Category: Blog

According to America’s VP Joe Biden, Dave’s vague promise – well, a hint at the contingent possibility of a promise – of an EU referendum puts in jeopardy world peace, prosperity and security.

According to Bulgaria’s Foreign Minister Nikolai Mladenov, Dave’s obliquely expressed reluctance to greet with open arms another million Balkan immigrants puts in jeopardy any chance of an EU compromise that’s supposed to precede the vaguely promised  referendum.

If I were Dave, I’d consider the sources and wonder what I’m doing right. It’s also worth pondering the likelihood that the pincer attack on Britain was coordinated.

I wonder where Joe Biden got this idea? Could it be that he’s again talking to Neil Kinnock, whose speech he famously plagiarised during his own run for US presidency? Show me a man who has to depend on Kinnock for his mots justes, and I’ll show you a man whose IQ resides way down south. Surely such a man couldn’t have come up with the usual federastic arguments on his own, without help from someone who knows the mantra by heart?

Actually, I forgot. Joe has just had talks with Angela Merkel and François Hollande who must have given him the script and taught him how to read it properly. ‘Nein, Joe, Sweden and Switzerland are not ze same country. Nicht! And neither are Slovakia and Slovenia, you dummkopf. And don’t forget to tell David zat a referendum ist ausgeschlossen.’ ‘Angie a raison, Zho, but no? She eez une femme very intelligent and very, comment vous dites? sexee.’

It’s also likely that Joe’s proximity to the original source of his wisdom involves a degree of separation. Its name is Obama, who has already enunciated all the same objections in several telephone conversations with Dave. One way or the other, no dummy can talk without the help of a ventriloquist.

‘We believe,’ says Biden, ‘that the United Kingdom is stronger as a result of its membership.’ Exactly how? By having to comply with business-stifling red tape? By destroying its own fishery industry? By having culturally alien laws stuffed down its throat? By having most power removed from its ancient parliament? By not being able to keep millions of immigrants away and off our welfare rolls?

And it takes a mind even more decayed than Joe’s to aver that the EU ‘makes critical contributions… to prosperity.’ How does it do that, at this time particularly? By pegging all eurozone currencies to the mark, thereby perpetuating Germany’s dominant position in Europe and suffocating competitiveness all over the continent? By laying trillions in cheap money on the less prosperous countries and thus ruining them with debt?

‘That is our view,’ says Biden. Fine, Joe, that’s your view. Just keep it to yourself, will you? You’ll look more intelligent that way. And don’t talk to Angie and François too often; it’s not good for you.

As to Mladenov, he comes across as God sending all those plagues on Egypt. ‘If this debate [about keeping the number of Balkan arrivals down ever so slightly] continues the way it’s heading, it will definitely dampen the enthusiasm for cooperation between the two countries,’ he warns in his good English learned at King’s College, London.

I realise that the prospect of Bulgaria’s ire must have every Briton quaking in his boots. On the other hand, tighter immigration quotas, coupled with more rigid admission standards at King’s College, might keep at bay some of the more undesirable elements disgorged by Eastern Europe.

What Mladenov is actually threatening isn’t just Bulgaria’s displeasure but her potential refusal to support the EU compromise so dear to what passes for Dave’s heart. It’s amazing how the gentlest hint at the very distant possibility that Britain might want to reclaim some of her sovereignty brings all those bullies and blackmailers out of the woodwork.

I think both Biden and Mladenov should apply for a remedial course at the Neil Kinnock Academy for Fine Rhetoric. It’s a good finishing school for those who’ve already matriculated at the Angie and François School of Bullying.

What a shame we no longer have a Prime Minister capable of standing up to such people.

 

This question is particularly puzzling because every answer hitherto provided fails to convince. After all, there’s every indication that this perverse bill was concocted recently and all of a sudden – with nary a hint of it in the Tory electoral manifesto.

So why this sudden outburst of enthusiasm? Why would even such a reasonably intelligent man as Education Secretary Michael Gove turn into a blithering idiot when the subject comes up?

He himself is happily married, Gove explains in The Mail, which proves that marriage is good. This is the short summation of several emetic paragraphs pitched at a level that would embarrass even an average writer of soap operas.

In a bit of a non sequitur, Gove concludes that hence allowing homosexuals to marry would uphold the goodness of this institution. Therefore, he writes, ‘I believe that marriage should be defended, supported and promoted in every way.’

In every way, Michael? How about allowing inter-species marriage? Or one between siblings? Mother and son? Surely Gove is intelligent enough to realise he’s talking nonsense. Before ascending to government, he would have known that, rather than upholding the institution of marriage, this outrage is destroying it. One gets a sneaky suspicion that Gove takes his cue from Dave’s Iago whispering in that poisonous way of his, ‘Want to stay on the front bench, Othello?’

But why has Dave himself suddenly jumped on this hobby horse? One explanation being bandied about is that homomarriage is for Dave a matter of conscience, of deep inner conviction. This is frankly risible.

On any other political issue Dave’s conscience is entirely shaped by focus groups – which is another way of saying he hasn’t got one. But in this instance, not just focus groups but also desperate pleas from Tory chairmen all over the country show that the bill is going to rend the party asunder. At least 20 percent of traditional Tory voters are now saying they’ll switch as a result; at least 180 Tory MPs will, according to The Telegraph, refuse to vote in favour.

Given the mood of the country, the state of the economy and his standing in the polls, Dave’s touting of homomarriage suggests a craving for political suicide, a tendency our power-hungry PM has never manifested before. So why is he pushing his party in this counterproductive direction? Is it perhaps – and this is pure conjecture – because someone is pushing him?

