Category: Blog

According to my Dutch friends, debates about medical services aren’t unique to Britain. Their system is different from ours, as the Dutch are still resisting the forward-looking, progressive idea of wholesale nationalisation. Obviously they, with their Germanic good sense, know what’s good for them, and it isn’t progress.

Yet the giant smelter otherwise known as the EU breeds uniformity. Hence the odd scandal in Amsterdam that looks as if it could just as easily have happened in Leeds.

What’s making the news now is the plight of a middle-aged man who suffered from prostate cancer. Upon much soul searching and extensive testing, his doctors decided that prostatectomy, the surgical removal of the prostate gland, was the best option.

In the good tradition of responsible medical practice, the patient was warned about the possible side effects. Reluctantly, he agreed to the operation nonetheless, wisely taking medical advice, as we all should.

The surgery was performed, and unfortunately the side effects proved to be as dire as the doctors warned. The patient became both impotent and incontinent, which is regrettably common with this type of invasive procedure. What was slightly out of the ordinary was that the operation had been performed on a wrong patient.

The poor man had the misfortune of being a namesake of the real patient, a coincidence that I’m sure both he and his wife now curse. What they should be cursing is modernity.

How such a mix-up could have occurred is a mystery to me. After all, a patient must be thoroughly investigated  before the decision to operate can be taken. Various scans and other tests are essential in any type of cancer, to establish its grade (degree of severity), nature and spread. So the records of the two patients must have been swapped not once, but several times, until the wrong man went under the knife. Surely proper attention to detail and duty of care must prevent such cock-ups not most of the time, but all the time.

Anyway, I told this story to an oncologist friend here in London and he was aghast. Not just with the criminal mix-up in Holland but also with the state of medicine closer to home. ‘They,’ he hissed, meaning the powers that be in the NHS and the Department of Health, ‘have just decreed that nursing must become a caring profession. What the hell else can it be? If something like this needs to be said, it means the whole ethos of my profession has been destroyed.’

It has indeed. In the past, when British hospitals were run by the Head Doctor and the matron, patients didn’t go into hospital fearing death from causes other than those from which they suffered. Wrong kidneys weren’t removed, wrong legs weren’t amputated and wrong patients weren’t operated on. Deadly hospital-acquired infections weren’t rife. Patients didn’t starve to death, nor died from thirst and general neglect. Nursing – and medicine in general – was indeed a caring profession.

But then progress arrived. In our country, medicine became a socialised institution pursuing roughly the same ends as all socialised institutions. Equality, diversity, multiculturalism, levelling – the usual set. Caring for health is being increasingly marginalised in our healthcare. It’s not about caring any longer – it’s about ‘caring and sharing’.

So what if many NHS doctors and nurses can neither speak nor understand English properly? The NHS is an equal-opportunity employer, and this is all that matters. That’s why our hospitals are running out of really good nurses, but there’s no dearth of Directors of Diversity. Someone has to look after the really important stuff, and it isn’t patients.

Most of this depravity is mandated by European employment directives, ably supported by the European Court of Human Rights. The Dutch are in the same boat, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it turned out that the consultant who recommended the operation couldn’t even read the clinical case history in Dutch.

At least the poor man, crippled for life, could take satisfaction in his country’s compliance with the progressive principles we all hold so dear. One doubts, however, that the weighing of pros and cons would in his mind produce a positive balance.     

It’s fitting that Oskar Lafontaine should have been one of the principal instigators of the single currency.

A German with a French surname, he’s a personal embodiment of European federalism, which, when all is said and done, is a Franco-German alliance with a few irrelevant extras. These include all those marginal countries, like Britain, there to act as bridesmaids at the Franco-German love-in Oskar carries in his own person.

He’s also a communist in all but name, which is a useful, if not necessary, qualification for a eurocrat. The whole project is designed as a more prosperous version of the Soviet Union, sort of a Third Reich before the genocide, and it takes an insider to know how to put all the nuts and bolts together.

For that reason Oskar ascended to the post of Germany’s finance minister at the time when the rouble… sorry, the euro was adopted as the currency to end all currencies, at least the European ones. Yet now the poor chap is having second thoughts.

Whatever make him change his mind? Surely it couldn’t be the demonstrable fact that the eurozone is on the verge of bankruptcy? Or that over half of young people in the Catholic part of it are out of work? Or that eurozone economies are no longer competitive – if one discounts the competitive ardour they display in begging for Germany’s largesse?

No, it can’t be any of those. As a true communist, Comrade Lafontaine must welcome such developments. They, as his spiritual father Lenin taught, create ‘a revolutionary situation’, wherein the uppers can’t, and the lowers won’t, live the old way.

Of course there’s always the possibility that he is reviewing his Marxist convictions, but it’s a minuscule one. Once a Leftie, always a Leftie – any shift isn’t so much a change of heart as a change of phraseology (with all due deference to Melanie Phillips who claims her heart did change – if so, she’s a rare exception).

I bet what scares Oskar is the distinct possibility that the revolution brewing in Europe may not be the one he and his mates will be able to control. In the same spirit, Stalin ordered German communists not to form a bloc with the Social Democrats – this in the knowledge that the only possible outcome would be Hitler coming to power.

The left edge of the putative EU monolith wants neither the anarchists to perpetrate a revolution in southern Europe nor Angela Merkel then to suppress it. The resulting order would either be completely disorderly if the anarchists win, or completely Merkelian if Angela carries the day. The comrades are uncomfortable with either scenario.

