Category: Blog

On 4 July, 1776, the Thirteen American colonies declared independence from Britain. Americans celebrate this day as a national holiday. The British, understandably, don’t.

On 14 July, 1789, a French mob stormed the Bastille, inaugurating one of the most disastrous upheavals in world history. The French celebrate this day as La Fête Nationale. The rest of us don’t.

On 8 May, 1945, Germany capitulated on the Western front. Western allied powers celebrate the day. Germany doesn’t.

On 9 May, 1945, Germany capitulated on the Eastern front. The Russians celebrate this as their Victory Day. The Germans don’t.

The same day, in other words, can be an occasion some want to remember and others would dearly like to forget. This brings us to Mothering Sunday, a Christian holiday celebrated throughout Europe since at least the 16^th century.

On that day, the fourth Sunday of Lent, millions of people would go ‘a-mothering’, that is return to their mother church, the main church or cathedral in the area.

Servants and children would be given a day off. On the way to church, the children would celebrate the reprieve from Latin and Greek by picking up wild flowers and giving them to their mothers. After Mass families would eat traditional cakes and buns.

Obviously, such a reactionary, obsolete tradition had no place in a world of modernity championed by the United States. Hence early in the 20^th century Americans began to celebrate Mother’s Day instead. Moreover, using the stratagem perfected by modern vandals, they did so on the same day as Mothering Sunday, piggybacking the new on the old.

This is what constitutes the great larceny of modernity: shoplifting the Christian ethos that formed our civilisation and shoving secular simulacra down people’s throats. Tradition was like a spoonful of sugar that, according to Mary Poppins, helps the bitter medicine go down.

In subliminal reference to the Holy Trinity, even the most pernicious slogans of modernity were usually made up of three elements, either words or phrases. This larcenous tradition began with the French liberté, egalité, fraternité, but it didn’t end there.           

Americans contributed ‘life, liberty and pursuit of happiness’. The Russian ‘vsia vlast sovetam’ (all power to the Soviets). The Germans ‘ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer’ (one people, one nation, one leader). And even a somewhat less significant revolution had to chip in with a vapid ‘Work harder, produce more, build Grenada!’

The revolutionaries sensed that the world around them was alive with Trinitarian music. As people’s ears were attuned to it, they were predisposed to respond to similar sounds even if they conveyed a different meaning.

Following in the wake of baseball caps, Coke and verbs made out of nouns, American Mother’s Day had also been making steady inroads on traditional Mothering Sunday until it ousted it. This was ominous.

On the face of it, there’s nothing objectionable about celebrating motherhood – it’s something worth celebrating. We all have mothers after all. Yet in the past we also had a Father, whose bride the Church was. The motherhood celebrated on this day was thus spiritual, not physiological – even though human mothers were also honoured by association. 

This is now gone. A few church-going Christians still celebrate Mothering Sunday. Many others think it’s just an archaic term for Mother’s Day. Most have never even heard of Mothering Sunday.  

So I hope that your joy of celebrating this occasion will be tinged with sadness. For tradition is an anchor that keeps us embedded in our civilisation. Lift the anchor, and the civilisation is cast adrift – this holds true for believer and non-believer alike.

Happy Mothering Sunday to all you fellow reactionaries out there. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Puns may have been the lowest form of humour to Dr Johnson, but in this instance the one on Obama’s name is hard to resist.

Yesterday it was lovely Michelle, rather than her hubby-wubby, who found herself with egg Benedict on her face, thus inspiring puerile jokes.

As a general observation, Michelle’s thoughts tend not to be as well-shaped as her body. She is driven mostly by burning passion, be that political, racial or feminist. Nothing unusual about that but, when such passion is the driver, embarrassment is often the destination.

Yesterday, as I saw fit to remind you, was International Women’s Day. Michelle doesn’t need such reminders: 8 March is eternally etched in her mind, next to Mayday and other ideological festivals.

For all their chromatic and biographical differences, my new friend John Kerry is Michelle’s natural soul mate. John even believes the soul exists – he’s a practising Catholic, which however doesn’t prevent him from also believing that women have a God-given right to abortion.

Such seeming contradictions don’t bother chaps who devote their lives to enunciating pieties of more recent provenance than religion. Being pro-abortion is modern and therefore Good. Being religious is antiquated and therefore Irrelevant. Except of course when the religion is Islam, which is neither Modern nor Relevant in fact, but is all those things subtextually. The subtext evokes muted echoes of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, racial and social equality.

Therefore, Islam is Good and Relevant, even though some of its adherents sometimes blow up things they shouldn’t. Hence the likes of Michelle and John will allow themselves the odd mildly disparaging remark about Islamism, while making sure the world knows that Islamism has nothing – not even a teensy-weensy bit! – to do with Islam. Michelle is particularly careful about that because she doesn’t want to upset some of her in-laws.

To commemorate yesterday’s big socialist occasion, our soul mates co-presented the Secretary of State’s International Women of Courage Award to 10 winners, five of them Muslim. Or rather nine winners, for the tenth one had to be hastily denied the prize at the last moment.

The 26-year old Egyptian Samira Ibrahim won her prize for having been abused by the military in 2011. Among other indignities she was given a virginity test. Reports say nothing about the test methodology or indeed finding, but clearly Samira was a prime candidate for the prestigious accolade.

Suddenly, when Michelle and John were practically on their way to the podium, it turns out that Samira regularly tweets texts that clash with the Good subtext. Specifically, she screams hatred for both Americans and Jews, not to mention American Jews, to whom she refers as ‘the Zionist lobby’.

