September 2017 – All Things Considered

30 Sep

Your supper is in the dustbin

It’s countdown to Corbyn. We shall not be kept waiting for long before we find ourselves living – if “living” is the right word here – under the most extreme left wing government Britain has ever seen. Corbyn’s plans make Michael Foot’s 1983 manifesto – called at the time “the longest suicide note in history” – read like a discussion paper produced by The Monday Club.

The Corbynistas are preaching “Socialism for the 21st century” – an oxymoron to rival “Valve radios for the digital age.”

There will be wholesale nationalisation, massive borrowing and spending, the abolition of all pay restraint and an expanded benefits system. Give Corbyn credit for one thing: he is a true prophet. He rightly predicts that his policies will lead to a run on the pound and a financial crisis.

What he does not foresee is that in this crisis investment will plummet as financiers put their money where it is likely to secure a return: they will not toss it into the stagnant and bottomless pit of Corbyn’s socialism. No investment means no real jobs but only a hugely-expanded and unproductive public sector paid for out of even more borrowing. All that borrowed money sloshing around will lead to high – and eventually hyper – inflation. Millions will be unemployed. People’s savings will be rendered worthless. Thus Corbyn’s foolish and wicked policies will most hurt those he claims to champion: the least well off throughout the country.

But this horrible dystopian nightmare won’t really come to pass, will it? The Tories under Theresa May will get their act together and mount a vigorous defence of capitalism and the free market.

Oh yes, and Ben Stokes will win The Polite Society’s Award for Gentlemanly Conduct.

Mrs May will not outline the virtues of capitalism and the free market – because she believes in neither. If she did, she would cut taxes and abolish strangulating business regulations. Instead since that terrible day she became prime minister, she has declared she is determined that the government will make even greater interventions in boardrooms, the minimum wage will be regularly increased and the cap on public sector pay will be scrapped.

Observing Corbyn’s army of snowflakes – all those innocent young people to whom he is promising the earth – May is promising today “to create a fairer society for the young.” But she can’t bribe them with a pint when Corbyn is offering them a firkin.

Why can’t she see that stealing the left’s political clothes will leave her dangerously undressed?

During last June’s election campaign a commentator remarked, only partly jesting, that Theresa May had “…adopted Ed Miliband’’s manifesto and moved it to the left.”

Is there any support for capitalism and the free market in today’s Conservative party? No, there is about as much capitalism among the Tories as logic in the editorial department of the Daily Telegraph.

Yesterday that newspaper shouted, “May must outline her capitalist policies.”

She doesn’t have any.

Followed by this ripe piece of idiocy: “The intellectual case for capitalism is easy to make. What of the moral one?”

But the intellectual case includes the moral case – otherwise there is nothing intelligent about it.

And if you think the Telegraph couldn’t get even stupider, how about this: “May’s vision is of a free market combined with sensible regulation.”

But if it’s regulated, it’s not free.

I’m probably not such a good prophet as Jeremy Corbyn, that great admirer of Chavez, Maduro and the state of Venezuela where there’s no food in the shops and people are stealing zoo animals to provide their next meal. But let me try my hand at prophecy nonetheless:

The days are coming when a wife shall leave a note for her husband saying: “Darling – I’ve gone to the Labour rally. Scavenge for your supper in the dustbin.”

28 Sep

There used to be a C. of E.

When I fancy a bit of excitement, which even at my ripe age I’m pleased to say is every day, I turn to the Church of England’s official website. Of course, the C. of E. being a dynamic, thrusting and very much up with the latest outfit, this is not called anything so dreary as Official Website: no, it’s called Top News Releases from the Church of England. This is the site which always sets my pulse racing. Take this morning for example. Today’s Top News Release simmers sexily for two or three pages, but I have space for only the scintillating opening sentence:

“New research by the Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI) on the cement and steel sectors shows that few of the largest companies in these sectors are well prepared for the transition to a low-carbon economy.”

Transition Pathway Initiative (TPI)? Now what does that remind me of? Why, of course, the Liverpool Care Pathway – the radical end of life treatment which denied sips of water to the dying. Happily, the LCP is now a thing of the past. One might hope a similar fate awaits the TPI

But really what most puzzles me is what the hell “the cement and steel sectors” of our industrial economy have to do with the C. of E. – and that they should have so much to do with the C. of E. that the mention of them is first item on its website?

Think what might have appeared there instead: “Justin Welby urges people to repent of their sins.” No chance.

“Bishop blesses a bankers’ conference.” Are you kidding!”

But I do the church a disservice. The church still does think that sin and repentance are important, but in its new teaching there are only corporate sins. We don’t hear sermons on the wickedness of adultery, keeping the Sabbath day holy or the great wrong of coveting your neighbour’s new Jag.

