Category: Blog

One becomes tired of pointing out the breathtaking effrontery of our politicians, but Nick does take the bicky. For this alumnus of Westminster School to attack even pre-castrated proposals on improving secondary education is a bit like Jamie Oliver finding meat-eating morally objectionable.

The British do pay too much attention to the type of school one attends. Actually, as long as the school isn’t actively subversive (Shirley Williams, ring your office), any one will do. Of the highly educated Englishmen I know, three went to grammar schools, three to minor public schools, one to a major public school and one, incredible as it may sound, to a comprehensive.

Without pretending to have a representative sample on my hands, I may still suggest that one doesn’t have to go to Westminster School to become truly educated. For, contrary to a popular misapprehension, education doesn’t equate the gathering of so much information, though that’s an important part. It’s what happens as a result of such gathering: a qualitative shift from ignorance to culture, from barbarism to civilisation, from base to high feelings, from primitive to refined tastes.

As any neurophysiologist will tell you, most people are capable of picking up and storing a practically infinite amount of information – why, even crossing Park Lane in rush hour probably overloads one’s synapses with a surfeit of data. Yet as any teacher will tell you, far from most people are capable of becoming educated in the true sense of the word, regardless of the kind of school they attend.

Teachers would be reluctant to put a number on those so capable, but if you held a gun to their head, most would probably say about 25 percent. Another 25 percent are still capable of succeeding in most practical fields, while the remainder will have to settle for a life of intellectually undemanding careers. They could, for example, become Deputy Prime Ministers. 

An effective educational system should then be made up of schools that educate the top third, instruct the second one and train the rest. Such a system would reflect the way God made people, and what he did can’t be undone. It can, however, be subverted – first by failing to recognise, or refusing to accept, that people are differently able and then creating single-tier schools that fail everybody equally. Enter the brainchild of the more pernicious lefties: British comprehensives.

‘Intelligent socialist’ is an oxymoron to begin with, but even the limited brainpower that socialists are born with tends to dwindle away to nothing when their smallish minds are overridden by a giant ideological bias. As a result of their efforts, the overall literacy levels in Britain are considerably below what they were at the height of the Industrial Revolution, when our masses were supposed to be oppressed and downtrodden.

A child of socialists this system may be, but even reasonably conservative politicians have fostered it. Margaret Thatcher, when she was still Education Secretary, closed down more grammar schools than any of her Labour counterparts ever did, although she might not have been an entirely free agent in that endeavour. On the other hand, though her brand of conservatism eschews economic egalitarianism, it’s not invariably averse to the social and cultural kind.

As a result of the wanton destruction of British education from 1965 onwards, the country has suffered much damage – not just culturally, but also socially and economically. The damage may not be irreparable, but it’s certainly not repairable quickly. Still, one has to start somewhere, and this is what our present Education Secretary is attempting to do, however timidly.

Having noticed that the GCSE exams presuppose the level of education that would have been expected in a kindergarten at the height of the Industrial Revolution, Michael Gove thinks they must be scrapped. In their stead we should go back to ‘world-class’ O-Levels for the abler pupils and have simpler CSE exams for the rest.

Being a politician, Mr Gove won’t find it in his vote-chasing heart to propose what really needs to be done: the scrapping of comprehensive ‘education’. But even the utterly modest and sensible first step he has found the courage to propose has created an outcry. The principal jeer-leader is Gove’s coalition partner Nick, ably assisted by the assorted Milibandits in opposition.

‘I’m not in favour of anything that would lead to a two-tier system where children at quite a young age are somehow cast on a scrapheap,’ declared Nick, with the bleating from the Milibandits providing the background noise. ‘What you want is an exam system which is fit for the future, doesn’t turn the clock back to the past and works for the many and not just for the few.’

In the past, Britain had one of the highest literacy levels in the world. She was in the top five in most academic disciplines, and top 10 in all. She’s now 16^th in science, 25^th in literacy and 28^th in maths. Methinks a bit of clock-turning wouldn’t be such a bad thing, don’t you? And I don’t know how many scrapheaps Nick has rummaged through lately, but if he looked at the metaphorical one he mentioned, he’d find it full of little savages extruded from the bowels of the single-tier education he favours.

Having myself gone to the kind of school where most boys carry knives, I don’t know what sort of curriculum Westminster School teaches. But if it produces alumni like Nick, perhaps another look at the syllabus is in order. Then again, not everyone can be educated in the true meaning of the word. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At my venerable age I ought to have lost any capacity for being astounded by politicians’ effrontery. And so I have, except that Dave Cameron manages to restore some of it with metronomic regularity.

This time he has launched a moral crusade against tax avoidance, using the comedian Jimmy Carr as his whipping boy. Now my understanding is that there exists a valid distinction between tax avoidance and tax evasion. The former is legal; the latter isn’t. And it’s legality rather than morality that politicians are supposed to uphold. For them to comment on the morality of legal tax shelters is akin to Dr Shipman enlarging on the fine points of care for the elderly.

Now in the moral gospel according to Dave, our money doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to the government, which decides how much of it we can keep for our families. At present, middle-class people are expected to keep less than half of what they earn in the sweat of their brow. The state confiscates the rest and wastes most of it on schemes ranging from unnecessary to ill-advised to idiotic to downright subversive.

It’s hardly surprising that most taxpayers don’t share this concept of morality. The more savvy among them explore, with the help of their accountants, every possible way of resisting state extortion as best they can. According to Dave, this is ‘quite frankly morally wrong’.

Dave is willing to admit under duress that ‘there is nothing wrong with people planning their tax affairs to invest in their pension and plan for their retirement – that sort of tax management is fine.’ That is, it’s fine now, when focus groups have told Dave that his original plan to tighten the pension loophole wouldn’t be well received. Alas, because those bloody wrinklies now tend to live longer, they are too numerous to ignore. Their vote can make or break even such an impeccably moral politician as Dave.

