, such a pact didn’t materialise. Messrs Cameron and Farage just couldn’t overcome the palpable contempt they felt for each other.

This was the kind of political naivety that Dave could afford, as it happened, but Nigel couldn’t. Whether one should commend him for his principled stance or rebuke him for letting ideological concerns trump political ones is a matter of taste.

In any case, I hope Ukippers, with or without Farage at the helm, will resolve their internal problems. They should remember the words of that famous proto-conservative: “And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

 

 

 

 

Those EU chaps just don’t get it. The Tories promised the referendum not to regain British sovereignty but to bury it for ever.

What part of tricking the electorate don’t they understand? Don’t know, but it must be an important part, judging by Germany’s brush off to George Osborne.

Our newly returned Chancellor went to Brussels trying to explain the facts of life to the Europeans who seem to be slow on the uptake. We, the Tory government, have a mandate to introduce far-reaching reforms, he said. Hence the upcoming referendum.

I’m sure his German interlocutor and counterpart Wolfgang Schäuble didn’t object at this point, although an objection might have been in order. It’s only to a mind utterly corrupted by half a century of one-moron-one-vote democracy that carrying less than 37 per cent of the electorate equates a sweeping mandate to do whatever the government wants.

But old Wolfgang possesses just such a mind, or he wouldn’t be where he is. So he just shrugged and said “Zo vot?”

George winced: once again he had to spell it out for those with learning difficulties. So, he said, we want you to massage the EU Treaty in such a way that it looks different, even if it remains essentially the same. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as you Germans put it, added our multi-lingual statesman.

Vee don’t say zis, Herr Osborne, objected Herr Schäuble. Ze French say zis, and zey agree wiv us zat ze Anglo-Saxons can go suck an Ei. Himmelherrgott! Ze EU isn’t a yo-yo manipulated by ze Anglo-Saxons. You made your Bett, you lie in it.

Can’t you see? pleaded Herr Osborne. That way we’ll guarantee the right vote in the referendum. Give us a change or two, let us secure the IN vote, and afterwards you can take them all back. See if we care. And then Britain will be all yours.

Ja, ja, said Wolfgang. I know you Anglo-Saxons. Give you a centimetre and you’ll grab a kilometre. Ze EU Treaty is like ze Decalogue. Huff and puff all you vant, but every commandment stays. Including adultery, as your Freund Boris should keep in mind.

In sheer exasperation, George turned to Hans Jörg Schelling, Austria’s finance minister, who happened to be passing by. “Hans, will you please explain to Wolfgang what’s what? Doesn’t he know what the bloody referendum is all about?”

He may not know, but I do, replied the Austrian. It’s about you lot being cowards.

“I sink politicians have to act decisively. And when ze politicians believe zey have to ask ze people, it’s an indication zat zey zemselves are not villing to make ze decisions and carry ze consequences,” he said.

“Are you out of your mind?” screamed George. “You want the dim-witted 20-year-old lesbians in our parliament to decide on serious matters?”

“Zat, mein Freund, is your problem,” said the German and the Austrian in unison. “Zat’s vot your Anglo-Saxon democracy is all about.”

All this is most annoying, but Dave and George shouldn’t despair. Those EU chaps are only playing hard to get to make a point. Once the point has sunk in, they’ll do what it takes to make sure the Brits vote the right way, which is to say the wrong way.

That’s why I share Herr Schelling’s view of democracy by plebiscite – even if we radically differ on the kind of decisive action we want our government to take.

But governments these days aren’t concerned about taking decisive action and making the right decisions. Their principal task is to make sure the make-up of our governing bodies faithfully reflects the population’s proportion of women, homosexuals, cripples and ethnic minorities.

This doesn’t mean they don’t know what the right decisions are. They do. But the nature of modern democracy run riot is such that doing what’s right is a guarantee of a severely curtailed political career, and that’s not a price modern politicians will ever pay.

As Jean-Claude Juncker, Europe’s Gauleiter, once said, “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.”

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Being rather pressed for time today, I had to turn for inspiration to the Russian ‘liberal’ (meaning anti-Putin) websites, those that  are blocked in their country of origin for being, well, anti-Putin.

They have a field day with Vlad’s major contribution to mathematics, acknowledging that something in this vein is long overdue.

You see, Vlad isn’t merely a president. He is a ‘national leader’, a title that places him somewhere between a president and God, but closer to the latter.

In that demiurgic capacity, Vlad is expected to transcend politics and revolutionise areas seemingly outside his field of expertise.

For example, Stalin, Vlad’s idol and role model, made a seminal contribution to linguistics that he analysed from the lofty vantage point of Marxism.

