society – Page 2 – All Things Considered

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.

31 Aug

Celebrating cultural diversity with knives, blood and acid

“I’ve never known of a single murder at the Glastonbury Festival,” said Commander David Musker, the man in charge of policing this year’s Notting Hill Carnival.

He was replying to an accusation by a “rapper” known to his fans as Stormzy who had claimed that the police precautions against looting and violence at the Carnival targeted only “black events.”

(Wasn’t it rather racist of Stormzy to introduce apartheid in this way?)

Stormzy taunted Mr Musker’s officers: “Where were you guys at Glastonbury?”

As a pre-emptive tactic before last weekend’s three days of anarchy, the police made around 300 arrests and this is what enraged Stormzy. But, Stormzy and his mates aside, no reasonable person could argue that the police action was unjustified in the light of the fact that the 2016 event turned into a riot in which six people were stabbed and 454 arrested.

The cost of policing this annual cultural extravaganza is £7 milion.

Besides the customary knives and guns, this year offered a novelty when two people had their faces sprayed with acid.

So did the Notting Hill Carnage 2017 live up to previous years?

It looks as if it excelled itself.

This year twenty-eight police officers were injured by the mob. Bottles were thrown at them – but then that’s only par for the course. In 2017 blood was spat at them as well.

The carnival has got so dangerous that Ken Marsh, chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, would like Stormzy’s annual “black event” to be banned. He asked, “What other event would be allowed to carry on regardless with so many police colleagues under attack?”

He added, “If this is the norm, it is unacceptable. It is a disgrace. Twenty-eight brave colleagues went to work this weekend and were attacked just for doing their job. This is not normal.”

Altogether 312 arrests were made, 58 for possession of an offensive weapon, knife or blade.

The dictionary defines “carnival” as “A special occasion of public enjoyment and entertainment involving wearing unusual clothes, dancing, eating and drinking, usually in the streets of a city.”

The dictionary might like to add, “With the chance of being stabbed, spattered in blood and having acid thrown in your face.”

Meanwhile, a spokesman for the London Assembly has declared, “Championing black culture is as important as ever and Carnival should continue.”

Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, notoriously told us that we must put up with the occasional terrorist atrocity as “Part and parcel of living in a major city.”

Similarly, what are twenty-eight injured police officers – so long as “black culture” continues?

17 Aug

Rees-Mogg versus the Mockers and the Gigglers

Why is Jacob Rees-Mogg so mocked and derided? Theresa May said she “giggled” when it was suggested he might be a candidate for the Tory leadership.

“Giggled”? That’s nothing: I wept when the stupendously incompetent and inept Theresa May was promoted to high office.

In fact Rees-Mogg is by no means universally mocked. That still considerable number of sensible and informed people, who can read behind the blather of the headlines and the idiocy of the political commentators, see in Jacob much to admire. His speeches and articles are well-received.

But he is derided. Never mind: he is derided only by those people for whom we ought to reserve our derision. You know who I mean: the political timeservers, the consensus-mongers, the whole flatulent rabble of politicians who, since the end of the Second World War, have seen their task only as managed decline. In other words, Jacob is derided by the mediocratic establishment.

It is easy to see why they despise him. He is not one of them.

He speaks English and writes elegantly while his detractors in politics and the press only babble, more or less ungrammatically, the cliches which they believe the people want to hear.

He tells the truth. For instance the truth that if you reduce taxation you actually produce more revenue for the exchequer.

The political class in the parliamentary parties and in the press would have us believe that money belongs to the government and that policy is the business of politicians as they decide how much money they will allocate to the docile population. Rees-Mogg speaks the truth plainly when he says: “The government doesn’t have any money of its own. It has only that which it extracts from the public through taxation.”

And he adds, “The public sector doesn’t generate any money at all, but only recycles that made available to it by the private sector.”

