Category: Blog

The BBC is often accused of a leftwing bias. Why, even its ex-boss Mark Thompson manfully admitted the accusation isn’t wholly unfounded.

Following that bout of self-deprecation, inveterate reactionaries (among whom I mournfully number myself) have had a field day.

The BBC’s general tendency to place itself to the left of every mainstream party on just about every issue has been pointed out. Its choice of The Guardian as the only paper privileged to run the BBC’s appointment ads has been castigated. Its knee-jerk touting of PC, multi-culti rectitude has been rebuked.

Well, I’m man enough to admit that we, reactionaries, have been wrong. That is, we weren’t wrong in pointing out that the BBC violates its charter by eschewing objectivity.

After all, as even inveterate reactionaries like me pay the licence fee, it’s not immediately clear why we should be subjected to clearly unbalanced journalism. At least, with The Guardian we have the option of not buying the paper, an economy measure denied even to listeners of BBC radio stations (we pay for them through our taxes).

However, the leftwing bias must have something going for it. It evidently enables its possessors to delve the depths of human nature inaccessible to fee-paying reactionaries.

This dawned on me as I drove down the A40 yesterday, listening to a Radio 4 report on what was coyly identified as ‘grooming’ prevalent in the Bangladeshi community. This, contrary to what you may think, has nothing to do with meticulous attention to one’s appearance.

As the report eventually made clear, ‘grooming’ is the BBC for rape. Apparently older men chat up young girls, rape them and then pass them on like so many relay batons among their friends who rape them too. The girls go along with this because they are too ashamed and, more to the point, scared to complain.

Radio 4 lamented the indisputably lamentable fact that this practice has reached endemic proportions. It then discerned the discernible link between ‘grooming’ and forced marriage, another widespread practice among British Muslims.

So far, so good. But then came one of those startling insights for which the BBC is so justly famous. It’s tempting, said the report, to ascribe such manifestly un-British behaviour to the offenders’ culture or religion. But of course the real reason lies much deeper than that.

That’s when I realised the error of my ways. I, along with every inveterate reactionary of my acquaintance (and to my eternal shame there are many), thought nothing was much deeper than culture or religion.

They aren’t the sole motivators of human behaviour, but the others have a dubious claim to greater depth – and no claim at all when they are explained in Freudian terms.

Alas, the report didn’t identify the real triggers, which made it harder to accept its assertion that such rather cavalier treatment of women has nothing to do with culture or religion. The simpletons among us thus feel justified in clinging to our reactionary beliefs.

BBC gnosticism, like any other kind, is based on facts known to the gnostics only. The rest of us have to rely on facts in the public domain, and these seem to suggest that culture and religion do have something to do with the propensity to abuse women.

According to St Paul, “…there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” This is, to put it mildly, not exactly the position taken by the holy book of Islam. The Koran, for example, states unequivocally that “men are a degree above them [women] in status.” (2:228)

Though the Koran prohibits rape, this pecking order is reflected in its treatment of relations between the sexes. Thus, “. . . If you fear highhandedness from your wives, remind them [of the teaching of God], then ignore them when you go to bed, then hit them.” (4:34) Or else, “Women are your fields: go, then, into your fields whence you please.” (2:223)

Numerous studies show that such seeds fall on fertile ground. For example, a 2008 survey by the Egyptian Centre for Women’s Rights found that more than 80 percent of Egyptian women have experienced sexual harassment. Nor did they ask for it by wearing unchaste Western clothes: the majority of the victims wore Islamic headscarves.

In all fairness, abuse of women is typical not just of Muslim countries but of all those untouched by Judaeo-Christian morality. This month’s UN study of various parts of Asia has revealed an interesting fact: an astounding proportion of men admit to having committed rape at least once.

Papua New Guinea Bougainville Island leads the way with 62% (a piece of avuncular advice to girls: don’t go to Bougainville on holiday), but others achieve respectable scores as well. China: 22%. Urban Indonesia: 26.2%. Sri Lanka: 14.5%. Rural Bangladesh: 14%.