Thus armed with the most universal and the only true philosophy, Stalin wrote a brochure Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, in which he contemplated whether language falls into the category of base or superstructure.

Stalin’s epochal discovery that language was neither took some linguists aback, and they had to be hastily re-educated in their chosen discipline at the institution of higher learning under the auspices of the State Administration for Camps, GULAG for short.

Khrushchev, being more of an empiricist, revolutionised agricultural sciences by deciding that if maize grew so abundantly in Iowa, there was no reason it couldn’t grow just as well in the sub-Arctic areas of Russia.

To test that hypothesis, he had many traditional rye and wheat fields ploughed and the cultures replaced with maize. As an immediate result of that trailblazing venture, Russia had to begin to import cereals and has been doing it ever since.

My friend Vlad switched back to less practical and more abstract sciences, in this instance mathematics.

Yesterday he delivered a Russian version of the State of the Union Address, in which he said, inter alia, that the mortality rate in Russia is stable, if unfortunately growing. Since there was no intrepid individual present who dared ask which it was, stable or growing, Vlad pressed on, putting a positive spin on the announcement.

The reason more people are dying is that Russians these days live longer, he explained. And the older we are, the sooner we die – no one could possibly argue against that.

Definitely not, though some might suggest that mortality rates are inversely, rather than directly, proportionate to life expectancy. Hence if, say, turtles live on average to 100 years, then it’s realistic to expect that their mortality rate would be about one per cent a year. And, if seals’ life expectancy is about 10 years, their mortality rate would be roughly 10 per cent. I don’t think that replacing animals with humans ought to change the arithmetic, but Russian national leaders have their own maths.

In a parallel and related development, Vlad played another mathematical trick on the ‘Immortal Regiment’ movement.

Some 15 years ago, people began to march through the streets carrying blown-up photo portraits of their parents and grandparents killed in the war. This, rather moving, practice started spontaneously and each year has been attracting more and more people.

Except that spontaneity is discouraged in Vlad’s Russia, especially if he feels left out. So this year he decided to lead the procession, proudly carrying the photograph of his father who had to have been killed in the war to qualify for the honour.

I’m sure he was, but, since Vlad was born seven years after the war ended, the late Mrs Putin had a gestation period whose length is highly unusual, among humans at any rate.

Every period of Russia’s history in which she is blessed with the presence of a strict but fair national leader invariably overlaps with an era of great discoveries. I’m glad that Vlad is keeping this fine tradition alive.

 

 

This is not, I hasten to disappoint my fellow Ukip voters, another attempt to besmirch the veracity of the German chancellor.

God knows I’ve made many such attempts in the past and, health and the EU Arrest Warrant permitting, will probably make many more in the future. But this isn’t it.

On the contrary, one can commend my friend Angie for the diplomatic way in which she handled the thorny issue of attending Putin’s victory Walpurgisnacht. Solomon himself would have been proud of Angie.

She, along with all other leaders of the upmarket part of the world, refused to take part in the obscene spectacle of Putin’s 9 May parade, in which the national leader celebrated not so much the Soviet victory over Angie’s Vaterland as the Russian victory over the Ukraine.

Many observers have remarked that this should have been an occasion not for gala celebrations, but for expressing sorrow over the millions killed and crippled. Repentance wouldn’t have been out of place either, especially on the part of Germany and Russia whose criminal pact divided Europe between history’s two most satanic regimes.

The Pact was signed in August, and in September the Second World War was kicked off by an almost simultaneous attack on Poland launched by Germany from the west and the USSR from the east.

When Hitler just managed to beat Stalin to the punch, attacking Russia a fortnight or so before Russia was to attack Germany, the Soviets went on to lose almost 28 million soldiers, the number they’ve been mendaciously lowering by five-million increments every few years.

The catastrophic casualties were partly due to the initial incompetence of the Soviet freshly minted officer corps, with 40,000 properly trained commanders purged out of the army, many of them out of life, in the run-up to the war.

But by far the greatest reason for the carnage was the Soviet method of fighting the war, based on the assumption that a few hundred thousand lives here or there don’t matter. Burying the enemy under an avalanche of Soviet corpses was the principal strategy, and exterminating those corpses-to-be that demurred.

In that spirit, the Soviets executed 107,000 of their own soldiers, and that’s just those sentenced to death by military tribunals. Many more, estimated at twice as many actually, were, by way of encouragement, machine-gunned in the back by the NKVD ‘blocking units’ or simply shot out of hand by political commissars.