And Jacob actually knows something worth knowing. He has what Denis Healey described as a “hinterland.” He is a classicist and a music lover. Compare and contrast with such as David Cameron who prefers to hang out with the head-bangers at pop festivals. Or Peter Mandelson and Gideon Osborne who once liked to be seen with Russian oligarchs on their yachts.

He has a sense of humour – not to be confused with the witless gurgling of politicians trying to tell a joke and the posturing belly-laughs of their hearers..

Jacob has an acute and informed political sensibility derived from his reading of history, the Greek philosophers and the Roman poets. What do his detractors know? The best of them know only management studies and the worst of them the positivistic claptrap of PPE. These people are monochrome political wonks. What does he know of politics, who only politics knows?

Almost worst of all – I’m saving the absolute worst of all for the end – Jacob is a traditional family man and attends the Catholic Mass in Latin. And there is conspicuous hostility to both those persuasions on the part of the politically-correct diversity-mongers and equality-salesmen in the the administrative class

So what, according to his uncultured despisers, is Jacob’s worst fault?

Why, he is a traditional Tory of course. That is, as the fatuous Mrs May, remarked of “the nasty party.”

03 Aug

The Sex Olympics

A new plague is stalking the land. It’s not the black death and it’s not cholera, but much more serious than either of these. I know it’s serious because it was the first item on the SKY News website this morning. It’s called binge viewing and it’s destroying the sleep and, says SKY, the lives of those afflicted.

Sadly, this virulent plague chiefly affects people described as “vulnerable”: that is the hordes of intellectually challenged, morally depraved and aesthetically numb who sit up all night watching tawdry shows such as Game of Thrones. Binge viewing, we were informed, is “a syndrome,” so victims who are made to suffer by Game of Thrones are very likely to have their sorry condition aggravated by the fact that they are also addicted to Strictly Come Dancing or Britain’s Got Talent or that top of the range nuts ‘n’ sluts show Say Yes to the Dress in which very fat women – both black and white, so there’s nothing racist about this – giggle and squeal as they try on ludicrously expensive wedding gowns which are then paid for by their fathers.

Back in the 1960s there was a remarkable and at the time shocking television play called The Sex Olympics. The premise was that there would come a time when, under a totalitarian government, millions would gawp endlessly at actors fornicating on screen. This fantasy has now been realised and it’s called Love Island.

I recall a telling remark by C.H. Sisson: “What makes St Augustine so interesting is that he lived through times very much like ours – and rejected them.”

Indeed, Augustine describes a state in which people are, “…unconcerned about the utter corruption of their country – ‘So long as it lasts’ they say – so long as it enjoys material prosperity.” The downfall of the Roman Empire was preceded by a whole series of financial crises. It was overwhelmed by mass immigration and threatened by barbarian violence. The comparisons with our own time are very striking. Augustine prophesied against “…rulers who are interested not in the morality, but the docility of their subjects; they are regarded not as directors of conduct but as controllers of material things and providers of material satisfaction.”

Doesn’t that make you think of extravagant loans to people who could never afford them; of laws to encourage 24/7 shopping and 24/7 boozing; of the whole world turned into advertisements? Art and culture debased, as Sir Peter Maxwell Davies once remarked of a Damien Hirst exhibition, “…into manufactured artefacts without content, with just a brand tag supposed to guarantee market value.”

A civilisation cannot survive on such debased conduct, on pretend values which are really valueless.

Augustine describes a society where: “Full publicity is given where shame would be appropriate; close secrecy is imposed where praise would be in order. Decency is veiled from sight; indecency is exposed to view. Scenes of evil attract packed audiences; good words scarcely find any listeners. It is as if purity should provoke a blush and corruption give grounds for pride.”

Here we are again on the eve of destruction. Pizza and porn are today’s bread and circuses. Binge viewers everywhere, sit back and enjoy the Sex Olympics.

