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!”

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02 Aug

Well, well Welby

There are varieties of fatuity – and then we come to Archbishop Justin Welby.

Yet again this week he offered to the nation the benefit of his boundless wisdom and called for a cross-party commission to negotiate Britain’s departure from the European Union. He said major decisions should be “taken off the political table.”

Even someone with less perspicuity than Welby – always supposing such a person could be found outside Bishopthorpe Palace – would understand that Brexit and the whole business of Britain’s negotiations with the EU are political  issues and so it is nonsense to suggest that they be removed from the political realm.

We might as well suggest that when Welby sits down with his fellow bishops to discuss, say, a fresh translation of The Athanasian Creed, the matter should be “taken off the theological table.”

Besides, when Welby wades in as he has with his dazzling moral superiority on full beam, you would think that even he would understand that such an intervention is itself a political act. Thus incoherently he uses a political statement to declare that the matter should not be political.

The Archbishop’s first language is gibberish

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “Can the politicians not put at the front of their minds the needs of the United Kingdom to come out with a functional, working system for Brexit, and agree that certain things are, as it were, off the political table and will be decided separately in an expert commission, or commission of senior politicians led by someone that (sic) is trusted in the political world?”

Welby would benefit from reading the well-known primer for infants and juniors Janet and John Look at Polity. For the decision to leave the EU was a political choice made by the British electorate. What we did in the referendum of 2016 was to express our will and then hand the matter over to the politicians whose job it is to work out the details

He wants “an expert commission” or “a commission of senior politicians led by someone that (sic again) is trusted in the political world.”

Does such a paragon exist?

What he really wants is a nanny – someone who knows best.

I wonder that Welby hasn’t noticed that Brexit is a divisive issue and a sizeable minority of the electorate voted against it. Any “expert commission” would of course itself be contentious from its appointment, with one side claiming it to be independent and the other side accusing it of bias

Crying for nanny is of course a characteristic of the infantile mind.

Like weak men everywhere, Welby has a craving for authority, for someone to tell him what to think and what to do. Plato would have provided him with such figures. Plato called them Guardians which the Latin philosophers translated as Custodes.

And they immediately asked the question, Quis custodiet ipsos Custodes?

Who Will Guard the Guardians?

Round of applause, please everyone. Let’s hear it for the Archbishop of Cant.

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04 May

The game’s up for the Fourth Reich

Here is part of a SKY News report:

“Senior EU figures are expected to react later to Theresa May’s combative speech in which she accused some in Brussels of ‘not wanting Britain to prosper.’ Launching the Conservative Party’s general election campaign after the dissolution of Parliament, she suggested leaks and threats had been ‘deliberately timed to affect the result of the general election’.”

Allow me to translate this journalese for you ,please, into something that resembles the way we speak in the street:

“The unelected EU Commissioners and others in their gang of apparatchiks and bureaucrats are in a state of panic and emotional shock because it has dawned at last on their sluggish collectivist minds that Britain is determined to leave their corrupt and disastrously inefficient and destructive political project. They will use every dirty trick they can think of, every lie they can invent and every false statistic they can manufacture to prevent our exit from the EU. Deceit and deception are the only ways of working known to them. Like the devil himself, these vile, self-promoting Eurocrats  have constructed an empire of lies. So we should not be surprised when we notice their meddling in our elections with the intention of perverting the results – as they pervert everything else they touch.”

But why are the leaders of the EU in such a flap about Brexit?

Because Britain is a massive contributor to the EU budget and our leaving might be enough by itself to bring about the collapse of their whole rotten project.

Because when other European nations see the success of Britain’s Brexit policy, they will be emboldened to leave too. Already there is strong support for Leave in a number of EU member states.

Because the people of Europe have come to see that the EU is not the benign keeper of the peace and bountiful distributor of funds which it pretends to be.  By obliging all member states to adopt the Deutschmark – that is the Euro by any other name – EU economic policy is run by the Germans and for the Germans, with the deliberate result that the non-industrial nations of southern Europe are impoverished to keep the Germans in the prosperity to which they have been accustomed ever since the USA pumped billions into their country’s restoration after the collapse of the Third Reich.

As the direct result of EU economic policy, the people of Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal have been made poor. Youth unemployment in these countries varies between 25% and 50%, a disaster producing a lost generation

Britain’s determination to make a success of Brexit is stirring these impoverished peoples and teaching them that they do not need to continue for ever as vassal provinces of Frau Merkel’s Fourth Reich .

That was a good speech yesterday, prime minister. Now don’t go all wobbly on us!

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06 Apr

Leave means Remain

Here’s a little quiz for you…

When is a Brexit not a Brexit?

Answer: when it’s Theresa May’s Brexit.

What does that mean?

It means that we shall have the appearance of Brexit while in reality all our ties to the EU will remain in place.

To quote John McEnroe, “You cain’t be serious!”

Oh yes, I’m being very serious.

Give us some examples of what you mean, then.

Easy. Already Britain is in the process of translating all the myriad EU laws and regulations which bind us into British laws and regulations where they will still bind us.