Last summer, after five Israeli tourists and a Bulgarian bus driver were killed by a suicide bomber, Samira was jubilant: ‘An explosion on a bus carrying Israelis in Burgas airport in Bulgaria on the Black Sea. Today is a very sweet day with a lot of very sweet news.’

As a mob was attacking the US embassy in Cairo, Samira responded with characteristic restraint: ‘Today is the anniversary of 9/11. May every year come with America burning.’

The Saudi ruling family are to Samira ‘dirtier than the Jews’. The beauty of such phrases is that they work the other way around just as well. She could have said ‘the Jews are even dirtier than the Al Sauds’ to the same effect.

The depth of Samira’s erudition matches the purity of her feelings and, unlike some pundits, she generously attributes her sources: ‘I have discovered with the passage of days, that no act contrary to morality, no crime against society takes place except with the Jews having a hand in it. Hitler.’

You’d think that such prose would be a disqualifying factor in being singled out for an American award animated by Good passions. You’d think wrong for, in common with the heretics of yesteryear, Samira was given a chance to recant.

Thankfully she spared Michelle and John further embarrassment by turning the opportunity down: ‘I refused to apologize to the Zionist lobby in America on the previous statements hostile to Zionism under pressure from the American government, so the prize was withdrawn,’ Samira proudly declared.

Clearly the girl is hell-bent on sticking to her guns (and bombs). Her style needs a bit of work though, but then English isn’t her first language.

Will the likes of Michelle and John ever learn? The lesson is fairly simple: their touchy-feely affection for Third World countries, especially of the Muslim variety, is misplaced – this regardless of who their rulers are.

Arab Spring or no Arab Spring, Samira is a child of her country, her religion and her culture. According to a recent Pew poll, 82 percent of Egyptians regard stoning adulterous women as just, 77 percent approve of chopping off thieves’ hands, 84 percent favour the death penalty for apostasy from Islam.

Samira may take exception to some of these practices, but not to the spirit behind them. She reflects the ethos of her world – as, unfortunately, Michelle and John reflect the ethos of theirs.

One last word to John, now we’re friends: crack the whip and kick a few butts back at the ranch, mate. Whoever researches such things at the State Department should be drawing unemployment benefits.   

Or is one allowed to refer to persons of the female persuasion in such a gender-specific way? Being a stickler for political correctness, I must check up on this. Anyway, just to be on the safe side, congratulations to every female-person reader.

On second thoughts, given the general thrust of my prose, perhaps my typical readers wouldn’t mind being called women if that’s what they are (and sometimes even if that’s what they aren’t). Nor are they likely to know what on earth I’m congratulating them on.

No more suspense: today is 8 March, International Women’s Day, originally known as International Working Women’s Day. And if you’re unfamiliar with this highlight of the calendar, this ignorance means… what exactly? That you aren’t international? Not working? Not a woman? Actually, none of these.

It only means that you’re neither a Soviet native nor a socialist nor Germaine Greer, who has celebrated the event so eloquently on Radio 3. So perhaps you ought to be congratulated on what you are not, rather than on what you are.

This day was big in the Soviet Union. At dawn every loudspeaker at every street corner would blare the words I used in the title. The announcer’s soupy voice would shake the male population out of their heavy, hung-over slumber. The men would then kiss their wives and give them some half-wilted mimosas that had been hiding under the bed through the night.

Effusive programmes on radio and TV would continue all day, highlighting women’s achievements in arts, sciences and especially sports. Actually, the Soviet sportswomen who achieved the most were indeed great champions, but alas not necessarily or merely women.

Capitalist imperialist hyenas eventually cottoned on to this hormonal incidental and introduced chromosome testing at all major events. After that the most distinguished Soviet athletes, such as Tamara and Irina Press, Tatiana Shchelkanova and Klavdia Boyarskikh announced their summary retirement. But such mishaps weren’t allowed to detract from the festivity of the occasion.

Less illustrious Soviet women gratefully accepted the mimosas, while lamenting that their real achievement went uncelebrated. This was holding a full-time job, then queueing up at grocery shops for hours, then trying to convert unpalatable ingredients into palatable meals, then washing up, then doing the laundry, then ironing, then cleaning up, then putting children to bed, then – as often as not – looking after the hubby-wubby reeling in at midnight blind-drunk and violent.

Add to this the odd beating, premature ageing and regular abortions, the preferred method of contraception in the USSR, and the true scale of their unsung achievements was nothing short of epic. So it’s not only with pride but also with sadness that they listened to the hosannas for yet another heroine who had in the previous 12 months upstaged the Yanks in discus throwing or shot put.

‘All progressive mankind is celebrating International Working Women’s Day!’ thundered the announcers, thus drawing a line in the sand. Contextually, anyone who failed to celebrate the holiday may still have belonged to mankind, just, but certainly not to the progressive part of it.

It’s good to see that even with the supposed demise of the Soviet Union, 8 March is still celebrated in Russia, and Russian women still astound the world with their fine achievements. Appearances to the contrary, these don’t always involve marrying oligarchs or turning a prodigious number of tricks in London hotels.

No, newly liberated Russian women don’t have to rely on men to express themselves as persons. Anyone seeking proof of this should visit the website of The Sun, a paper known for its enlightened treatment of the fair sex (sorry, I know it’s supposed to be ‘gender’ but it just doesn’t scan in this sentence).

Keeping up with the great festival, this august publication has posted a video of the Russian gymnast Tatiana Kozhevnikova. This remarkable woman shows what’s possible to achieve with years of training, dedication and self-denial in the service of a worthy cause.