Without having ready data at one’s disposal, one could still venture a guess that no country that used to be Christian (none still is) would boast such numbers. For instance, I can’t think offhand of any rapist among my friends in half a dozen Western countries.

But that’s clearly an irrelevant observation. According to the BBC, neither religion nor culture has anything to do with it.

 

The Crown Prosecution Office has refused to prosecute doctors who authorise abortion on the basis of the foetus’s sex.

That the expected child is female is accepted as sufficient grounds for an abortion. And our post-Christian subversives don’t even realise that they are being torn apart by conflicting pieties.

On the one hand feminists insist on a woman’s sovereignty over her own body – hence abortion on demand. But then they undermine their own feminism by implicitly acknowledging that women are inferior to men.

Of course opposing abortion on any grounds whatsoever is so uncool that such sentiments can’t even be voiced in polite company.

Yet, though it helps, one doesn’t have to be a Christian to oppose infanticide. After all, for old times’ sake if for no other reason, Western countries are committed to regard human life as sacred.

Does abortion constitute the taking of a human life? Is the foetus a part of a woman’s body over which she has sovereignty or is it an independent human being over whom she has the duty of care?

The latter, has to be the answer based on any considerations one cares to name: physiological, medical, philosophical, moral – never mind religious.

At what point in the pregnancy should abortion be banned? This argument is waged with much arm-flapping passion but without much logic. Swift’s big-enders and little-enders must have provided the inspiration.

For example, reducing the allowable limit from 24 to 12 weeks is seen as a significant achievement. In some ways it is, for the number of abortions will probably go down. But the logic of the argument defeats me.

On the 24-week side, I can’t see any moral or rational difference between killing a child three months before birth or three months after. Babies born prematurely were able to survive even before the introduction of modern technology, and scans show that a six-month-old foetus is a fully formed person.

What about three months then? Here we must answer the critical question: at what exact point does a human life begin? The logic followed by the 12-week little-enders has to be that it begins at 12 weeks plus one day. In other words, a foetus is but a part of a woman’s body at 84 days but an autonomous person at 85. Sounds absurd, doesn’t it?

No one endowed with intellectual honesty can argue that human life begins at exactly 84 days and not a day earlier. Could it be 83 days perhaps? Or, at a pinch, 82?

The only logically defensible, morally indisputable and scientifically verifiable point at which human life begins is the moment of conception. Therefore abortion constitutes the taking of a human life, otherwise known as homicide.

Now, as in any homicide, there may be mitigating or even exculpating circumstances, such as the likelihood that the woman won’t survive childbirth. However, such cases must be considered individually, and they don’t justify abortion on demand.

As to pushing girls to the front of the abortion queue, this practice lacks even novelty appeal. Its roots go back to the pre-Christian world of Hellenic antiquity.

In those days, as Plato explained in his Republic and especially Laws, the polis was next to everything and the individual next to nothing. In Rome too, res publica rode roughshod over res privata. There was no res privata worth speaking of – the value of a human being was determined on the basis of state interests.

As a predictable fallout from that utilitarian ethos, unwanted children, mostly girls, were often dumped to die by the roadside. Wild animals provided the service nowadays delivered by abortion clinics.

Christianity changed all that. Every human being came to be cherished not because of any towering achievement or superior character but simply because he was indeed human.

In fact, people incapable of achievement, like those frail boys routinely drowned by the Spartans or unwanted baby girls left to die in the woods by the Romans, began to be seen as God’s creatures to be loved before all others.

Though some people may have been wicked, some weak, some moribund, none was useless. They all had redeeming qualities because they had all been redeemed.

Therein resides the only meaningful equality – this is the only sense in which ‘all men are created equal’. And in this context, as in the amorous one, man embraces woman.

It is noticeable in every walk of life how dispensing with Christianity has pushed us back to Hellenic times rather than driving us forward. Except that neither a Plato nor a Praxiteles nor a Sophocles is anywhere in evidence. Nor, more to the point, is a Pericles.