Hence, rather than mocking the ‘pitiful’ casualties of their American allies (without whom the Soviets wouldn’t have won), Putin, who sees himself as the typological and dynastic heir to Stalin, should have gone down on his knees and begged forgiveness for his idol’s war crimes against, among others, his own people.

Instead Vlad chose to rattle a few state-of-the-art sabres in a show of aggressive strength exceeding in mind-numbing jingoism similar extravaganzas of Soviet times. It would have been immoral folly on the part of Western leaders to attend, and they didn’t.

And that’s where Angie’s Solomon bit comes in. She shunned the parade as well, but, smoothing Vlad’s ruffled feathers, she arrived in Moscow the next day to lay a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier. (Contrary to the old Moscow quip, what was unknown about the soldier was his name, not the fact that he was indeed a soldier.)

Angie then talked cabbages and kings with Vlad for a couple of hours, after which she issued a stern statement denouncing the Russian beastliness in the Ukraine.

The old forked tongues spoke loud and clear, except that this time it was wagging not in Angie’s mouth but in that of whoever translated her remarks for the Kremlin website.

This is how the official site of Germany’s Bundeskanzlerampt (Federal Chancellery) quotes what Angie really said about Europe’s cooperation with Russia:

“This cooperation has, however, been seriously compromised by the ‘criminal and unlawful annexation of Crimea and the military hostilities in eastern Ukraine,’ said Angela Merkel. ‘It is serious because we see these acts as a violation of the very foundations on which our common European peace order is built,’ she explained.”

And this is what purports to be the exact translation of her statement on the official Kremlin site (in my own reverse translation from the Russian):

“This cooperation has been seriously damaged by the annexation of Crimea, carried out, in contravention of international law, by military action in Ukraine, which we see as a threat to the European peace settlement.”

Change a few minor details here or there, and the statement becomes much softer than it actually was. By the sleight of the Russian translator’s hand, several key words simply disappeared: ‘criminal’, ‘unlawful’, ‘serious’, ‘violation of the very foundations’.

The general thrust of Angie’s rebuke hasn’t changed, but in such statements the tone means as much as the semantics. An annexation that’s criminal and unlawful is cosmically different from one that merely contravenes international law.

Still, one has to compliment Vlad for his self-restraint. After all, the official Russian translation could have just as easily ascribed to Angie an unequivocal support for Russia’s self-defence against Ukrainian Judaeo-Banderite fascism, along with the promise to join in by attacking the Ukraine from the west.

This pincer tactic was, after all, perfected by the two countries 76 years ago. However, Germany has seen the light since then, this time relying on subterfuge rather than tanks to conquer Europe.

Vlad, however, is the old dog who eschews new tricks. And that dog is red in tooth and claw.

 

 

 

 

That today’s Conservative party, as led and personified by Dave, has nothing to do with conservatism hardly needs any further proof. Yet Dave has kindly provided it.

Just look at the post-election developments that have already happened, and consider some that are bound to happen.

First, the cabinet reshuffle. Dave and his house-trained media are proudly bellowing all over the country that a third of the cabinet are now women. Yet to any conservative this is neither good nor bad – it ought to be irrelevant.

We ought to be governed by those best qualified to do so, regardless of any other characteristics. The brouhaha about the sex of our cabinet ministers shows that Dave et al have fully bought into the destructive agenda of the New Age.

For one thing, this sort of thing is demeaning to such cabinet members as Theresa May, who would be sufficiently qualified even if born with a different chromosome mix. And should Sajid Javid, an eminently accomplished young man, think he got promoted as a sop to a different branch of New Age philosophy? What about Robert Halfon who, as a crippled Jew, ticks two boxes?

The most important thing, however, is that those triumphant dispatches spell yet another obituary to parliamentary conservatism. As does Dave’s restated commitment to replacing the EU Human Rights Act with our own Bill of Rights.

Ditching the former is an idea long overdue – Britain has nothing to learn about human rights from Strasbourg or Brussels. But it’s important not only to do the right thing, but also to do it for the right reasons. For example, respect for our history, sovereignty and constitutional tradition is a good reason for wishing to leave the EU. Hating foreigners is not.

A new Bill of Rights would be only marginally less subversive than the Human Rights Act. It’s a way of saying to the EU not to bother about destroying our constitutional tradition. We can do the job ourselves.

We certainly don’t need another Bill of Rights, considering we already had one in 1689. Actually, we didn’t need that Lockean concoction either, but that’s a different story. What matters is that Dave’s legal thought seems to be anchored to a system of positive law prevalent on the continent.