But actually, the moral agent is the individual and acts of virtue or vice are products of the individual will. But for the modern C. of E. the individual has dropped out of its agenda altogether: it’s too reminiscent of Thatcherism and all that nastiness.

The C.of E. used to be known as the Tory party at prayer. Now it’s the Corbynistas on the picket line.

Sins are now only the politically incorrect acts of corporations – such as the corporations’ dealing in steel and cement. Good heavens – “They are not well-prepared for the transition to a low carbon economy”! That must score more on the Richter Sin Scale than sleeping with my neighbour’s wife.

The competence of the church to advise the steel and cement sectors must be in some doubt. Indeed the competence of the church in any area of management and administration is clearly in doubt. For example, the archbishops and bishops preside over an institution which has lost half its membership since the year 2000.

It is an institution whose leaders have so squandered its considerable assets that there is no money left…who sold off the old vicarages at the bottom of the property market…and its parish churches are closing almost as fast as the pubs

What to do in such a crisis? The bishops’ answer is displacement activity: think about something else. Their policy amounts to, “We can’t run our own affairs, so let us run someone else’s.”

It reminds me of when a previous Archbishop of Canterbury asked the prime minister if the church could mediate in the national coal strike. Stanley Baldwin replied, “Yes, if you’ll let the National Union of Mineworkers rewrite the Athansasian Creed.”

25 Sep

We will fight them with our floral tributes

As a result of last Sunday’s elections, the AFD, the third largest party in Germany, has declared that Muslims are not welcome in that country. Meanwhile in Holland, the second largest party has said the same. Even the most cursory examination of social trends in the European nations helps explain this antipathy.

Brussels has become the jihadist capital of Europe, a city where more than half of the continent’s terrorist atrocities are planned and co-ordinated. It contains the highest per capita number of fighters in Europe. The Molenbeck suburb is a no go area, a ghetto, with twenty-two mosques. 6% of the population of Belgium as a whole are Muslim.

Malmo in Sweden is a hell-hole of violent crime organised and perpetrated by Muslim immigrants. In this formerly eirenic and ultra-tolerant country there are now so many sex crimes that it has been described as the rape capital of the world – worse even than South Africa

Hungary’s prime minster has stated, “We don’t want any more Muslims here.” There are now two razor wire fences to keep them out. Foreign minister Peter Szijarto says the fences have been built as a defence “against migration pressure.”

The rule of political correctness is absolute in Germany where Andre Schulz, head of the criminal police association complains, “Only 10% of rapes and other sex crimes are reported.”And the police have asked the media not to show photographs of suspects for fear that this would reveal them as Muslims. In the first nine months of 2016 – the latest period for which figures are available – there were 2790 sex offences – that’s about ten each day.

Italy is suffering more than most countries as it is the arrival point of choice for African immigrants – 59,000 of them this year so far.

In Spain the immigration numbers are three times what they were last year and there is widespread violence as the incomers attempt to storm the barriers erected to keep them out .

According to an American journalist working in Greece, “It is as though the population has simply been replaced by Muslims and the country’s institutions by those of Islam.”

I wonder, in the light of these catastrophic events, will there ever come a tipping point when Europeans say to hell with political correctness and accusations of “Islamophobia”: enough is enough?

Allow me a personal anecdote. On 9/11 I was at a conference in Oxford. After the attacks on New York and Washington, I returned quickly to my family and to the church where I was rector in the City of London. On the crowded train, travellers were sombre and subdued. I noticed the Daily Telegraph’s front page headline AMERICA AT WAR. i was moved with a sensation very far from happiness but something like the first stirrings of a sense of relief. I said, almost aloud to myself, “Well at least these attacks mean the end of political correctness. Now at last the West will wake up.”

But we didn’t. If the deaths of 3000 innocent people going about their daily business would not provoke us to take decisive action, whatever in the world would?

Nothing apparently. Not 9/11 and not the hundreds of Islamic terrorist attacks perpetrated in the intervening sixteen years in London, Paris, Manchester, Boston, Nice and in so many other towns and cities.

After each attack, our inertia follows a familiar pattern. First, a blaze of exciting scenes on TV – the media love it, because it gives them a real story above the dull round of politics. Then comes the prime ministerial or presidential fatuous declaration: “They will never divide us and never defeat us.” But the prime minister/president hasn’t noticed that they have already divided us and defeated us. Then follow the mawkish Dianafication scenes with wayside shrines, teddy bears galore and carpets of flowers. (Islamic terrorism does wonders for the florists’ trade)

What we are suffering today is a violent Islamic insurgency – the fourth, at least, since Charles Martel defeated the Muslims at Tours in 732 and thereby saved Europe from conquest. Incursions continued on and off throughout the Middle Ages. There was the siege of Malta in 1565, the Battle of Lepanto in 1572 and the relief of the encirclement of Vienna by Jan Sobieski in 1683.