27 Jul

Goodnight sweetheart

“Such modest attainments as you can boast in the way of polite society will hardly survive the faith to which they owe their significance.” – Choruses from the Rock (1934) by T.S.Eliot

In other words, if Christianity goes, the lot goes. Europe has rejected the Christian faith and consequently the form of life which was created by that faith and which sustained our continent for fifteen hundred years has disappeared. People imagined that western societies could, with impunity, abandon Christianity and somehow all the good things which we value and cherish would remain.

They won’t and they haven’t.

The secular modernity which has replaced Christianity has delivered us into spiritual, intellectual, moral and aesthetic decadence.

Spiritually, religiously, the churches have discarded their formative texts. Roman Catholics have ditched the Tridentine Mass in favour of modern doggerel versions. The Church of England has thrown out The Authorised Version of the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer. Our theologians – from Bultmann’s “demythologising” of the gospel to Robinson’s Honest to God and John Hick’s The Myth of God Incarnate – have ceased to believe in the Virgin Birth of Our Lord, his miracles, his Resurrection and Ascension

In the matter of morals, society, aided and abetted unfortunately by the church, has rejected the Ten Commandments and replaced those rules for living with act utilitarianism or situation ethics. This is defined as “doing the loving thing in any given situation. regardless of rules.” In other words, we make up our ethics on the spot. This is also known as “the new morality” – of which a wit remarked, “It’s only the old immorality in a miniskirt.” Whereas, the Ten Commandments are ethically sustaining because they are deontological – from being, from what is rather than what is merely thought . Separate morality from being and you end up, as Hamlet knew, in a world where “…there’s nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” So you can think yourself to be a girl even if in fact you are a boy. Or you can be non-specific or neutral. Schools have replaced the old pronouns “he” and “she” with the non-committal “Zie.”

As with our ethics, so with our intellectual life, we have descended into a new Babel of relativism. Deconstructionist critics such as Jacques Derrida claim that “Texts don’t have meanings.” (He said this in a text, by the way!) And if there are no meanings, there is no such thing as the truth. There is only “true for me” or “your” truth and “my” truth and “post-truth.”. We are so intellectually distracted that we can’t see that this means we can no longer talk about truth. In such a world our great philosophical tradition from Plato to Kant, from Aristotle to Collingwood has come to an end.

Aesthetically, we value and admire the wrong things. The rot started at The Renaissance. I’m not saying the Old Masters couldn’t paint, but that their attention was wrongly focussed. From the divine and spiritual objectivity of the Middle Ages – of such as Giotto and Fra Angelico – the Renaissance painters decided to picture humankind and the natural world instead. As T.E. Hulme said, “They rejected man’s place in the world as a species bound by Original Sin and requiring a Saviour and came to believe that, on the whole, humankind is a good thing.” We have descended further into a generalised mess which says that a work of art is anything that anyone says is a work of art. So we have installations, Saatchi, Tracey Emin and art as anti-art, Damien Hirst and animals pickled in formaldehyde, tattoos and the worship of ugliness.

We have abandoned chivalry, etiquette and honour along with natural hierarchy and deference. Our broadcast media, the Internet and the whole of our gadgeteered world of electronic devices is a lewd peep show. In their decline, the Romans had their bread and circuses. We have pizza and porn shows: Love Island in which people are paid to have sex on camera for the benefit of a depraved mass audience.

We are rotten within and we have become unable and unwilling to defend our civilisation against barbarism. This too is a consequence of our abandonment of Christianity. Four times since The Battle of Tours in AD 732 to the relief of the Siege of Vienna 1683, Christian armies led by Christian princes defended our continent against imperialistic, marauding Muslims who would first destroy it and then turn it into a dust bowl resembling the landscapes from which they originated. Secular, modern Europe invites the Islamic hordes in and reserves its condemnation only for those who oppose these disastrous incursions. The preferred word is “Islamophobia.” But a phobia is an irrational fear and there is nothing irrational about fearing a barbarous enemy who has stated times without number that he wants to kill us.

What words are left for Europe? Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine et lux perpetuam luceat eis…..Dies irae, dies illa.