To shift gears, as it were, two years ago HMG was seriously mooting the possibility of increasing our motorway speed limit to 80 mph. After a brisk and unresolved debate in the press, the idea faded away. But why did it come up in the first place? After all, the measure is sensible, which fact alone ought to have nipped it in the bud, long before any public discussion.

It occurred to me then that the only reason HMG wasted its valuable time on this proposal was that it wished to harmonise UK speed limits with those on the continent, where they are generally higher than ours. In other words, it was the EU that put this, uncharacteristically sensible, idea into Dave’s shell-like.

Could it be that Dave’s newly found passion for destroying the institution Michael Gove holds so dear also has the same origin? Please say it’s not so, Dave. Please say the EU can’t yet tell a British PM to commit political hara-kiri (and do untold damage to his country in the process) just like that.

Alas, both the nature of the bill and its timing lead inexorably to this melancholy conclusion. After all, the same bill was introduced in France just two months ago. That brought hundreds of thousands of protesters to the streets of Paris, but we don’t do this sort of thing – we’re much too civilised for that. We just bend over and take it… oops, wrong phrase, sorry.

In Germany, same-sex couples enjoy every right of marriage, including that to adoption, and in Hamburg homomarriage is already legal. Belgium, Holland, Iceland, Norway, Spain, Sweden allow homomarriage, and most other EU members are inexorably moving that way.

I’m guessing here, but could it be that Dave’s sudden and otherwise inexplicable change of heart was dictated by Brussels? The EU already provides 80 percent of our new legislation, so why not this one? No reason at all.

Another bit of circumstantial evidence comes from German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, on whose silly article in The Times I commented this week. Guido is in a didactic mood these days, and Britain isn’t the only country he feels he has to hector.

The other day he attacked the Russian ambassador to Germany Vladimir Grinin over Russia’s proposed bill to outlaw homosexual propaganda. Germany, pontificated Guido, feels that the offensive legislation would aggravate European-Russian relations and would also damage Russia’s image in Europe.

I’d suggest that if this criminal state still enjoys a good image in Europe, and Guido is a self-declared friend of Russia, then something is wrong with Europe. Routine murders of political opponents, a police force that not so much fights crime as perpetrates it, widespread torture, corruption from top to bottom, international money-laundering on an epic scale, abject poverty of most people, curtailed freedom of the press – surely these should already have got Russia into Europe’s bad books?

But no – it’s Russia’s attempt to ban Gay Day parades that has piqued Guido’s ire and, it has to be said, led him to a most undiplomatic outburst. One may detect a personal animus there, and one wouldn’t be wrong.

Like Michael Gove, Guido is a happily married man, the difference being that he is married to another man, Gove’s namesake Michael Mronz. One just wonders how he introduces his other half at diplomatic receptions. ‘This is my husband’? ‘This is my wife?’ ‘This is the love of my life?’ I’m sure his Saudi and Iranian counterparts would be all smiles.

But such prurient musings aside, it’s clear that the EU is in the middle of a homomarriage offensive. Itself a convoluted contrivance, it naturally detests, and wishes to compromise, all institutions that predate the Treaty of Rome. And if Germany sees fit to lecture a country lying outside EU jurisdiction, it’s not hard to imagine how the arms of EU members are being twisted all over the place.

Is this what lurks behind Dave’s favourite bill? I don’t know. But it’s highly likely, wouldn’t you say?

 

 

As the parliamentary vote on homomarriage draws nearer, arguments in favour are becoming ever more idiotic. But even against this background, the Equalities Minister Helen Grant can claim pride of place.

For she supports this abomination not as the ultimate authority on equality but as the Christian she claims to be. Thereby Mrs Grant has earned my gratitude by communicating in no uncertain terms that politicians can sink to an even lower intellectual and moral level than I imagined. I thought, against evidence it has to be said, there was a lower limit to their knavery, and I thank Helen for correcting this lamentable mistake.

Christians, says this self-described ‘God-fearing woman’, should support homomarriage because it upholds the Christian values of ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’. Admittedly, I can’t cite any scriptural injunction against same-sex marriage – for the simple reason that either at the time Scripture was compiled or in the subsequent two millennia this possibility never occurred to anyone this side of the lunatic asylum.

But the underlying activity receives quite a few mentions in both Testaments, from Leviticus 18, 20 to Romans 1: 24-32. Each time it’s described in wrathful, accusatory, apocalyptic terms. Thus, for example, St Paul: ‘Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.’

But then St Paul didn’t have the benefit of advice from a true Christian, our Equalities Minister. She would have explained to him what his religion was all about. Helen’s faith, she says, ‘is very fundamental to everything I do and think.’ Evidently St Paul’s faith wasn’t.

This utterly objectionable woman occupying an utterly useless, not to say subversive, post consistently confuses Christianity with the remit of a diversity consultant, or else of an Equalities Minister. Christianity to her is about ‘justice, equality, fairness, ending discrimination…’

Jesus himself saw his religion differently, but then he too was deprived of Helen’s sage counsel. Had he benefited from it, he would never have attacked the scribes and Pharisees in such demonstrably unfair, discriminatory terms. ‘Blind’, ‘fools’, ‘your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness’, ‘For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter the kingdom of heaven.’

Really? And there we were, thinking that the kingdom of heaven was an equal-opportunity employer subject to EU Equality Directives.

One wonders if Mrs Grant worships the same Christ who thunders, ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.’ Alas, the gospels stubbornly refuse to sate her hunger for a touchy-feely Jesus who wouldn’t be out of place seeking employment with the social services. Verily I say unto you, it’s not just the language of Scripture but also its content that ought to be changed to suit our infinitely more progressive needs.

