politics – Page 5 – All Things Considered

30 May

Have you used it yet?

Do you remember that line towards the end of Tony Hancock’s classic sketch The Blood Donor when Tony, having given a pint of his blood, keeps phoning the clinic to ask what’s happened to it: “Have you used it yet?”

I thought of this when Eastbourne Tory HQ rang me up for the second time and said, “You’ve received your postal vote. Have you used it yet?” It’s unusual, to say the least, to receive such attention from politicians. So what’s the cause of this sudden outbreak of solicitousness?.

Blind panic, that’s what.

For the Lenin lookalike Jeremy Corbyn is coming up fast on the blind side. Who would have thought it – that a leader who has produced an economic policy which would condemn the whole nation to the debtors’ prison is, with just over a week to polling day, being taken seriously by an increasing proportion of the electorate? Add to that the fact that he’s a Jew-baiter with friends in the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah, a mourner at the memorial of the Palestinian mastermind of the lethal attack on the Munich Olympics of 1972. Not to forget that he invited leaders of the IRA to the House of Commons not long after they had bombed Mrs Thatcher and her cabinet in Brighton.

The truth is that Corbyn sees Tories as bigger enemies than any of the terrorist organisations which want to kill us.

He is no friend of the armed forces whose activities he wishes severely to restrict. His policy on nuclear deterrence is straight out of the madhouse as he declares he will keep it but would never use it.

He is so deluded when it comes to the historical record that he thinks the 1400 years war which Islam has waged against Europe is all the fault of Tony Blair.

A Corbyn cabinet would contain caricature loonies and apostles of the politics of envy such as Emily Thornberry and the comically incompetent Diane Abbott.

So why would any even moderately sane person toy with the idea of voting Labour next week?

Elementary, my dear voters: elementary.

There is no Tory alternative.

May has shifted her party light years to the left. More power to the unions. More intervention in the economy – well, she said clearly last week she doesn’t believe in “the untrammelled free market.” So she’s setting about trammelling it with even higher business taxes and ever-more regulation.

Theresa May has always been a preposterous attention seeker and control freak. Now, aged 60, she disports herself like a frisky teenage girl. Her long career at the home office was a disaster. Wholesale rape and abuse of underage schoolgirls by Muslim men? The answer. Do nothing. Infiltration of schools by militant Islamists in Birmingham? Nothing. Charged with bringing immigration down to “the tens of thousands”? Nothing again. Well, not quite nothing. She claimed she was powerless to reduce immigration, “Because I’m bound by the EU’s Shengen rules about the free movement of populations.” Having so said, she then voted Remain! How’s that for joined-up thinking? The best that can be said of Mrs May is that she’s rather dim.

Do you still think that Brexit is safe in the hands of such a serially incompetent woman?

Rank and file Tories are a merciful crowd and they could perhaps forgive her all her errors and make allowances for her inconsistencies. But what grass roots Tories cannot do is retain affection for a leader who has turned against the party’s natural constituency and its core supporters . Her most recent policy announcements make it very plain that she does not believe in the right to own one’s own home and to hand on the value of of this inheritance intact to one’s children. That’s the Tory political equivalent of an Archbishop of Canterbury saying he doesn’t believe in God.

Are we all fools? After all, none of Theresa May’s left wing policies should have come as a surprise. Years ago she gave us fair warning when she declared the Tories of Margaret Thatcher’s governments “the nasty party.”

She is fiercely ambitious. And her ambition is to be remembered as the opposite of Margaret Thatcher.

We Eastbourne Tories are a fairly docile and biddable lot. But this bloody difficult woman has got our dander up.

26 May

The celebration of innocence is a British value

“They will never win…They can’t kill our values…”

Two of this week’s headlines in the gush and schmaltz sheets otherwise known as our newspapers. I had thought that was about it when it came to British values: gush and schmaltz – and, of course, appeasing the enemy.

But I was mistaken and so I apologise. From those same newspapers I have just learned that another of our values is the celebration of children’s innocence. Apparently we love the little ones and we will do anything to shield them from physical harm and moral corruption

(Pity then that we did nothing for years about the hundreds of Muslim men who systematically raped and otherwise sexually abused underage schoolgirls in a score of our towns and cities. But I’m sure that was just a rare lapse, so we can – as the home secretary at the time, Theresa May and her police forces did – turn a blind eye to it. All in the interests of appeasement, naturally)

According to the gush and schmaltz sheets and the gush and schmaltz telly, we have been particularly strenuous in our nurturing of children’s innocence this week. Parents, uncles and aunts, friends and brothers and sisters from all over the north of England took their preteens to Ariana Grande’s pop concert in Manchester.