Good night sweetheart

These fragments have I shored against my ruins.

20 Jul

Dianafication II

Twenty years ago Britain wallowed in a public exhibition of gross sentimentality. The occasion was the untimely death of the Princess of Wales. For a fortnight weeping crowds thronged the area around Kensington Palace producing an ocean of floral tributes. There were similar scenes in many towns and cities. A visitor might have been excused for concluding that the favourite pastime of the British was to watch royal funerals on television, pausing now and again to rush out into the street and throw teddy bears at passing hearses.

It was nothing less than mass hysteria. In such instances when the mob takes over, all reasonable sentiment and genuine mourning are replaced by intense emotionality threatening violence. And indeed there were many threats issued by the crazed throng, especially to the Queen. In an ecstasy of irrational hatred the maudlin mob claimed the death of the princess and her paramour, late at night in a car being driven too fast through Paris, had somehow been contrived by the Duke of Edinburgh.

The mood was psychotic and ugly and if, as I did, you criticised the frenzy, you received death threats – as I did.

We can, I think, detect, a change in the nation’s character from that time twenty years ago which we might for convenience refer to as The Great Dianafication. Its symptoms erupt again every time something nasty happens, such as the many acts of Islamic terrorism and slaughter to which we have had to become accustomed.

Here again is the signature carpet of flowers, the mawkish inscriptions daubed all over the public spaces, the flying teddy bears and the now obbligato crooning by pop-singer-of-the-moment of some hideously sugary ballad. The telly omnipresent, of course, and whipping up the hysteria.

As i write, I notice we have entered upon a Second Dianafication and this time the occasion is the catastrophic apartments fire in Kensington.

Yesterday in a public meeting to discuss the fire and its tragic aftermath there was the spectacle again of mass emotionality threatening violence. Elizabeth Campbell, newly appointed leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council, was asked to resign. No, she wasn’t asked: rather the mob howled for her blood. Speaker after speaker screamed and yelled incoherently from the public gallery. After each had spoken, he was hugged by fellow members of the crowd. When one who announced himself as Hamid ended his tirade with the words, “I’ve had enough!” the room boiled over in tears of anger.

Needless to say, if the whole purpose of the meeting was to discover the facts about the catastrophe, a parade of mass hysteria was no way to go about it.

Sinisterly, the newly-elected Labour party MP for the constituency, Emma Dent Coad, declared, “I agree entirely” when she was asked if she backed the petition of 1500 demanding Elizabeth Campbell’s resignation.

What makes these events so frightening is not the display of mass hysteria – worrying though that is – but the fact that this hysteria is being hijacked and exploited by politicians of the hard left.

For Corbyn and his gang, this – thanks again to the ubiquitous telly – widely publicised protest is one more useful ingredient in their revolutionary stew. It amounted to an advertisement for the nationwide discontent being whipped up by the Corbynistas. Corbyn has already promised a summer of co-ordinated strikes and “a march of a million” to culminate a “Red October” to sweep him into Number Ten.

As in war, so in a revolution, truth is the first category. The lie put about during the first Dianafication is that the death of the princess was the fault of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. The tower block fire is being promoted as all the fault of the Tory government.

It is just another step towards the mob’s conclusion that all our ills are the fault of the Tory government. So let us bring down the Tory government – as Chavez and Maduro would say, “By hook or by crook.”

There will be more protests, more. floral tributes, more teddy bears and more cringingly awful crooning; more hugs, more tears and more riots.

There will be blood

17 Jul

Four legs good; two legs bad

I don’t know how they get away with it. Let me try to explain, but first you’ll need a bit of background

The first Bishop of Loughborough is to be Rev’d Canon Gulnar Eleanor Francis-Dehqani, Canon Francis-Dehqani was born in Iran in 1966 and, along with a great many other Christians, she and her family fled that country after the 1979 Islamic revolution which brought to power Ayatollah Khomeini

The new bishop likes to be called Gull and the Diocese of Leicester (of which Loughborough is a part) has told us what they expect from her: “Guli will take a full role in the work of the Church across Leicester and Leicestershire, but the post will also have a focus on supporting Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) clergy, lay workers and congregations in the county.”