Other than that, rest assured that this self-described ‘heir to Blair’ feels about private pensions the same as his role model does. Blair’s first act was to launch a five-billion-pound assault on pension funds. Given half the chance, Dave will live up to Tony’s legacy, but not just yet. For the time being he has to count on his general economic policy, rather than specific raids, to reduce private pensions and other savings to dust.

I’m not going to comment on the specifics of the particular offshore shelter from which Jimmy Carr has benefited. Nor will I compare it to other shelters collectively described by Dave as ‘very dodgy tax avoiding schemes’. As far as I’m concerned, if they are legal they aren’t dodgy. And if they are illegal, they are the business of the CPO, not of our morally crusading Prime Minister.

He and other politicians correctly see every pound left in our pockets as a threat to their power. Economic independence isn’t the same as political liberty, but they largely overlap. Since our state isn’t so much a democracy as a spivocracy, taxation is for it more than just a means of sustaining its solvency. It’s a weapon for the spivocrats to increase their power in relation to private individuals. Regarded in that light, every man who’s clever enough to shield his income from Dave’s grubby hands is committing a moral act.

My hat’s off to Mr Carr, and more power to him. But there is a way for Dave to give his flaming moral sense a rest, at least on this issue. It’s called flat tax.

Charge everybody a flat rate of about 20 percent on any income above a £10,000 personal allowance, permit only legitimate business deductions, and no problem, moral or otherwise, with tax avoidance will ever arise. I can’t calculate the precise effect of such an arrangement on the Exchequer, but people who can, Nobel-winning economists among them, assure us that, at worst, the state will break even on the revenue thus derived. That means it’ll come out ahead, as the need for costly tax-collection efforts will be vastly reduced. Even more important, Dave won’t be tossing and turning at night, kept awake as he is now by affronts to his morality.

If the purpose of taxation were strictly economic this would work famously. But since extortionist taxes are there to send what Vince Cable calls ‘an important message’, that is who’s boss, and to whom our money really belongs, a flat rate will never happen. Never mind that progressive taxation violates the founding principle of Western justice, that of equality before the law. We’re not about legality here, are we? We’re about morality, as defined by Dave and his jolly friends.

The American writer HL Mencken once said that ‘the state remains, as it was in the beginning, the common enemy of all well-disposed, industrious and decent men.’ Dave must be a Mencken fan – he does his level best to prove him right.

 

 

French elections are coming in thick and fast, and only the thick will fail to get out fast.

For, in a world where even Darwinism is but a theory, there exists one immutable law of nature: when socialists take over, people flee. Admittedly, some run away even from reasonably laissez-faire governments as well, but there’s a difference.

Most economic escapees from decent lands are guilty of some impropriety, usually of the tax variety. However, those who run away from socialists tend to be honest, decent people who all suffer from the same phobia: they hate being robbed by their government.

Britain taxes middle-class people at over 50 percent, and over 40 percent of our economy (closer to 75 percent in the Celtic fringe and the North) is socialist – or public-sector if this is the term you prefer. It says a lot for France that so many of her citizens regard as an oasis of freedom even our overtaxed, overregulated land run by self-serving politicians with learning difficulties.

London is already the seventh largest French city in the world, what with approximately 300,000 Gauls making it their home. Ashford, comfortably sitting on the Eurostar line between London and Folkestone boasts a large French population as well. Most of them work across the Channel, which they obtusely call La Manche, ignoring the waterway’s real name. The Channel to them isn’t English; good job their taxes are.

I don’t know if London can accommodate a million Frenchmen, but if it can it’ll have to, soon. For Hollande’s socialists have just won a 300-seat majority in the National Assembly, thereby finding themselves in total control of both the executive and legislative power. More important, they’ll now grab control of people’s money, which, in common with all socialists, they regard as their own.

It’s a mistake to think that economic and military disasters are some kind of force majeure, a confluence of historical circumstances rendering any human agency helpless. Taxing circumstances do arise periodically, and they do create critical situations. But such situations only become national and international catastrophes when the wrong people are in charge at the time.

Had Louis XIV, rather than Louis XVI, been in charge in 1789, the French revolution wouldn’t have happened. Nicholas I wouldn’t have suffered the fate of his grandson Nicholas II in 1917. Bismarck wouldn’t have let Weimar disintegrate into a breeding ground for Nazism. Unlike Blair, Churchill wouldn’t have acted as America’s poodle in Iraq. And if today’s Western governments were run by statesmen rather than spivs, the world in general and Europe in particular wouldn’t be running the risk of implosion.

In any self-respecting country someone like François Hollande would be satisfying his political ambitions by ranting off a soapbox somewhere in the Bois de Boulogne, with half a dozen derelicts in attendance. The rants would be regularly interrupted by either les flics or by muscular chaps wearing white coats and bearing straightjackets.

It takes a madman even to conceive the policies Hollande is about to implement, especially at present. An economy groaning under the weight of debt, taxation and regulation needs a breath of fresh air. It needs to get rid of the suffocating yoke around its neck by getting the government off its back.

What does François propose instead? A top tax bracket of 75 percent (in fact, closer to 100 percent when all taxes are taken into account), the lowering of the pension age from 62 to 60 and introducing a tax on all financial transactions. This in a country that’s on the verge of needing a bailout, Greek style.

Last Friday, Angela Merkel gave François a piece of her mind, chapter and verse. But France isn’t Greece, not yet anyway. Merkel can’t even try to whip her into shape to the same extent, though I must admit to having a persistent fantasy of Angela in a shiny PVC outfit, brandishing a cat-o’-nine-tails: ‘You’ve been a bad boy, François, but I have just ze remedy…’

That means Hollande will try to put his policies into effect, grabbing a catastrophe out of the jaws of a crisis. Anticipating such an outcome, the French began overworking London estate agents the moment François was elected president. What then was a vigorous trickle will now become a stampede. The French will be competing for London properties against Russian Mafiosi and Arab Springers. They’ll put their educated minds to work in the City. French will become the dominant language on the 22 Bus. And I for one am rubbing my hands gleefully.