A friend’s little son was recently asked at school what the name was, starting with an A, for someone who isn’t sure that God exists. After a moment’s thought, the boy, proud of knowing the answer, replied, ‘Anglican!’ I wonder if Mrs Grant, who belongs to the Church of England, would give the same answer.

One just wishes these spivocrats left Christianity alone. They’re going to push this abominable bill through Parliament anyway, what with 60 percent of the Tories supporting it and just about 100 percent of the other two parties.

Why, even those who previously opposed the bill, such as Justice Secretary Chris Grayling and Minister for Faith Baroness Warsi (which faith would that be, Sayeeda?), have now seen the light and heard the voice. Sounding amazingly like Dave, the voice said, ‘Why persecutest thou me? Art thou missing the back benches, thou infidel?’

So the spivocrats, ably led by Dave, are well justified in feeling smug about the whole thing. There’s no need to add blasphemy to their other qualities we all know and love: cynicism, cowardice, egoism, amorality, absence of principles. Leave the real Gospels alone, chaps; stick to the secular ones, the EU Charter for Fundamental Rights or something. That’s where you belong.

As to Helen Grant, you’re wrong, dear. Homomarriage isn’t ‘consistent with Christian values’, nor indeed with purely secular decency and common sense. Neither is the very existence of an equalities minister consistent with any sound definition of a free country. 

On 30 January, the 80^th anniversary of Hitler’s ascent to power, the German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle published in The Times an article with the self-explanatory title Britain’s narrow view of the EU is wrong.

Far be it from my mind to tie the two momentous events together or to suggest even obliquely that Herr Westerwelle is in any sense a direct heir to Herr Hitler or, come to that, Westerwelle’s institutional predecessor Herr Ribbentrop. However, if there is one thing they have in common, it’s a propensity for brazen effrontery, and Westerwelle’s article establishes his credentials in this area beyond any dispute.

Personally, I don’t think the Federal Republic, for all her exemplary post-war record of benign government, has yet earned the right to lecture countries whose political virtue is of rather longer standing. But even if at a weak moment we feel generous enough to listen to Germany’s views on such matters, they ought not to be conveyed in a peremptory manner that, alas, does evoke Ribbentrop circa 1938.

In common with our home-grown champions of a single European state, such as Ken Clark who in his dotage claims that leaving the EU would spell the end of Britain, Guido is long on meaningless waffle and short on meaningful arguments.

He starts out by patting Dave on the back for some parts of his epochal speech, while issuing avuncular admonishments for some others. Specifically, he agrees with Dave that Europe must stay competitive in the face of a rapidly growing Chinese economy.

Of course, if Europe were to become a single state, this desideratum would have to be on the agenda. Conversely, for this desideratum to be on the agenda Europe would have to become a single state. Otherwise, sovereign states could rely on their own efforts to sort out their economic position vis-à-vis China or any other competitor. The German motor trade, for example, ought to be able to hold its own – one doesn’t see too many people driving a Leefan, a Geely or any other Chinese vehicle, and nor does one anticipate those cars ousting Audis and BMWs in any foreseeable future.

In other words, Guido commits the widespread rhetorical fallacy of using as an argument the proposition he’s trying to prove. A lesson in rhetoric, not just in manners, is clearly in ordnung.

He then magnanimously concedes that ‘the EU does not need to set down rules on everything – only on those issues that, say, Britain, France or Poland cannot resolve better on their own.’ The choice of those three countries as an example is timed as perfectly as the whole article: after all, Britain and France last went to war with Germany when the latter helped Poland to solve the problem of Danzig.

So which problems require German (or EU) assistance this time? ‘Brussels,’ explains Guido, ‘could do better to tackle money laundering and banking transparency.’ One wonders how such problems had been tackled before the EU. Cooperation between friendly police forces springs to mind, along with such cross-border setups as Interpol. I’d like to see some evidence that the situation with money laundering was any worse then than it is now – and no one at the time suggested that member countries had to abandon their national sovereignty.

As to ‘banking transparency’, Guido clearly has in mind an arrangement that existed in Germany back in the thirties, when banks were under state control in all but name. Except that then the purpose of such bullying was to provide unlimited financing for Germany’s planned war effort. The purpose today is to close every loophole enabling Europeans to shield a little of their money from oppressive, confiscatory taxation.

Then Guido comes to the meat of his message by making an earth-shattering pronouncement that ‘there are no rights without duties. There can be no cherry-picking. Saying “You either do what I want or I’ll leave!” is not an attitude that works.’ Bend over, Britain, and take your punishment.

Dave’s hints at a certain democratic deficit in the EU didn’t sit well with Guido either. Democracy, he says, ‘should also include the European parliament.’ The ghost of Enoch Powell appears before us, informing all the Hamlets in the audience that no European democracy can exist because no European demos exists. But discussing such ideas would take Guido so far out of his depth that it would constitute cruelty to animals. (Incidentally, I bet Guido supports animal rights – his kind always does. How does that tally with rights entailing duties?)

Guido is on safer grounds when displaying a trait that many associate (wrongly!!! I hasten to add before this becomes a police matter) with the German national character: stating the blindingly obvious. ‘One thing… is not negotiable from Germany’s point of view. For us the European Union is far more than just a single market…’

But we never thought it was negotiable, Guido. We have always felt that the EU is for Germany a single state she can run in ways that would expiate her past sins and light up the path to her future grandeur. Still, thanks for reminding us.

There, Dave, you’ve been told. There will be no ‘new settlement’ on which the British public will have its say in some unspecified referendum at some unspecified time. So what are you going to do about it? Extricate the thorny European dilemma out of the long grass into which you tried to kick it in your speech? Call an immediate referendum? Fat chance.