Unfortunately, owing to our other value of appeasing the enemy, some of these youngsters were slaughtered. Put it down to another disagreeable lapse. We know it will never happen again.

All was for the fluffiest in the fluffiest of all possible worlds. Lots of pink. Rabbits’ ears

(The teddy bears put in their appearance later)

Here is part of what the delightful Ariana sang to the innocents:

“All you get, skin to skin. O my God…”

(So you see God too is part of our British values)

“…Don’t ya stop boy. Something about you makes me feel like a dangerous woman. All gals wanna be like that. Bad girls underneath like that.”

I was so captivated by the charm and innocence of these lyrics that I craved more. So I went into Ariana’s website. Here in an innocent state of semi-undress she pouts (innocently of course) as she sings an innocent little sexy number for the innocent preteens. As she does so, we see scenes of couples engaged in vigorous copulation. One couple on a car bonnet. Another couple – a charmingly whimsical touch, this – in a launderette. A big black man with a little white girl – no doubt in celebration of our other British value of antiracism – in an office. Finally, a reassuringly cosy domestic theme emerged as the couple did it in the kitchen .

Can I just ask you all, at this particularly gushy and schmaltzy time, to put away your habitual cynicism and rejoice with me in our British values?

19 May

A canting fraud

The dictionary defines “trammel” as “a hindrance or impediment to free action.”

Kindly bear that in mind for a moment.

Publishing the Conservative party’s election manifesto yesterday, Theresa May said, “We do not believe in untrammelled free markets.”

We should be grateful when any politician offers us such a plain, unequivocal statement. It follows from her words that she believes in trammelling or hindering free markets. We can express this in fewer words. Mrs May might have spared herself the bother of uttering the long word “untrammelled.” What she said yesterday means simply, “We do not believe in free markets.”

In fact the phrase “untrammelled free” is a tautology.

So there you have it from the mouth of a Conservative prime minister: the Conservative party does not believe in free markets.

Then it has ceased to be the Conservative party.

Mrs May’s speech was full of interesting phrases: “”We reject the cult of selfish individualism.”

This is meaningless. It’s like saying, “We’re against sin.” Of course we are. But individualism doesn’t have to be selfish. As Adam Smith and scores of others have pointed out, by pursuing his individual interests, a man often benefits many others. Make a £million by designing a better mousetrap and you will not only have enriched yourself but made a huge contribution to the entire community.

That speech of Mrs May’s is crammed full of philosophy – but it isn’t Tory philosophy. She concluded lyrically: “True Conservatism means a commitment to country and community and to the good that government can do.”

There are indeed two good things that government can and should do: defend us from foreign enemies and keep the peace in our streets. Then it should get out of our lives.

The wretched woman Theresa May is a canting fraud: a socialist fraud at that.

14 May

Theresa May: the Red Tory

Behold, I show you two mysteries: the one mystery the greater and the other mystery the less.

The lesser mystery is of why the Daily Telegraph is so enamoured of Theresa May. This mystery is only partly explained by the fact that the Telegraph has sacked so many of its intelligent writers – including, by the looks of the layout, the grammar and the spelling mistakes – all the sub-editors. The so called “star writers” remaining there, with a couple of notable exceptions, are would-be dolly birds in their forties and fifties whose subjects are their emotions, the menopause, their self-esteem and their cellulite.

The greater mystery concerns the Daily Mail’s utter infatuation with Mrs May whom they regard as a reincarnation of Margaret Thatcher.

But May is no Maggie.

Mrs Thatcher won over the working class voters by allowing them to buy their council houses. Mrs May says she wants to build 300,000 council houses for rent. Why? To steal support from Corbyn’s Trots. One might say, “It’s the oikonomy, stupid!”

Thus she intends to create a great many more sink estates. Of course, to do this was not her declared purpose but, as the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe pointed out in her book Intention, if you’re pretty certain that your actions will involve particular undesirable consequences and you persist in your actions anyway, then logically speaking you have intended those consequences.

