politics – Page 3 – All Things Considered

06 Nov

Taxation: Institutionalised Theft Disguised as a Virtue

Anything to have a go at the Queen.

Her Majesty is accused of being among those who invest some of their money in countries and institutions where tax rates are lower.

The word used all over the press is precisely that one “accused.” But accusations are only in respect of actions deemed to be wrong. The Queen and others who seek to avoid tax have done nothing wrong: they are merely acting prudently.

Tax evasion is a crime but tax avoidance is not.

Naturally, all lefties, Guardianistas and the BBC endemic are appalled that people should – though it be within the law – decide to pay as little tax as possible. For example Dame Margaret Hodge adorned The Today Programme this morning with her efflorescent platitudes and excoriated all tax-avoiders. She said, “We have a social contract in which we all come together and, according to our means, contribute to the common pot.”

No we don’t. If that is anyone’s idea of how politics and economics works, then it’s bunkum. The whole notion of the social contract from Rousseau to John Rawls is the mythological framework, masquerading as moral rectitude, by which governments persuade, coerce and bully the people into paying…paying for what? For the government, of course. And for the institutionalised profligacy which spends our money on things we don’t want.

The government doesn’t know best. We know best how to spend our own money.

For example, I’m not at all happy that the government should use my money to provide, free of charge, homosexuals with prophylactic pills which enable them to go forth and fornicate profusely without the danger of catching AIDs

Among the other wastages I resent paying for is the state education system which is so dysfunctional that it should be described as child abuse. What other words are there to describe such a system which, according to the Education department’s own figures, leaves 43% of our children – after eleven years of full time, compulsory and hideously expensive schooling – unable to read, write and count efficiently?

We have lived a long time under Labour and Conservative governments based on a lie. This lie is the article of socialist faith which declares that what unreconstructed political reactionaries like me describe as “my money” really belongs to the government to control, disperse or with-hold according to its own whim.

This sort of government – the only sort of government seen in Britain for decades – is not about good management of the nation’s resources: it is about political control.

Taxation is the government’s method by which it seeks – and in which it succeeds spectacularly – to control us.

All socialism is inherently unjust. And it has never worked anywhere. When it is practised moderately, it inhibits the people’s freedom. When it is practised thoroughly, it leads to Stalin and the gulag or presently in Venezuela – so admired by our leader-in-waiting Jeremy Corbyn – people rummaging in dustbins for food.

Down with the Exchequer! God save the Queen!

04 Nov

The Ladies Misbehaving

Michael White is that rare – perhaps unique? – thing: a lefty with a sense of humour. His political articles and sketches in The Guardian have been making me laugh for decades. But this week Michael was not joking.

He was a guest on BBC Radio Four’s The Media Show, hosted by Andrea Catherwood and of course the subject was the “inappropriate behaviour” of the naughty MPs and so many others that Andrea wondered if to our concept of institutional racism we should add institutional sexual misbehaviour. This was when Michael roughly interfered with the feminist, politically-correct prejudices of the BBC.

He said that inappropriate sexual behaviour was not exclusive to men but that “Clever, attractive young women can play the power game too.”

Outrage was swift and violent. Andrea expostulated – which is a polite way of saying she went into full bollocking mode: “D’you mean to say these women are at fault?”

Good grief! Didn’t Michael understand that he was talking on the BBC where it is an article of the severest dogma that women can never be at fault?

No, he didn’t understand or, brave man, he didn’t care. He said, “I’m going further than that. I’m saying women too can be predators.”

He spoke the truth – however unacceptable to the politically-correct establishment. We were given an example only this week of a woman prominent in society exhibiting inappropriate sexual behaviour. Kenneth Branagh reported that Dame Judi Dench had exposed herself to him backstage. Poor Ken, I understand he’s still receiving counselling for post-traumatic stress disorder!

Moreover, Michael didn’t merely speak the truth: he spoke the universal truth that there have always been women sexual predators. I don’t suppose they read the Bible much at the Beeb, but they might make a start with the story of those two randy young tarts the daughters of Lot who got their father drunk and took advantage of him: “And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth. Come, let us make our father drink wine and we will lie with him” (Genesis 19: 31-32).

Well, if they haven’t read the Bible, surely they have glanced at bits of bawd in Chaucer and Shakespeare – to say nothing of the misconduct of some of the Borgia ladies. I won’t get on to the psychopathic predations of such as Rosemary west and Myra Hindley.