For I share the French national obsession with food, and whenever the French move into a neighbourhood the food improves. There’s a superb butcher not far from where I live, listing Gordon Ramsey among the regular patrons. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen Gordon there, but each time I join the queue, two thirds of those in it are French. But for them, the butcher might not have survived. Now he’s thriving. The same goes for our local bakery, which is becoming indistinguishable from a boulangerie somewhere in the Sixth.

This, I realise, is a shamefully narrow, not to say solipsistic, perspective. We could broaden it though, if you insist. If the French blackmail the Germans into introducing a tax on financial transactions, where do you think most of those transactions will be made? I’ll give you a multiple choice: A) Frankfurt, B) Paris, C) the moon, D) London. You got it in one. And if their top tax bracket is twice as high as ours, it’s a safe bet that most economically virile Frenchmen will end up in the Royal Borough.

Will the last one of them leaving Paris please turn off all the lights? Before long France won’t be able to afford the electricity bill.

For the first time since 323 BC, Greece finds herself at the centre of European politics. That was the year Alexander of Macedon died, leaving behind him a legacy of conquest and reasonably benevolent rule. Neither is in store for the country today.

Admittedly Greece had some news value in 1821-1832 when she fought for her independence from the Ottoman Turks. But even though that cause attracted all sorts of Romantic layabouts, such as Byron, the war wasn’t seen as one on which the future of Europe hinged.

Suddenly, yet another round of elections has turned the country into the earth-moving fulcrum that Archimedes craved so forlornly. For if you believe the press, the elections are supposed to have saved Europe from an otherwise inevitable demise. The earth has been moved.

It’s not that anyone thinks that some unknown tectonic fault was about to break the continent off from Asia, casting it adrift into the ocean where it would then do an Atlantis. You see, Europe is no longer a continent. It’s shorthand.

The name has always had metaphorical uses. At various times in the past it stood for Christendom, with its civilisation and culture reflecting the metaphysical foundations on which it rested. Now it means the European Union or, more narrow still, its defunct single currency.

Anyone staggered by the craven, anti-historical, ideological idiocy that begat that abortion of an experiment is immediately accused of hating ‘Europe’. Never mind that the accused may be a cultured, well-travelled, multi-lingual person, while the accuser may not know the difference between Emily Dickinson and Emile Durkheim, or even between Sweden and Switzerland. The accused is a Europhobe, the accuser a Europhile. He’s the one rejoicing in the triumph of the New Democracy (ND) party that, according to him, has won a ringing mandate from the Greek electorate to ‘stay in Europe’ and keep the euro. The continent has been saved. It’ll remain firmly attached to Asia.

When ideology runs riot, reason is never in the race. Thus our Europhile has no qualms about regarding as a mandate ND’s 29.6 percent of the vote, well short of the absolute majority. Even if this ‘centre-right’ party, which is directly responsible for having run up the criminal deficit in the first place, were to form a coalition with the socialists, which at the time of writing isn’t exactly a foregone conclusion, it would then have only about 160 out of the 300 parliamentary seats on offer.

It’s good to see though that the country is reviving the tradition of highly limited democracy for which it, or more specifically Athens, is so justly famous. Only about 30,000 or so fully enfranchised citizens (out of Attica’s population of about a quarter of a million) could vote in Athens on either side of Alexander, with 5,000-6,000 constituting the quorum.

Or perhaps the tradition animating today’s Greeks is of more recent provenance: after all, Tony Blair’s party chose to regard the 35.2 percent of the popular vote it won in 2005 as a mandate to wreak constitutional mayhem. Tocqueville needn’t have worried about the dictatorship of a majority. A minority dictatorship is the order of the day, all perfectly democratic of course.

But do let’s accept the Greek elections as they are portrayed in the press: the pivot of European politics. What did the Greeks actually vote for and against?

Well, if you really must know, they voted for austerity as a precondition for receiving another €160 billion handout, on top of the €240 billion they’ve received already. At least that’s today’s line we’re expected to swallow. But it’ll take a lot of ouzo to help it go down.

If the Greeks read European papers attentively, they know that ‘austerity’, just as ‘Europe’, isn’t used in its true meaning. What it means nowadays is that the government undertakes to slow down its orgy of public spending designed to corrupt the populace into voting the right way. Not to reverse it, God forbid. We’re talking, to use Britain as one example, about a small reduction in the rate of increase – not about an overall reduction in the amounts spent.

Yet even in Britain one nevertheless hears the growling, rumbling noise among the people used to getting something for nothing, which is to say the majority. In time the noise will be turned into a rallying cry by the Milibandits, the folk who are already talking about creating a pan-European anti-austerity alliance of all true-red socialists.

Now if you think, correctly, that the British have been corrupted too much to accept any meaningful austerity, then multiply our corruption by 100 and you’ll know where the Greeks stand in relation to fiscal rigour.

Of course they want to get their €160 billion, wouldn’t you? But only the naïve think for a second that whoever ends up forming a coalition will abide by the preconditions Angela has imposed. And she knows it, bright girl that she is.

The Greeks will pretend to have found the fiscal God, and Angela will pretend to believe them. She needs the euro as the tether that binds the EU together, suffocating every urge for political and economic independence from Germany. So she and her likeminded eurosupremacists will hail the Greek election as the saviour of the euro.

The euro can’t be saved, Angie. Whether the Greeks stay in or out for the moment doesn’t matter one drachma. Everyone will be out before long, and all talk about contagion is so much tosh. The euro is doomed not because of any potential infection being passed on from one country to another, but because it’s genetically unsound. Every member of it has structural problems for which there are no solutions.