The most recent anti-Hollande manif in Paris was conducted not under the fleur de lys, the only possible symbol of a virtuous counterrevolution, but under the red banners of Leftie anarchism. Amazingly, some Catholics came along, to voice their opposition to the debauchment of marriage. Joining forces with the people who are institutionally and emotionally committed to murdering Christians and destroying churches seems odd to me, but European politics is nothing if not topsy-turvy these days.

But one can understand Lafontaine’s unease – should either faction emerge victorious, the likes of Oskar won’t get even a sniff of power. That’s why he seems ready to perform a post-natal abortion on his own brainchild, the euro.

Don’t be surprised if Angela doesn’t follow suit. She understands as well as Oskar that the euro isn’t so much an economic as a political construct. Her predecessors used tanks to pursue their political ends; Angela relies on the euro. The single currency is her Guderian’s panzers.

But even as Guderian’s tanks were eventually set alight by superior and more numerous tanks, so will the euro be blown apart by aggressive markets. One can only hope that this is as far as the analogy will go: one would hate to see millions die for the fallacy that Oskar no longer espouses but Angela still does.

Our own, admittedly more benign, answer to Lafontaine is Nigel Lawson, who is now calling for withdrawal from the EU. Said withdrawal should be effective immediately after the British vote for it (which they may not) in a referendum (which they may not get) promised by Dave should he be re-elected (which he most probably won’t be).

Better late than never, I suppose, but being a vindictive sort I find it hard to forget that, when he was Chancellor, Lawson put forth the disastrous policy of shadowing the deutschmark and eventually joining the ERM, the precursor of the euro. One tangible result of that debacle, apart from an immediate loss of billions, was sending the economy into a tailspin it still hasn’t reversed.

As a corollary, Margaret Thatcher was ousted and replaced by the pathetic John Major who succeeded in making the Tories unelectable for at least a generation (unless you believe that Dave was elected as a Tory, which I don’t).

Anyone even remotely familiar with economics knew all along that unifying European currencies, or for that matter states, would lead to a catastrophe. Where were all those Oskars and Nigels then? Doing what they always do – seeking power for themselves and their ilk.

Lafontaine and Lawson have different friends, but not different aspirations. Hence their belated recovery of sight. Nigel did beat Oskar to it by a couple of years, but then his political career has been dead for yonks. Political execution is like the normal kind: it focuses the mind.

 

 

 

 

Scottish pop historian Niall was tropistically drawn to America, home of the neoconservative politics he favours. Admittedly there was also the small matter of about $5,000,000 he makes every year teaching at Harvard, writing books and speaking at conferences.

It was one of the latter that got him into a spot of trouble the other day. Ferguson was asked to comment on Keynes’s astute observation ‘in the long run we are all dead’, and one would think nothing could be easier.

One possible answer could have been that Keynesian economics, centred as they are on an activist state running up huge debts, saddles all subsequent generations with a ruinous burden. In support one could be tempted to mention that the current federal debt in the States equals about $100,000 for every American – and growing every day. Moreover, the funds feeding Social Security and Medicare are hopelessly bankrupt. This admirable tendency is bearing much poisonous fruit now, but the toxic seeds were planted by Roosevelt’s New Deal, largely inspired by Keynes.

If one so wished, one could also make a snide comment about the militant leftist atheism of the Bloomsbury set, of which Keynes was a paid-up member. Attendant to that is inevitable solipsism: not only is there no afterlife for an individual but, as far as he is concerned, all life stops, or might as well stop, after his death. Generations to come? No one cares about those. It was a Bloomsbury article of faith.

Actually, one could also think of many other perfectly reasonable responses to that query. The one Ferguson chose was weak. Keynes, he explained, was a childless homosexual. Therefore he neither had nor could have children, which influenced his economic ideas. He simply had no sense of posterity.

This response was indeed weak. But it wasn’t indefensible – and the subsequent outcry made some sort of defence necessary. Niall couldn’t just ignore his prissy critics; he has that $5,000,000 a year to protect. One possible reply could be quoting the great Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter who tended to refer to Keynesian economics as ‘childless vision’. Schumpeter, however, didn’t mention the ‘h’ word – he was specifically prophesying the kind of problems we have now, those adumbrated by Keynes.

However, whenever the ‘h’ word is nowadays used in any other than a laudatory context, the wrathful god of PC rescinds any right to self-defence. Nothing short of a snivelling apology will be accepted, and that’s what Ferguson proffered with emetic alacrity.

He apologised ‘unreservedly’ for his ‘stupid and tactless remarks’. ‘It is simply false to suggest, as I did, that his approach to economic policy was inspired by any aspect of his personal life.’ ‘First, it is obvious that people who do not have children also care about future generations. Second,’ grovelled Ferguson, ‘I had forgotten that Keynes’s wife Lydia miscarried.’’

I actually don’t think that Ferguson’s original remarks, though not particularly clever, were as stupid and tactless as all that. His apology, however, is both idiotic and cowardly.

Of course people who have no children for whatever reason, be it their sexual proclivity, medical problems or personal choice, may still care about future generations. But this would be simply an academic construct devoid of any visceral, physiological involvement. By the same token, a chap who rents a flat and one who owns a house may both defend the idea of private property. However it’s hard not to think that the house owner just may be a bit more fervent in mounting his defence.

True enough, Keynes had a Russian wife. He acquired her at a time when the GPU, as the KGB/FSB then was, was assigning whores as wives, mistresses but in fact watchers to Western left-leaning intellectuals. Incidentally, one of such ladies was Baroness Budberg, Nick Clegg’s Russian ancestor of whom he’s self-admittedly proud. H.G. Wells, Louis Aragon, Romain Rolland, Bruce Lockhart were among many lucky recipients of such sexual overseers, with GPU compliments.