Our common, precedent-based law doesn’t need to be codified in a single document: it comes not from a state diktat but from experience lovingly gathered and extensively tested over generations.

If Dave is unaware of this, it’s most unfortunate. But if he knows what’s what but talks about bills of rights regardless, it’s much worse. He has accepted the language, and therefore the thought, of those whose legal tradition isn’t only different from ours but is diametrically opposite to it.

The French, for example, even those supposedly on the right of the political spectrum, have unconditional étatism (of which positive law is part and parcel) as part of their DNA. Even those who have nothing but contempt for fascism, would find little wrong with Mussolini’s slogan “all within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”.

This adulation of the central state is remarkably different from the politics based on devolving power to the lowest sensible level, and ultimately to the individual. The French and other continentals mistakenly ascribe this, to them, quaint practice to les Anglo-Saxons, whereas in fact it springs from the political, originally theological, tradition of Chirstendom.

Even cursory familiarity with European history will show that a culture emanating from the central state isn’t conducive to political stability. We’ve had roughly the same system of government since 1688 (fundamentally, much longer), and I won’t bother you with enumerating the different political systems the French and the Germans have had in the same period. If I tried to do so, I’d quickly run out of fingers on both hands and toes on both feet.

Even though I doubt that Dave understands such things fully, he is clearly a European federalist at heart, which is why he’s desperate to codify – and thereby contradict – millennia-old English laws in a written document.

His approach to the EU referendum comes from the same source. The very promise to hold this plebiscite was wrought out of Dave by the rise of Ukip, which he saw as a threat to his political survival.

Dave never made any secret of his intent to campaign for the IN vote, provided he could extract some mythical concessions from Brussels. He and his ilk pretend not to realise that the EU is a totalitarian setup and, as such, will only ever offer temporary and meaningless concessions if Brexit looks likely otherwise.

Once those crumbs off the Brussels table have been thrown in our direction, Dave feels that the combined weight of our own and EU propaganda will swing the vote his way, burying British sovereignty for any foreseeable future.

Now he has let it be known that he plans to hold the referendum even earlier than the promised date of late 2017. Why such sudden haste?

The educated guess is that Dave wants to exploit the euphoria that supposedly followed his electoral victory. As one of our dailies put it, he can now take the Tory party anywhere he wants. And since he wants to take it to the IN vote in the referendum, his erstwhile adversaries on the left will joyously march in step.

This election has shown that a broad constituency for real conservatism doesn’t exist in Britain, and now Dave is demonstrating that neither does a major party with a taste for it. Let’s just hope that Ukip will come back with a vengeance and – this time – a coherent conservative programme. And enough firepower to affect the consensus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The other day I received a call from my friend Vlad, who, as a Christian of recent vintage, generously doesn’t hold my loving criticism of him against me.

Alex, he said, how are you, me old China, yob tvoyu mat? [China is very much on Vlad’s mind these days, and the Russian words roughly mean ‘as I live and breathe’.] He was going, he continued, to copy me on a letter he was about to send to our mutual friend Dave, but only if I promised to keep it strictly off the record.

I had to explain to Vlad that no such promise was necessary because publishing the letter without his explicit permission would violate every tenet of journalistic ethics I hold dear. So here’s the letter:

Dear Dave,

Sorry I missed you at our victory celebration, but then I understand you have your own victory to celebrate. Congratulations on that, from the bottom of my heart and from Medvedev’s bottom as well.

Now I hope you won’t mind a piece of avuncular advice, but your first order of the day must be to prevent the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 21^st century, the breakup of the English Union. (The breakup of the Soviet Union was such a catastrophe in the 20^th century.)

When all those marginal folk in the outer reaches of the metropolis begin to get ideas above their station, a strong leader must step in and sort them out. I am such a strong leader, as Comrade Hitchens can confirm, and you can learn from my experience.

Your solution to the problem of Scotland has to be the same as mine to the problem of the Ukraine because both problems are strikingly similar, and I use the word ‘strikingly’ advisedly.

Both provinces (don’t ever call them ‘countries’ – that’ll make the bastards even more uppity) joined the respective metropolises voluntarily, centuries ago, and they’ve both been treated better than they deserve – something they’ve repaid with rank ingratitude.

In both provinces, the minorities speaking the metropolitan language are savagely oppressed by the aboriginal barbarians. In your case the situation is even worse: as I understand, the English-speaking minority in Scotland makes up 99 per cent of the population, even if the English they speak sounds like they’re deaf-mutes learning how to talk.

Both provinces have been taken over by fascist-nationalist gangs. Both now want to leave the fraternal union with the metropolis to become lackeys to EU, and therefore US, fascism.