The state again claims primacy over the individual who is supposed to serve res publica, as personified by the Tonies and Daves of this world. And as the interests of a secular state aren’t threatened by millions of aborted babies, why not allow abortion on demand? Why not leave the decision of which babies to abort and which to keep strictly to the parents’ and doctors’ discretion? No reason at all.

Except the one mentioned by Hilaire Belloc: “‘We are tickled by [the Barbarian’s] irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond; and on these faces there is no smile.”

For a more serious blog than yesterday’s, please click http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.fr/2013/09/the-times-poses-question-only.html

My St Petersburg friends only agreed to send me the transcript when I swore it would be for my eyes only. Hence, in the good tradition of journalistic ethics, I’m publishing it immediately.

Putin (VP): This meeting will come to order! Everybody sit! Refusal to do so will be treated as an escape attempt! Sorry, inside joke.

Merkel (AM): Jawohl, Herr Oberst! But I’m not going to sitzen next to François. He always plays footsies.

Hollande (FH): Listen, sale boche, I’d rather play footsies with a dog!

AM: Ja. Like a rottweiler.

FH: Don’t you dare call Valerie that!

Cameron (DC): Can we please get back to the business at hand?

VP: Shut up, Dave. No one ever listens to you. Or your little island.

DC: Oh yeah?

VP: Yeah. Da.

DC: Says who?

VP: Says I.

DC: Well, I’ll have you know that our little island has made a big contribution to the world. We gave you the Beatles, Sid Vicious, Amy Winehouse…

FH: Amy Woo?

DC: Not Woo. She wasn’t Chinese, for heaven’s sake. Winehouse!

FH: Woo is Amy Winehouse?

DC: No, Woo is Chinese. Amy was a great British artist – as great at Mick Jagger and…

AM: You’re a fine one to talk about culture, Dave. You can’t even speak German.

DC: Oh yes I can! All Englishmen are multilingual!

AM: Ah so? Say something in German then.

DC: Er… Also, Schweinhund, vee’ve got vays to make you talk…

VP: Silence! We are world leaders, not squabbling fishwives! Speaking of which, Angela, why isn’t your foreign minister here? Westerwelle?

AM: Guido had to fly back home. His husband doesn’t know how to operate the dishwasher.

VP: I thought Guido was the husband…

AM: Not this week.

DC: He’s the husband to every man and the wife to every woman…

VP: Shut up, Dave, no one listens to you.

DC: A propos Guido, Vladimir, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about gay rights in Russia…

VP: Gay? Does this stand for Got Aids Yet?

FH: C’est pas drôle. Is not funny. Valerie is worried…

VP: I’ll tell you what she should be worried about, suka. Your going along with that mudak President Obama on Syria, that’s what. And where do you think you’re going, Barack?

Obama (BO): To the other end of the table. I’m not gonna sit next to you. Not after what you’ve just said.

VP: Oh really? Well, let me tell you this: you drop one bomb on Syria, and we’ll whack you in the shithouse!

BO: You will, eh? Well, let me tell you, we can bomb Syria flat and there’s zilch you can do about it!

VP: One bomb, Barack, one bomb, and we’ll sell Assad something to blow your ships out of the water to tsardom come.

BO: You do that and we’ll impound all your laundered cash in our banks.

VP: And we’ll dump all our dollars, a trillion of them. Your dollar will be worth nothing! Or a yen, which is the same thing.

Taro Aso (TA): I don’t rike the imprication.

Hu Jintao (HJ): I do. We have a couple of trillion of our own, please, Mr Obama. We could dump them too.

BO: You could, eh? So who’s going to buy your plastic underpants and polyester shirts?

FH: Hu is going to buy his own underpants?

BO: I’m asking, not telling. Who’s going to buy your stuff if the dollar goes kaput?

AM: See, Dave, Barack speaks German.

BO: What I mean, Hu, is stop making empty threats. See you at the noodle factory.