As to Guido, one wonders if his article was translated into English or was originally written in that language. If so, he shows an enviable command of the English idiom, exceeding even that of Joachim von Ribbentrop’s. Therefore he won’t have any trouble understanding this English expression: pull the other one. 

Dave’s worried about black and Asian voters. That is, he doesn’t really worry about them as blacks or Asians. It’s their being voters that gives him sleepless nights.

To be more precise, Dave is concerned that ethnic minorities don’t vote Tory. Just 16 percent of them did the honourable thing at the last election, which just won’t do.

Being a man of action, especially when his own political future hangs in the balance, Dave gathered his advisors together and told them to come up with a list of policies that would make those stubborn ethnics have a Damascene experience on the road to the voting booths. Anything will do, chaps, anything at all. Just let your imagination go.

I wouldn’t venture a guess on what those mandarins will think up. A promise to deport enough white Brits out of London to make their proportion drop from the current 45 percent to 10? Possibly. Bar whites from government jobs? Perhaps. Forbid two white people to marry unless they’re both the same sex? Maybe. Whatever the focus groups say may work.

But enough of those wild stabs in the dark. Let’s stick to the policy that has already been announced. Big companies will be ‘urged’ to publish the ethnic breakdown of their workforce in general and their management in particular.

Alok Sharma, the Tory vice-chairman spearheading this noble undertaking, explains how the trick will work. ‘Peer pressure’ will be exerted on FTSE 100 companies to come up with ‘some sort of voluntary code’ according to which they’d release into the public domain the ethnic breakdown of those in their employ.

Presumably, what he means by peer pressure isn’t cajoling by members of the upper house, but rather pressure coming from… whom exactly? After all, those companies are in the FTSE 100 precisely because they’re peerless, and they are unlikely to pressure themselves. One has to surmise that the pressure will come from Mr Sharma and those who’re pulling his strings, Dave specifically. So we’re talking not about peer pressure but about government coercion – obviously with the aim of introducing quotas.

Quotas? Perish the thought, says our friend Alok. ‘It’s about information.’

Silly me, and there I was, thinking it was yet another attempt to hamstring businesses by dictating idiotic policies to them, thereby increasing state power and harvesting a few more votes. Nothing can be further from the truth.

It’s all about a disinterested quest for pure knowledge, the kind of healthy inquisitiveness that moves progress along. It’s hard not to feel sympathy for those who pursue information as a purely academic exercise, with no intention whatsoever of finding a practical application for it.

‘All the companies I’ve talked to are incredibly keen on having diversity in the workforce,’ says Alok. Of course they are. I can just see, as if for real, those endless AGMs, with the CEO announcing that profits are 20 percent down on last year.

‘Bugger the profits, Dan,’ says the Chairman. ‘Tell us how we’re doing on diversity.’

‘Yes, but the shareholders are threatening a revolt…’ pleads the dejected CEO.

‘Bugger the shareholders too,’ insists the Chairman. ‘Are we up to 15 percent Asians and 10 percent blacks, is what we need to know.’ ‘Well, yes we are…’ ‘Thanks, Dan. Meeting adjourned.’

‘Yes, but the shareholders…’

[THE WHOLE BOARD IN CHORUS:] Bugger the shareholders!

Those readers who have been involved in any business activity will know how perfectly realistic this vision is. My own experience may be somewhat different, but hey, this is just one man’s experience.

I do remember, however, that every company I’ve ever worked for, including those I’ve served as director, would have staffed up with dachshunds if that could increase the profits. A chance of an extra 10 percent at year’s end would have encouraged them to make the staff all-white, all-black, all-brown or all polka dot – it really wouldn’t have made one bit of difference.

What did make a lot of difference was that we hired, and could afford to hire, the best people for the job. Their race, sex or age would have been neither a primary nor a secondary nor a tertiary consideration. It wouldn’t have come into the picture at all.

Now call me a cynic, but I don’t believe Mr Sharma’s assurances that the ethnic breakdown will be requested simply for him and his jolly friends to have a good laugh at a dinner table. ‘Look Dave, Widget & Widget have no Pakistanis on the board. How about that?’ ‘Funny that, isn’t it? But look, Kaxo-Schmaxo have nothing but Indians. Isn’t that a knee-slapper?’

It’s as clear as the day is long that they’ll soon try to introduce quotas, dictating to businesses whom they should and shouldn’t hire (or fire). Now, considering the non-education system created by our political class, finding qualified candidates for any decent job is becoming progressively harder. Introducing further restrictions will make it harder still, to put it mildly.

Effectively the government makes sanctimonious noises about competitiveness, while doing what it can to stifle it. All to the accompaniment of the bleating in the press that the Tories’ poor record with ethnic voters is all Enoch Powell’s fault.

“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.” Powell was wrong to quote Virgil; he ought to have known that our ignorant leftie pundits would be dining on ‘rivers of blood’ for centuries. But he was right in predicting that unrestricted immigration would eventually lead to Britain not being Britain any longer. He also knew that social pressure would build up to a point where one day a fissure would occur.

What even he couldn’t anticipate was that 45 years later we’d be governed by people prepared to put a millstone around our businesses’ neck for the sake of a couple of percentage points in the polls. At least, Powell’s inept contemporaries were being subversive out of principle, however wrong.

 

 

 

 

Just four days ago I bemoaned the fact that HMG in its wisdom is cutting the strength of our armed forces to a meagre 82,000. Now you may be worried that today’s title suggests an about-face so rapid it might cause a nosebleed.