Anything else?

Yes, Mrs May says that free movement of populations – that the EU Shengen Agreement or, in a word immigration – will stay in place even after we’ve left.

She can’t say that!

She can and she did – yesterday. Here’s what she said about our continued accommodation to the EU:

“Once we’ve got the deal … it will be necessary for there to be a period of time when businesses and governments are adjusting systems and so forth,”

Well, there’s bound to be a period of transition.

And it will last forever.

This is dreadful – but she’ll never get away with it. Parliament will hold her to account to aim for a genuine Brexit.

But Mrs May will get around that. Indeed she did so yesterday by making her remarks about free movement when parliament is in recess and while she was out of the country.

But she promised “Brexit means Brexit”

And so it does. And “soap” means “soap.” But there’s soft soap and there’s hard soap. Mrs May’s line is in soft soap. And she has always been a Remainer, remember.  What we shall end up with is the word “Brexit” but not the substance of Brexit. May will say, “Brexit changes everything” – which, being translated, means “Everything will stay the same.”

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03 Apr

Confessions of a Europhile

It’s time I came clean and owned up: I am a Europhile.

But, before all my fellow Brexiteers disown me, I must make clear that the Europe I love and daily thank God for has nothing to do with that monstrous tyranny in Brussels. I hate and despise the EU: its unelected Commissioners; its extortionate fraud called the customs union which sets British taxes and disbars us from trading freely with the rest of the world; its manifest corruption demonstrated by its refusal to publish audited accounts for two decades; its doctrine of universal rights derived from the blood-soaked philosophy which guided the French Revolution; its thorough atheism by which it has banished Christianity from the public realm; its relentless invention of new business taxes and regulations which stifle Britain’s economic prosperity and which have produced catastrophic unemployment among the young throughout the continent, impoverished Italy, Spain and Portugal and brought Greece to the edge of economic collapse and social disaster. Most of all I despise the EU for its suicidal immigration policy which is importing millions of members of an alien and vicious ideology  – people who have repeatedly declared their contempt for the West – to live among us and so transform our continent until it comes to resemble the s*** heaps from which these hordes are glad to escape.

I fail entirely to understand the minds of the Remainers who regard this tyrannous servitude, this blatantly repressive regime, as freedom and as a paragon of the liberal values.

Have I made myself clear? Good – then I will tell you of that Europe which I love and for which I daily give thanks.

It is the Europe which, in the early Middle Ages, began to fashion the modern world: the monks, their monasteries, their agriculture and their learning; the common Latin language and the universities as the bedrock of scholarship; logic, philosophy; men such as Anselm, Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Francis Bacon.

Then there are the sublime creations of European literature, music , art and sculpture: The Divine Comedy; the paintings of Giotto; Gregorian plainchant; the invention of polyphony which produced the classical musical tradition; Tallis, Byrd, Purcell, Bach, Haydn, Schubert, Mozart and Beethoven; the public schools; hospitals and hospices; the trades guilds and the livery companies; the Gothic and the Romanesque, a cathedral in every city and a parish church in every village; the practical virtue of charity; Europe’s scientists, mathematicians, astronomers and medical doctors who have enriched our understanding and our wellbeing.

All these blessings and wonders – and many more besides – were and are the creation of the Europe I confess I love.

I confess, but I do not apologise

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03 Dec

The Richmond Park Slaughter

O joy, joy and more joy! Here’s a treat rarer than any blue moon: A radio interviewer with brains, articulate and sharp enough to ask the killer follow-up question to any politician’s fumbled reply. They can’t do this on The Today Programme. But is it perhaps not can’t but won’t for fear that such an intelligent approach might pierce the fog of cliche in which the BBC usually manages to conceal its modus operandi of obfuscation and prejudice?

Sarah Olney, the newly-elected MP for Richmond Park, came on TalkRadio to be interviewed by the very sharp Julia Hartley-Brewer. Julia was noteworthy among radio journalists for her ability to think sequentially and to speak in sentences. From the very beginning, she was on top of her game – which is more than you could say for the flaky Ms Olney.

She began, “When are you going to hold the second bye-election?”

The flummoxed Olney stayed flummoxed.

“I mean, you want a rerun of the referendum on our membership of the EU. That was won by the Leave campaigners with a bigger majority than you got.”

Waffle punctuated by squirming silence.

“Fewer than 50% of the Richmond electorate voted for you. Leave got 54%. But you want a second referendum. Why not a rerun of this bye-election?”

“There wasn’t a clear result to the referendum.”

“Yes there was!”

A very long silence.

“If you can’t answer a few simple questions, people might wonder if you’re up to the job of being their MP.”

An even longer silence.

Enter Olney’s spin-doctor:

“We have to go.”

“No you don’t!”

“Sarah has another interview to do.”

“But how can she? This time was booked with us”

Exit Ms Olney, pursued by her quavering minder. Leaving Julia to speak the closing soliloquy:

“She doesn’t feel she’s up to these questions – which is a bit of a shame, isn’t it?”

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