The viewers are treated to a neatly choreographed footage of Tatiana lifting heavy kettlebells with the part of her body that in the less progressive times was reserved either for the pleasure of love or the pain of childbirth. Apparently her personal best is 14 kilos (31 lbs), which may or may not be the world record but is a notable feat in either case.

So congratulations are in order. To Tatiana, for dedicating her life to expanding the realm of the possible. To Russia (aka the Soviet Union), for turning 8 March into a truly international holiday celebrated by Germaine Greer. To The Sun for letting us all share in the spirit of the occasion. And especially to all of you, men or women, who don’t know what the hell 8 March means.

 

 

 

 

 

 

These days we’re too hung up on political taxonomy to keep in focus things that really matter.

We imagine that describing someone as ‘rightwing’, ‘leftwing’ or any gradation thereof conveys adequate information. We think that ‘democracy’ is a sufficient condition for a country’s virtue. We accept that ‘neoconservatism’ is a new type of conservatism, though in fact it’s much nearer a new kind of Trotskyism.

Like most political descriptors, these have lost whatever little meaning they once had. From time to time we are reminded of this linguistic debacle by a news item, such as the death of Hugo Chávez. Drawing as they do tonnes of comments from all over the world, such events emphasise where the real watersheds run among both politicians and commentators.

Such dividing lines typically separate not left from right but the intelligent from the stupid, the educated from the ignorant and the good from the evil.

The trouble with Ken Livingston, for example, isn’t that he’s leftwing but that he’s evil and stupid (though not devoid of some cunning), as proved by his admiration for the deceased. Chávez, according to Ken, devoted his life to ridding the world of ‘exploitation’ and ‘colonialism’.

In pursuit of such glorious ends, Hugo supported every terrorist regime or organisation on earth, had his opponents silenced or arrested, nationalised his country’s economy thereby driving its people into unemployment and poverty, and wiped out any semblance of free press. Now you decide whether Ken is stupid or evil or, most probably, both. But just to say he’s leftwing is to say next to nothing.

Ahmadinejad compared the dear departed to Jesus, while our own George Galloway described him as ‘champion of the poor’ – and he wasn’t referring to Chávez’s sustained effort to create as many poor as was possible in oil-rich Venezuela. Now Galloway is probably leftwing while Ahmadinejad probably isn’t. So what? What matters here is that both are evil and quite possibly stupid as well.

As to our broadcast media, I think a law should be passed forbidding them to comment on countries or politicians whose names they can’t pronounce. Thus most American commentators refer to the famous mass murderer as ‘Shay’, as if the chap had owned a French restaurant called ‘Chez Guevara’.

Such an injunction would be a necessary but, as Jon Snow of Channel 4 shows, not a sufficient measure. He pronounces Spanish names properly, which is scarce consolation considering what he says. Such as, ‘Whatever you think of Chávez, Latin America is far more its own continent today thanks to Lula, Chávez and others…’ And Germany was far more its own country thanks to Hitler. If you admire chaps like Chávez, Jon, why don’t you just say so.

That David Aaronovitch tends towards the left goes without saying – he’s a Times columnist after all. So let’s concentrate on his relevant qualities, as manifested in his article The US Was Midwife to Commandante Chávez.

Aaronovitch essentially subscribes to the view jointly held by all Latin American communists, that all the troubles of that continent were caused by the US government and such corporations as Ford, Coca-Cola and the United Fruit. In support the pundit recruits Pablo Neruda, whom he describes as ‘a poet for the young; a poet for love and politics’.

I’d also be tempted to mention in passing what else Neruda was: head of the KGB spy ring in Latin America. Really, Aaronovitch should vet his sources more carefully, otherwise people might think he’s ignorant, in addition to his other sterling qualities.

‘Whatever has happened in Venezuela,’ explains Aaranovitch, ‘might have been different if, for decades before, the United States had behaved better.’

Never mind 70 years of systematic Soviet propaganda, ably augmented since 1958 by Castro and other Soviet stooges. Never mind the huge spy ring run by the ‘poet of love’. Never mind a largely illiterate and idle population. Never mind the mayhem created in Chile by Castro’s proxy Allende. Never mind ‘Shay’s’ subversion. Never mind fascist dictators like Perón in Argentina or Stroessner in Paraguay. It’s all Coca-Cola’s fault.

Aaronovitch then compliments Chávez, ‘who, unlike his heroes [Fidel and ‘Shay’] executed no one and created no concentration camps.’ Well, the boy did what he had to do. He didn’t need death squads and concentration camps because he was democratically elected and re-elected by a thoroughly brainwashed populace. The odd beating and imprisonment did the job famously, coupled of course with Bolshevik-scale propaganda.

This points at Aaranovitch’s inability to tie different ends of his narrative together even in a short piece. ‘The abused neocons, I think, are right where the realpolitikers are wrong. Treat people in other lands… as people deserving liberty, dignity and democracy…’ and everything will be hunky-dory.

First, the neocons are more abusing than abused. This peculiar blend of American nationalism with Trotskyist internationalism has more or less dominated US foreign policy since Reagan’s tenure at least. Second, carrying democracy to every tribal society on earth is the neocons’ pronounced, practically sole, aim.

We are witnessing the results in the Middle East. Democratic elections so beloved of the neocons, instigated by them and made possible by the war they had championed, have destroyed stability in the region, bringing to power the kind of regimes that are rapidly taking the world to a possible nuclear disaster.

Mentioning Chávez and the neocons in the same article, anyone with half a brain and a modicum of moral sense would show how the former testifies to the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the latter. Chávez, after all, was elected as democratically as Perón, Ahmadinejad or for that matter Hitler – as democratically as the neocons desire. Democracy triumphs, so what’s the problem then? Job done.