Even nice girls have been known to lay hands unseemly on men and boys

My first job out of school was in a textiles warehouse in Leeds. My bosses wanted me to gain experience and advancement in the trade, so they sent me on a week’s course to the cotton mill in Barrowford, near Nelson in Lancashire. Here I came across a most unladylike custom. When a new lad, aged fifteen, started at the mill, the girls would leave their looms and shuttles, womanhandle him into the ladies and black his balls with boot polish.

I rush to add that I don’t think even Andrea Leadsome in all her fury at Michael Fallon would have bent so low as to smear the former defence secretary’s scrotum with a coating of Cherry Blossom

Quite posh girls have been known to misbehave. In my late teens I worked in the stats office at the Ministry of Labour. In those days before computers, all official letters and documents were typed by young women specially employed for the task. I would be sent down from the third floor to the typing pool on the first floor, there to enter on a scene so intimidating I nearly dropped my documents and ran straight back up the staircase, In the scented haze, thirty or forty miniskirted nubile females sat at desks in ranks. When a man opened the door, the clattering keys would cease and the timorous visitor, if he was a handsome – or even a passable – man would be ogled and whistled at.

At my theological college I quickly learned to heed a word of warning concerning the lecherous assistant cook and housemaid, “Don’t let yourself get talked into shelling peas with Celia!”

Sexual misconduct has always gone on and it always will even if Mrs May passes a Bill for the Abolition of Original Sin. So let’s ditch the shock and mock horror and get on with the serious business of running the country.

I am just a little concerned to know whether Michael White got out of that BBC studio alive

03 Nov

Look on these things and laugh

There was a spectacular sunrise over the sea this morning in Eastbourne, so I got out of bed early and, with as much cheerfulness as I could muster, prepared myself for another day in the asylum. It’s getting so you daren’t open the newspaper or switch on the BBC propaganda machine for fear of cracking up completely and running out into the street shouting, screaming and foaming at the mouth.

What’s new? The defence secretary has resigned because fifteen years ago he placed his hand on a woman’s knee. Even the woman – described of course as “the victim” – said it amounted to nothing much. It is alleged Mr Fallon also gurgled suggestively in Andrea Leadsom’s ear, perhaps with a view to some hanky-panky. Getting suggestive with Andrea Leadsom? Like cuddling an icebreaker. Well, I suppose a defence secretary ought to display some courage.

Someone else whose name I forget – they are all so damned forgettable, these persons-of-note and celebs – has apologised because forty years he spoke to a woman “in a funny tone of voice.”

The madness of modern society is produced by politicians and the media who vigorously sexualise every aspect of our lives – children from the age of five get early training in sexual deviancy – and then affect surprise and outrage when people behave in a frisky fashion

Don’t worry. it will pass. The “inappropriate behaviour” syndrome will go the way of the “every egg is poisonous” proclamation and mad cow disease. In other words, it’s a fashion, a nine days wonder. Before it dies out though, it will have to go through its utterly bonkers stage. In fact we are reaching this stage now – the day when anyone who has not been chatted-up or mildly molested – that is has not been accorded “victim” status – will feel feel socially excluded, a pariah.

But while this latest nonsense is running its course, it is doing a hell of a lot of serious political damage. Brexit is in crisis. The world teeters on the edge of nuclear war. The global Islamic insurgency gathers pace. Immigration remains out of control. Meanwhile the Marxist Corbyn – friend of Hamas, Hezbollah and lately of the IRA – prepares his government in waiting, all unchallenged

The only response from the prime minister is to thrash about like a fish escaped the landing net.

Theresa May is so comically, so pathologically, incompetent that she dare not fortify her political chances by having around her colleagues of ability. Each one is carefully checked to make sure he/she is no damn use and therefore no threat.

That is why we now have her chum Gavin Williamson – of no ministerial experience and knowing nothing of the armed forces – promoted to be defence secretary in place of knee-stroker Fallon.

When we recall the names of those in post-war cabinet office, we can hardly help being impressed – even when the politics of some of them may not be to our liking. There was more than a smattering of ability and panache around in those days.

Churchill’s cabinet in Coronation Year included Eden, Butler, Macmillan, Sandys, Thorneycroft and Brook.

Wilson in 1967 sat round the cabinet table with Stewart, Castle, Crossman, Jenkins and Shore.