Keynes too drew the long straw in the athletic shape of the ballerina Lydia Lopokova. Now how irrelevant is that?

Niall is a big boy, so surely he must realise that Lydia could have been impregnated by a man other than her husband. Also it’s entirely possible for partners in a ‘lavender marriage’ to go against their instincts and actually produce a child by the traditional method. James I, for one, begat Charles I while sending pornographic love letters to the Duke of Buckingham.

This happens even in our blasé time, and back in the 1920s, when homosexuality was still regarded as a perversion, it happened routinely for respectability’s sake. For example, Keynes’s Bloomsbury friends Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West, both homosexual, had two children. That didn’t prevent Vita from having an affair with Virginia Woolf any more than Lydia prevented Keynes from having one with Lytton Strachey.

‘My disagreements with Keynes’s economic philosophy,’ pleads Ferguson, ‘have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation.’ This part of the apology is even more disingenuous than the rest, though it may appear straightforward to the uninitiated.

You see, neocons, such as Ferguson, have a complex relationship with Keynesian economics. On the one hand, the ‘conservative’ part of their self-description demands that they make anti-Keynesian noises. On the other hand, their Trotskyist temperament makes them advocate non-stop quasi-colonial aggression. This can only be waged by an extremely powerful state, and Keynesian economics does empower the state at the expense of the individual.

That’s why leading neocons, and these days they are considerably less bright than they used to be, are perfectly capable of extolling in the same sentence the virtues of the welfare state and free markets. Even Irving Kristol, who was cleverer than today’s lot, saw nothing incongruous in ‘the conservative welfare state.’

Such intellectual, and at base moral, muddle is typical of neocon writers. That’s what Ferguson should really be apologising for, not for his inane but harmless remarks. But hey, the lad has two families to support.

This one of the universal templates for advertising headlines. Fill in the blank with whichever product you’re paid to promote and you’ll have a reasonable ad without having to think about it.

I bet Dave knows this cliché. He certainly lives by it. After all, he still bears every other hallmark of his brief career in PR, such as an inordinate affection for focus groups.

Even as we speak, he must be licking his UKIP-inflicted wounds, trying to squeeze what’s left of his political career into the time-proven template.

The second part must give him no problems whatsoever. The lad has the power of his nonexistent convictions and will defend their absence with an obduracy worthy of a better use. Hence we should be in no doubt as to what he intends to give us: more of the same.

To wit: replacing sound economic policies with the printing press, importing and bribing voters grateful to him personally, staying in the EU at whatever cost, destroying our education and medicine even beyond their already ruinous state, irreversibly changing Britain’s demographic balance, playing lickspittle to Americans whenever they fancy some fisticuffs in the Middle East, getting rid of our defence, appointing advisors who fagged for Dave at Eton and got pissed with him at the Bullingdon – well, you don’t need me to tell you that Dave welcomes the status quo. He doesn’t call himself Conservative for nothing.

It’s the first part of the formula that must take some thought. For it’s becoming increasingly clear that the Tories won’t win many elections that are also contested by UKIP. UKIP may not win them either, but that’s scant consolation.

Losing a few council seats here and there rankles, but it’s not the end of the world, thinks Dave. Neither is the likely outright loss of the European elections. But polling half the number of UKIP votes in a parliamentary by-election points at years in opposition.

More – much more – important is the writing on Dave’s personal wall. And it says ‘out’. True enough, speaking-tour millions beckon, but what’s the fun in money if it isn’t accompanied by power? Dave’s friend Tony is a case in point: he’s raking it in, but all the money in the world won’t fill the void in his power-craving heart. And Dave listens to Tony. Dave meant it when he said he was ‘heir to Blair’.

So what’s Dave going to promise us to stave off the threat posed by all those… clowns! closet racists! proles! fascists! fruitcakes! smoking, ale-swilling, laughing hyenas! – what?!? What’s going to make them go away?

Here Dave must take stock of his full arsenal of empty promises. An EU referendum, maybe in 2015, maybe in 2017, maybe some time in the future, maybe never? No, that’s not it. Dave had already made that pledge chiselled in cotton wool before this week’s elections, and still those UKIP bastards rubbed his nose in it.

Take that ex-pug David Davis’s advice and call a referendum straight away? No, that’s not going to work: neither Ken nor Nick will wear it. And what will Tony say? Calling an in-out plebiscite now, when the EU is going down the tubes, means running a serious risk of losing it, and that simply won’t do. The EU must live so Dave may thrive. So damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Cutting taxes? Yes, that’s not a bad idea – throw a bone to those bitching middle classes. In the long run this might even increase the tax base and hence revenue. But in the long run Dave will be on the lecture circuit, so who cares? Cut taxes straight away and there will be less bribe money in the kitty to mollify all those old Estonians and our home-grown lazybones.

And what will Tony say? Dave knows exactly what that’ll be. Tony will say – nay, he’ll scream off The Guardian’s page – that Dave is a privileged nabob out to please his banker mates at the expense of all those stiffs, working or otherwise, whose mouthpiece Tony still fancies himself to be.

No, cutting taxes is a non-starter. However, promising to do so may just keep those UKIP wolves at bay long enough for Dave to squeak by in the next election, or at least to lose it by a respectable margin, with some of his parliamentary party still in Westminster. Yes, let’s promise that. Or hint at the possibility that we may promise it after the next election. A good idea, that. Tony will approve.