Much as I appreciate your concern for my physical, and possibly also mental, health, I hasten to allay your fears. I’m reasonably healthy and, as far as I can judge, sane. That, however, is more than I can say for our country.

For the army I’m to talk about isn’t the kind that’ll leave bodies in the field, defending God, Queen and country against attacks. My subject is the burgeoning army that not only doesn’t repel attacks on our liberties but in fact itself constitutes such an attack.

No more suspense: the army in question is that of social workers. Of these there are 87,442 currently registered with the General Social Care Council – 5,000 more than in the army that can make the difference between the nation’s life and death.

In addition to those on active duty, the real army has a certain number of reservists, but these will only be called up in case of dire emergency. Not to be outdone, the army of social workers also has reserves: 84,754 freeloaders who are currently in training and will be seeking council jobs by 2016 – with no emergency anywhere in sight.

In addition to its raison d’être, the real army performs valuable social services. It takes young men and women, typically those with bleak employment prospects, and trains them in skills that can then stand them in good stead in civilian life. 

Even more critical, the army teaches them discipline, decisiveness, the importance of mental and physical strength. A soldier also learns to be both self-reliant and unselfish, ready to help others at a great cost to himself. And, if the old adage about there being no atheists in the foxholes is true, a soldier who survives army life will learn to thank God – as useful a skill as any, if only to remind one of the existence of an entity infinitely greater than oneself.

All such qualities are as vital in civilian life as they are exceedingly rare. And one reason they are so rare is the sterling job done by the phoney army, that of social workers. This new model army is growing at a time when the real army is shrinking – a process not dissimilar to cancer, with malignant cells multiplying at the expense of the healthy ones.

Unlike the armed forces, social services don’t train youngsters to pick themselves up by the bootstraps. Quite the contrary, the lesson they teach is how to sink in the morass of idleness, dependency, moral and intellectual torpor. The whole welfare culture is busting a hole in the walls protecting the country’s ethos, and the social forces are the battering ram.

It has been amply demonstrated that neither Britain nor any other Western country can any longer afford the giant leech of a welfare state, sucking the nations’ blood with the help of social workers acting in the capacity of proboscis, jaws and teeth.

The problem isn’t just economic – as with any other social malaise, it’s primarily moral. The West in general and Britain specifically can’t absorb the corrupting effect of a society in which half the people work in the sweat of their brow to support families in which three generations have never held a job.

Society’s poison is the modern state’s meat, for each scrounger – and for that matter each social worker or anyone else who depends on the state for his livelihood – increases its power. Traditionally, this toxic effect has benefited mostly the left of the political spectrum, but these days the parliamentary right and left are converging into one amorphous blob.

That’s why the two curves, those of the army’s and the social services’ numerical strength, will continue to diverge regardless of who inhabits that Georgian semi in Downing Street. This is the lesson taught by modernity.

Now an educational convention, these days falling by the wayside, is that every lesson must be followed by some homework. So here’s the question I’d like you to ponder at your leisure: how many UKIP voters (which is to say real conservatives) are there among our 172,196 current and aspiring social workers? Here’s the multiple choice: a) None, b) None, c) None, d) What are you on, mate?

Lest you might accuse me of being overly negative, I’d like to put forth a positive proposal: instead of risking the lives of our 350 soldiers to be sent to Mali, let’s send a few thousand social workers instead. They could either kill the fanatics with kindness, or else set up a ‘social’ for the muderers, thereby rendering them perpetually weak and useless.

Admittedly, some social workers may not return home. But there are plenty more where they come from.

The British Tourist Board and the British government advertise the country in diametrically opposite ways. This is easy to understand for they pursue diametrically opposite ends: the former wants to attract visitors, the latter seeks to repel immigrants.

The second goal is rather more urgent than the first, what with millions of Romanians and Bulgarians becoming entitled to come here in a year’s time. It can be confidently predicted that sizeable numbers will take advantage of this entitlement, what with average salaries in those countries being lower than the sums our ‘social’ routinely shells out.

Thus the government’s key campaign pledge, that of limiting immigration, will bite the dust. This will offend Dave’s and Theresa’s sense of balance, for they won’t have even a single kept promise to offset the numerous ones they’ve broken.

Hence the arrival of a Balkan flood must be nipped in the bud. This task wouldn’t be unduly hard if Britain remained a sovereign nation: a simple ‘sorry, old chaps, you can’t come here’ would suffice. But should we attempt to utter this phrase now, the EU would countermand it by saying ‘oh yes, they can’, and that would be that.

That option off limits, Albion has to rely on its much publicised perfidy to seek more subtle deterrents. One such is an advertising campaign, currently in development, aimed at discouraging Bulgarians and Romanians from coming to the UK. The strategy is based on depicting Britain as a horrible place to live, mainly because it’s cold and wet.

Now I have to own up to a blot on my copybook: for about 30 years I not only believed in the power of advertising, but indeed wielded it for a variety of clients on either side of the Atlantic. During much of that period I was in a position to judge other people’s work, telling them when it went wrong. Slipping back into that shed skin, I must tell HMG to go back to the drawing board.

Is that the best you can do? The weather? Can’t you find something more effective to say about Britain? Here are, off the top, 10 ideas for possible ads:

Britain isn’t all beer and skittles – no one plays skittles anymore. Visual: the centre of any city on a Saturday night, with crowds of youngsters fighting, tossing rubbish bins through shop windows and throwing up.

The Brits say ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’. So your children will get none. The visual depicts schoolchildren beating up a teacher in the classroom.

NHS – it stands for No Hope of Survival.  Visual: at least 20 obviously abandoned men and women piled up together in a unisex hospital ward.

