The Coffee House Wall 17th/23rd February

Posted on February 17, 2014

This is the Coffee House Wall for this week. I won’t say that it is your chance to communicate with us, as we are all in this together. It is, nevertheless, the Conservative Blog post that has no particular theme, and where everything is on topic. Let’s just remember that we want to avoid ad hominem attacks on others. We don’t want to engage with trolls. We want to moderate our language ourselves as responsible and mature adults, choosing to use fruity language only where it is necessary. This is our opportunity to show what the Spectator Coffee House Wall could have been like.

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280 thoughts on “The Coffee House Wall 17th/23rd February”

  5. Frank P February 17th, 2014 – 13:14
    “nice to know there are still some real Englishmen around”

    The weather was foul on Saturday last and so I took my beloved out for a drive and a pleasant lunch, we opted for Richmond, North Yorkshire (Richard 3rd was Lord of the Manor) the old railway station has been tastefully converted into a multi-use venue.

    Whilst we ate an excellent lunch, it dawned on us both, that just like our own smaller town this is England, England as it was and I suspect will be for many a year.

  7. EC (15:54)

    Thanks, David. We must make sure that his Breitbart debut is widely disseminated. Stand by for MSM ad hominem broadside on Dellers.

  8. I don’t often cry. How can I, considering I lived through World War II and learned at a young age how cruel so-called civilised people can be. Today, however, I wept listening to what is going on in North Korea. Torture, mothers forced to murder their new born babies, I won’t go on, it is all there in print or on the radio. During World War II, there was the excuse that nobody knew what the Nazis were doing, today that excuse cannot be used. U.N. Sanctions against NK are useless, China will veto them, and just act like Switzerland did, ‘hearing no evil, seeing no evil’, and getting richer. Would a complete boycott on Chinese goods and trade help to bring about a veto? Would countries not at the mercy of North Korea be willing to suffer a loss of cheap goods and services? I don’t know. I am neither an economist nor a politician, just a person who lives vainly in the hope that things have improved in my life time.

  9. A lesson in humility?
    This test is to ascertain your mental state now. If you get one right you are doing ok, if you get none right you better go for counselling.
    Giraffe Test
    There are 4 questions. Don’t miss one.
    1. How do you put a giraffe into a refrigerator?
    Stop and think about it before deciding on your answer.

    The correct answer is: Open the refrigerator, put in the giraffe, and close the door. This question tests whether you tend to do simple things in an overly complicated way.

    2 How do you put an elephant into a refrigerator?

    Did you say, Open the refrigerator, put in the elephant, and close the refrigerator?

    Wrong Answer.

    Correct Answer: Open the refrigerator, take out the giraffe, put in the elephant and close the door. This tests your ability to think through the repercussions of your previous actions.

    3. The Lion King is hosting an Animal Conference. All the animals attend …. Except one. Which animal does not attend?

    Correct Answer : The Elephant. The elephant is in the refrigerator. You just put him in there. This tests your memory.
    Okay, even if you did not answer the first three questions correctly, you still have one more chance to show your true abilities.

    4. There is a river you must cross but it is used by crocodiles, and
    you do not have a boat. How do you manage it?

    Correct Answer: You jump into the river and swim across. Haven’t you been listening? All the crocodiles are attending the Animal Conference. This tests whether you learn quickly from your mistakes.

    According to Anderson Consulting Worldwide, around 90% of the
    Retirees they tested got all questions wrong, but many preschoolers got several correct answers. Anderson Consulting says this conclusively proves the theory that most Retirees do not have the brains of a four-year-old.

  10. There is a piece by Judas Goat Douglas Carswell in The Shariagraph, less notable for its pretend to be on the voters’ side content than for the Comments underneath (as always).

    Someone called Bickers wrote this below. I think it is right. Not only is postal voting the big scam, but LibLabCon have huge numbers of people on the de facto payroll. Developers getting rich off the back of immigration, the quangos and so on.

    These are placemen bought and in post to do unmost damage off the radar. Anyway, take it away, ‘Bickers’:

    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/douglascarswellmp/100259311/british-democracy-is-dying-replaced-by-a-smug-self-serving-technocracy/

    After fighting the recent by-election UKIP’s future prospects are exciting although it’s was alarming for many of its supporters to witness first hand the way our once great democracy is being undermined by the Establishment (surely not part of their plan to subjugate the UK under the heel of the EU!).