Having dilemmas like that can drive a man to drink. Promises, promises… Dave pours himself a stiff one and puts on his favourite Fleetwood Mac single ‘Tell me lies, tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.’ Yes, that’s it. Mustn’t life imitate art? Of course it must. Tony says so.

 

  

The events of the last 20 years or so are supposed to have changed Russia beyond recognition. That may be, though the point is arguable (which is the polite way of saying I think it’s wrong).

What’s undeniable is that Russian leaders are cut from exactly the same cloth, of the kind that used to be fashioned into KGB uniforms. Their behaviour has changed, however, and not for the better. In the past Soviet leaders used to conceal, with variable success, their nouveau riche swinishness behind the Kremlin walls. These days they don’t bother.

Nikita Khrushchev, for example, had a weakness for the national drink, downing a 7-ounce glass of it at every breakfast, and to think that unlike his subjects he could actually get orange juice. Occasionally Nikita appeared publicly in his cups, the likelihood of which indiscretion being inversely proportionate to the importance of the occasion. But one can’t recall a single instance when he was too drunk to turn up at a meeting with a foreign, especially Western, leader.

Yeltsyn, having thrown out the bathwater of proletarian internationalism, threw out the baby of elementary decency along with it. He was drunk permanently and on one occasion couldn’t get out of his presidential plane in Dublin, leaving the welcoming party stunned on the tarmac. He also created the so-called oligarchy by generously tossing billions at his cronies, in the style of Catherine the Great rewarding her lovers’ ardour with estates the size of a large British county.

Since then Russian leaders have been acting in ways that make our millionaire footballers seem like illustrations to Debrett’s Etiquette for Girls. And unlike Soviet wives who used to keep a low profile, this lot, starting with Raisa Gorbachev, try to outdo their hubby-wubbies in conspicuously tasteless consumption.

Our press, traditionally ignorant about things Russian, encourages that sort of thing by extolling the refinement of these august ladies. Those Russians who actually are refined laugh sardonically: the likes of the late Raisa couldn’t open their mouths without displaying the cultural and phonetic attainment of an average collective-farm milkmaid.

This brings us to Svetlana Medvedeva, the wife of Putin’s poodle. This woman is also hailed for her subtle refinement, to which her claim is weak to the point of being nonexistent. As if to prove this she does like to have a free hand with state funds.

Last year, for example, Svetlana spent her holiday in Italy. It was a modest affair, just her and a few close friends. Actually, about 50 of them. To obtain maximum privacy, she hired the entire five-star Grand Hotel La Pace in Tuscany’s Montecatini Terme. The hotel has 140 rooms, each costing from 4,000 to 9,000 euros a night. Lest she might be accused of penny-pinching, Mrs Medvedev paid for them all, even though she only used fewer than a half.

When some imprudent Russian journalist raised the issue, the Kremlin issued a curt statement saying that Svetlana had paid for her holiday out of her own funds. Well, one can only congratulate a woman whose small change stretches to, say, 800,000 euros a day for a fortnight, even though she neither inherited nor earned as much in her whole life. One can’t imagine Samantha Cameron or Michelle Obama getting away with something like that, but Russian journalists know better than to probe too insistently.

Anyway, a friend of mine, a tutor of English in Tel-Aviv, just rang with a funny story. One of his students is a low-level employee at the Russian embassy, and yesterday my friend went to his house to give a lesson. When he entered his student’s modest flat, he thought a pipe must have burst: the floor was one contiguous puddle.

The truth was communicated to him by a muscular, apron-clad Russian woman wielding a swab and a bucket. She was scrubbing the floor clean in the old-fashioned way of Russian peasant women who often had to share their quarters with incontinent livestock.

‘What’s the occasion?’ asked my friend and received a reply delivered through his student’s clenched teeth (the cleaning woman spoke no language other than Russian). Turned out Svetlana Medvedeva, this time in her capacity as emissary of the Russian patriarch, flew in with a retinue roughly the size of Marie-Antoinette’s, 130 or so. This not being strictly a pleasure junket, she had assumed that the embassy would provide quarters commensurate with her recently acquired tastes.

Alas, a characteristic break in communications had occurred and the danger of having to sleep rough began to loom large. However, though the Russians’ organisational skills are of less than sterling quality, their ingenuity can’t be faulted.

No five-star hotel could be hired in its entirety, so Svetlana and her immediate entourage had to contend with merely half of one floor. At the same time the embassy ordered that its staff put up the rest of the party in their own flats. Hence the feverish wielding of swabs and paint brushes: the dignitaries had to be treated royally, as it were.

I wonder how the Russians, about 20 percent of whom still live in stinking communal flats, feel about such little anecdotes. One can just hear them say, ‘If this is democracy, bring back Stalin.’ In fact, polls show that’s exactly what they do say. Dear oh dear oh dear.

 

 

 

Reading opinion pieces these days, especially in The Times, makes me want to pinch myself. (For medical reasons I read neither The Guardian nor The Independent, but then hardly anyone else does.)

Am I asleep and having a particularly nasty nightmare? Am I hallucinating? Am I finally off my rocker, as Penelope suggested when I put on my tennis shorts inside out? Reading Daniel Finkelstein’s article, I pinched myself so many times that the inside of my left arm has acquired a macabre bluish tint. But I did have to make sure.

No, I’m not insane yet. Neither, unfortunately, is he. The blighter actually presents a sequential argument encapsulated in a sentence halfway down: ‘But I have started to fear those who want to deport Abu Qatada at any price almost as much as I fear him.’