British medicine is the best in the world, you can buy drugs at every corner. Visual: King’s Cross at night.

Miss communism? Come to Britain. Visual: Ed Miliband.

British men are nice, they love one another. Visual: a Gay Day parade.

The Brits tolerate any religion, except Christianity. Visual: A street scene in Bradford.

Meet your future British neighbours. Visual: A heavily tattooed, facial-metalled woman with half a dozen children, all obviously by different fathers, against the background of a council estate. A variation on the same theme:

Are you dying to meet your future British neighbours? Visual: A street gang armed with baseball bats and flick knives.

Brits love dogs, but not always the other way around. Visual: close-up of a particularly ferocious rottweiler scowling at the camera.

Note to the creative team: these aren’t complete concepts, only possible avenues to explore. See what you can do, come back in a week.

Oh well, as we all know, you can’t enter the same river twice. I doubt HMG propagandists will beat a path to my door, seeking my advice on advertising. Especially since they already know that, with or without my help, they won’t be able to do anything that’ll work.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Having admitted at his trial to the rape of a 13-year-old girl, Adil Rashid, 18, was facing four to seven years in prison.

Yet Judge Michael Stokes suspended the sentence, for reasons that make one doubt not just his sanity but also that of our whole society. In fact, this case could provide a valuable diagnostic tool in any psychiatric examination. However, lacking medical qualifications, I’ll have to approach the stated reasons behind such lenience from other angles.

Reason One: Since Rashid had gone to an Islamic faith school, he didn’t know that having sex with female children was wrong.

Now, Rashid was born, bred and educated in Birmingham, not in Dar-es-Salaam. Even if his environment could indeed ‘be described as a closed community’, as his defence attorney claimed, surely he must have ventured outside his school enough times to make such ignorance unlikely?

But even assuming for the sake of argument that he was indeed unaware of the difference between a child and a woman, or between a woman and a lollipop, as his lawyer also suggested, since when is that an extenuating circumstance? Certainly not since the Roman jurists first enunciated in no uncertain terms that ignorantia juris non excusat (ignorance of the law is no excuse).

Had Judge Stokes sent Rashid down for the full seven years, he would have therefore asserted a legal principle that operates in the law of every civilised country. More important, he would have sent an important message ‘to encourage the others’, in Voltaire’s phrase.

The message would have come across loud and clear: if your religion is in conflict with British laws, move somewhere where they don’t apply. Saudi Arabia or Sudan spring to mind. And if indeed Muslim faith schools encourage their pupils to ignore our laws, such schools must be censured first and shut down second.

The English common law reigns supreme in England (unless, as is often the case, it’s superseded by the EU law, but that’s a different story). This means it takes priority over any religious law whenever the two are in conflict.

Such a pecking order can in no way impinge on Judaeo-Christian legal principles because the law of the land is based upon them. Thus I’m not aware of any Judaeo-Christian commandment that might conceivably clash with our criminal code. For example, neither Testament urges believers to kill.  

With all deference and respect, the same isn’t the case with the Koran. That holy book commands Muslims to ‘slay them [unbelievers] wherever ye find them…’ (2:91). It also takes a dim view of apostates: ‘…If they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them…’ (4:89)

Suppose a classmate of Rashid’s were so devout, and so isolated from the non-Muslim world, that he didn’t realise that following such commandments just may be problematic under British law. What if he ventured outside his ‘closed community’ only to murder a Jew, a Christian or someone who has left Islam? The monster could then benefit from the precedent set by Judge Stokes: the poor lad was just as ignorant of our murder laws as Rashid was of injunctions against statutory rape.

In other words, Reason One is invalid, Judge Stokes must be disbarred, and the rest of us ought to contemplate what such encouragement of alien creeds does to our society in particular and the West in general. For we live at a time when, after decades of a trough, Islamic aggression is at its peak. Three-fourths of all current armed conflicts involve Islam, and its target is the West along with everything it stands for.

As the history of the last 1,400 years has shown beyond reasonable doubt, to use Judge Stokes’s language, the only way to calm Muslims down is to show courage and resolve. The judge, or more likely those who had instructed him, has shown general lassitude and specific cowardice, with a bit of PC idiocy thrown in for good measure. The results can be catastrophic, and the sooner we realise this, the better.

Reason Two evokes less all-embracing problems, but it’s objectionable none the less. According to Judge Stokes, Rashid was so ‘passive’ and ‘lacking assertiveness’ that sending him to jail might cause him ‘more damage than good’.

It seems to me that Rashid was far from ‘passive’ when he groomed the child on Facebook and lured her to a Nottingham hotel room. And he certainly was ‘assertive’ enough to rape her. Don’t our jurists realise how moronic they sound whenever they try to justify their own craven, weak-kneed liberalism?

The good judge should take a remedial course in law to learn what custodial punishment is for. As it is, he’s clearly confusing it with social services and self-improvement counselling. The purpose of jail, sir, isn’t to improve criminals. It’s to serve justice by punishing them. It’s also to pacify society, unsettled by a vile deed, by informing it that the law is still there to offer justice and protection.

A society in which judges, and indeed those who instruct them, need to be told such simple truths is chronically sick. A society that doesn’t send unequivocal messages to potential criminals will never again be heard. And a society that lacks the nerve to defend itself doesn’t deserve to survive.

HMG’s decision to cut our army strength to 82,000, the lowest since William Pitt sat in Dave’s chair, dovetails neatly with its earlier commitment to cut policemen’s salaries. It also shows how little those who govern us understand the purpose of government.