Both profess hatred for the core population of the Union and threaten to break it up. This in spite of the word ‘Ukraine’ meaning ‘outskirts of Russia’, and the areas where most Scottish fascists live aren’t called ‘low’ lands for nothing.

Seems like your Scots are demanding more money as a condition for staying in the Sov… I mean English Union. If you give it to them, you’ll only be repeating the same mistake we made. After all, we’ve been feeding the Ukies for centuries, apart from the minor hiatus in 1932-1933 which they themselves engineered (for details, read our history textbooks). And the more we feed them, the more they want to be fed by someone else.

Similar problems call for similar solutions, and I hope you take a leaf out of my book, written by history’s ablest administrator and greatest military leader Comrade Stalin.

First thing to do, Dave, me old China, is to nationalise your clothing factories and switch their whole production to cranking out checked men’s skirts, which I believe those Scots fascists call kilts. (Incidentally, their preference for that garment proves they’re all ‘blue’, that’s the Russian for poofters. Once you’re in charge, I’ll teach you how to sort them out.)

When you’ve got a few thousand skirts, you can denationalise the factories, meaning give them as loyalty rewards to your close mates. Then put the skirts on your best troops and teach them how to talk funny.

The rest is a matter of speed, decisiveness and leadership. You put your shirted and skirted troops on personnel carriers and tanks, both of them. (Only kidding, Dave, I know you have more than two. Just.) Make sure the vehicles have no British decals, that goes without saying.

Then deploy your artillery and missiles close to the border and pound the living govno (that’s the Russian for you know what) out of everything within range. That done, send in the skirts.

Make sure they scream a few local phrases, those that apply to the situation, such as Heid doon arse up! (‘ere we go in proper English), A clean shirt’ll do ye! (you’re toast, mate) and Haud yer wheesht! (shut up or I’ll blow your head off).

Once the skirts have taken over most of the province, turn to your papers, which by now you should have given as loyalty rewards to your best mates. Tell them to fill every page with simple messages, such as:

England has nothing to do with it. This is a spontaneous uprising by Scottish patriots out to liberate their province from Judaeo-Americano-European fascists. The patriots want to restore the province to the legitimate government illegally overthrown at the instigation of US-EU fascist-capitalist cliques.

Job done, problem solved – and you’ve risked next to nothing. Those EU fascists may hit you with sanctions, but they won’t really mean it. They sell more to you than you to them, so give them a few months and Boris is your uncle.

It’s a win-win situation, Dave, me old China. The important thing is not to own up to anything, even if the fascists find British army dog tags on the soldiers they kill or capture (there won’t be many). Just say they’ve planted them, which is exactly the kind of perfidy one expects from skirt-wearing transvestites.

Let me know how you get on – and keep in touch through our mutual friend Alex. He’s a trusted old boot.

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How could the polls get it so wrong? Every newspaper is asking this question, in so many words or otherwise. The answer is simple: they didn’t.

Allow me to explain what I mean.

When it comes to polling, gathering information is a purely technical task. The art and science come in when the information is being digested and interpreted.

To begin with, we must realise the natural limitation of electoral polls: they apply mathematics to what can be properly understood only through less numerical disciplines, such as history, psychology (individual and collective), philosophy and even – as God is my witness – theology.

Only these can elucidate human behaviour, and even then not with absolute certainty. Counting heads is very different from counting beans: beans don’t think, change views, dissemble, emote. Heads do.

Statistics can help, but it’s unrealistic to expect that a survey of a few thousand people will yield an unfailing clue to how millions will behave on election day.

This isn’t to say that polls are useless – only that we shouldn’t get our expectations up too high. However, there’s always a pearl underneath the manure heap of statistical data. The trick is to find it.

With that lengthy preamble in mind, let’s look at the polls that allegedly got everything so wrong.

In the run-up to the election, many observers were asking why-oh-why questions. Why is a party with ostensibly such a strong economic record in government locked in a dead heat with a party whose stated intent is to introduce more of the same policies that proved so catastrophic the last time Labour was in power?

My answer to that question was that the British electorate had been thoroughly corrupted by several generations of socialism. To accelerate that process, the state – regardless of which party runs it – has made growing numbers of voters dependent on it for their livelihood.

It doesn’t matter whether this dependence comes as social handouts or government jobs. The greater the number of people with a vested interest in public spending, the more likely the electoral success of a party that promises more public spending.

The election results would hinge, I suggested, not on what people say to those pests who ask them personal questions, but on whether or not the number of such dependents has reached a certain critical mass.