Mr Finkelstein freely admits to having strong feelings about the matter: ‘I hate Abu Qatada too.’ However, he’s selflessly prepared to override his irrational animosity for the sake of public good: ‘But the law is the law.’

This is almost a verbatim translation of the Roman adage dura lex, sed lex (the law is harsh, but it is the law), so Daniel must be a classical scholar. Alas, a legal scholar he ain’t.

The UK Immigration Law states unequivocally that ‘A foreign national may be made the subject of a deportation order for a number of reasons. These include: The Secretary of State believes that is in the interests of the public good that the foreign national is removed from the UK…’

Therefore, logically there can be only two possible reasons to take issue with the Jordanian’s deportation: 1) it isn’t in public interest or 2) the UK law has no jurisdiction in the UK. Let’s consider them in this order, borrowing freely from Daniel’s gospel.

AQ ‘is a dangerous man who thinks it is a good idea to kill Jews’. Many of his friends ‘ended up in court on a series of terrorist charges… One of the main ideas was to kill Jewish tourists’. ‘And [AQ] was wrapped up in the plotting… He’d handed over the money to buy a computer, messages had been found between him and the gang, and he had, the evidence suggests, proposed targets and congratulated the bombers when the explosives went off.’

In my simplistic way I’d suggest that public interest would be well served by AQ’s removal. However, what upsets Mr Finkelstein’s finely tuned legal sensibility is that the case against AQ relies heavily on the testimony of supposedly coerced witnesses. ‘And although this has always been denied, the denials have never been wholly convincing.’

I don’t know, they sounded convincing to me. But does our evangelist think that those chaps at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, none of whom is held there by due process, led Navy Seals to Osama out of the goodness of their hearts and a sense of public duty?

A moral test: MI5 is aware that nuclear charges have been placed all over London, and they’re due to go off in two hours. The man who has placed the charges has been arrested but refuses to talk. Would you use torture to find out where the charges are? I would. Mr Finkelstein apparently wouldn’t – his flaming conscience and a keen sense of legality would be more important than the lives of millions.

‘Do we seriously want the Home Secretary to ignore the pesky courts and just shove this man on a plane?’ he asks rhetorically. Yes we do, is my answer. Things Mr Finkelstein himself mentioned make this desirable. And the British law I cited means that it’s also legal – not everything has to go through a court, especially when a foreign national is involved.

Here we get to the crux of the matter. For it’s not any British law that keeps AQ in Britain, but one imposed by the European Court of Human Rights. While Mr Finkelstein feigns unease with the foreign provenance of this legislation, he loves the idea of a human rights court (‘I think it is better, and hope that it might be possible, that we have a British Bill of Rights’) and is ‘astonished at how many people, particularly on the right,’ fail to see the light.

We’ve come full circle. Such people, those on the right, frighten Mr Finkelstein more than AQ does – even though he wants to kill Jews, of whom Mr Finkelstein is presumably one (I apologise if this presumption is incorrect, but every Finkelstein I’ve ever met is Jewish), along with everyone else who happens to be in the neighbourhood.

I’m not particularly surprised at this outpouring of the usual ‘liberal’ effluvia, this time leavened with illiterate quasi-legal casuistry. It’s The Times after all. But the extent of ignorance is somewhat surprising in someone who has been to school.

Britain, Mr Finkelstein, has no need for a Bill of Rights – the English Common Law, evolved over a millennium, provides perfectly adequate protection of our freedoms. The country he evidently sees as an ideal needed such constitutional amendments because it was neonatal – having rejected the law governing the metropolis, Americans had to put something on paper quickly.

Yet the top journalist at The Times ought to have observed that the existence of a Bill of Rights didn’t prevent the Americans from setting up Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Neither did it prevent them, during the war, from interning thousands of Americans guilty only of possessing a subversive skin colour.

‘Britain is a liberal democracy built on law,’ Mr Finkelstein kindly informs us. Personally, I’ve always thought Britain is a constitutional monarchy, but let’s not quibble about such trivia.

Whatever we are, we have no law that says we must commit national suicide to please our EU partners, whose own legal rectitude is of rather more recent origin than ours. Neither do we have one that says our Secretary of State can’t throw that foul obscenity out. I suggest Mr Finkelstein take a refresher course in such things – but steer clear of the LSE this time, Daniel. They teach all sorts of nonsense there.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By way of disclaimer, I must state that, though I intend to vote UKIP every chance I get, I’m neither the party’s member nor indeed unqualified supporter. In fact, I’m constitutionally incapable of being an unqualified supporter of any political group.

However, if I didn’t suffer from this innate personality flaw, the current criticism of UKIP would turn me into the staunchest flag bearer. In fact, the conspiracy theorist in me suspects that UKIP is so devious that it’s paying The Times to keep up its relentless offensive against the party.

Yesterday anti-UKIP diatribes appeared on several pages, including the editorial. Today it’s Hugo Rifkind’s turn to pick up the relay baton and do his level best to promote UKIP by ostensibly attacking it.

He starts out by endorsing Dave Cameron’s 2006 description of UKIP as a party of ‘fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists.’ Then he half acknowledges that this may no longer be completely true: ‘It’s different now’. Exactly how?

‘They’re against some arguably restrictive things, such as the EU, employment protection…’ Arguably? That means that the opposite view is still correct, if not exactly unassailable. Amazing what a little adverb can do to hedge one’s bets. What is unarguably rotten, however, is this: ‘…but also against gay marriage, building on the green belt, wind farms, immigration, out-of-town supermarkets and travellers concreting over fields.’