Why does the Daily Mail persistently mistake the socialist Theresa May for a Conservative? Mrs Thatcher’s Conservative party was the party which the Mail knew and loved. But, according to May, this was “the nasty party.”

May will do nothing to reduce the burden of taxation or the other burden of business regulations. She will deliver a Brexit – if at all – soft as a lightly-boiled egg. After May’s Brexit, she will claim job done, we’re out. But the underlying practical reality will reveal that nothing has changed.

She voted Remain, remember.

She was a disaster at the home office, from her passports fiasco to her failure to prevent the rape and sexual abuse of thousands of girls in a score of our towns and cities by Muslim men; from her refusal to intervene in the infiltration of Birmingham schools by militant Islam, to her failure to honour her commission to “reduce immigration to the tens of thousands.” And, when she was confronted on this matter, she said she was powerless to act because she was bound by the EU’s Shengen rules on free movement of populations.

Then she voted Remain anyway! This explains both the shallowness of her mind and the depth of her duplicity.

Mrs Thatcher once said she intended that the Labour government which preceded her would go down in history as “the last Labour government.” In her inflamed lust for the capture of Labour votes, May is moving the Conservative party relentlessly to the left.

And the last state will be worse than the first – for all of us.

10 May

Waste and void, waste and void, and darkness at the heart of our schools

The Labour party and the Lib Dems are competing with each other to discover which party can spend the most taxpayers’ money on the most useless project.

Spending on state education is higher today than it has ever been, while nearly half of the pupils leave school after eleven years of full time compulsory schooling unable to read, write or count efficiently.

I can at least count sufficiently accurately to know that this does not represent value for money.

Now Labour have announced they will spend an additional £4.8billion. and the Lib Dems £7billion more. This is a scandalous misappropriation of public money.

Labour say this increase will be paid for by increasing corporation tax from the current 19% to 26% by 2021, But even at its present level, corporation tax is far too high and a blight on industry and commerce everywhere. Corbyn and his gang ought to be made to understand that exorbitant business taxes aren’t just a wonderful example of socialists’ politics of envy and their obsession with bashing the bosses: companies employ workers – a few of whom might even be foolish enough to vote Labour – and every corporation tax rise means more workers will get the sack.

A further increase in teachers’ salaries is included in Labour’s calculations. I would say teachers are generously paid already compared with most other workers. A head teacher (outside London) can earn as much as £108K – more, given extra allowances for special responsibilities. Senior teachers receive up to £59K and heads of department £38K. The average pay for a classroom teacher is £33K and even unqualified teachers receive £26K. There is a pension scheme more generous than most others can dream about. All this while a teacher spends 195 days each year in school when most workers turn up to the job on 241 days annually.

State schools are not only educationally incompetent and intellectually abysmal: they are also chaotic, violent and dangerous.

A recent survey by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) showed that four out of ten teachers had been physically assaulted by children over the previous year. More than three quarters said they had been pushed or shoved, around half were kicked or had had an object such as a piece of furniture thrown at them, and more than a third had been punched. Just under half said pupil behaviour gets worse year on year; and the figures back them up. According to the Department for Education 18,970 pupils at primary and secondary schools were temporarily excluded in 2013-2014 because of physical attacks on teachers and other adults – obstruction, jostling, biting, kicking, hair-pulling – compared with 17,190 the previous year. There is some dispute about the number of assaults in more recent years, but all available surveys reveal that these have increased still further. Three-quarters of trainee and newly-qualified teachers are considering leaving the profession, according to a 2015 ATL survey. Of those, 25% said challenging pupil behaviour was the reason. Meanwhile, a 2014 joint survey by the ATL and ITV News found that more than a quarter of teachers had faced aggression from a student’s parents or carers in the past year.

Does anyone think this moronic, violent shambles should be handed even more of our money?

09 May

Worse than the U-boats

Theresa May is turning out to be a Red Tory who takes her economic policies from Ed Miliband. When Labour pledged a cap on energy prices at the 2015 general election, this policy was rightly rubbished by the Tories – because such manipulations of the market always end up in higher prices in the long run. Anyone but a blockhead, or a Red Tory, would be able to see this at once. Competition among the energy producers would diminish. For the energy firms would get together and agree to charge similar prices – to create a “cost cluster” just below the level of the cap.

The best way to reduce the cost of power for householders and for industry is to resource energy supplies from cheaper and more readily available fuels.