It’s not just those who sponge off the state or work for it. It’s also large groups of people who have been corrupted by more subtle and gradual methods than transfers of cash.

Hence the critical mass may also include inveterate class warriors, those who hate the toffs or anyone with money (this often despite themselves being wealthy).

Then there are those moral individuals who simply want to do the right thing, thereby looking good to others and, more important, to themselves. Alas, it takes intelligent people, their numbers reduced by our oxymoronic comprehensive education, to know what the right thing is.

I said a few days ago that I didn’t know whether the catastrophic critical mass had been reached, and the election results show it hasn’t. Not yet. But it soon will be, which the polls showed beyond reasonable doubt.

Juxtaposing poll findings with election results, one can see that masses of people had said they’d vote Labour but in fact voted Tory.

Why they voted Tory is easy enough to understand once we’ve realised that the critical mass of corruption hasn’t yet been reached. People who still have one foot in real life would rather defer the economic, social and geopolitical catastrophe that Labour would predictably have ushered in.

That much is boringly obvious. The interesting question is, why did so many of such residually sane persons lie they’d vote Labour when they were buttonholed by those inquisitive pollsters?

Simple. It’s no longer socially acceptable to admit one’s conservative convictions. For millions of people, doing so is now tantamount to delivering this mantra:

“I am a soulless materialist who doesn’t give a flying, well, whatever flies, for anything other than my narrow, selfish interests. The poor should eat one another, the environment has done nothing for me, I hate Johnny Foreigner, I hope every endangered species will be caught in a wind turbine and die, breaking the bloody contraption in the process. And oh yes, I think a woman should stay in the kitchen with a mattress tied to her back. Did I mention I’m also a racist, homophobe and global-warming denier? Well, I am.”

In other words, socialism has successfully claimed high moral ground by setting the terms of debate. Hence for many people admitting to a preference for the slightly less socialist party, the Tories, spells an admission to moral failure.

They may be prepared to buck the Zeitgeist in deed, but not yet in word. But the word wasn’t just at the beginning of the world; it’s also at the beginning of politics.

Whoever controls language controls thought – and deed won’t lag far behind. Modern totalitarians know this, and all modern governments are totalitarian in their aspirations, if not yet their methods.

Now, let me stick my neck out: I refused to make predictions before this election, but I’m willing to make one for the future.

Labour will regroup, recut their camouflage in the Blair style, allay some of the shameful, selfish fears people have for the future of their families and their country, and ride the high horse of their phoney morality to a landslide.

This may happen in five years or sooner, depending on how big a mess the Tories will make, and how quickly. Meanwhile let’s thank God it hasn’t happened already. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photos of Dave grinning pretty for the camera, his arm around Sam, are emetic. But not, one has to admit, as much as photos of Ed indulging in public foreplay with Nicola Sturgeon would be. (They’re probably not involved, but you can forgive me for getting the wrong impression.)

The day is also brightened up by the demise of the LibDems, who have lost most of their parliamentary party to the Tories, the popular vote to Ukip and some of their big hitters to oblivion.

Vince Cable, Danny Alexander, Simon Hughes are all gone on to new careers, and Charles Kennedy can now devote all his time, as opposed to most of it, to falling down the stairs at Westminster pubs (a delightful sight to which I have personally been treated once or twice).

This raises the question of how Paddy Ashdown likes his hat cooked. He did after all promise to eat it if the exit polls painted a true picture of the LibDem downfall.

I trust Paddy’s taste in culinary matters though: he has a house in Burgundy not far from mine, and most Brits living in France are foodies. Perhaps stewing a hat in a local Irancy wine would make it palatable, but I’d rather not offer unsolicited advice. Bon appétit, Paddy!

My vote for Ukip didn’t dent the Tory majority in our constituency, as I knew it wouldn’t. With a landslide of 62.9 per cent of the vote, the incumbent Tory candidate fell just short of Putin’s support, but at least no ballot boxes were stuffed, nor any observers crippled.

There’s doom and gloom at Ukip this morning, but the party should look on the bright side. It has scored a triumphant result in popular vote, coming in third, though a disappointing one in parliamentary seats, being on course to a mere two as I write this. Moreover, Ukip finished second in 100 constituencies, increasing its 2010 score by, well, 100.

This has led to a predictable outcry to ditch the first-past-the-post system (FPTP), a cause so far dear mostly to the LibDems. This makes Ukippers sound too much like sore losers, a group never held in high esteem anywhere, and especially in Britain.

We can’t abandon an institution that has served well for centuries just because we don’t like what it’s doing today. This is too myopic and selfish for words.