People can be fooled for days, perhaps weeks. But the markets can only be fooled for hours, nay minutes. Witness the original modest rally after ND swept all before it, only followed by a massive dip when Spain delivered the next batch of rotten news. The markets know that this giant Ponzi scheme will go the way of all such undertakings sooner, rather than later. Except that this time no Bernie Madoff will conveniently be there to take the rap.

Rather than seeking scapegoats, we should slaughter the sacred cow of ‘Europe’. Let the word revert to its original meanings rooted in geography and culture. It’s been abused enough. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dave and George, ably assisted by Mervyn, have cooked up a great scheme: they’ll pump £140 billion into our banks on condition that about 60 percent of the money will then be used for mortgage and business loans.

The amount is positively mean compared to the £325 billion already injected into the banks to keep them from a richly deserved demise. That programme achieved its dubious purpose in that most banks do indeed continue trading even as we speak. What they don’t continue is lending, opting instead to use the money as chips in the computer games banks play with one another. Such newly found frugality has two obvious effects, one bad, the other good.

Since the money is being used merely as a life-support system for the banks, it circulates within their bodies only, doing nothing to drip-feed financial plasma into the veins of the economy. The economy then becomes exsanguinated, leaving our private finances anaemic and moribund. That’s bad – and this is the situation we have at the moment.

On the other hand, if all those billions, trillions and zillions were dumped into general circulation, we’d have not so much an economic Eden as inflation from hell. And inflation, as anyone familiar with the history of the Weimar Republic will tell you, spells disasters of all sorts, not just in the economy. Thus tucking the money under the banks’ mattresses at least keeps inflation down. That’s good – but it won’t last if the banks are forced to release the funds into the economy, as sooner or later they will be.

If we strip the Exchequer’s proposal of the usual PR effluvia, we’ll see that in essence they’ve reversed the long-standing policy of preferring recession to inflation. This goes to show yet again that, when it comes to the economy, the government can only ever give us the choice between a rock and a hard place. Occasionally both. Never neither.

Simple homespun logic would suggest that, if governments are constantly damned if they do and damned if they don’t, perhaps they – and, more important, we – would be better off if they stayed out of the economy altogether. One shouldn’t play if one can’t win seems to be the conclusion, but I find this so shocking that I have to seek outside help.

Hence I’ve interviewed a few experts (identified by their initials only), trying to find out what they think. Here’s what they said in response.

What do you think of the active role our government likes to play in the economy?

EB: The moment that government appears at market, the principles of the market will be subverted.

But surely making it easier for people and small businesses to borrow will stimulate the economy?

AL: You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.

Yes, the events of 2008 seem to bear this out. But we’re in big trouble now, and some excess spending will offer an immediate solution, won’t it?

AL: You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.

Well, every good housewife could tell you that. But aren’t governments run on different principles?

AS: What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.

In that case, let’s extend the parallel. By definition, all family members are economically equal. Shouldn’t we try to achieve the same conditions in society at large, by taxing the rich more?

AL: You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.

EB: Compulsory equalisations can only mean equal want, equal wretchedness, equal beggary.

It sounds to me as if you’re advocating less government interference, not more. But can individuals be trusted with their own economic well-being?

AS. Every individual can judge much better than any statesman or lawgiver can do for him. The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would assume an authority which could safely be trusted to no council or state, and which nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.

But doesn’t this individualism border on selfishness, naked pursuit of self-interest?

AS. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their self-love.

At that point there was nothing left for me to do but thank Messrs Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and Abraham Lincoln for their time. Their views, I thought, have antiquarian value, but no other. One can only shudder to think of the kind of havoc they’d wreak on Western economies if given the chance.

We’re so much better off with Dave and George, especially now that they have Mervyn King on their side. Count your blessings – but please, please don’t count your money. You’d only get depressed.

 

Our illustrious Prime Minister has been espied – and photographed, naturally – in a Bucks pub last Sunday, sitting on a fence and drinking Guinness.

Now that’s a sight for sore eyes. If you ever doubted Dave is ‘a genuine guy’, as described by the pub’s landlord, then you ought to be ashamed of yourself. If you ever regarded Dave as posh just because he’s related to the Queen, this photo opportunity ought to disabuse you of such notions. Bet you thought Dave was the kind of toffee-nosed bloke who drank nothing but Krug and Château Margaux. Well, you thought wrong.

There he was, pint of the black stuff in hand, shirt hanging loose, feet shod in trainers. Not only has Dave preached love for hoodies, he’s but half a step removed from being a hoody himself. Well, perhaps that’s going a bit too far. ‘Genuine guy’ is just right – you know, the kind who leaves the pub and drives home without realising he has left his little daughter behind.

Add to this karaoke, the computer game Fruit Ninja (which, according to a close adviser, he spends ‘a crazy, scary amount of time playing’), and affection for watching Danish TV dramas as his chosen ways of ‘chillaxing’, and there you have it: an eminently electable chap, slightly on the prole side of middle class.

Really, if focus groups show that a suspicion of poshness still lingers, one hesitates to suggest what else Dave could do. Perhaps beating Sam occasionally would be a properly populist thing to do. And then amusing his mates, policy consultants and a couple of hand-picked reporters, who just happen to have dropped by, with this one:

‘What do you tell Sam when she sports two black eyes? Nothing. She’s already been told twice.’

Laughter all around. Never mind the policies, feel the common touch.

And speaking of policies, Dave is as good at sitting on the metaphorical fence as he is at sitting on a literal one down the pub. I can’t tell you how many fences he has sat on in his policies and pronouncements, nor how many about-faces he and his mate George have performed with the agility of Torvill and Dean. Frankly I’ve lost count. And so have all those commentators who raise a hue and cry every time Dave spins a double Axel.