Maggie’s gang in 1987 featured Whitelaw, Wakeham, Lawson, Howe, Hurd, Baker, Parkinson, Ridley and Waddington

Now look at Theresa’s pigmies and toadies: Green, Rudd, Greening, Patel, Williamson and Sajid – “Terrorist attacks are part and parcel of living in a cosmopolitan society” – Javid.

Look on these things and laugh. But our laughing is only hysterical. The cackling of the madhouse.

05 Oct

“F” Off

The fate which befell the writing on the wall behind Theresa May as she made her speech yesterday contained a message. (He that hath ears to hear, let him hear). One of the letters fell off the wall. “It was the “F” that was off.

It is a measure of the intellectual feebleness and moral frailty of the Tory hierarchy that they could allow May – a woman of stupendous incompetence and sublime ineptness – to ascend to a position of high office. She should never have got further than the back corridor where she might have performed the useful function of keeping the party’s electoral roll up to date. That task might – just – have been within her abilities. I certainly wouldn’t trust her to make the tea.

During her campaign for the leadership, Mrs May asked us to “Judge me on my record.” Happily, there is a lot of record on which to judge her, as she was the longest-serving home secretary since 1945. Her tenure was a conspicuous catalogue of errors and incompetence. Remember 2014 and the chaos caused by the delay in the issue of passports? May claimed this was owing to “a surge in applications,” but it turned out she had been warned the year before that her policy of closing overseas processing offices had resulted in a backlog of 360,000 applications and weeks of delay.

She complained that the Human Rights Act permitted suspected terrorists to continue living in this country under the clause that speaks of their right “to a family life.” She cited the case of one such suspect who was not deported “because he had a pet cat.” Then – trademark May – after so complaining, she did nothing to get the Act amended. As home secretary, she was in charge of the police. She cut their numbers and their budget during a long period in which the terrorist threat was at its highest. She sat back and did nothing for years while in Rotherham, Leicester, Bradford, Rochdale and a dozen other towns and cities the police failed to stop the wholesale rape and sexual abuse of under-age white girls by Muslims This is still going on. She was slow and indecisive in her pathetic attempt to intervene in the infiltration of schools in Birmingham by Islamic extremists. She described sharia courts as “beneficial” and allowed them to operate in parallel with British law – and this in spite of the fact that such courts are complicit in the mistreatment of Muslim women by their menfolk.

The list of her sins, negligences and ignorances, her half-baked and deranged actions and inactions, is almost endless. But the worst of her many failures was her record on immigration. As home secretary, she was charged to put into practice Cameron’s declared aim of reducing the number of immigrants from over half a million every year to “the tens of thousands.” In fact, during her tenure net immigration increased from a million to three million. But here is the truly laughable bit – were it not so catastrophic for our country: May claimed she was powerless to reduce immigration “because of Shengen, the EU’s open borders rule.” And then she voted for Remain! How’s that for joined-up thinking?

She began her term her term as prime minister by announcing economic and social policies that you might think belonged exclusively to Jeremy Corbyn. She wants to curb executive pay. Apart from the fact that this could be achieved only by the adoption of the most draconian and demagogic policies, it would also drive the best talent into the arms of our competitors. Her plans to ensure more women are appointed to company boards is yet another example of her liking for social engineering, while her other ambitions for tighter regulation of the City and a more socialistic approach to industrial relations will lead, give it time, to the sort of sclerosis which paralyses the economy in France. The sole criteria for the selection and appointment to senior jobs in commerce and industry should be competence, and when competence is jeopardised the results are always inefficiency and mediocrity. Besides, decisions about whom to appoint to senior management are the prerogative of the companies concerned and are no business of the government – especially a Conservative government. May is leading the party so far to the left that I’m tempted to say Britain is unique among the nations: not only do we have a socialist opposition, we have a socialist government as well.

Like all weak leaders, she has appointed wets and yes-men. After the Referendum vote, what Britain needed most was the announcement of vigorous Tory economic policies. Taxes should have been cut drastically and a bonfire made of the sheaves of regulations which strangle the life out of the City. Instead, May appointed a chancellor of the exchequer who gave us an autumn statement so anodyne it put me to sleep. Talking of sleep, the new home secretary, Amber Rudd, is clearly not up to the job and, like May herself when she occupied that office, she refuses to tackle the problem that threatens to sink our country altogether: mass immigration, now at a record level.