    Postal voting, when combined with a short by-election campaign, as initiated by Labour in Wythenshawe & Sale East, makes most attempts to challenge a strong incumbent party (especially Labour) almost futile. Remember, it was Labour that introduced postal voting to enable those too infirm to make it to a polling station an opportunity to place their vote.

    Many are now firmly of the view that after introducing postal voting Labour knew that they would be able to ‘spread’ it and then ‘work’ it to their advantage. In Wythenshawe, where Labour has been deeply embedded for fifty years they ‘worked’ the postal vote and must have known very early on that they had victory ‘in the bag’.

    For some time many people have suspected that there was something ‘rotten in the State of Denmark’ regarding postal voting, however it was still a shock to witness it on polling day when e.g. a lady informed UKIP that she’d voted however couldn’t confirm who for as her husband ‘takes care of who the family votes for’. It’s now an urgent priority that the Electoral Commission face up to the scandal of postal voting and its detrimental impact on what’s left of our failing democracy. Quite frankly, to be sending our servicemen & women into harm’s way on the premise of spreading democracy, when we have serious flaws in our own is quite sickening.

    Even had postal voting not been an issue UKIP would have still had an almost impossible hill to climb. Labour have ‘owned’ the seat for fifty years, they have activists, union members and public sector employees on the ground. UKIP had no local infrastructure or support base and from effectively a standing start they achieved 18% in less than three weeks (one week for the postal vote). That’s a fantastic effort.

    Many of those who voted for UKIP were disillusioned, once loyal Labour supporters (Labour won with only 15% of the electorate). They feel like they are now second class citizens, with housing, benefits and public services being given to ‘undeserving immigrants’, often ahead of them in the queue, that employers are deliberately replacing them with more malleable immigrants who’ll accept lower wages and conditions and that the benefits system is too complex (and its attendant bureaucracy too self serving) to work for them.

    Some voters complained about the government appointed private agencies given the task of getting people back into work, and only doing so temporarily, making millions. UKIP met too many people in Wythenshawe who had given up and had no hope or belief that society cared about them. Most are in a place that they cannot get out of. Official figures may show the economy is recovering, however what UKIP witnessed was a section of society being left on the sidelines, trapped on benefits by a political class who’ve never had a real job, living high on the hog and more interested in their careers than taking the difficult decisions needed to support British Citizens. Interestingly, the EU was a subject that many working class people were scathing about, contrary to what the chattering classes and media like to claim.

    How are UKIP going to fight Labour:

    1. NHS: Labour like to claim they are the only party that champions the NHS and can protect it. Leaving aside the hundreds of people that died at Stafford (& elsewhere) because of Labour’s allegedly dreadful management of the NHS, Labour claim that they don’t want private business providing NHS services for profit. What hypocrites!

    Labour colluded with The City, Bankers and property developers in 700 odd PFI (private finance initiatives) contracts worth tens of billions to build schools and hospitals. The terms given by Labour to the Bankers and developers were so generous that hospital budgets, and therefore services for patients have been (and for the next few decades) will be severely compromised. UKIP believes (as does the Public Accounts Select Committee) that Labour’s PFI contract for Wythenshawe hospital was one of the worst signed by Labour. The Bankers and property developers allegedly put down £6million and borrowed a further £75million. In return Labour gave them a contract worth circa £900million in fee’s over thirty five years. The deal means that the hospital probably cost sixteen times more than it should have done. Even worse, the debt that the hospital has been saddled with means that circa 1 in 10 pounds of their operating budget for serving patients has instead to go on servicing payments to Bankers and property developers. In most constituencies Labour’s PFI financial incompetence is there to behold. Let’s tell voters that it was Labour who got into bed with the Bankers and that it was their sipping with the ‘devil’ (that they now oddly despise) that has led to many of today’s pressures on front line health services and threats to patients lives.

    2. Cost of Living Crisis (or austerity): all roads lead back to a hypocritical Labour
    Party!

    * It was Labour that took the Country to the edge of bankruptcy in 2008. It was Labour that controlled the regulation that allowed the Banks and The City to go on a debt fuelled spending and lending binge. It was Labour that spent hundreds of
    billions on inflating the size of the public sector and allowing pen pushing overpaid managers to create useless, stifling and self serving empires.