But the Conservative government refuses to do this – having made the absurd promise to reduce Britain’s carbon footprint to zero by 2050. Incidentally, we are the only country to make this pledge.

Our present energy policy is an act of criminal insanity.

What economic sense is there in offering massive subsidies – at the taxpayers’ expense – to wind and solar power, especially when these sources are unreliable? The Red Toryism of Mrs May is hardly achieved by giving huge handouts to rich landowners to erect thousands of inefficient windmills.

Odd that fanatical environmentalists should so conspire to ruin the landscape.

A few years ago, new advances in technology enabled our mines to produce increasing supplies of “clean” and cheap coal. Now we have closed down the coal mines and the huge power station at Drax is importing, at colossal cost, massive amounts of biomass from the other side of the Atlantic – incidentally destroying whole areas of woodland

Such an absurd policy amounts to both economic profligacy and environmental vandalism at the same time.

In the USA there has been achieved, through the spectacularly successful fracking industry, a revolution in energy production and supply which in little more than a decade has changed America from being an oil-importing nation – dependent on the greed and chicanery of the Gulf States – to become a net exporter of energy. This bloodless revolution has resulted not only in gigantic economic benefits but in shifting the strategic geo-political balance to favour the western nations. For the first time we are freed from Saudi Arabia’s economic blackmail.

To favour western nations? Well, at least to favour those western countries which go in for fracking: Poland and Hungary come to mind.

Mrs May says she is the champion of those “just about managing.” Given sensible energy policies the country would enjoy economic boom years and a considerable reduction in the cost of living – especially for those described by the new Red Tories as “vulnerable.”

With fuel prices constantly on the rise – the only possible result of our insane energy policies – those currently just about managing will be able to manage no longer.

Meanwhile, Britain is sitting on vast resources of shale gas and yet production has barely begun.

By these follies and by gross neglect, Mrs May’s government is imposing the sort of hardship on our people that would have been the envy of the German U-boat commanders.

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!

03 May

The very devout LGBT community

Frau Merkel has met Vladimir Putin for talks.

Now that must have been a momentous occasion against the background of global insecurity, wars, rumours of wars, tensions and terrorism on three continents. What would have been Angela Merkel’s most pressing concerns? Surely the civil war in Syria which has been going on for six years. She would have asked Mr Putin to use his influence over Turkey’s dictator Erdogan and urge him not to flood Europe with millions of imperialistic Muslim migrants. She would have voiced the apprehension of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the face of an energised Russian military presence on their borders.

And Vlad, a man with a keen sense of history and given to plain speaking, he would have stated his concerns about Prussian militarism. I can almost hear him framing his sentences: “Three times during the last 150 years, you Germans have waged war on Europe with the aim of domination: in 1870 under Bismarck, 1914 by the Kaiser and again in 1939 by Hitler. The Russian people are apprehensive about the foreign policy intentions of your Fourth Reich.”

I suppose, if their talks had been purposeful and sincere, the two leaders might even have felt their way towards a common understanding.

In the context of the current international instability, all the topics I have mentioned must surely have been on the table? Instead, the headline report on this summit meeting informed us, “Mrs Merkel asked Mr Putin to use his authority to clamp down on the homophobia currently oppressing the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered community in Chechnya.”

No doubt this is a good cause but, compared, say, with the genocide of Christians throughout the Middle East and in many parts of Africa, it is hardly the most severe threat to international peace and harmony. It’s as if in 1938 Joachim von Ribbentrop had begged Comrade Molotov to ease the parking restrictions on the over eighties nudist basketball team in Minsk.

But I suppose I ought to understand that the former things have passed away and that, in our diverse, non-sexist, non-racist, post-modern, post-truth, fake news world, our priorities have altered beyond recognition. Rather than occupy themselves with the possibility of nuclear war or Muslim terrorism and Islam-inspired wars in a score of countries, leaders of the world’s great powers meet to discuss the prospects for sexual deviants in an outlying province.

It is the language in which Frau Merkel’s plea was made which puzzles me most. In this modern world of ours, we seem to have developed a very strange vocabulary. Frau Merkel did not refer to the allegedly persecuted Chechnyans as sexual deviants, but as “The LGBT community.”