Her rhetorical insistence that “Brexit means Brexit” is a lie and a sham. A lie because she is a declared Remainer. A sham because her negotiations with the EU amount to capitulation. She has accepted “a period of transition” which guarantees we shall have no momentum out for four years – and probably forever. This is exactly what May wants. She has promised to go on paying exorbitant sums to the EU for the foreseeable future.

The woman is a disastrous shambles.

Even in today’s etiolated Tory party, surely there are enough “suits” who will fall in behind the Chairman of the 1922 Committee, stroll across to Number Ten and tell her it’s time to go?

If she lingers, the future for the country is Corbyn, the renowned fan of Chavez and Maduro and the Venezuela where people are scavenging in dustbins for food and stealing zoo animals to provide their next meal.

May has sat here too long for any good she might have done. She should go. And for all our sakes, she should go quickly.

04 Oct

Britain’s Apartheid

At the Conservative conference, Theresa May urged the party to value “our communities.”

Wrong from the start. Doubly wrong coming from someone who claims to be a Conservative. For at the root of conservatism is the notion of all the people as being one community. This was splendidly expressed by Samuel Johnson in his dictionary where he derided Whiggery as “a faction.”

Conservatism had its origins in the Elizabethan Settlement in which church and state were seen as the one realm in two different aspects – with the monarch as head of state and supreme governor of the Church of England. No doubt this is the origin too of the saying that the Church of England is “the Tory party at prayer.” Toryism in the 18th century – Johnson’s Toryism – was concerned above all with strengthening this belief in the oneness of the realm. The people of that time remembered the civil war and rabid sectarianism which tore the country apart in the previous century and they vowed that this must not happen a second time.

So they built on the Elizabethan Settlement a polity which was concerned above all with national unity. In order for this to succeed it must be a unity that did not make extreme demands on the people. Indeed, this had been at the centre of the original Settlement. Nothing too onerous. Yes, people should go to church, but not every week as if they were enthusiasts or fanatics but, according to The Book of Common Prayer, “three times a year of which Easter should be one.” Only a conformity which did not demand anything excessive could possibly work as the bedrock of peace and stability.

And this is what that other Settlement under the Restoration in 1660 aimed to achieve.

These are things of which we should all be proud because they demonstrated generosity when, with the passing of the Test and Corporation Act of 1828 and the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829. Protestant Dissenters and Roman Catholics were incorporated as full members of the nation.

This worked remarkably well until the mass immigrations of the 20th century. Those arriving on our shores were not enjoined to adopt our way of life but allowed – even encouraged – to separate off into what the multiculturalists – and now Mars May – refer to as “communities.”

What they actually are, of course, is ghettos. When such separate development was practised in South Africa, British politicians condemned it as Apartheid. When precisely the same thing happens over here, it is regarded as wholesome “diversity.”

This, Mrs May, is not the route to social cohesion: it is the way back to the murderous sectarianism of the English Civil War.

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.”

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!”

30 Aug

The art of the impossible

I have long wondered what makes Janet Daley’s writing so tenebrously dull. A recitation of the fat stock prices would have more interest, the speaking clock subtler nuance. If she were to write about a kaleidoscope, it would be in black and white.

It can’t be because she’s American. Mark Twain was American and he wasn’t dull. Neither was Ezra Pound who wrote, “The reader deserves from time to time to be refreshed by shards of ecstasy.” Daley’s prose is as refreshing as a lorry-load of slurry.

Happily my puzzlement has at last been dispersed. Writing (about herself) this week in the Daily Telegraph, Daley says,

“Political argument and debate seem to me to encompass – or at least affect – almost everything that matters in the human condition. How we are governed defines our social relations, our life opportunities, our moral choices and our civil responsibilities. In democratic societies, there is a particular responsibility for people to make informed decisions, not only about who is to be in power but about the limits and function of government itself.”

See what I mean?

What does she know of politics who only politics knows?

Political conversation is not everything – not even “almost” everything – that matters in the human condition. What scope, beyond that of leisurely diversion, does her definition of what matters leave to art, literature, music, philosophy and even, God help us, theology?

We practise these things, Ms Daley, so that we do not die of politics.

Politicos themselves sometimes acknowledge this truth. Even Ken Livingston has his newts, John Major could be not inconsiderably interesting on the subject of motorway cones and Matthew Parris has written gaily about his exploits on Hampstead Heath.

I wonder if there is a cure for Janet’s political monotony?

I think there is. She could try writing her memoirs. Suggested title: Homage to Catatonia

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Category Archives: politics