Gull is delighted with her job specification:

“I’m very excited…”

(Newly-appointed hierarchs always start off by telling us how excited they are)

This one is excited “…about the potential for this role which draws together several important themes in the current life of the Church. Whilst being a bishop for the whole diocese, it (sic) will be a particular joy and a privilege to learn from and draw out the rich resources of Christians from minority ethnic communities.”

Well, she does not exactly speak as we speak in the street, but I think we know what she means. Since her escape from Iran, she has held a great many posts in the realm of synods, quangos and church committees and she has mastered the art of talking multi-culti bureauspeak.

That’s what I meant by saying I don’t know how they get away with it. I mean Gull and the Diocese ought surely to be arraigned for racism?

We can only imagine the furore that would ensue if a diocesan office had issued a job-specification as follows: “The post will have a focus on supporting White, English and Majority Ethnic (WEME) clergy, lay workers and congregations in the county>”

And if the appointee’s response had been: “It will be a particular joy…”

(Joy, like excited is another word they can’t leave alone)

“…and a privilege to learn from and draw out the rich resources from the majority white English population.”

An appointee saying such things would be denounced immediately for shameful and vile racism. She certainly wouldn’t be appointed. For the scandal is that you can be as racist as you like – so long as the objects of your racism are British and white.

I have listened to the arguments of the multi-culti fascists for for half a century and so I know them all off by heart. We are allowed to make exceptions in the case of preferred minorities, because they are under-represented and so we must give them a leg up with a good dose of positive discrimination.

The trouble with this is that there is nothing positive about it. Discrimination is discrimination is discrimination.

The multi-culti bureau-speakers are racists. And they get away with their racism because the counter culture, the culture of preferring minorities, is the culture now.

Do you remember chapter three of Animal Farm and Snowball’s condensation of The Seven Commandments of Animalism? “Four legs good; two legs bad.”

17 Jun

The show must go on!

from the office of the Controller Monomedia (incorporating BBC, SKY & ITV) to all staff…

Boys & Girls,

First, congratulations and a million thanks for your coverage on the day after the Kensington fire. Our ratings were off the top of the Richter scale. It’s even more mega than that: forget the death of Jo Cox or Cilla or even Michael Jackson, this is our finest hour since the princess popped it in 1997 and the universal Dianafication that followed.

Kensington represents our biggest touchy-feely extravaganza for decades. And wow, you certainly showed how to sell it!

I’ve just enjoyed looking back at the vids. There were so many highlights but surely the masterstroke was the split-screen shot with “cold fish” May on one side and Comrade “Hugger” Corbyn on the other. Jeremy, “man of the people,” kissing the little ones, while May, beautifully captured scowling behind a line of coppers, was the icing on the cake.

Editors and film crews did excellent work getting close-ups of smiling children of the local riff-raff. And how you captured the delicious “anger”!

Above all you remembered the first law of telly journalism: emotion – especially grief – is “sexy.”

Of course, I realise that all this was not achieved on the hoof. Your preparations were meticulous and cameras were in place early. This reminded me of one of our greatest successes, the Brixton and Toxteth riots of 1981. Every evening before sunset, our crews were on the spot when the oiks emerged and started chucking their petrol bombs. There were some unforgettable moments – like the close-up of the young thug stepping inside the smashed window of a shoe shop and nicking a pair of expensive trainers.

Your manipulation of the mob’s mood was superb. Every time a presenter said “There is rising anger,” there was rising anger.

The juxtaposition of dispossessed survivors and cries of “heartless” and “cuts” was another stroke of genius.