All these victories were achieved by Christian armies under the command of Christian princes and blessed by bishops and popes. But now Europe has abandoned Christianity and therefor lest its soul. We no longer hold to the values which created Europe and sustained it for almost 2000 years as the greatest civilisation and cultural efflorescence the world has ever seen.#. When a civilisation loses its self-belief, no power on earth can save it.

Unless of course you think the jihadist’s axe and his bomb and his Islamovan will be seen off by Equality, Diversity, Multiculturalism and a population of transgendered snowflakes.

24 Sep

Who were those far right national socialists?

After today’s elections it seems likely that the Alternative for Germany party will hold seats in the country’s parliament. The BBC and all our newspapers are appalled. First item on the news this morning the presenter said, “This will be the first time members of the far right have achieved significant political representation since the days of Hitler’s Nazis.”

I can find only one thing wrong with that statement: the Nazis were not a party of the far right, or indeed of any sort of right

They were called The German Workers National Socialist Party. And the name was appropriate.

It is often argued that the Nazis were not socialists because they left industry and commerce – the means of production and distribution – in the hands of private companies. But this facade concealed the truth that the bosses of these companies were merely functionaries, managers who obeyed the orders of the actual owner which was the Nazi government.

The socialist policy of the Nazis was enforced three years into their rule when, in 1936 the government introduced controls over prices and wages. These controls inevitably lead to shortages, because they abolished the flexible system of supply and demand.

The response of a socialist government to shortages is rationing. This is made easier when the socialist government is also totalitarian and brooks no opposition.

Hitler’s totalitarian socialist regime didn’t stop at the regulation of wages and prices: it decided what goods should be produced, in what quantities and how these goods should be allocated and distributed. The thorough bureaucracy required to do this produces stagnation and economic chaos.

Figuratively speaking, in a National Socialist brewery, there wouldn’t be enough beer to organise the proverbial piss up.

Shortages produce endless queues for whatever goods might become available.

They also produce a flourishing black market. The government must clamp down very heavily on this and ensure harsh punishments for those convicted. This requires a huge network of informers which makes daily life hell on earth for the people who are forever in the most fearful doubt over who might be an informer – often one’s own friends or even family.

Convicted black marketeers were not tried by normal juries, because ordinary citizens sitting on a jury would never hand out the stiff sentences which the government required – for a trivial offence such as selling a pound of meat illegally. So judgement and sentencing were carried out by government-appointed administrative tribunals.

The last state of that polity which began with price and wage control was a regime which exercised total control and its instrument was the secret police, the Gestapo.

Welcome to the full-blown reign of terror. And it was a Socialist reign of terror as thorough as anything instituted by Joseph Stalin.

23 Sep

Bye bye Brexit, bye bye

That’s it then. It’s all over, folks. We are going to leave the EU, but “leave” will effectually mean “stay.”

Theresa May has already amply earned from me the epithets “spectacularly incompetent” and “sublimely inept.” To these we can now add “traitorous .”

In her last Friday’s Florence Speech, the prime minister gave away the household silver – £20million worth – when she promised to pay that sum to the EU and insisted that Britain will honour its budget commitments for two years after we have left. She will also guarantee continued free movement of EU nationals. And we shall remain bound by the rulings of the European Court of Justice.

So you see what I mean when I say “leave” will mean “stay”?

Nigel Farage has described May’s surrender as , “A big win for the political class but two fingers up to the British electorate.”

What smiles must be spreading across the creepy visages of Tony Blair, Ken Clarke, Vince Cable and the noxious Jeremy Corbyn this morning!

On the matter of May’s support for the continuing sovereignty over us of the ECJ, Jacob Rees-Mogg has just said that getting rid of that Court’s authority is for us “an absolute red line.” He has also criticised the Prime minister for “promising to give money to the EU ahead of the negotiations.”

To make matters worse, May says the transition period will be “around” two years.

In other words, it will last forever.

Over the last two years I have written many articles outlining May’s incompetence, arrogance and general unfitness for high office. She was a disaster as the longest-serving home secretary since 1945. Among her incompetences was her failure for years to do anything about the wholesale rape of underage white girls by Muslims in a score of our towns and cities. (This is still going on, by the way). She did nothing to prevent the infiltration of Birmingham schools by jihadists. Charged with getting immigration down to “the tens of thousands,” she actually oversaw a vast increase in immigration during her period of office. When challenged about this, she replied, “My hands are tied because of the Schengen arrangements which guarantee free movement of populations..”

Then she voted Remain! How’s that for joined up thinking?

In the light of her record at the home office, what would be the best thing to do with a woman such as this? Relegation to a clerking job in the back office more suitable to her level of intelligence? The sack with the provision that she must never again be put in a position of responsibility? A spell in remedial psychotherapy?