One might suggest that the state has not one but many different purposes: extorting money from those who work and passing it on to those who don’t; making sure the word ‘marriage’ acquires a whole new meaning; rewriting the rules of succession; supporting alien religions at the expense of Christianity; keeping children from educated families away from university; maintaining a health service that turns hospitals into death traps; enforcing an immigration policy aimed at turning the Brits into a minority in Britain; and above all self-perpetuating.

True, all these are worthy goals that must be pursued with vigour and tenacity. But occasionally it’s worth remembering that, since the first time our hirsute ancestors appointed the strongest among them to fight off objectionable outlanders, protecting its citizens has been regarded as the state’s raison d’être.

To make this appeal to history even-handed, one has to acknowledge that the need for standing armies is of somewhat more recent provenance. This stands to reason: in the past, the two principal branches of service, cavalry and infantry, were made up of men who required little training.

The cavalrymen would have typically learned to ride roughly when they were old enough to walk up to a horse. The ability to wield a sword and a lance was acquired at only a slightly older age.

The infantrymen knew how to drive an arrow through a wild boar at 300 yards when they didn’t yet have to shave. The skill to finish the animal off with a knife was also easily transferable to combat.

Those in both groups were extremely fit, as they spent their time working or hunting outdoors, rather than playing computer games indoors. They also ate food ‘cooked from fresh’, in the parlance of today’s lot, rather than crisps and frozen pizzas.

When a need arose, it took longer to gather a fighting force than to train it. Officers simply told their men (women were supposed to be women in those days) to imagine that those French knights were actually wild boar, to be killed either with long bows or with lances. A shot of rum or a mug of ale then got the men in the right mood, and they couldn’t wait to hear ‘for God, king and country’ before letting fly with all they had.

Nowadays the situation is different. Our arrows and lances, launched from land, sea or air, are laser-guided and they take more than a blacksmith to make or an archer to operate. This means that a standing, preferably professional, army isn’t a luxury but a necessity, for without it the state would be remiss in its principal role, that of protecting its citizens.

How large should an army be? How long is a piece of string? The answer in either instance is the same: depends on the need. However, when it comes to the string, the need is much easier both to calculate and to anticipate.

By way of illustration, I’d like to remind of you of Ross Perot, the billionaire Texan businessmen who in 1978 did what the US government failed to do in 1979: he got hostages out of Iran.

Perot’s companies operated all over the world, including its less pleasant parts. Naturally, his recruits had to be promised that if they got in trouble Ross would get them out. That promise, along with premium salaries, kept Perot’s overseas offices fully staffed.

Ross is an old-fashioned chap and, though at times he has dabbled in politics, he isn’t a politician. Thus his word is his bond, and he doesn’t lie the way he breathes. So to make sure he could act on his promise, he kept on staff quite a few former marines and Green Berets, whose sole job was to keep themselves fighting fit, ready if a need for their services arose, which Ross hoped would be never.

However, the need did arise, and Perot’s private army went into action, augmented by Ross’s buddies from his army days. After years of doing nothing, they did everything they were asked to do: the hostages were sprung out of an Iranian prison and brought home safe.

Unlike the Americans’ belief that ‘all men are created equal’, the moral of the story is indeed self-evident: an army has to be strong enough to meet not only the present needs but also those likely to arise in the future. It ought to be clear that cutting the army down to half of the UK’s police force isn’t going to meet this objective – not by a long shot.

This means HMG is being penny-wise and pound-foolish – much in the manner of the Americans who first made a few million transferring military technology to build up the Soviet army, only then to spend billions trying to counteract it.

I don’t know what our military needs are going to be, say in the next decade. Neither for that matter does HMG. Yet it’s relatively easy to see that such needs will be considerable and global, for the Channel can’t protect the country against ICBMs and dirty bombs in terrorists’ suitcases as effectively as it did against the panzers and the SS.

What with Islam going through a particularly impassioned stage, the pressure building up in the EU boiler, and the Argentines making aggressive noises, it’s foreseeable that our armed forces will be called upon to act in faraway corners of the globe. And at this very time our army strength is being cut to the strength of four divisions plus auxiliary  services – far from enough even to protect itself, never mind the rest of us.

HMG is thus reneging on its mission, thereby losing its claim to its own legitimacy and our allegiance. Protectio trahit subjectionem, subjectio projectionem (protection entails allegiance, allegiance entails protection) has been the guiding principle of Western government since its business was first transacted in Latin.

Dave would be well-advised to remember this. But then of course he has other priorities (see the second paragraph above).

 

 

 

 

The other day I suggested that Dave is a Cicero to Obama’s Demosthenes, and now he has delivered himself of a long-awaited oratory aimed at justifying such flattering parallels.

Even as Obama expanded his mandate beyond the boundaries of time by claiming obligations ‘to all posterity’, Dave has stretched his own remit in space, by insisting he wants ‘a better deal’ not only for Britain but ‘for Europe too’.

It’s good to see a man with a broad outlook on life. However, perhaps Dave ought to remember that he was elected by the British people, and then appointed by Her Majesty to lead her government in the interests of her subjects. If such interests coincide with Europe’s, fine. If they don’t, too bad. Methinks Dave is planning to give Tony a run for his money when the job of EU president next comes up for grabs.

And specifically, Prime Minister? How will you deliver the pan-European better deal?

Here’s Dave’s answer: ‘It is nonsense that people shopping online in some parts of Europe are unable to access the best deals because of where they live.’ From being vaguely broad the aspiration has narrowed to a needlepoint. Perhaps Dave is campaigning for the presidency of Amazon.com, rather than that of Europe.