TA:  I don’t rike any of this. No agreement on Syria seems rikery.

BO: No kidding. Well, this is an economic summit, ain’t it? So we’re economical with agreements.

VP: As the chairman of this conference… What is it, Angela?

AM: I’ve heard a funny one lately. Knock, knock!

DC: Who’s there?

AM: No, it’s not Hu. It’s Angela.

DC: Funny, very. You Germans are known for your sense of humour.

VP: Shut up, Dave, no one listens to you. The meeting is adjourned. Dismisssed!

AM: Himmelherrgott! Take your hand off my knee, you bloody Frosch!

FH: Woo are you calling a frog, you sale boche…

Attached to the transcript was a copy of the joint statement by European Commission President Barroso and European Council President Van ‘Rumpy-Pumpy’ Rompuy:

“The G20 has proven its worth, in the face of the major challenges the global economy has experienced over the last five years, as the world’s premier forum for economic cooperation: all G20 members remain determined to implement our ambitious commitments and take further steps on the way to strong and sustainable growth. We are pleased that the European Union’s objectives for this summit have been broadly achieved.”

 

 

 

 

 

To kick off the G20 meeting in St Petersburg, Col. Putin’s aide described Britain as “just a small island no one pays any attention to”.

He forgot to mention that the only reason people listen to Russia is that she’s both willing and able to blackmail them into rapt attention with either nuclear weapons or oil, or usually both.

Dave’s reaction? An indignant “I don’t accept that for a moment.”

Exactly what doesn’t he accept? Britain is undeniably an island, neither the smallest nor indeed the largest one.

Yet, as a British diplomat commented in response, our economy is still much larger than Russia’s. Moreover, our income, unlike Russia’s, doesn’t mostly come out of the ground. Nor does it then get laundered before being paid in.

And yet the Russians are right: not many countries listen to us any longer. The reason for this is that Britain lacks a sense of purpose and our ‘leaders’ a sense of dignity.

The problem isn’t, as Times pundits and other lefties clamour, that we’re alienated from the EU. It’s that we aren’t alienated enough.

Nor is Britain’s refusal to go along with yet another idiotic US adventure a factor in our diminished status. It’s that normally we’re too eager to play the dummy to America’s ventriloquist.

The world’s financial centre, fifth largest economy and one of the West’s three nuclear powers deserves respect. But first such a country has to respect herself.

This self-respect is manifestly lacking in our ‘leaders’, which is why they are prepared to swallow any insults assorted thugs throw in their faces.

When Ed’s brother Dave (not to be confused with Ed’s spiritual twin Dave who’s our prime minister) was Foreign Secretary, he once made some perfunctory remarks on human rights to the Russian foreign minister Lavrov. The latter’s response was predictably thuggish: “Who the f… are you to lecture me?”

Any minister who respects himself and the great country he represents would have walked out, banging the door behind him. HMG would then have issued a note demanding an abject official apology, barring which diplomatic relations would be severed.

Alternatively or additionally, no holders of Russian passports would be admitted into Britain, and those already there would be summarily deported. This would include the oligarchs who, according to the proud boast of Putin’s minion, have “bought up Chelsea”.

Instead, Dave Mark I went on as if nothing had happened. So has Dave Mark II this time in Petersburg.

He should have got up and left, firing a parting shot that no civilised discourse is possible with manifestly uncivilised louts. Unless Russia wants to find herself in a position of an even worse pariah than she is already, Putin had better paper-train his spokesmen (and himself) to keep a civil tongue in their heads.

But then Dave has form in being spineless. Shortly before he became prime minister he agreed to appear on the talk show hosted by the hideous vulgarian Jonathan Ross. No self-respecting statesman would have done so, but hey, it’s Dave we’re talking about.

In his inimitable style Ross then asked Dave if, as a youngster, he used to wank to a picture of Margaret Thatcher. At this point, not just any self-respecting statesman but indeed any self-respecting man would have got up and left without saying a word. Not our PR Dave – he just smiled and went on being a man of the (vulgar) people.