    * Because we now have to clear the debts caused by Labour (still growing at an alarming rate under the Coalition) we, our kids and their kids are going to have a
    reduced standard of living for many years to come.

    * Labour allegedly encouraged hundreds of thousands of immigrants to come to the UK in just a few short years. Those immigrants, desperate for work, tended to take the jobs of the working class, Labour’s so called natural constituency. Because of Labour the working class have suffered job losses, wage compression and lost employment opportunities. It beggars belief that it was Labour that thought it’d be a good idea to advertise British jobs across the whole of Europe when hundreds of thousands of British Citizens were out of work.

    * Energy prices: it was Labour (and Ed Miliband specifically) that signed into
    law the 2008 Climate Change Act, Parliament’s most expensive Act ever. The Act
    will cost circa £18billion each year for forty years. That money is mainly to
    subsidise rich land owners hosting wind farms, wind farm manufacturers (mostly
    based abroad) and a raft of other dodgy subsidies for renewables/green quangos
    and other assorted rent seekers. Rather than come clean with the electorate
    about what the Act was going to cost the cowardly Labour government hid the
    costs in our energy bills. And guess which section of society now has to pay
    disproportionately more of its disposable income on energy, the working class,
    you know the people that Labour claims to support.

    * Air Passenger Duty (APD): under Labour this stealth tax (Labour introduced scores) soared and a family of four travelling to Florida in 2013 paid £268.00 in APD, the highest in Europe. APD is driving long haul traffic abroad (where APD is much lower or has been scrapped), and is causing airlines to question the viability of opening new long haul routes from the UK. So apart from hammering those working class families struggling to pay for a once in a life time holiday Labour’s green taxes are driving jobs & business abroad.

    LABOUR HAS BETRAYED THE WORKING CLASS. This cannot be said often enough!

    We need to ram home to the electorate, and Labour voters in particular, between now and the General Election the sheer hypocrisy and financial incompetence of Labour and their betrayal of the working class.

    Finally, only UKIP is patriotic. The three main parties are slowly handing over control of our Country to a bureaucratic, unaccountable monolith. Our parents &
    grandparents fought in two World Wars to keep this country sovereign. LibLabCon
    have no right, without a mandate from the people to dilute or give away our
    hard earned democracy.

    If Oliver Cromwell was alive today he’d repeat what he did to the Long Parliament in 1653 – “It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage………”

  11. I find it very interesting how in the last week, all the MSM enforcers have been out, backing up Georgie Porgie’s assertion that Scotland cannot keep the pound.

    Mr Mainstream Propagandist Par Excellence Andrew Neil is on YouTube waling at Nicola Sturgeon asking her: How can you keep the pound if they won’t let you.

    We will keep the pound, says Ms Sturgeon.

    Oh how the MSM lauds one of their own, Mr Neil.

    And then, after a few days of lies and posturing by the MSM, they have to admit, because the internet found them out (oh how they hate the internet!) that Scotland damn well can keep the pound even if it has to do so informally.

    The Dominican Republic isn’t in America, but it doesn’t stop everyone using the US dollar as their day-to-day currency.

    All hot air.

    Scare, scare, scare.

    Don’t take control.

    Please.

    No, don’t do that.

    Listen to our scare story.

    Tomorrow’s front page headline: If Scotland goes independent, David Cameron will huff and puff and blow Holyrood’s door in.

    Twaddle.

    All of it.

    Do as you please, folks, and give them all a fright.

  13. Why should Scotland keep the pound, Joany? It can buy it up at the Currency Exchange at Edinburgh Airport but it has no right to a currency union and Osborne is manifestly speaking the truth on this. Likewise Scotland will not be allowed to join the EU.