It’s a moot point whether Aaaronovitch is leftwing. What else he is matters much more. Instead let’s ask the real question: ‘If these are our opinion formers, why are we surprised at the opinions they form?’

 

Sometimes an outsider can see what an insider can’t, thus enabling the insider to get in touch with his real self.

The Times proves that this is indeed possible by first explaining what conservatism isn’t and then, courtesy of Rachel Sylvester, what is really is. Thanks to this vacuous, lefty, moribund paper, we now stand corrected on whatever misapprehensions we might have had.

Commenting on UKIP’s showing at Eastleigh, The Times suggested that the party is weak intellectually. Specifically, as proofs of this cerebral deficiency, it listed such risible policies as opposition to the EU, desire to stimulate growth by cutting taxes and reducing welfare expenditure, support for grammar schools and antagonism to unrestricted immigration. Such policies, said the editorial, aren’t so much conservative as unsound.

Fair enough. But then we must assume that sound conservatism would call for subjugating Britain to the EU, stifling growth by increasing both taxes and welfare spend, eliminating the few remaining grammar schools and inviting the world’s all and sundry to help themselves to our welfare state, which by now would be big enough to accommodate such an influx.

The Times didn’t actually state that in so many words, but in this instance the denotation allows for only one possible connotation. Still, a few things were left unsaid, leaving a gap which Miss Sylvester has now bridged.

In her article Tories Must See the Conservative in Cameron she teaches all us cynics a valuable lesson in penetrating political thought. Dave, according to her, is as conservative as they get. As far as hypotheses go, this one is paradoxical, but then so have been many others. For example, no one could have imagined that matter under some circumstances could act as both particles and field until this paradox was supported by evidence.

So what kind of evidence does Rachel dredge up in support of this counterintuitive proposition?

‘Raised in rural Berkshire, the son of a stockbroker and a magistrate, who went to Eton and Oxford, plays tennis, tends his veg patch and used to hunt…’ Oh well, this settles it then. By these criteria I’m at best a socialist, tennis being the only qualification I possess. Moreover, I now realise that no one I’ve ever met, never mind my close friends, has the slightest claim to being a conservative – they’d fail the Sylvester litmus test in most or all rubrics.

After such a powerful QED argument, it’s surprising that Rachel felt the need to come up with any others. But hey, nothing succeeds like excess. So she continues:

‘His support for gay marriage is based on a deep belief in the importance of marriage’. Crikey. Now we know: all those subversives, who have for millennia taken it for granted that marriage is a union between a man and a woman, have done so because they detested the very institution of marriage. A true conservative can only prove his credentials by supporting marriage between a man and any mammal of his choice. No wonder I don’t number a single conservative among my friends.

Case made, wouldn’t you say? Not yet. ‘His husky-hugging greenery grows out of an instinct to preserve the environment.’ Of course it does. Before long Dave will become so dyed-in-the-wool conservative that he’ll apply for membership in the Green Party and lead it to parliamentary majority in the EU.

‘House of Lords reform is necessary only to protect the credibility of Parliament.’ Such credibility had been sorely lacking for almost a thousand years until Dave’s fellow conservative and role model Tony reduced the Lords to a travesty. It therefore behoves Dave to reassert his credentials by turning the Upper House into a Ye-Auld-England tourist attraction.

‘The ringfencing of aid is a patrician attempt to help the poor…’ Quite. It also betokens aristocratic disdain for wealth (other than his own, naturally), of which most nouveaux are being deprived to keep the ring fence up. Conservatism therefore is all about transferring money from those who earned it to those who haven’t, building up a megalomaniac state in the process.

‘Public service reform is intended to save, rather than dismantle, the NHS and state schools.’ Dismantle those venerable institutions? Perish the thought. God forbid bodies will become healthier and minds better developed. What’s conservative about that?

These deep taxonomic insights were followed by equally profound and original philosophy: ‘Nobody can stop the clocks, still less reverse the progress of time. The world moves on…’

None of my friends would be capable of either such deep insights or such startlingly idiosyncratic turn of phrase. But then we now know that unlike Rachel and Dave they aren’t conservative.

To sum up: conservatism is all about support for homomarriage, espousing the ideas of the Greens, perpetrating constitutional vandalism, building up the welfare state, pumping more money into our exemplary nationalised education and medicine, and expressing oneself in hackneyed platitudes that a generation ago would have earned an F in English at any grammar school.

Oh yes, let’s not forget hunting in Berkshire. Berkshire hunt? It’s best not to go there.

Just one world tour, and US Secretary of State John Kerry is already moving up on the list of my favourite politicians.

I commented earlier on his budding tendency to coin portmanteau names by linking two countries together and thus coming up with a third that doesn’t exist. By fusing Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan he came up with Kyrzakhstan, suggesting that from America’s vantage point all those foreign lands are more or less the same. It’s like a seven-foot giant and a four-foot dwarf appearing equally tiny if you look at them from Mars.

Some may cringe at such ignorance on the part of the world’s top diplomat, but I rejoice. As much as any other man I love to see my prejudices confirmed, and Americans seldom disappoint. I only hope that, if it’s true that war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography, Our Lord won’t instigate a global conflict just to give Kerry a remedial class he so desperately needs.

On that same trip, my idol John spoke to a group of youngsters at a crowded Internet café in Berlin. A girl representing an organisation of young Muslims asked John what thoughts crossed his mind when he espied her co-religionists in America.