None of the above. Her colleagues in the Conservative party decided instead to make her prime minister where her notorious incompetence meant she couldn’t even see off a twerp like Corbyn – and that after 192 members of Corbyn’s own party had signed a vote of no confidence in him.

Today the papers are accepting Corbyn’s self-assessment that he is “the political mainstream now.” The papers are right.

Thanks to Mrs May it is very likely that we shall shortly be ruled by a left wing government more extreme than anything seen in this country before. Think Venezuela.

Let me remind you that more people voted Leave than have ever voted for anything in Britain. Yet we shall, in all but name, still be a member of the wretched EU five years after that referendum.

What more is there to be said?

Private Frazer in Dad’s Army got it right: “We’re all doomed!”

22 Sep

Spare a thought for the BBC

I sympathise with the writers and performers of W1A, the BBC comedy drama which has just begun its third series. W1A is advertised as a satire on the BBC itself

This is an impossibility, for the BBC is beyond satire. How would you go about satirising a Corporation…

Whose economics and political presenters constantly bash the bankers and other fat cats but then pay some of the trashiest of their own staff hundreds of thousands of pounds?

Whose charter obliges it to “inform and educate” but which bans all discussion – a necessary part of informing and educating – of important subjects such as climate change?

Which is charged to be impartial but which blatantly and relentlessly takes sides on key issues – for example, its editors’ and presenters’ opposition to Brexit? (It was a BBC man himself who, on the morning after the referendum result, said he couldn’t find a single member of staff in Broadcasting House or the Television Centre in favour of Leave).

Which earns £billions from the worldwide commercial sales of its programmes and yet demands a massive annual subsidy through the universal tax misleadingly described as a “licence”?

Which announced the channel BBC Four with the slogan “a place to think” – and yet fills every Friday evening/night with six hours of rock music?

Which is staffed by illiterate presenters who say such as “I’m sat…I’m stood”; “Deteriate”; “Mitigate against”; “refute” (for “repudiate”) etc ad nauseam.

Whose same presenters are emotionally incontinent and whose standard question is about feeling – for instance, “How did you feel when your mother died in that house fire?”

Besides, why is the BBC presenting yet another satirical show, W1A, when it already broadcasts so many other programmes which can only be described as satires, such as Strictly Come Dancing; Mrs Brown’s Boys; Woman’s Hour; Songs of Praise; Celebrity Money for Nothing; The Andrew Marr Show; The Today Programme and anything fronted by Lucy Worsley?

09 Sep

Preposterous and shameful

“Chief Constable defends his decision to take evidence which helped to convict a paedophile gang from a man convicted of raping children.”

That was the newspaper headline. But Chief Constable Steve Ashman should not be required to defend his actions

Northumbria Police’s decision to pay the unnamed convict almost £10,000 came to light when details of the case were revealed last month.

The seventeen rapists were sentenced for their crime of recruiting mainly underage girls, giving them drugs and then persuading or forcing them into sex, Steve Ashman described the “outpouring of public support” for his force’s decisions.

Mr Ashman said: “When reflecting upon the morality of the decision, I think it’s important to take account of public opinion. If the moral compass was spinning when it was first made public a few weeks ago, when the verdicts were handed out, it’s absolutely fixed now in our favour. If I had any doubt, and I didn’t personally, but if I had any doubt whether it was the right thing to do, then I’m absolutely determined now that it was right.”

Of course it was right. The only consideration in this matter is not the pedigree of the witness but that of whether his evidence was reliable: in a word, whether it could be certified that what he told the police was the truth. It was. And without it the seventeen men and one woman who constituted that gang of child molesters would still be at large. The fact that these wicked people are now behind bars is a tribute to Steve Ashman’s courage and a cause for small rejoicings.

Regrettably, mind you, only for small rejoicings.

The conviction in Northumbria was a rare event. For the systematic rape and sexual abuse has been going on for decades in a score of British towns and cities. The perpetrators get away with it because they are all Muslims and they operate in ghettoes into which the police rarely venture. If they do so venture and make accusations, the cry goes up, “Islamophobia!” And the police, fearful they will be charged with “racism” and lose their livelihood, back off.

If these rapists were white men, they would be behind bars before you could say “Allahu Akbar – drug that girl!”

The most shocking aspect of this sordid affair is that, in all those towns and cities, the systematic rapes are still happening and the perpetrators remain free to do as they like.

There was one word missing from that newspaper report I read this morning. The word is “Muslim.” It is the correct word. For all the rapists were Muslims. There was not a Methodist among them, nor a Seventh Day Adventist, nor a Guardian-reading freethinker. The rapists’ defining characteristic is their adherence to Islam.

Two different systems of criminal justice are operating in this country today: one for Muslims and the other for indigenous whites. This is shameful and utterly preposterous. And the matter is further compounded by the fact that hardly anyone dares mention the fact.

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Monthly Archives: September 2017