But as an ex-PR man, if a PR man can ever be an ex, Dave knows how to counter accusations of an excessive propensity to emulate weathervanes, or figure skaters if you’d rather. The first thing one learns in that profession is how to turn a negative into a positive. Thus, if a toothpaste tastes foul, that’s because it contains chemicals that are good for your gums. If a car is too slow, that’s because it’s designed for economy and ecology. And when Dave and George toss key policies aside like a wad of used Kleenex, that proves they ‘listen’.

To whom, if one may ask? To you and me? Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met Dave, so he hasn’t had the chance to listen to me. Nor has he listened to millions of others. What he has listened to is focus groups and opinion polls. The ability to do so, and then obey with a dog’s fidelity, is a sine qua non of modern politicians, and they don’t come any more modern than Dave. Why, in the modernity stakes he could give even Tony a good run for his money, and that takes some doing.

I have news for our politicians: their job isn’t to listen. It’s to govern. And the great theoreticians and practitioners of England’s ancient constitution, Edmund Burke prime among them, knew the difference.

Burke’s ‘representatives, not delegates’ was a sublime understanding of our MPs’ true role. Every Englishman must have his interests represented – but not necessarily his wishes. We elect those people because presumably they know our interests and are capable of doing whatever is necessary to uphold them. Government by modern plebiscite or post-modern focus group is a constitutional abomination, and it is a constitution, not democracy, that’s the true antithesis of tyranny.

How things have changed; how the constitution has been abused. Dave isn’t solely or even primarily to blame for that of course. Many pre-war and most post-war governments have done their bit – to a point where the previous paragraph would sound heretical to most politicians and their flock. Their individual intelligence and attainment don’t even matter any longer.

For it’s not they who speak and act, it’s the Zeitgeist. Even if today’s front benches were filled with Burkes (they are, but the word is spelled differently), they wouldn’t be able to change much. Several generations of focus-group politicians have corrupted the public, and the public has retaliated by corrupting them back even more.

In light of all this, perhaps it would be a good idea if Dave and his fellow listeners spent more time down the pub than up in Westminster. They’d govern less that way, which has to mean they’d govern better.

 

  

 

A vague impression is wafting in off British newspaper pages that the Germans have had it with the EU project. Supposedly, they are so exasperated with the less frugal and industrious nations that they are prepared to tell them to shape up or ship out. There’s also a feeling that Angela Merkel is so at odds with her electorate that her position is becoming precarious.

Nothing can be further from the truth, and French papers seem to grasp the issues better, but then of course they have more at stake. Also, the French in general are more likely than the Brits to see the big picture without getting overly bogged down in small-print nitty-gritty.

The big picture has a photographic clarity so rare in modern political art. The purpose of the EU, as far as Germany is concerned, is to put Europe under German management. Political power, not money, is the ultimate prize, just as a gold medal, not money, is the immediate goal of any Olympic athlete. Every such athlete takes it for granted that, once the medal is over his neck, millions in endorsements will follow. But first things first: the original goal is primary, everything else is derivative.

It would be odd if other EU members, even France, felt as positive about the possibility of Germany’s political domination. They don’t. But they desperately need German money to stay afloat, and the money – whatever our papers are saying – is on offer. However, the offer comes with strings attached: by way of interest and finance charge, France is expected to do a Vichy. Déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra, American baseball coach and cracker-barrel philosopher, once said.

This is it in a nutshell, pure and simple. But the language of politics and diplomacy is seldom simple and never pure. And the European dialect of that language would make even Aesop sound too forthright. A translation from European into human is always necessary, and this is a service I’ll try to provide to the best of my modest ability.

Angela, as quoted in Le Figaro: ‘We need more Europe…’ [Since the geographic size of Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, is immutable, this has to mean a more German Europe.] ‘…more budgetary union…’ [A German finance minister ruling the roost.] … ‘and, above all, we need more political union.’ [Like the one between Berlin and Vichy.] ‘We must, step by step, cede power to Europe.’ [Does this mean Germany ceding some of her power to Portugal, or Portugal all of hers to Germany? No translation needed there.]

In his response, Bernard Cazeneuve, France’s Minister for European Affairs, proved he is a fluent speaker of European too. France ‘favours the deepening of European integration. But institutional reform can’t take priority over the urgent need to respond to the crisis…’ [Just give us the dosh, Angie, and never mind your boche megalomania.] ‘Closer long-term integration of European nations will be impossible unless the EU demonstrates its ability to respond to the crisis.’ [It’s cash on the nail, Angie, or the deal’s off.]

‘Eurobonds must make a contribution to overcoming the crisis.’ [Germany must pay for everyone.] ‘The bonds will help catalyse the process of institutional integration.’ [No bonds, no integration.]

And then came the clincher: ‘We continue our discussions of this issue with our German friends and other partners to arrive, by the European summit at the end of June, at a ‘road map’, which is to say a method… of acquiring a clear perspective.’

What can be clearer than this? Pay up or shut up, Angie. If by 28 June your signature, preferably in blood, isn’t on the bottom line, might as well not bother with the summit. Then, and only then, your electorate will really land you dans la merde profonde. They know and you know what Germany really wants. Fine with us, but don’t think for a second you’ll get it for free.

Can’t you just see Angie squirming, ‘What’s this dummkopf on about?’ But deep down she knows exactly what François, the ventriloquist speaking through his dummy, wants. She knows what they all want – they want Germany to pay for what she has always craved: political domination. The method of payment is up to her.

A couple of times in the last hundred years Germany tried to pay for it in the currency of blood, but the price wasn’t right. Now she must pay for it in legal tender, and that just might do the trick. But pay she must, and pay she will. The question is, are we going to chip in?     

 

 

The news of Putin owning a collection of wristwatches worth about £500,000 made a brief splash in the British press. Much joy was found in drawing comparisons between that little treasure and Col. Putin’s official salary of £72,000 a year.