My hair stands up on end. How much more fruitcake, loony and closet racist can a party get? Wind farms, gay marriage, free-for-all emigration and travellers setting up camps in someone’s back yard are all articles of faith. Any infidel against any one of those is fair game for any kind of insult, from fascist to racist to… paedophile anyone?

‘How they square all this with “libertarianism” is anybody’s guess, but I suspect it’s largely done by not reading books.’ Among UKIP supporters (and my friends) one finds Britain’s leading writers, philosophers and theologians, each one of whom reads more books in a year than Rifkind has clearly read in his, admittedly short, lifetime. But hey, he’s a writer, not a reader, and it’s his column.

He’s right about libertarianism though; it’s an unfortunate choice of self-description. One suspects that UKIP publicists went for it because the word ‘conservative’, which would describe the party more accurately, is already taken and thoroughly perverted.

Now comes the capital charge against UKIP, one that ought to make every progressive man hold a cupped hand to his mouth and rush to the lavatory, making gagging sounds as he runs. ‘The dominant philosophy, if you can quite call it that, is one that holds that there is a true, right and commonsense way of doing things and that Britain, through the shrillness of special interest groups and the Machiavellian scheming and moral bankruptcy of its political class, has strayed from this path.’

One of UKIP’s proposals is the revival of grammar schools, a long overdue idea amply supported by the cited sentence. Yes, I realise Hugo must have been educated at an independent establishment, but grammar schools have been shown to have a positive knock-on effect on education in general.

But style aside, what causes Hugo’s ire in this ‘dominant philosophy’? It’s ‘the way it can end up sounding a bit… well, racist.’ Right, I get it. Belief in the existence of truth is ipso facto racist even if ostensibly it has absolutely nothing to do with race. Is it also… well, paedophiliac, Hugo? …fascist? …kleptomaniac? Any term of opprobrium would do, take your pick.

‘The UKIP strategy is to suggest that politicians are the problem; that a smug and entitled political class is not just irritating but actively damaging to the national interest.’ Perish the thought.

People like Ken ‘Kenneth’ Clarke strive to promote the national interest by making sure that Britain is governed from Brussels, while people like the Cameroons and the Milibandits know only one cure for our troubles: more of the same. If that doesn’t prove their commitment to the national interest, I don’t know what would.

Actually, UKIP’s suggestion, so abhorrent to Hugo, is true not only of British politicians but of all Western ones, with the possible exception of Angela Merkel. She is irritating all right, but at least she tries to promote Germany’s national interest, as she misconstrues it.

This whole affair reminds me of the Soviet Union, where the only way for a writer to introduce the public to political ideas different from Leninism was to heap abuse on them. Those clever chaps would trick the censors by attacking, say, Berkeley for being a reactionary idealist in the pay of the ruling classes. In the process, they’d explain in considerable detail every aspect of Berkeley’s philosophy – much to the grateful readers’ delight.

Hugo Rifkind and other hacks from The Times must harbour a secret affection for UKIP. It’s only by seemingly attacking it that they can get around the watchful eye of their editors and owners and carry the UKIP message to their readers. The party ought to be ecstatic: this kind of publicity would cost millions if they had to pay for it.

 

 

 

 

Throw a veil over a shark, and it still won’t look like a turbot. Put the odd bit of conservative phraseology into The Times, and it’ll still sound like The Daily Mirror minus the intellectual subtlety.

Today, the paper has decided to join the battle on the side of our faux Tories taking a last stand against UKIP before the Thursday council elections. One detects genuine desperation in the invective unleashed by Ken Clarke, for UKIP threatens the political survival of the so-called Tories possibly and their left wing, championed by Clarke, definitely.

The desperation evinced by The Times is less obvious but more profound. As far as the paper is concerned, UKIP threatens more than just the electoral prospects of this or that party. It imperils our toxic modernity, the ethos that encourages formerly respectable papers to turn into illiterate, irresponsible rags.

“It is hard to avoid the impression,” laments The Times, “that UKIP has taken one look at the open, modern world and said ‘no thank you very much.’”

And specifically? That dastardly party would “consign to the dustbin” such “new-fangled ideas as ‘multiculturalism’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘climate change’”, to say nothing of ‘social engineering’.

I’m scared, aren’t you? Just thinking that such monsters could possibly win a few votes is guaranteed to give any sensible individual sleepless nights. Pursued by nightmares of a world with no multiculturalism and social engineering, he’d wake up every half an hour hoarse from his own screams.

And even more specifically? “Nigel Farage is an adept populist, skilled at touching the issues that concern large parts of the electorate.” Crikey. A politician who’s a populist. Whatever next. And touching the issues that people care about – what does he think he is, a statesman?

Of course, Ken ‘Kenneth’ Clarke, the paper’s darling, is the very opposite of all that. He hasn’t had an ounce of populism since last night, probably spent pressing lager-reeking flesh in a pub, dripping foam off his pint glass onto his hushpuppies and doing a bit of karaoke for good measure. Some may say that a septuagenarian referring to himself officially by a three-letter abbreviation of his Christian (well, agnostic) name is the populist teapot calling the kettle black.

Lest you might think I’m being unfair to the paper, it also includes some substantive criticism of UKIP, most of it consonant with Ken’s and Dave’s diatribes anchored by words like ‘fruitcakes’. For example, the party is accused of not vetting all its candidates, which laxity leaves an opening through which a few BNP creepy-crawlies can sneak in.

Fair cop. UKIP still lacks an extensive national organisation capable of keeping the odd extremist out, and it would be surprising if it didn’t, considering its size, experience and funding. The two main parties, by contrast, have been around for yonks, and they’ve honed their vetting techniques to the sharpness of a cutthroat razor.