Ukip’s chief appeal (to me, at any rate) is that it has the potential to become a real conservative party, as opposed to the bogus one presently usurping the name. They could thus fill a slot that may not be very wide but is still sizeable.

However, playing fast and loose with the constitution isn’t a good way of establishing conservative credentials. FPTP has persevered for centuries because it has been successful in ensuring political stability, a quality appealing not only to the English national character but also to foreign investors.

The system also reflects the underlying conviction, now terrifyingly on its way out, that there is such a thing as society, and people are its members, as distinct from atomised individuals.

Communities are the building blocks of society, just as families are the building blocks of communities. It has been assumed for centuries that those within a community have interests similar enough to be represented effectively and justly as a collective, rather than individual, entity.

This assumption has at times produced a disparity between popular vote and parliamentary representation. Hence FPTP merits another look, especially because Blairite gerrymandering created a situation where a Labour seat can be secured with fewer votes than any other party’s. But a reform shouldn’t mean destruction – or, in this case, introducing a system in which marginal parties hold government to ransom.

It’s true that, for a party supported by 3,000,000 voters, having only two MPs (the number currently projected) is unfair. Those of us who voted Ukip have every reason to feel hard done by.

But we ought to console ourselves by the thought that such concerns are transient, while the constitution is transcendent (for validation, refer to Romans 13:1 or, in a more secular mood, Reflections on the Revolution in France).

Rather than bemoaning what might – or should – have been, the party ought to congratulate itself on its huge achievements and stock up its reservoirs of patience. The Treaty of Rome wasn’t built in a day, as the saying doesn’t really go, and neither is a party hoping to repeal it.

FPTP makes it hard for third parties to become kings, but they can still act as king makers.

By the time by-elections roll along, the Tories will have made a sufficient hash of things for Ukip to beef up its parliamentary presence to a point where it could exert an even more telling effect on British politics. If nothing else, the party could push the Tories, kicking and screaming, further in the right direction.

None of us should pretend that good has triumphed. Most people weren’t so much enamoured of the Tories as horrified by the thought of a government in which Miliband’s wires would be pulled by the SNP, whose principal sentiment is hatred of the English.

That, alas, is what British politics has become: faced with the evil of two lessers, voters opt for the lesser of two evils. All we can do now is sit tight and wait to see which of his promises Dave will break first this time.

My vote goes to his promise not to contest another election.

Voting Ukip, said Iain Duncan Smith, Tory Secretary for Work and Pensions, is like writing a suicide note.

Much to my detractors’ chagrin, it’s only in the sense of that simile that I’m going to kill myself on election day.

This desperate act will be done in the serene knowledge that I won’t be taking anyone with me: in my constituency, the Tories enjoy a majority even Putin would envy – and they don’t have to stuff the ballot boxes or cripple anyone trying to stop them doing so.

Would I still vote Ukip if it mattered? If this could mean letting Labour in? My emphatic, unequivocal and resolute answer is that I don’t know. Perhaps. Probably. Unless my right wrist went on strike at the last moment.

I wouldn’t respect myself Friday morning, gagging at the sight of Ed grinning smugly from TV screens. But then I’d learn to live with it, confident as I am that the difference between the two sets of subversive nonentities, though not nonexistent, isn’t as great as they claim.

Writers more secure in their understanding of the intricacies of strategic, tactical or tactico-strategic voting, will tell you which way you should go. I don’t presume to be qualified to do so.

All I can suggest is that you vote your conscience, leaving the subversive nonentities and their groupies in the press to figure out the strategy and tactics. They have to earn their keep somehow.

Just decide which party you hate the least (I doubt many people love any of them, unless paid to) and vote accordingly.

And, if you know how to pray, do so. Whichever way you vote, Britain will go to the dogs without God’s help. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A new book, Le Corbusier: A French Fascism by Xavier de Jarcy, cites evidence showing that the Franco-Swiss architect not only held fascist and anti-Semitic views, but was in fact a member of a militant fascist group.

“Personally, I was very shocked,” says the author. “I found it hard to accept. You need time to absorb that kind of information.”

Personally, I’m not shocked at all. And I don’t need any time to absorb that information. For Le Corbusier’s totalitarian outlook can be easily inferred not only from his writings but, more tellingly, from his day job.

Le Corbusier’s architectural ideas, realised or otherwise, scream fascism as loudly as anything produced by Albert Speer or other exponents of totalitarianism by artistic means.

Unlike Speer, however, Le Corbusier left a legacy of lasting damage, as so appropriately demonstrated by Centre Pompidou in Paris, the venue of the current exhibition of the architect’s work.