The comparison is spurious: it’s like comparing apples and condominiums. Since Soviet times the worst curse known to Russians has been ‘May you live on your salary only!’ In light of that folk wisdom, half a million quid in Swiss and German timepieces should be weighed not against Putin’s salary but against his reported 4.5% holding in the world’s largest gas producer Gazprom, his 37% of Surgutneftegaz and, by proxy, 50% of Russia’s largest oil trader Guvnor.

Do some quick sums, and Col. Putin’s combined wealth nears £100 billion, comfortably making him the world’s richest man. Suddenly, his timepieces begin to look the way a £10 genuine imitation Swatch would look to you and me.

Commenting on the good colonel’s affection for flaunting his wealth on his wrist, British reporters left out some local colour, a lacuna I shall now try to fill. The Russians, you see, are given to extremes, and this applies to the behaviour of their nouveaux riches. Everywhere people who fall into this category tend to live by the first commandment of poor taste: if you got it, flaunt it. But the Russians outdo Western nouveaux, and Westerners in general, in this character trait, as they do in most others. They swing within a much wider emotional and behavioural amplitude than any Westerners, and any quirk is in them multiplied by 10.

So how would a Russian nouveau flaunt it? He may own any number of gaudy palaces, but he can’t take them with him when shopping in Sloane Street or, for that matter, Red Square. He may have garages filled to the gunwales with Ferraris and Bentleys, but he can’t drive them into a party. How can he then scream at the world that he has just made it?

Women have it easy. They can wrap themselves in sable or lynx, but not so tight as to conceal millions’ worth of jewels hanging off them like baubles off a Christmas tree. Thus no matter where they go, everyone will see they’ve arrived. But what are their poor rich husbands supposed to do?

In the past, rich Russian merchants solved the problem in all sorts of baroque ways. They’d light their cigars with 100-rouble notes (about £3,000 in today’s inflated cash), bust up restaurants and pay 10 times the damage, give a waiter a small fortune for the privilege of smearing his face with mustard, defecate into grand pianos. Some or most of these excesses are still practised by the oligarchic small fry, but the really big fish, and certainly leaders of the world’s second largest nuclear power, have to be a tad more temperate.

Nor can they emulate their women and wear emerald necklaces, diamond tiaras and ruby rings, at least not in public. Now you understand that a £100,000 watch, tastefully half-covered by a cuff with competing, but not clashing, cufflinks of similar value, emerges as the only option.

Half a social step down from Putin you may see such messages of human worth as prison tattoos and two-inch-long fingernails, proving to all interested parties that their proud possessor doesn’t demean himself by physical toil. But that is a matter of style only: in substance, today all of Russian society is widely and deeply criminalised, which affects not just its morality but also its aesthetics.

Yet I can say one thing for Col. Putin: unsavoury he is, but at least he has never taken monastic vows. So if he wishes to amass untold riches and display their tiny particle on his wrist, more power to him – though it’s unclear how he can grab more power, at least not until he has rebuilt the old Soviet Union de jure, not just de facto.

Alas, even some Russians who have taken such vows can’t resist wearing a fortune under their cassock cuffs. Enter Patriarch Kiril, head of the Russian Church, who was recently photographed sporting a £30,000 Breguet at a press conference. Since all Russian senior clergy have to be monks, an outcry followed, and the Patriarch’s PR men came out fighting. They accused everyone who had commented on the timepiece of Russophobia, atheism and lies. The Patriarch, they claimed, had never worn the offensive item – and as proof they showed a doctored version of the same photograph, with no watch anywhere in sight.

Alas, meticulousness not being the dominant Russian virtue, their Photoshop artist overlooked an important detail: the reflection of the watch on the tabletop in front of His Beatitude. The picture became supernatural, as befits a prelate: only the shadow of an object, not the object itself, was in evidence.

The scandal became more virulent, and juicier details came to light. It turned out the monastic gentleman shares his palatial apartment with a woman first identified as his sister, then his cousin, then his distant relation, a progression that was bound to lead to salacious speculation.

Moreover, the Patriarch and his sister-cousin-relation recently filed, and won, a lawsuit against their downstairs neighbour. The chap had had some renovations done to his flat, and the resulting dust allegedly caused $1.7-million worth of damage to the Patriarch’s quarters. The lawsuit raised many questions, but one was particularly pointed: how could a monk who has taken a vow of poverty have amassed so much property that even a small damage to it is estimated in seven digits?

As I drew a distinction between the Patriarch and Col. Putin, it would now be only fair to point out a similarity. Putin’s rank was earned in the KGB, of which Kiril has been a lifelong agent, complete with a codename. That criminal organisation has converged with the criminal underworld to rule Russia in its own image. And power always cries out for its symbols, those communicating unassailable authority. In the past, that function was performed by raspberry-coloured stripes on KGB officers’ epaulettes. Not it’s watches.

So if you bump into an obviously well-heeled Russian at a party, ask him the time. He’ll be only too happy to oblige.

 

 

 

 

 

What’s this foul smell in the air? Must be the alphabet soup of international organisations, all those UNs, EUs, UNESCOs, IMFs, PDQs, SOBs, you name it. Unlike your normal soups, this one has been rancid from the moment it was cooked, and now it’s positively fetid.

If you think there’s nothing wrong with the soup, smell the latest portion of insanity served up by the United Nations’ Human Rights Council. Its quadrennial review welcomes the views of every member on how assiduously other members protect the inviolability of the human person. The assumption is that everyone’s opinion is equally valid, which is nonsensical whatever field you choose as a testing ground. In the area of human rights, it goes well beyond nonsensical and towards severe psychiatric disorder.

Thus Britain has been criticised for her abysmal record by, among others, Russia, Cuba, Belarus, Pakistan and Iran, those universally respected bastions of human rights. As Nazi Germany isn’t about any longer, she couldn’t take part in the review. Otherwise she would have criticised us too.