As a result, it’s only by subterfuge that any real conservative can get through the fine filter of his grassroots organisation. Conservatives being congenitally bad liars, most get found out and blackballed in the first round.

At the same time Labour’s selectors are so vigilant that the party’s parliamentary fraction is bulging with ‘former’ communists and members of transparent KGB fronts, such as the CND. I readily agree that even a former BNP member isn’t fit to be a politician in a civilised country. Would the Milibandits agree the same thing about a CND functionary? Fat chance.

Another criticism levelled at UKIP is that it’s “very easy to be against things in politics. It is against immigration, the European Union, the notion of Britain going to the dogs and the existing British political class. It is much harder to be in favour of anything while maintaining credibility and coherence.”

Again I agree – and doff my hat to the ruling coalition and its twin the Labour party. Contextually, they’ve maintained credibility and coherence by being in favour of all those wonderful things that UKIP is against, along with ‘multiculturalism’, ‘inclusion’ and ‘climate change’, to say nothing of ‘social engineering’. How much more sound it is to make the country go to the dogs than to protest against it.

Better the devil you don’t know then, and both The Times and Ken ‘Kenneth’ are right that UKIP is a protest party – we do have an awful lot to protest against. True enough, the party’s positive proposals, though far from nonexistent, could be thought through more deeply, their numbers added up more accurately.

However, would The Times suggest that the mainstream parties are in any position to cast the first, indeed any, stone? If so, the paper ought to take a quick look around – even to the point of reading its own factual reports on the economy, education, justice, healthcare and so forth.

Attacking UKIP members and voters as some sort of insane village idiots only succeeds in making the teapot take another look at the kettle – and find it considerably blacker. In any case, such claims are also a lie.

I for one have several UKIP supporters among my friends. Every one of them has more intelligence, not to mention integrity, in his little finger than Ken ‘Kenneth’ has in his whole beer-bloated body – with enough room left over for the combined wits of The Times leader writers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Generally I don’t use the word ‘surreal’ in a context that doesn’t involve René Magritte, but this early in the morning no better modifier springs to mind.

A High Court panel led by Britain’s most senior judges has decreed that a man can still be convicted of rape even if the woman agreed to hanky-panky.

The landmark case involves a Muslim woman whose husband broke his promise not to ejaculate inside her. According to our top legal minds, the poor thing was therefore raped as she ‘was deprived of choice relating to the crucial feature on which her original consent to sexual intercourse was based’.

So a simple ‘yes’ from a woman is no longer sufficient to keep the man out of pokey. Consent must now include a list of ‘crucial features’, and any deviation constitutes a felony that women are these days conditioned to believe is worse than murder.

I wonder if Their Lordships have considered the full ramifications of their ruling. Suppose for the sake of argument, and I know this may not be a safe assumption, that intercourse between husband and wife takes place in private. How can the court be sure that a breach of contract occurred? How can the prosecution prove that the non-consensual spouting off resulted from malicious intent rather than a common malfunction?

After all, oral contracts, according to Sam Goldwin, aren’t worth the paper they are written on. Her word against his is often insufficient to convict even in a case of common-or-garden rape, defined by my trusted Chambers as ‘unlawful sexual intercourse (usu. by force) with another person’. When sex is consensual and therefore archaically defined as lawful, rape may become even harder to prove. Yet proved it must be for, as we know, underneath it all, and I’m sure Germaine Greer will agree, any sex is implicit rape.

Since, for old times’ sake, the burden of proof is still on the prosecution, there’s only one solution to the problem: consent must be stated in writing, by filling in a standard form made up of many rubrics. A stack of such forms, translated into at least 20 languages, must be issued free of charge to every couple, married or otherwise, and also to every man, woman or other looking for some action on a Saturday night.

To become legally binding, the form must be signed by both parties and then officially notarised, which may present something of a problem. You see, the decision to have sex frequently and irresponsibly involves no long-term planning. Not only can it be spontaneous but, even worse, it may be taken at a time when most notary offices are closed for the night.

The problem is serious but not insurmountable: supply, as we know, generates demand. Before long all-night notary offices will appear in every neighbourhood, with the officials also licensed to dispense condoms and offer advice on various ballistic and contraceptive possibilities inherent in assorted sexual variants.

As to the form itself, I’ll leave it to our Lord Chief Justice to compile. By way of suggestion, however, the document must be exhaustive to the point of being exhausting. Nothing ought to be left to chance.

Definitely specified before each erotic encounter must be a) position(s); b) duration; c) orifice(s) utilised; d) method of contraception; e) financial responsibility for any medical problem transmitted therein; f) any extras, e.g. S & M, B & D, other; g) presence and/or number of observers and/or other participants; h) use of any audio and/or video recording equipment; j) any resulting contractual obligations, e.g. the man does the dishes and/or mows the lawn tomorrow, in case of separate residences conveys the woman home in a taxi, sends flowers and/or chocolates the next day – well, I’m not a High Court judge, and only such a qualified person could be relied upon to draft a vitally important document like this to provide for every eventuality.

Whether our top jurists ought to busy themselves with such rank idiocy is of course a different matter. Yet in a way I sympathise with them. Like any other functionaries they have to justify their keep by being seen to do something. Since about 80 percent of our new laws come courtesy of the EU, their Lordships have to find new areas in which they can apply their keen intellects.

For the same reason, our PM Dave finds time to attend book launches and offer rather imperious advice to the Football Association. I count on his support in this initiative, and I know Samantha will agree that it’s long overdue.