John’s response strengthened his claim to my lifelong friendship. ‘In America,’ he said, ‘you have a right to be stupid.’ He then added a few qualifiers about tolerance, thereby weakening said claim. He should have left it at the first sentence, with its refreshing, if possibly inadvertent, candour.

However, the framers of the US Constitution with its 27 amendments somehow omitted the right to stupidity, perhaps realising that voracious exercise of it would render democracy inoperable. This showed remarkable foresight, which is confirmed by every recent survey.

For example, only one American in 1,000 could name all five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (of speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of grievances). By laudable contrast, 22 percent could name all five members of the Simpson family.  

Another study concluded that only five percent of Americans could correctly answer three-fourths of the questions asked about economics, 11 percent those about domestic issues, 14 percent those about foreign affairs and 10 percent those about geography. Hence John Kerry can pride himself on belonging to an overwhelming majority, and isn’t this what all modern politicians strive for?

We aren’t talking about the knowledge of recondite facts and arcane references: only about 25 percent of native-born Americans would pass the elementary citizenship test given to immigrants. (Q: Who was the first president of the United States? A: George Washington Bridge.)

It’s therefore not surprising that most US voters don’t know the difference between conservatives and liberals, and in America the distinction is still valid. This explains how someone like Obama could be elected president, finding himself in a position to appoint someone like Kerry Secretary of State.

Lest you might think that the respondents selected for such surveys were deliberately drawn from the particularly obtuse strata of the population, consider the poll conducted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

There the sample was 14,000 randomly selected students at 50 universities around the country. This elite group scored under 55 percent on a test measuring their knowledge of American civic basics. Hence 45 percent wouldn’t qualify for citizenship if they didn’t have the good fortune of being born in the USA. Interestingly, freshmen tested higher than seniors, suggesting that university education isn’t all it’s cut out to be.

Before you run the Union Jack up the pole, consider the fact that similar studies in the UK show only marginally better results. This raises fundamental questions about one-man-one-vote democracy, the kind of questions these days few ask and no one answers.

As Plato and Aristotle postulated and their fellow Athenians showed, even a limited democracy can function effectively only in a nation possessing a high degree of civic and political sophistication. Unless a vote is cast from a position of responsibility and knowledge, it’s at best useless and at worst subversive.

In a constitutional democracy based on universal franchise, a candidate for political office must be weighed in the balance of the nation’s constitutional history and its fundamental principles. It’s reasonably clear that a stupid populace bone-ignorant about such things is incapable of this weighing exercise. In other words, it’s not qualified to vote.

Therefore even a politician with a firmer grasp of his brief and a greater intelligence than John Kerry would be unable to rely on such attainments to appeal to the electorate. Instead of addressing people’s minds he’d have to tickle the bits located some three feet lower.

A few generations of this sort of thing, and a new political class will evolve, including spivs with a knack for cheap demagoguery and excluding anyone with a talent for statesmanship. The politicians will in their turn promote ignorance and stupidity on the part of the electorate, thus squaring the vicious circle of modernity.

The Founding Fathers, apostles of American democracy, along with Tocqueville, their St Paul, were all aware of such pitfalls. But weaned as they were on the ideas of the Enlightenment, they thought democracy would be able to get around them.

They were wrong because the Enlightenment was wrong. Bien pensant ideas divorced from reality will sooner or later reverse the meaning of every term used to denote such notions.

Enlightenment turns out to be obscurantism, liberalism becomes illiberal, equality leads to tyranny. And democracy turns into the rule of the craven and dishonest over the stupid and ignorant. This is an historical law to which there are no exceptions.

 

My admiration for Dave knows no bounds, certainly no lower ones. As you know, I consider him the greatest British prime minister since Gordon Brown, and I’ll loyally fight his corner against all detractors.

Dave knows this too, which is why he regards me as a friend. He and I often go down the pub together, letting our hair down, our shirts out and our children get lost. At such relaxed moments I sometimes ask Dave to clarify the meaning of his pronouncements whenever I feel they take me out of my, admittedly rather shallow, depth.

This is what I did last night, when Dave and I shared some ideas and pork scratchings at his local. ‘What did you mean, Dave,’ I asked after my second pint of Wife Beater and his fourth, ‘when you said you’ll neither lurch to the right nor plant yourself in the middle between your political opponents? If you’re neither on the right nor in the middle, you’re on the left, aren’t you?’

‘Boot, you imbecile,’ answered Dave in a courageous attempt to conceal his affection for yours truly, ‘even you with your pea brain must understand this. Just read what I wrote. You know how to read, don’t you? “It’s not about being Left-wing or Right-wing – it’s about being where the British people are.” So there’s no need to lurch either to the right or to the left. British people are already in the lurch. Innit?’ he added, realising that other pub crawlers were trying to listen to our conversation.

‘Take gay marriage, for example,’ said Dave and then delivered one of his famous witticisms, ‘please, please take it.’ As I was wiping tears of laughter off my shirt front, he turned serious.

‘Where are the British people on this issue? Not on the left of the body politic and not on the right. They’re planted right down the middle, firmly, to the hilt and for a long haul. They like it up the middle. All I have to do is give’em a little push from behind.’ Then, suddenly aware that he forgot to drop his aitches yet again, Dave added, ‘Djamean?’

‘Yes, Dave, you did say that Britain had been going down for years under Labour,’ I said in a feeble attempt to match Dave’s wit.

‘I said it was going downhill, not down, you retard,’ laughed Dave and playfully punched me in the jaw with a solid left jab. ‘And now we aren’t pushing it fast enough… mate. That’s what makes some people lurch to the right, but they’ll never make us go the same way.’