To be fair to Dave, he isn’t the only Western politician prepared to lap up Russian spit off his face. Commenting on John Kerry’s accusation that Russia had supplied poison-gas technology to Assad, Sergei Ivanov, Chief of Putin’s staff, accused the US State secretary of “lying through his teeth” (the Russian expression he used is actually ruder). The undiplomatic word ‘lie’ was also used by Putin himself.

Diplomats don’t talk that way; thugs do. A foreign minister of a respectable country doesn’t lie. He may misrepresent facts. Perhaps he may be misinformed. His information may not be quite accurate. His accusations may be groundless. But – read my lips, Messrs Ivanov and Putin – HE. NEVER. ‘LIES’.

Any diplomatic representative of his country would be completely within his rights to leave the meeting there and then, saying that no further conversation is possible with louts. Talking to the journalists he may then say something along the lines of “Yes, we all know that Syria has a thriving missile production of her own.” But his immediate reaction ought to be a mighty bang of the door.

Take it from someone who spent his youth being bullied by Putin’s and Ivanov’s KGB colleagues: neither meekness nor reasoning works. Russian – and for that matter any other – bullies pounce at any sign of weakness and recoil from any show of strength.

Perhaps Messrs Kerry and Cameron should consult the history books to see how their predecessors used to handle loutish foreigners. On second thoughts, perhaps they shouldn’t – it wouldn’t do them any good.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 …I’d love to see you at my book launch. But the invitation comes with a warning: the book may not be what you expect on the basis of my other work.

Those who read my books for their ideas will be disappointed: there are precious few of those in this one.

Those who for some unfathomable reason are interested in the details of my life, will be disappointed too, if less so. For the book really isn’t so much about me as about Russia – admittedly as seen through my eyes.

Disappointment all around then? Well, not necessarily.

What I’ve tried to do is help the reader learn about Russia the way a child and a youngster would learn it while growing up there. Actually, that’s the second objective. The first one is to keep the reader entertained and amused.

You’ll laugh quite a bit at some of the stories. But if you get in the spirit of it, you’ll laugh the way I did – through tears. In Russian literature this combination of mirth and lacrymosity goes back to Gogol, or later to Bulgakov and Platonov.

It’ll be up to you to decide how well the same trick can work in very English prose. One way or the other, this promises to be a hell of a good party.

Hope to see you there – but please let me know if you’re coming (sonata@btinternet.com). We don’t want to run out of wine.

 

 

You are cordially invited to the launch of

 

How the Future Worked

 

 by Alexander Boot

 

an anecdotal account of Russia based on the author’s

not altogether happy memories of it

 

Published by Bretwalda Books

 

Wednesday, 25^th September

 

at Daunt Books, 158-164 Fulham Road, London SW10 9PR

 

6.30 to 8.30 pm

RSVP

email: sonata@btinternet.com

telephone: 020 7736 3286

 

When this idea is put forth, my reaction is to say, “Pull the other one, it’s got church bells on.” Alas, these days I’m finding myself in the minority.

Western intellectuals are losing their minds so rapidly that a cynic is tempted to think they didn’t have much to lose in the first place.

Even conservative Christians, generally the brightest group, are showing signs of mental instability. In a way that’s understandable: they’ve been dealt enough head blows to suffer some mild brain damage.

One significant symptom is the growing if grudging admiration for Putin’s Russia, and Col. Putin in particular. Many British Christians, for example, have expressed admiration for Russia’s law banning homosexual propaganda among children.

Suddenly Col. Putin is being chalked up as one of the PLUs (People Like Us), if not without some reservations. At least, when this taxonomic perversion is committed by a British pundit, some sense of balance is occasionally preserved. When the accolade is tinged with the Gallic temperament, balance goes right out of the window.

Witness the article Tsar Poutine in the Figaro. The author, Eric Zemmour, thinks the West, specifically les anglo-saxonnes, has been beastly to Putin. Now whenever a continental uses the word Anglo-Saxon to lump all Anglophone nations together, he doesn’t mean it as a compliment.