I didn’t know these people had formed themselves into a community. What sort of organisation is this? Is it like a monastic community with plainchant, Bible readings, a rule of life and the keeping of the ecclesiastical hours? Is the LGBT community in Chechnya devout? Do they start each day with the office of Prime followed by Matins? I feel sure they will want to include Sext.

I shall just have to get used to the fact that we no longer employ the conventional categories or even speak the language I learned as a child. As Wittgenstein said, “Change the language and you change the world.”

And how, Ludwig! And how!

O brave new world that hath such people in it.

26 Apr

Two Spectators but differing perspectives

Every week, a friend in Alice Springs sends me The Spectator Australia which is really the London version with perhaps ten pages at the start given over to Australian matters. Consistently, these pages are conspicuously better than the rest of the magazine. Let me give an example from the edition for the Easter weekend. After a shocking account of violent assaults by Muslims on Christians in Sydney. Aussie Spec’s editorial continued as follows:

“One of the obvious causes of what is called ‘Christophobia’ is the poisonous, amoral, cowardly effect of left wing political correctness and the simpering attitude of many ‘progressive’ Christian clergy towards Islam. Rather than seeing what has historically been a violent and uncompromising religion as possibly posing an existential threat to their own beliefs, many clergy now choose to embrace Islam in the name of ‘multifaith dialogue’. The effectiveness of this suicidal approach can be seen in France where more than 2000 mosques have been built in the last ten years while 60 churches have been closed – many becoming mosques. Where are the Christians defending their ancient faith? Carry on doing nothing and get ready to bury Jesus Christ once and for all.”

Why do we never get such plain speaking out of the truth in our London edition?

Those early pages in the Australian version unfailingly present a conservative opinion on all political, social and economic affairs.

They make the rest of the magazine – ie the London material – look like what in fact it has become: a collection of evasions and euphemisms and indeed of the very political correctness which the Australian editor deplores.

As a regrettable consequence, we no longer have a mainstream conservative weekly magazine in Britain

(Rev’d Dr Peter Mullen 3 Naomi Close Eastbourne BN20 7UU 01323-655832)

25 Apr

Same old Frogland

In an uncertain world, it’s reassuring to fortify oneself with a few truisms such as All Cows Eat Grass, All Men Are Mortal and All Entries For The Eurovision Song Contest Are Bound To Be Trash. Let me add another: All French Politicians Are Lefties.

From time to time a new face appears on the French political scene who is announced as right wing. Who can forget Nicolas Sarkozy? Well, I’m trying to. He was said to be a conservative and to have “broken the mould” of socialist leaders in France.

The broken mould was quickly restored to its former perfection as Sarkozy revealed himself to be a collectivist like all his confreres.

Step forward the next alleged mould-breaker, the so-called “centrist” Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frederic Macron, born on St Thomas’ Day 1977. He is to become France’s new president in a couple of weeks, for no better reason than that the French Establishment – a very powerful force, unlike the French Resistance – can’t stand Marine Le Pen who is always described, at least when people are speaking politely, as of the “far right.” No, she’s another socialist – perhaps even a national socialist – and her economic policies are to the left of Hollande’s.

At least Macron has had an education to fit him for his new job. he has a master’s degree in public affairs and he went on from that to study at the Ecole Nationale D’Administration, France’s top college for apparatchiks and career bureaucrats – a bit like PPE, but for people imagined to have some intelligence. From there he slipped silkily into the post of Inspector General of Finances. After a short break at Rothschild’s to allow him to make his millions, as all successful socialists and egalitarians do, Macron was appointed Deputy Secretary General to Francois Hollande, the leftist of the French lefties who buggered what was left of the French economy after Sarkozy had departed the scene.

Asked about his political and economic beliefs, Macron replied he is in favour of “collective solidarity.” In other words, do as the trades unions demand, or they’ll set fire to all the motor cars.

He is also an enthusiastic Europhile and a committed federalist who wants to “strengthen the EU and provide a common budget.”

He shares Frau Merkel’s open door immigration policy. No wonder Angela is in raptures at the prospect of Emmanuel’s appointment!

He is an avid global warmer and wants to see “ecological transition” which, being interpreted, means more windmills.

At least young Manny Macron displays the French tradition of toujours l’amour. He fell in love with his schoolteacher, Brigitte Trogneux when he was fifteen – she is twenty-four years his senior – and now they are wed with three children from Brigitte’s first marriage.

What are we to make of all this? Just that in Frogland Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Category Archives: politics