‘Yes, but Ukip votes cost you Eastleigh, didn’t they?’ I suggested, only to see Dave turn crimson. ‘Nutters!’ he screamed. ‘Morons! Barbour louts! Fascists! Forces of conservatism!’ It took another swift pint of Wife Beater to calm him down.

‘Let me explain this to you in words of one syllable, Boot… er… mate,’ said Dave, helping himself to my onion crisps.

‘The demographics of the Eastleigh electorate are ineluctably intertwined with their socioeconomic situation, thereby inexorably propelling them towards the effluvia of encephalophonic animadversions perpetrated by those psychointellectually disadvantaged functionaries of Ukip…’

‘I get it, Dave,’ I said, even though I didn’t. ‘They don’t like it up the middle after all.’

‘But they do, mate, you retard, that’s exactly what they like. Gagging for it,’ explained Dave. ‘That’s why we’re not going to lurch to either side, and especially not to the right. And we’ll eschew every “cynical attempt to calculate the middle distance between our political opponents”, just like I wrote. Take those Ukip nutters out of the equation, and there is no bloody distance between us and our opponents. And there won’t be unless we lurch to the right, which we won’t.’

What I like about Dave is that he has the power of his office… sorry, I mean convictions. Like no other politician, he can ringfence his beliefs and stay sitting on the ring fence for ever. This throws light on the point he made the other day. After all, if you sit on a fence, a lurch to either side means you’ll fall down.

‘I understand now, Dave’ I said. ‘You’re “on the side of hard-working, decent, patriotic people”, just like you wrote. That’s what makes you different from all those nutters. They’re on the side of the lazy, the evil, the treacherous. But you’re on the right side, mate, which means you don’t have to lurch anywhere.’

‘You got it in one, Boot,’ said Dave and ordered his Special Branch bodyguard to tell the landlord we’re switching to shorts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My lower-case conservative friends are enthusiastic about UKIP finishing ahead of both Tories and Labour in the Eastleigh by-election. By contrast, I’m upset about UKIP finishing behind the LibDems.

Is Nigel Farage’s pint glass half-full or half-empty? This depends on whether one looks upon it from an aesthetic or pragmatic vantage point.

Aesthetically it’s most satisfying that UKIP has shown its potential to consign the morally and intellectually bankrupt Tory party to roughly the role traditionally played by the LibDems. It’s now a fair assumption that when UKIP contests a seat, the Tories will be unlikely to win it. It’s as fair an assumption that neither will UKIP.

That’s where pragmatism comes in. This was once explained to me in simple words by a formidable Tory front-bencher. ‘A vote for UKIP,’ she roared in response to my cri de coeur, ‘is a vote for Labour.’ Or for LibDems, as the case was yesterday. Either way, she had a point.

Do we seriously think that the Milibandits, in or out of coalition with the Cleggies, will be better than the Cameroons? Of course we don’t. At their best, they’ll be just as bad. At their normal, they’ll be even worse. At their worst, they’ll make the Brits seek refuge in Romania, not the other way round.

True conservatives are counting on UKIP to knock the Tories out of their shilly-shallying stride, making them act like, well, Tories, rather than Blair clones. UKIP then is supposed to do for the Tories what a spoiler does for a car. It keeps it on the straight and narrow.

The recent travesty with referendum promises shows how forlorn this hope is. His mind honed by PR trickery, Dave made a sop to anti-federalism by half-promising a referendum (a half-promise on anything is the best Dave can make – just look at his track record, or indeed his face). This, however, has not so much strings as a noose attached.

For, in common with most modern politicians, Dave is incapable of looking beyond the next election. Hence the referendum carrot can’t be eaten unless he remains at Downing Street after 2015 – and Eastleigh shows how improbable this is. Moreover, no promise has been made on the wording of the big question, and any market researcher will tell you that this is often decisive.

If you ask the people ‘Do you wish to stay in the EU so we can continue to trade with Europe?’, you’ll get one answer. If you ask ‘Do you wish to leave the EU so Britain can become independent again?’ the answer will be different.

In other words, Dave made no binding or substantive promise. He merely tried to neutralise what’s commonly perceived as UKIP’s single issue. The trick didn’t work in Eastleigh. Whether it’ll work nationally remains to be seen. In the unlikely event that it does, the Tories may yet win the next election. In the almost certain event that it doesn’t, Labour will win. In either event, we’ll lose.

It’s naïve to expect that a tectonic shift can occur in any major modern party. Those embarking on spoiling raids may toss bricks through windows all they want – the spivocrats will paper the windows over and remain almost as cosy as before. And historically, our first-past-the-post culture consigns any third party to such petty thuggery at best.

All this achieves these days is making the spivocrats conjure up new and more devious cardsharping tricks. Sure enough, voters can satisfy their platonic cravings by casting a protest vote in a by-election or even nationally, but this would mean something only if there were a real difference between the two main parties. But there isn’t, so it doesn’t.

Much as we may love UKIP, and Nigel Farage personally, it’s hard to say that the party is being triumphant in its spoiler role. The Tories are just as spivocratic as before, and UKIP still doesn’t have a single MP. Moreover, the party now has half as many members as it did in 2004. It does well in European elections, but that only goes to show how trivial most Brits consider these to be.

If UKIP is to succeed, it must stop snapping at the Tories’ ankles. It must kick them into touch. And the only way to achieve this is by reinventing itself as the true conservative party, one that can engage and win a debate on the economy and health, education and defence – on every issue of vital interest to the country.

The only meaningful way of winning such debates isn’t to field better debaters – it’s to offer better solutions. For such solutions to be taken seriously, the party must position itself as a serious force. UKIP must show itself to be ready not to trip up Tory nincompoops but to form a government.