In this instance, Zemmour “recognises the Anglo-Saxon techniques of demonisation. Remember, for example, comparisons of Saddam Hussein to Hitler.”

Unlike “Yeltsyn who sold his country out to trans-Atlantic groups”, Putin “has restored the state. And Russian patriotism. By authoritarian methods. In the tradition of the tsars.”

“Little by little, he has become the leader of  world opposition to the new ideological order dominated by the West [and characterised by] antiracism, globalism, homophilia, feminism, Islamophilia and Christianophobia.”

In other words, “While France has renounced her former mission, Putin has become the last defender of Eastern Christianity. …He defends national sovereignty, family and the Orthodox religion.”

A reality check, Monsieur Zemmour, s’il vous plaît. You know, reality? That elusive substance formed by facts, rather than ideological bias?

Col. Putin is a proud alumnus of the most diabolical organisation in the history of mankind. (“There’s no such thing as ex-KGB,” he once said. “This is for life.”) In the first 50 years of its existence it murdered 60 million people, including 40,000 priests just in Lenin’s lifetime (d. 1924).

In those turbulent days, Cheka (precursor of KGB/FSB) flying squads would machinegun whole parishes and rob the churches of their valuables. Worse still, Col. Putin’s sponsoring organisation turned the church hierarchy into its extension.

Specifically, priests were obligated on pain of death to divulge any juicy information vouchsafed to them in confession – and acceded, something that in the West would result in summary unfrocking.

This Faustian arrangement has led to an institutional paradox: the KGB in effect appointed and ran the prelates of the Russian church. Some of them, such as the first post-war patriarch Alexis and the Soviet representative at the World Council of Churches Metropolitan Nicodemus, were career KGB officers.

In the fine tradition of his lifelong employer, Col. Putin has kept this arrangement intact. All three candidates for the patriarchate in the 2009 election, including the eventual winner Patriarch Kiril, are professional KGB operatives.

Recently opened KGB files include countless reports on the activities of ‘Agent Mikhailov’ (Kiril’s KGB codename). Every report concludes that “Agent Mikhailov has fulfilled his assignment.”

Now imagine it’s 1967, 22 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany – the same time that has elapsed since the so-called collapse of communism in Russia in 1991. The West German government is led by an SS Obersturmbannführer (the equivalent of Putin’s rank) and is made up almost exclusively of officers in the SS, SD and Gestapo. Moreover, every notable clergyman is known to have collaborated with those organisations.

Do you think the Zemmours of this world would have been as ecstatic about the resurgence of Lutheranism in Germany?

Let’s extend the parallel – it extends so naturally, the temptation is irresistible. What if the same SS government had fused with organised crime to create the widest money-laundering network in history? Routinely murdered its opponents both at home and abroad? Suppressed free press? Maintained one of the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals? Consistently supported and armed the West’s enemies? Cynically used Christianity to advance its cause?

These are all accomplishments of which Col. Putin can proudly boast. Is Mr Zemmour aware of them?

Hitler ended unemployment and revitalised the economy. Stalin industrialised Russia. Putin has banned some of the things there we’d like to ban here. Is Mr Zemmour familiar with the downside in all three instances?

The downside makes none of the gentlemen a present-day answer to Charles Martel. In search of those able to defend Christianity, we should look inwards, not to Putin’s fascist state.

Zemmour’s revolutionary ancestors used to say “Pas d’ennemis a gauche” (no enemies on the Left). Like them, we desperately need allies. Unlike them, we have to apply moral criteria to choosing our allies, for otherwise we’d be just like them.

As to Christianity, God has saved it from countless enemies. Let’s pray He will save it from ‘friends’ like Col. Putin of the KGB. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Commenting on the Syria vote in the Commons, our Chancellor George said, ‘Look, I think Parliament has spoken.’

Now so has our mayor Boris. The motion should be re-submitted to Parliament, he declared, because “to use gas for mass murder is a crime that we cannot allow to go unpunished.”