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

This, according to Albert Einstein, himself a competent amateur violinist, was the best approach to Bach’s music. Little did he know that the same approach would do wonders for today’s classical radio stations.

Broadening the scope of Einstein’s advice and following it would make our own BBC 3 infinitely better, though it would still fall far short of being good.

Yes, we’d be spared the gasping, inane, often illiterate comments the station’s announcers typically deliver with shit-eating mirth, as if it were all a knee-slapping joke. It would be a huge improvement if these utterly objectionable persons simply introduced a piece by saying, ‘Here is such-and-such performed by so and so,’ and then just played the damn thing.

Yet this couldn’t be more than a good start. For they’d still be in a position to decide what is played and by whom – so ultimately their ability to inflict harm, though diminished, wouldn’t be neutralised.

It would be almost bearable if those announcers simply suffered from a deficit of mind and taste. After all, these commodities, especially the second, are now so rare that expecting them from radio presenters would be bucking statistical odds, a bit like selling all one’s worldly possessions to buy a pile of lottery tickets.

The real problem is that their mindless, tasteless comments are proffered in the service of an ideology or, to be more precise, a subversive bias.

Much has been written and said, correctly, about the BBC’s political bias, but few have commented that the same bias, mutatis mutandis, pervades its cultural programming as well. In both areas the objective seems to be subverting anything that is traditionally associated with Western civilisation, be it in its political, religious or cultural manifestation.

Music is the prime target, for nothing else this side of Scripture expresses the transcendent nature of our civilisation with the same poignancy. Great composers, from Bach down, translate the metaphysical essence into physical notes, but these are merely a vessel. The contents are the drama, subtlety, noble spirit, grandeur, creative energy of the Western soul.

The greater the composer, the more powerfully are these attributes conveyed in his music. The greater the performer, the more precisely he interprets them for his listeners. Music is thus consummated in a threesome of composer, performer and listener – it isn’t just a literary document written down on a score sheet. If it were, we’d have not recitals but recitations.

How can a radio station ostensibly dedicated to promoting the West’s greatest artistic treasure, its music, undermine it? By 1) playing much inferior music 2) performed by grossly incompetent musicians and 3) indoctrinating the audience into believing that this is what music is all about.

I can’t vouch that this is indeed BBC 3’s aim, but one is hard-pressed to see what they’d do differently if it were. For example, every morning (and I only use them in lieu of an alarm clock) they have to play some demotic stuff, like the Khachaturian or Gershwin today.

I have nothing against mindless entertainment if done well, and works like The Sabre Dance or An American in Paris satisfy this requirement. They are still mindless entertainment and, as such, belong in some mindless-entertainment station, not the flagship of the BBC’s expedition into ‘culture’.

Gershwin in particular falls between two stools, that of jazz and that of real music. Hence his buttocks are securely planted on the floor of popular taste, and more power to him. Better Gershwin than rap. But playing his music in a slot that could otherwise be taken up by, say, a Schubert sonata contributes to the general diminution of aesthetic, and therefore spiritual, standards. That must be the intent, if only an unwitting one.

Speaking of Schubert sonatas, I’d have to qualify my previous statement. Such music can only be good for the soul if it’s played by a performer who has one. Such musicians are almost extinct these days, and some of BBC 3’s darlings are cases in point.

One of them is Paul Lewis who this morning regaled us with an anodyne, mechanical rendition of the scherzo movement from the Schubert B Flat sonata. The presenter’s subsequent gasps were emetically effusive, the smug self-satisfaction unmistakeable: job done. Another work of genius has been pulled down to the level where the masses weaned on easy listening can feel comfortable.

Lewis is on the wrong side of 40, so he can no longer plead youth as an extenuating circumstance. Another BBC pet, Benjamin Grosvenor, has this excuse, but nothing in his playing suggests that it’ll get better with age. In all likelihood it’ll get worse.

Young Ben treated us to his version of Chopin’s Scherzo in E Major, today evidently being the Scamp-the-Scherzo day on BBC 3. Like his older accomplice Paul, Ben is blessed with the kind of fleet fingers that’ll do any pickpocket proud. The mirthful woman presenter shared an insight that this gave his playing a ‘champagne-like effervescence’. Stale urine would be a more accurate simile.

All these youngsters slide over the surface of music, which means they don’t convey it all. For the pay dirt of real music lies underneath the surface, and digital dexterity alone, though a sine qua non, won’t carry a performer to that kind of depth.

Chopin, for example, can be played in any number of ways, but one thing that’s absolutely indispensable is to convey his noble, aristocratic spirit. To do so, the performer must have some of it himself – along with the other attributes I earlier listed as essential to our civilisation.

Grosvenor’s unmistakeable facility is just as unmistakeably facile – he isn’t, nor can be, at one with the music he plays. If he were, he’d know where, for instance, to play rubatos and where they sound vulgar. As it is, he reminds us that ‘rubato’ is a cognate of ‘rob’ – he robs Chopin of his beauty, vicariously committing the same larceny against our whole civilisation.

BBC 3 occasionally plays records of great musicians of the past, but inevitably adding snide comments, along the lines of Schnabel being ‘dated’ or Gould ‘eccentric’. They could do a great public service by explaining why all those Bens, Pauls, Imogens, Mitsukos and other cultural aliens wouldn’t be fit to turn the pages for those giants. After all, not every listener knows the difference between really good and digitally competent.

Alas, they themselves don’t know the difference. Or, which is more ominous, are deliberately trying to destroy what’s left of our civilisation. If so, they’re doing a good job.