No, that too is wrong. Dave is seeking neither job. He’s campaigning in the 2015 election. His speech isn’t an earth-shattering statement of intent. It’s his plea to be returned to 10 Downing Street.

How else would you explain the proposed timing of the epochal referendum to which he now is/isn’t firmly/contingently committed? ‘No later than 2017,’ suggests Dave, which is the political for ‘no earlier’. Since Labour is opposed to any referendum, for Dave to keep this promise the Tories must win the next election. QED.

This seems so unlikely as to empty the promise of any meaningful content. And even if Dave remains Prime Minister beyond 2015, perhaps by forming a new coalition with the BNP, the Communist Party, UKIP, the Greens, Respect Party and the Manchester United fan club, so what? Five years is a lot of water under Westminster Bridge. Dave has been known to go back on campaign promises of much more recent vintage. Can’t you just hear it now? ‘Our 2013 pledge was made in good faith, but now the circumstances have changed so drastically…’

The pledge is contingent not only on something unlikely, Dave’s re-election, but also on something impossible, ‘…a new settlement in which Britain can be comfortable and all our countries can thrive.’

‘And when the referendum comes,’ continues Dave, ‘let me say now that if we can negotiate such an arrangement, I will campaign for it with all my heart and soul.’ The operative word here is ‘if’, and this if isn’t just big but, to use Dave’s preferred locution, ginormous.

In fact, if a new settlement is the pre-condition for the referendum, there’s no need to wait five years. It’s clear to anyone with an IQ higher than Dave’s house number in Downing Street that the only way for the EU to delay the collapse of the euro is to accelerate ‘ever closer union’. Again volunteering my services as translator, that means a single European state. Not coincidentally, this necessity tallies with the EU’s declared purpose.

This means that Britain may get a few crumbs thrown her way off the EU table, and in fact Frau Merkel has hinted at such a possibility, but we’ll never get a piece of the meat. Dave’s professed craving for ‘flexible, willing cooperation [which] is a much stronger glue than compulsion from the centre’ shows he’s either a child waiting for the tooth fairy or a fool who doesn’t realise that no tooth fairy exists – or else a knave who claims it exists while knowing it doesn’t.

The 64,000-euro question asks itself: What if no new settlement is forthcoming? Now, unlike Dave’s ifs, this one is tiny. After all, every federast, from Angela to François, from Barroso to Rumpy-Pumpy, has stated in no uncertain terms that being an EU member is like being pregnant: you either are or you aren’t. No picking, no choosing, no flexibility, no willingness – read my lips, Dave: no new settlement.

In that case, do we go to a referendum straight away, without sitting on our thumbs for five years? If we do, will Dave still campaign for the yes vote, as he promises to do now? Or will he say in his inimitable manner that the pledge of a referendum has been invalidated by the EU’s intransigence?

Dave answers none of such questions. Instead he utters a mantra of platitudes, some false, others so self-evident as to be irrelevant.

Falling into the first category is Dave’s boast that ‘the first purpose of the European Union – to secure peace – has been achieved and we should pay tribute to all those in the EU, alongside NATO, who made that happen.’ Well, at least NATO gets a parenthetical mention. And here we were, thinking that it was the threat of Luxembourg’s counteroffensive that prevented those 50,000 Soviet tanks from rolling towards the Atlantic.

It’s because NATO, and specifically the American nuclear umbrella, secured peace that the retarded baby of an EU was able to crawl out of the Franco-German loins. And in any case, read my lips again, Dave: ‘the first purpose of the European Union’ isn’t ‘to secure peace’. It’s to create a single, tyrannical, unaccountable European state. Omit this understanding, and the speech becomes just meaningless waffle.

The second category, that of needless truisms, includes Dave’s admittedly accurate enumeration of EU failings, ‘undemocratic’, ‘unaccountable’, ‘crisis of competitiveness’ and so on. Thank God for small mercies, for no British PM since Mrs Thatcher has dared to suggest there’s something wrong with the EU. But then they didn’t come under such pressure from their own party and UKIP. Dave has, hence his speech.

In the process he uses, naturally without attribution, Enoch Powell’s astute comment that there’s no such thing as a European demos (and therefore there can be no European democracy, but Dave skips this part). That’s a masterstroke of cynical but effective politicking: those who don’t know the provenance of the phrase will think Dave is clever; those who do will think he hints at his Eurosceptic lineage.

In fact, the whole speech is just that: effective politicking, shame about meaningful content. Dave tugs at every imaginable heart string, while showing yet again that his own ganglion of conviction is nonexistent.

Amazingly, conservative pundits were impressed by Dave’s Pauline attempt to be all things to all men, or rather by his technical mastery of political infighting. One can understand how they feel: we all like the aroma of freshly baked bread, even if we know we won’t get the loaf.

In one short speech Dave managed to score all sorts of political points:

·      He defanged a previously threatening UKIP, now seemingly deprived of their central plank.

·      He confirmed his pro-EU credentials by decrying British isolationism – no little-Englander, he.

·      He also established his anti-EU credentials by stating with (un)equivocal firmness that at some unspecified time, given an unspecified confluence of events, Britain will consider the theoretical possibility of leaving the EU, much as Dave personally thinks that would be a disaster of Biblical proportions.

·      He postponed making any serious decisions until his second term, while giving voters a semblance of a reason to give it to him.

·      He made Labour come down from its Eurofence.

·      He got an or-else bargaining chip for the next time he goes to Brussels with an outstretched hand.

All good stuff, that. But political virtuosity can’t mask a deficit of substance. After all, the art of politics isn’t practised for its own sake, but rather for the sake of the country. How Dave’s impersonation of Cicero will serve Britain is anyone’s guess. My guess is it won’t.