The Russians, for example, are upset by the excessive force our police use to deal with riots and also by conditions in our prisons, which ‘amount to torture’. I agree. Our policemen, hard as they try, still don’t quite resemble Carmelite nuns, and our prisons, while approaching the standards of sanatoria, still haven’t quite got there.

Yet Aristotle teaches that all knowledge is comparative. Adapting the Greek’s wisdom to the issue at hand, one has to question, however timidly, the Russians’ moral right to open their mouths on human or any other rights. In fact, only my justly famous tact prevents me from suggesting they take the words ‘off’ and ‘sod’ and arrange them in the right order.

For my sins, as if to atone for the accident of birth, I follow the Russian press regularly. So take it from me: honest cops there are far outnumbered by those who dabble in contract killings on the side. Propensity for sadism seems to be a job requirement in Russian law enforcement. Being arrested there for any infraction at all, a traffic violation, public drunkenness and especially taking part in anti-Putin protests, is all one’s life is worth.

People brought to police stations, and not yet charged with any crime, are routinely beaten and tortured within an inch of their lives, and often beyond that point. Sometimes the techniques applied leave the area of classicism and enter that of baroque.

For instance recently cops in Kazan raped a man with a champagne bottle kept at the station specifically for that purpose. Admittedly, if the bottle contained the treacly, well-nigh undrinkable Russian beverage larcenously called champagne, then that’s the only purpose it could have served. Still, the man died of internal injuries, and his murderers got away with a slap on the wrists.

Inmates spending a few months in Russian prisons often come out crippled for life, if they come out at all. And Lyudmila Alexeyeva, she of the Helsinki group, was savagely beaten last year by cops who were a quarter her age (she is in her 80s).

Alexeyeva was lucky she didn’t get killed. Under Putin, journalism, especially if practised in the opposition press, has become a daredevil occupation: at least 40 pundits have been dispatched in variously inventive ways, from drive-by shooting and defenestration to stabbing and nuclear terrorism (remember Litvinenko?). Even journalists who support seemingly innocuous causes, such as opposing the destruction of a forest in north Moscow, are left beaten up and maimed for life.

During the White Ribbon demonstrations in Moscow and elsewhere, police truncheons saw the light of day, with hundreds of demonstrators having their lights knocked out. And unlike our own Tottenham rioters, the victims hadn’t been smashing shop windows or setting cars on fire. They just shouted their humble requests for unrigged elections, which has to be a capital crime in Russia.

Everything that can be said about the Russians’ stand on human rights goes threefold for Belarus, which is independent from Russia in name only. And Cuba’s record is so exemplary that Miami has become a large Cuban city, its population made up of desperados willing to risk their lives only to escape from that paragon of human rights.

And yet, if we continue to practise what Aristotle preached, the Russians’ complaints sound almost legitimate compared to those coming from Iran and Pakistan. Their Halal beef with Britain is our poor record on multiculturalism, so manifestly inferior to their own. I shan’t carry on about their ethnic strife, responsible for thousands of deaths every year. I’ll keep silent on their mutilated and institutionally abused women, on their dissidents dangling off cranes – and I’ll even clam up on their murdered homosexuals.

Suffice it to say that when they have as many churches and synagogues as we have mosques (1,600-odd and counting – a difference of three orders of magnitude compared to the 1960s), then we’ll talk multiculturalism, and Britain’s record thereof. As things are, I’d rather talk about Christians and Jews being murdered in both Pakistan and Iran with monotonous regularity. And, as a secondary topic, I’d like to discuss the definition of cynicism, and how it ought to be reassessed.

Coming up next: Joey Barton’s lecture on good manners, Myra Hindley’s lessons on bringing up children, Dr Shipman’s advice on care for the elderly. We do have a lot to learn from all of these, so watch this space.

Meanwhile, may I suggest that we stop financing all those international talk shops whose sole purpose is to undermine the West? Let them pay for their own deranged harangues. 

 

 

 

 

The good thing about evil dictators of modernity is that they make no secret of their aggressive intentions towards the West. The bad thing is that the West tends not to listen.

Neither Lenin nor Hitler ever bothered with subterfuge. The international socialist Lenin created Komintern, a giant subversive organisation run out of Moscow and explicitly devoted to deliver the world into Soviet concentration camps. Both Lenin and his accomplices, such as Trotsky and Bukharin, openly talked and wrote about world revolution as their desideratum, effectively declaring war on the West. The West’s reaction? Massive financial and technological support of the Bolshevik regime, eventually enabling Stalin to build a formidable military machine. That juggernaut was only a few weeks away from rolling over Europe, when Hitler’s pre-emptive attack pushed it back. When the machine was cranked up again, it could only gobble up half of Europe, something that upset Stalin no end.

Nor did the national socialist Hitler conceal his murderous plans, as any reader of Mein Kampf will confirm. The West’s reaction? Massive support of the Nazi regime, first ignoring its threat and then failing to deal with it early enough, say after the militarisation of the Rheinland, when Hitler could have been stopped dead at relatively little cost. The results of the Western tendency towards appeasement are well known. But the lessons of it aren’t well learned.

In strategic terms, the Putin regime today is roughly where Nazi Germany was in 1936 – at the accelerated stage of a rearmament programme. In addition to physical weapons, this includes metaphysical ones: propaganda aimed at creating the right frame of mind both in the country and its potential adversaries, in this instance NATO. Weapons are the domain of the Defence Ministry; propaganda is mostly the responsibility of the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service), formerly known as the KGB First Directorate charged with dealing with the West.