It’s clear that Boris is taking lessons in democracy from the EU: if at first you don’t succeed, skydiving isn’t for you – but voting is. If the vote goes against you, keep’em voting until they get it right.

At a time when Presidents Barack Hussein and even François (!) have decided to seek legislative approval for military action, Boris is sorry his old Bullingdon Club friend Dave didn’t act as a dictator.

Boris certainly would have done, and that’s the whole point of his Telegraph article. Give me the chance, he seems to be imploring. I won’t wimp out like Dave. I’ll deliver “a calibrated and limited response to a grotesque war crime”.

No, thanks, mate. One Bullingdon cabinet is enough.

It’s clear to Boris, if not to the rest of us, that Assad has “killed hundreds of civilians in an act of utter savagery.” Hence the proper response is to kill a few hundred more by launching a ‘calibrated’ laser-guided response, with its predictable collateral damage.

I think Boris has got it wrong. He’s a member of the Conservative party, not a neoconservative one. Those chaps operate on the ancient wisdom ‘spare the bomb and spoil a land’.

Serbia? Of course. Libya? Naturally. Iraq? Definitely – the best way to introduce democracy is to attach it to laser-guided missiles. Now of course the democratically controlled Iraqi army has massacred Camp Ashraf, so what should we do? Bomb them again? But hey, we’re the ones who put them there.

Dave has been saved from having to grapple with such dilemmas by Parliament, but Boris can rely only on his flaming conscience, fluent pen and flatulent mouth. As a mayor, he’s accountable to Londoners. As a columnist, he’s accountable to no one.

As if to allay the suspicions of cynics like me, Boris gave a sop to his erstwhile friend, now his competitor, Dave. I’m not angling for Dave’s job, he pretends to be saying. On the contrary, “I predict that by the end of this episode it will be Labour that looks divided, and David Cameron who looks the statesman.”

Nothing, and certainly not an attempt to trick Parliament into another vote, will ever make Dave look the statesman – for the simple reason that he isn’t one. What’s more, Boris knows this perfectly well – and he knows that everybody knows he knows.

In other words, while indignantly accusing Labour of playing politics, Boris is trying to show the Milibandits how the game should be played for real. Morality doesn’t even come into it.

In our post-Christian world it never does. “But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint,” warned Edmund Burke. The warning wasn’t heeded.

In the absence of virtue (which to Burke meant specifically Christian virtue), real politik has to mean really amoral politics. Under such conditions, democracy manifestly can’t elevate to government those fit to govern.

Instead democracy turns into spivocracy, the rule of those driven exclusively by self-interest and specifically by lust for power. On second thoughts, one has to be careful when using the word ‘lust’ in the context of Boris Johnson. Perhaps ‘striving’ would be safer.

Since these days every assertion has to be supported by forensics, this comment on democracy must also demand evidential proof. By way of such I suggest a little experiment you can conduct yourself.

Take any four consecutive British prime ministers during Burke’s lifetime (1729-1797) and compare them to our last four ‘leaders’ (John, Tony, Gordon and Dave). See what I mean?

It’s clear that a time when neither ‘Christianity’ nor ‘constitutional monarchy’ was a figure of speech in the UK, politics attracted an infinitely better grade of human material.

That’s what enabled England to civilise half the world, after a fashion, and Britannia to rule the waves, and not those of the electronic variety.

And Boris? He’d be well-advised to stay within his remit, that of the mayor of London. The city doesn’t conduct an independent foreign policy, though some of its boroughs do. Lambeth, for example, declares itself to be a ‘nuclear-free zone’, perhaps in the hope of avoiding direct hits from enemy missiles, should it come to that.

Boris really ought to curb his impatience: he may eventually get there in the end, but he should watch his step. He may be popular with some Tories, but Dave won’t be supplanted without a fight.

And you don’t ride into such battles armed with ideas that 75 percent of the people and most of your party reject. It’s best to contain your impatience and wait for Dave to stab himself in the back once too often. He’s bound to oblige.