As it is, UKIP is sending mixed signals, which is why it’s delivering mixed results. On the one hand, the party broadens its appeal by placing itself on the side of the conservative angels on such issues as grammar schools, immigration, same-sex marriage. On the other hand its top functionaries suggest, as one did to me a few months ago, that UKIP would disband the moment we leave the EU.

Such a silly remark in a private conversation wouldn’t matter, but unfortunately this is the general impression the party conveys to the electorate. Unless this changes, a vote for UKIP will indeed mean a vote for Labour.

What can be done? Not being an expert in political free-for-all, I can only suggest a broad strategy, not concrete tactical steps.

First, UKIP must come up with an all-embracing political philosophy, positioning itself as the true conservative party, the only one capable of upholding the country’s ancient constitution, making it prosperous, just and free. This is harder than it sounds, for no more or less universal understanding of conservatism is discernible at present.

Then UKIP must translate this philosophy into the kind of sound bytes that can penetrate the consciousness of a public that has been systematically and, one suspects, deliberately corrupted and dumbed down.

Unlike the first two tasks, the next two would cost. UKIP must employ the best talent to carry the sound bytes to the populace – widely, incessantly and effectively. This would be impossible without finding big backers, but a cursory inspection suggests they’re there to be found.

Finally, the party must contest every election, communicating to voters its seriousness of purpose. The electorate must be made to realise that UKIP’s intention is to form the government, not to keep it marginally more honest.

True, this is all easier said than done, especially the last two parts. But unless it’s done, UKIP will be limited to providing good, clean fun. Tory candidates will weep into their pillows. Labour will snigger. And the country, now properly entertained, will laugh all the way to disaster.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The EU has finally figured out a way to solve all its problems in one fell swoop. Unrest throughout Europe? Finished. Euro crisis? Over. Recession? No longer.

All these problems are behind us, with a bright future beckoning but a few steps up the road. For the EU is about to pass a law capping bankers’ bonuses at an amount equal to a year’s salary.

This announcement filled my heart with so much joy that my mind emptied of coherent thought. Since filling an article with nothing but ‘hooray!’ ‘bravo!’ and ‘hear, hear!’ would compromise my intellectual integrity, I’ve had to seek outside help.

This came from a Russian visitor to London, I.L. Kutchaheadoff, former pickpocket, then Second Secretary of the GULAG Party Committee, currently a member of the Duma, owner of three football leagues in Britain, nine newspapers in Spain, an oil trading company in Zurich (registered in Panama, operating in Goa) and a Korean massage parlour in Courchevel. Mr – or rather ‘Comrade’, as he prefers to be called for old times’ sake – Kutchaheadoff kindly agreed to share his views. Here’s what he had to say:

‘Comrades! I, along with all progressive mankind, welcome the EU announcement. It’s about time bankers, those hyenas of capitalism, running dogs of usury, skunks of imperialism, had their ears clipped. If Comrade Marx were alive today, he’d be happy, even though in an ideal world his preference would be to slash not bankers’ bonuses but their jugular veins.

‘However, much as I’m happy about this measure, I hope this is only the first of many. Didn’t Comrade Mao teach that a journey of 1,000 miles starts with a small step? So I’d like to take this opportunity and recommend a few subsequent steps, nay giant leaps on the road to our glittering future.

‘As far as caps go, a year’s salary is meaningless unless we also set an upper limit on said salaries, for example €15,000 a year. This is far in excess of the average wage in Saransk, Comrade Depardieu’s new hometown, but for the time being we must allow such iniquity.

‘The EU must then ban the charging of interest on bank loans, and our forward-looking English comrades have already taken a step in that direction. This measure was also proposed by Comrade Marx, but for appearances’ sake we can refer to the Old Testament instead – with apologies to Comrade Marx, who not only disliked both Testaments but also hated the Yi… I mean persons of Hebraic origin.

‘Since the banks will then become unable to produce surplus value, they’d have to be nationalised once and for all, with operational control passing on to the Financial Union (FU for short) and the regional EU Secretary.

‘Also I couldn’t help noticing, comrades, that your shops sell goods for considerably more than what they pay the manufacturers. This outrage must be corrected immediately, along with the anarchy reigning in the retail trade. Not only do shops overcharge the toiling masses, but they also choose their merchandise. This has to stop. The EU Central Committee must issue pan-European circulars mandating that, for example, shoe shops may not carry more than three most popular styles (e.g. jackboots, bast sandals, felt knee-boots). Ideally, shoe shops should sell no shoes at all to avoid complacency on the part of the toiling masses.

‘Neither should manufacturers who supply the shops be allowed to make what they wish, charge what they want and pay their employees whatever they fancy. To follow on my example, Church’s (to be renamed ‘Party Committee’s’) shall sell only the three styles of footwear specified above. They’ll pay their managers no more than €10,000 a year and will charge no more than €5 for a pair of stylish jackboots.

‘But this means de facto nationalisation, I hear you say. I agree with you, comrades; such palliatives must be outlawed. That’s why both industry and retail trade must be nationalised de jure. This means by an EU Central Committee decree to be greeted with mandated enthusiasm by the toilers of Europe.

‘Our English comrades have already nationalised healthcare, making the NHS the largest employer in Europe and fifth largest in the world, and I applaud them. It goes without saying that this progressive model must be followed across Europe, with private medicine banned once and for all. Doctors’ pay shall be calculated in line with that of a cobbler or a medium-level banker (€10,000 a year being the benchmark).