But the most wonderful Diana moment for me was when one of our prettiest young presenters – tears in her eyes – delivered straight to camera – “Here in Kensington and Chelsea, some of Britain’s very poorest are living side-by-side with the richest fat cats.”

Now, the thing is, you must not let up. The present media bonanza mustn’t be allowed to fade into a nine days’ wonder. It’s your responsibility – and privilege, I might add – to keep it going. Your job is to fan the flames, so to speak!

Emerging themes for the next few days; (1) masses of floral tributes (2) wayside shrines (3) vigils (4) gratuitous – and escalating – violence.

See if you can get a rock singer to dedicate his/her latest “number” to the people of Grenfell Tower.

I must end on a cautionary note. It has come to my attention that some of our people have been heard muttering, “Hey, we’d better be careful what we wish for. If we actually succeed in putting Jeremy in Number 10 and getting a revolutionary communist government, press and telly freedom will be the first things to go.”

Ignore these Jeremiahs. (Gosh, I nearly said Jeremys!)

It’s our show. Enjoy it while it lasts!

Love

Gordon

Gordon Oswald Dickheadson {GOD}

11 Jun

All Infants Now

How can we account for Jeremy Corbyn’s success in the general election? It’s education – stupid!

The Jesuits used to say, “Give me a child until he’s seven and I will show you the man.” With socialism it takes a little longer: “Give me fifty years of comprehensive education and I will show you a nation of idiots.”

The Department of Education itself admits that, after eleven years of compulsory state education, 43% of pupils leave school unable to read. write and count efficiently. Worse, two generations of teachers – who come out with such expressions as “I was sat” and “I was stood” – have gone through this system, so the result is dumber still and dumber.

Perhaps I’m not being fair. They have a curriculum, don’t they? They learn stuff? But the curriculum is devised by left wing educational commissars who boast of “increasing pupils’ literacy and numeracy.” Yes, their literacy and numeracy are excellent: it’s just that they can’t read, they can’t write and they can’t add up.

History? This is the slave trade – but carefully omitting to mention that this trade was abolished in British dominions by British toffs and policed by the Royal Navy. They teach the evils of empire and imperialism, without reference to the cruellest and most prolonged imperialism of them all, and that’s Islamic imperialism. Bits about Hitler. Nothing about Nelson, but loads about Nelson Mandela. Loads more about Martin Luther King, universal rights – especially for terrorists – and the pagan fantasy of global warming.

Literature? You don’t mean dead white males do you, and honorary dead white males such as Jane Austen and George Eliot? Try The Catcher in the Rye instead.

Music? Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and the repertoire of the classical tradition? Don’t be so elitist. We’ve got rock music and steel bands. Ethnic music. Peruvian nose-flute music. The teachers are all at Glastonbury anyhow.

Natural history? Windmills and cutting down trees in the US and shipping them over here to provide biomass to reduce the “carbon footprint.” Definitely no fracking.

Moral instruction? Wear a condom. How to become homosexual. And – brand new this one – how little boys can become little girls if they like and little girls become little boys. And you don’t have to be either if you don’t want to. Equality. Diversity. Multiculturalism. Political-correctness. Unilateral nuclear disarmament.

Religious education? Islam is the religion of peace and love. Christianity is mostly old bunk. The main thing is not to be “Islamophobic.”

When pupils have mastered this agitprop schedule of ignorance, they can move on to what is misleadingly called “university” where they will learn about safe spaces, “no platform” for anyone who disagrees with this rubbish, and how to abolish free speech

Provide a curriculum like this and you will produce –as we have – a generation that will idolise a Marxist Jew-baiter, a unilateral disarmer who doubles as a friend of the IRA, Hamas and Hezbollah.

The most disturbing aspect of all this is that, whereas in 1983, when the loony leftie Michael Foot produced a manifesto similar to Corbyn’s, the people threw him out on his ear.

But today such dangerous idiocy is applauded

That is the extent of our infantilisation over a mere 34 years.

All Things Considered

Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Category Archives: society