Both have spoken in the last few months, in a forthright manner that distinguishes those who know their cause is just. The propaganda bit came in a 32-minute video clip put together by the Russian Institute for Strategic Research (known as RISI in Russian or RISS in English) and shown on Russian television on 13 March, 2012. The RISI, whatever its official status, is an SVR think tank, and it’s run by Gen. Leonid Reshetnikov, until 2006 head of the SVR Analysis Department. In those days his name was different, but then what’s in a name? He is still doing the same job, with a few added responsibilities.

For those of you who understand Russian, I do suggest you watch this bit of shrill war propaganda (http://www.riss.ru/vystuplenija_v_smi/?newsId=563). Others will have to rely on my digest of it, and I’ll stick close to the text, adding a few parenthetic remarks of my own.

The gist is that the West has always tried to destroy Russia because it was terrified by her growing might. It was the West, specifically America, that engineered the 1917 February Revolution that put an end to the monarchy. It was a dastardly Wall Street abetted by Britain that, using the German General Staff as a clearance house, financed the subsequent Bolshevik takeover.

It was the West that falsely accused the Soviets of unprecedented atrocities when its own record, specifically during the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, was no better. In the interests of scholarly integrity the clip doesn’t hold the United States directly responsible for those outrages, rather implying that all Western countries are tarred with the same historical brush, and have been since the Middle Ages.

[Just to keep the record straight, the Inquisition carried out about 30,000 death sentences in the 400 years it was in business. The Soviets murdered over 60 million of their own citizens between 1917 and 1987 (Source: Prof. RJ Rummel’s book Lethal Politics, 1990). Both figures are reprehensible, but the latter is 2,000 times more so, if my arithmetic serves.]

When the Soviet Union grew too strong for America’s comfort, explains the clip, she bribed Gorbachev, Yeltsyn, liberals, democrats, liberal democrats, oligarchs, emphatically including Boris Berezovsky, and other traitors into destroying the country and breaking it up into 15 feeble fragments. It then bribed them further into putting in place liberal reforms that brought Russia to her knees, fostering starvation, unemployment, homelessness, stray children and civil conflicts responsible for killing up to 600,000 people. [‘Up to’ are fraught words, covering in this instance the range from one to 600,000, but then the Russians’ actuarial techniques are notoriously vague when it comes to human lives.]

Now the West is worried by Russia’s growing strength under her great national leader Putin, and it’s trying to undermine her as best it can. Specifically, it finances and organises all those White Ribbon demonstrations against Putin, as proved by video sequences showing opposition leaders walking in the general direction of the US Embassy. [If it’s true that the Embassy can organise rallies involving hundreds of thousands, then my hat’s off to it. But, considering its rather limited resources and a long history of incompetence in such matters, perhaps the metaphorical hat should remain perched on my head.]

The West, according to the RISI, would dearly love to bomb Russia into docility or, preferably, the Middle Ages. Direct proof for such intentions isn’t offered, while the indirect variety supposedly comes from NATO’s action in Iraq, Serbia and Lybia, where not only poor Saddam, Milosevich and Col. Gaddafi but even the Colonel’s little grandchildren were brutally murdered. [Contextually, by the Americans and, by association, Russian liberals.] Russia’s friends Chavez and Assad are also under mortal threat. Yet the West can’t bomb Russia, considering her growing military muscle under Putin.

The video then reels off a few numbers, such as Russia’s GDP that under Putin has grown 10-fold [a parallel increase in world prices of hydrocarbons, Russia’s chief export, isn’t mentioned] and her military expenditure that has been increased by a similar proportion. The latter achievement is then illustrated by sequences, showing missile launches, and a few pieces of hard data. Apparently, Putin’s army is about to receive 60 new AA systems, 90 new types of warplanes and uncountable new missile systems, including those with a range of 5,500 km and those armed with 15 MIRVs.

The whole tone of the film is indistinguishable from Stalin’s, Khrushchev’s or Brezhnev’s war propaganda, and the nice xenophobic touches create just the right atmosphere. The Russians are implicitly told to be wary of the West and, above all, to support the Putin regime that won’t let the West get away with its sharp practices and murderous intentions.

By contrast, the report of Russia’s Defence Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov to Putin, published on the government’s official website, is delivered in the dry, informative language of battleground briefing (http://premier.gov.ru/eng/events/news/18490/). Stab points aren’t used to formulate the tasks for Mr Serdyukov’s ministry, but they are implied. Here they are some of them, verbatim, and they do add credibility to the RISI video:

• Massive and comprehensive modernisation of the Armed Forces. The state programme of modernisation until 2020 contains the relevant plans and by January 2021 we will prepare plans for the following modernisation programmes:

• The development of weapons based on new physical principles: radiation, geophysical, wave, genetic, psychophysical, etc. [Most of these are internationally banned, but since when is that a problem?]

• The implementation of the state armament programme for 2011-2020.

• Ensuring dynamic development of military education, fundamental military science and applied research programmes. We have plans from 2012 until 2015; we will update them and prepare for approval.

• Restoration of the former competences of military institutions and their integration with the evolving system of military education. [In other words, achieving the total militarisation of society that characterised Soviet years.]

• The integration of military research and civilian science. We are planning to prepare the programme within this year, and as of January 1, 2016, similar decisions are to be taken for the next period. [In other words, militarising science and most economy, as they were in the Soviet past.

• The strengthening of the integrated aerospace defence system of the Russian Federation. [That was called Star Wars when the Americans were developing it.] The plan of building the Armed Forces until 2015 has already been approved. By January 2016 we will prepare a similar plan for the development of the aerospace defence for the following five years.

• Revival of the oceanic Navy, especially in the North and the Far East. We will prepare the plan during this year for the period starting in 2016, and the plan until 2015 has already been approved. [Strategic Navy is hard to describe as a purely defensive service, but that’s where the RISI comes in.]

Both the impassioned video and the deadpan Serdyukov report scare me. Do they scare you? If not, perhaps they should, especially considering that, though both are in the public domain, neither has been as much as mentioned in the Western press.