‘The English, who’ve seen the error of their imperialist ways, are also planning to introduce control of the press, telling the papers what they can’t write. My fur hat’s off to them. But their plans, commendable as they are, don’t go far enough. Tell the hacks what they can’t write by all means – but they also have to be told exactly what they must write. This is called telling the truth (Pravda in my native language).

‘Education? Here too our English comrades are leading the way by turning On the Origin of Species into the gospel of science, just as Das Kapital must be reinstated as the gospel of economics. To be on the safe side, however, all books that disagree with the two gospels (including the so-called Bible) must be removed from school libraries and, ideally, burned.

‘Pupils must be taught only those subjects that will enable them to advance the common cause: iron casting, gold exploration, uranium mining, laser guidance, barbed wire manufacturing, goose-stepping, money laundering. If asked, I’ll be pleased to draw up the detailed curricula.

‘And don’t get me started on publishing… Oops, have to run, comrades. There’s a recalcitrant editor who needs sacking and an anti-Marxist blasphemer to be execu…, I mean re-educated. One last thing before I go: shouldn’t the EU be renamed the EUSSR? Think about it, comrades. And keep up the good work.’

 

 

 

 

In an attempt to pull the economy out of the doldrums, the Bank of England is planning to cut its base rate to below zero. In parallel, it’ll shift its printing press into a higher gear and add to the £375 billion of worthless currency it has already run off in the last few months.

I’m sure that savers and pensioners, whose livelihood will be destroyed, are finding solace in knowing that the country’s economy is in safe hands. Managers of building societies must be ecstatic too: they’ll no longer have to get up early to go to work. The rest of us wonder what other weapons of mass fiscal destruction our rulers will deploy against us.

It’s axiomatic that the state’s fiscal policies affect people’s economic behaviour. The lending crisis of 2008, or rather the ongoing crisis that started in 2008, was caused by many factors. But by far the most pernicious of them all was the fiscal policy of the US administration and other Western governments. Collectively they encouraged banks and individuals to behave foolishly and irresponsibly.

By keeping the base rate artificially low and providing incentives for banks to lend, the US government created the subprime mortgage crisis that delivered to the world economy a blow from which it has never recovered.

In the subsequent panicky attempts to get their economies up from the floor, governments started pumping funny money in, trillions’ worth. The money was indeed funny because it didn’t reflect any underlying value. Ostensibly it came from the printing presses activated by the levers held in the hands of quasi-independent central banks. But the real culprits were Western governments exerting pressure on the banks.

‘Quantitative easing’ is by its nature inflationary – it increases the money supply without increasing the amount of goods and services available. Sure enough, for several years now the interest on savings and government bonds has been lower than the inflation rate, roughly by half.

The new bright idea will hit the economy with a double whammy: it’ll increase the inflation and further punish responsible individuals by plundering their savings. Add to this the surreptitious but progressively sharper pinpricks of higher taxes, and we find ourselves bleeding white.

Saving will now be even more of a losing proposition than before. The pot will simply grow smaller every month until it’s empty. Borrowing, on the other hand, seems to make every sense in the world – why not take on a second, third or fourth mortgage if there’s practically no interest to pay? The value of your properties will grow at no cost to you; it’s like getting rich by investing somebody else’s money.

This is the kind of mentality that has proved ruinous already. Derisory interest rates to the state are what a piece of cheese is to a mousetrap. Encouraged to take gambling risks with their money, millions of human mice reach for the cheese, only to see the trap slam shut behind them.

For at some point in the near future the lending rates will go up, as they did in America a few years ago. As thousands of overextended people got caught in negative equity and impossible repayments, a spate of defaults hit America, along with all those dominoes leaning against it in our globalised world.

So, if saving is silly and overextending ourselves in the property markets fraught with danger, what else are we to do with our money, what’s left of it after the state has taken its growing cut? We could either spend it or take gambling risks. But what about those of us who are by nature neither gamblers nor wastrels? Historically, there used to be viable options, but this has changed.

The up side of low interest rates was that they encouraged active, rather than passive, investment. For example, rather than letting money sit in a savings account, in the past we could invest it in the shares of our manufacturing concerns and then grow with them.

In those days, the price of shares and the amounts of dividends reflected the real value of the firm. That’s why shares were held for years, often for generations. Rather than putting money into a building society, people would buy shares in solid firms and live off dividends. If the company was doing well, the dividends were high. If not, they were low. But by and large the marginally greater risk of such investments was offset by returns higher than those available at a bank.

This situation has changed. Hardly anyone buys shares for the dividends any longer. People gamble on a rapid increase in the shares’ face value, and with the advent of High-Frequency Trading (HFT) fluctuations are very rapid indeed. Share ownership first began to be measured in months, then in days and now – courtesy of HFT – often in seconds.

Most HFT traders sell their whole portfolio in one day, and in America about 70 percent of all trading is done that way. This means that share values no longer reflect a company’s long-term performance – more and more they depend on imperceptible, and often unaccountable, factors  changing by the second.

Under such circumstances buying shares has become sheer gambling. The choice is no longer between putting money in a bank or investing in the stock market – it’s between buying shares or roulette chips.

Hence the government’s strategy is just what we’ve come to expect from this lot. They’re counting on a short-term upsurge in growth that’ll last until the next election. If they win it, they’ll handle the inevitable fallout then. If they lose, this becomes somebody else’s problem.

Don’t you just love these chaps? Alas, even as we no longer have reasonable choices of investment, neither do we have any reasonable choice of government. The lads waiting in the wings are even worse.

The Nobel economist Milton Friedman, the great champion of modern economies, titled his bestseller Free to Choose. I wish.