Le Corbusier is one of France’s cultural heroes, which makes him a demigod there. Criticism therefore equates blasphemy, to which the French respond with vigour only outdone by the Muslims.

So far Mr Jarcy hasn’t been eviscerated, beheaded or even shot, but the verbal violence to which he has been exposed is quite virulent.

Jarcy, says Frederic Migayrou, one of the exhibition’s curators, is a headline-grabber out “to create a media event”, tabloid-style.

Most of the evidence the wretch quotes, says the curator, is dated. Actually that’s hardly surprising, considering that Le Corbusier died in 1965 and hence has been unable to provide any fresh evidence in the intervening 50 years.

And “all the quotations on racism or fascism came from… private correspondence.” Presumably that makes the evidence inadmissable.

Then came the clincher, giving the lie to Jarcy’s insinuations: “Le Corbusier was also in contact with many architects close to communism [and] people thought he was a communist in exactly the same way.”

Mr Migayrou obviously thinks that fascism and communism are so incompatible that championing one precludes any association with the other.

This is nonsense, which can be confirmed in a couple of minutes by anyone glancing at reproductions of works by Nazi, Fascist and Soviet painters or sculptors, depicting the same muscular men and sinewy-breasted women holding up the institutional symbols of their ideology.

The swastika, fasces or hammer and sickle are incidental there. What matters is the spirit, or rather absence thereof. We aren’t looking at works of art – we’re looking at totalitarianism executed in pigment, stone or bronze.

The same goes for totalitarian architecture, except that it doesn’t just make an artistic statement. It also tells people how they must live, and even though at times various fascist ideologies differ aesthetically, they’re all united in their shared commitment to dehumanising humans.

Le Corbusier’s work screams totalitarianism in concrete, his preferred material. He didn’t care which totalitarian was in power, as long as Le Corbusier was his architect. Stalin, Laval, Mussolini, Hitler could all look at his designs and smile in that kindly, avuncular way of theirs.

That Le Corbusier was talented is as indisputable as it’s irrelevant. Albert Speer also had talent, and so did Miron Merzhanov, Stalin’s personal architect. This only goes to show that, when driven by evil motives, a talented man can do more harm than a hack.

When you see today’s ugly, impersonal concrete structures giving parts of great European cities that unmistakeably Soviet je ne sais quoi, think of Le Corbusier. Think of him specifically in London, when looking at the Southbank, the Barbican or whole areas of tower blocks. It’s his vision, albeit executed by less talented men.

But never mind areas. Le Corbusier thought on the scale of whole cities, which he wanted to build or rebuild to the stencil he had in his fecund mind.

Of course rebuilding cities that already exist, such as Paris or Moscow, first means wiping the slate clean. That was exactly what Le Corbusier proposed to whomever was willing to listen, from Vichy to Stalin.

He wasn’t the only one, it has to be said. For example, at roughly the same time Kazimir Malevich proposed that the Kremlin, St Basil’s and the Bolshoi all be replaced with structures more in keeping with the technological Zeitgeist.

Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin proposed to perpetrate similar vandalism in Paris, and then on all continents. “Oslo, Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Algiers, Port Said, Rio or Buenos Aires,” Le Corbusier wrote, “the solution is the same since it answers the same needs.”

He was particularly inspired by Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s charming Old Town. Le Corbusier could never see such a place without wishing to replace it with his mass-produced monstrosities, and he proposed to do just that.

No surprises there: totalitarians worship at the altar of uniformity. There was only one right way, and only Le Corbusier knew what it was.

The right way à la Le Corbusier was not only to drive people into soulless, inhuman slabs of concrete, but also to take their streets away. Not for him were places where people could walk, shop, chat with their neighbours.

He strove to replace streets with roads, zipping by his concrete boxes or, better still, underneath them, with the whole city raised on to stilts for that purpose. The stilts idea didn’t really catch on, but one can see cities of roads rather than streets all over America.

Antoni Gaudi, an architect at least equal to Le Corbusier in talent, sought to incorporate his own ideas into the existing townscape, enriching rather than destroying it. For Le Corbusier that sort of thing was too namby-pamby for words.

Masonry walls, according to him, had no right to exist, Gothic architecture was incoherent because it ignored primary forms – concrete and glass were God, and Le Corbusier was his prophet.

There’s no point arguing whether Le Corbusier was a fascist, communist or neither. He resided in that dark area where all totalitarians converge in their desire to override human nature and bend people to their will by every available means, violent, political, social – or architectural.