Please click http://archbishop-cranmer.blogspot.fr/2013/08/cheese-eating-surrender-monkeys.html

Dave has achieved two feats for the price of one defeat:

He became the first prime minister since 1782 to lose the parliamentary vote on military action.

And even more improbable, he made me side with Labour, Putin and Assad. What do you know, he may yet make a pacifist of me.

There’s much circumstantial evidence to support the view that Parliament was right and Dave was wrong. One bit of good news is that an Obama spokesman suggested that Britain is becoming isolated from her allies, both the United States and the EU.

Well, I know this may come as a surprise to our American friends, but every sovereign nation acting in its interests is to some extent isolated. After all, her interests may not always coincide with others’.

Presumably, not being isolated from the USA means joining her on any asinine adventure and paying with British lives for America’s ignorance of the outside world.

As to the EU, Britain has gone along with it on everything, apart from joining the euro. Had we done so, we’d no longer be ‘isolated’. We’d be bankrupt. As it is, we’re only staying afloat because we’ve been able to devalue the pound, a device inaccessible to, say, Greece or Portugal.

If this is what isolation means, then the more the merrier, I’d say.

The other piece of good news was provided by Lord Ashdown, who has announced that the vote made him “depressed” and “ashamed”. Anything that has such an effect on Paddy can’t be all bad.

Assuming that the Americans won’t go it alone, as they well may, the group with the greatest reason to rejoice is the Syrian Christians. For any action on the part of the West, which the Muslims mistakenly regard as still Christian, would certainly result in violent reprisals against this community.

Christians make up about 10 percent of Syria’s population, and there’s no denying that, should Assad’s regime be driven out by Western action, they would be hit by a double whammy.

First, Assad’s forces would abuse them on the way out, taking their resentment out on defenceless people. Second, the victorious Muslim fanatics, many of them associated with al-Qaeda, would do what comes naturally: spill Christian blood.

This is a matter of fact, not conjecture. For the rebels have already given us a taste of things to come by destroying dozens of churches and driving thousands of Christians out of Syria and into refugee camps.

Just a fortnight ago, 15 Christians were murdered in Wadi al Nasara, and only a victorious regular army can prevent such outrages from occurring on a massive scale.

If further proof is needed, it’s kindly provided by other countries where American purveyors of democracy über alles have succeeded in creating troubled waters in which Muslim fanatics could then fish.

In Iraq, about 800,000 Christians have been driven out of their homes and many have been killed. Ditto in Libya, where al-Qaeda groups have had a field day in the south of the country.

No Muslim country in the world has ever disproved this simple observation: the more influential the Sharia law, the more Christians will suffer. Provided that our parliamentary vote gives Obama some second thoughts, the advent of the Sharia law in Syria may be indefinitely put off – and surely any sensible Christian should welcome such a development?

Dave, of course, is a self-confessed “active member of the Church of England”. Nowadays this apparently doesn’t preclude being a passive Christian, for otherwise he wouldn’t have campaigned so hysterically for an action guaranteed to result in Christians’ misery.

This would have been suffered not only by Syrian Christians but also by the home-grown variety. For Syrians have promised that any British involvement in Western aggression against their country would result in suicide-bomb attacks on England. Experience suggests that this is one promise the Muslims tend to keep.

All that would be worth it if Britain’s national interests were at stake. Yet not even Dave and his fellow war-monger Tony claim that this is the case.

They want us to play poodle to the Americans as a way of punishing Assad for his alleged use of poison gas against his own people. This moral transgression has so far not been proven, but the Ba’athists do have form in using such weapons. However, one doesn’t recall too much American indignation at Saddam’s gas attacks on the Iranians during the 1979-1987 war.

So they object not to the use of such weapons in se, but to their use by those who aren’t upholding American interests, however misconstrued. Well, at least Parliament didn’t misconstrue ours.

In any case, Dave being such an active member of the Church of England, he should recall a saying from the book his Church still holds sacred:

“Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”