  14. For me the book of the year is “Why Nations Fail”, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. It really is a must read for anyone who wants to understand how nations rise and fall. Don’t believe I’m in agreement with all its arguments; I’m not. The authersargue for the continuation of foreign aid for example.One of the greatest modern supports of failed and failing states. That said they provide a tremendous banquet of food for thought through ancient and modern history in support of their thesis. I know Cameron claims to have read it but don’t let that put you off. For two reasons; the first of course is that Cameron’s causal link with the truth is often slight, indeed more remote than an Argentinian on an Independence for the Falklands march in Buenos Aires. So, the chances really are that he hasn’t and never will read and so understand its essential libertarian message. Can we really believe that those sternly pouting lips ignore the opportunity to whisper sweet nothings into SamCam’s pretty ear just in order to lip-synch the words of Acemon and Robinson as the dissect the essentilly ‘extractive’ nature of the political and economic instutions which make sone states fail, (Soviet Russia, Venice, the Mayan and Roman empires) whilst inclusive, entreprenural nations (C18 Britain and the US) succeed?
    If examining Sam’s earwax has indeed been pushed into second place then I’m a), impressed and b) unsurprised by the fact that, despite having read it he’s done nothing to change the rapidly failing and anti-democratic nature of Britain’s existing political and economic systems. After all, Cameron is very much of the political class that recognises a failing state does not necessrily fail the elites which extract its wealth for themselves.
    So why would he want to change it?
    You may or may not agree with their views, but you will certainly inform yourself and your understanding of the interaction of politics, democracy and economics if you treat yourself to this book. Oh and, for what it’s worth, I suspect you’ll be one up on David Cameron as well.

    http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/aandrreview.pdf

  15. The Australian judge introducing the report on the horrors of North Korea repeats, in passing, the often repeated notion: “At the end of the Second World War, so many people said if only we had known the wrongs that were done…”
    Which always make me wonder, “if only we had known…” what would we have done that we weren’t doing already?

  16. Well we did know what was happening in WWII and it was decided for various reasons not to bomb the camps. That might have been right or wrong but it was a decision made with knowledge of what was happening.

  17. PfM, yes I thought that was the case. But the idea seems to be put about that we weren’t doing anything – which seems a bit unfair, given that we were totally at war with Germany.

  18. I agree Peter, they have no right to a currency union.

    It’s the sort of thing that requires a bit of detail, but there are commentaries out there on the web that explain it all.

    http://caledonianmercury.com/2014/02/17/do-we-need-osborne-or-barrosos-permission/0044903

    Even the massivley anti-independence City AM ran a piece with the headline: ‘Of course Scotland can use the pound without a currency union. Jersey does exactly that’

    http://www.cityam.com/blog/1392314299/course-scotland-can-use-pound-without-currency-union-jersey-does-exactly

    Barroso’s comments are actually re-heated utterances, just given more prominence by a very angry MSM.

    Here’s an old headline:

    Former European Court judge says Barroso is wrong on Scotland’s EU position

    http://www.thecourier.co.uk/news/politics/former-european-court-judge-says-barroso-is-wrong-on-scotland-s-eu-position-1.61552

    I don’t understand this ‘can’t do’ attitude of the Brits. I want the best for England, I want the best for Wales, I want the best for Scotland, but that clearly isn’t happening in the political structures that exist at present.

    Something must change radically and that is the mindset that I want to see people realise they can achieve.

    And I pin it all on secession and the idea of the nation state – the idea the elites have tried to abolish.

    All I want to see is the levers of power closer to what people actually want.

    I just cannot see how the status quo is providing that or will provide that.

    I’m sad to say it, but those of us who are broadly of the same mindset must have a Yes We Can moment, and we must be opportunistic, like Rahm Emannuel.

    We must use crises and other events to political advantage.

    All I can see, if Scotland goes independent, is power back in the hands of the people in a way the Establishment never meant to happen.

    I cannot see how democracy in England would be diminished by Scotland going alone.

  20. Yes, but North Korea has no elections of any kind!

    That is to confuse independence per se with Salmond.

    Here is what I think will happen.

    I think that Scotland will learn to stand on its own two feet and that the politcial establishment will go back into the melting pot and Labour, the Tories and latterly the SNP will all have to reithink themselves.

    I think it will unleash a huge debate about immigration and that all the parties in Scotland will have to adjust to a public that doesn’t want mass immigration.

    I also think that if independence is achieved it will have the same effect on England (which is already in flux, but realising it has massive difficulties in getting rid of LibLabCon.

    I think the Scots will very quickly see through Mr Salmond’s socialist fantasy and realise that now – unlike North Korea – they are in a position to do something about it without blaming another country and without silly tactical voting contests where the results of general elections are skewed because of the voting pattern of another nation.

    Likewise, haven’t the people of England had enough of Scotland’s electorate determining their future.

    I do not live in the England any more, yet I recall for 13 years the complaints – made, I think, with much justification – that the socialist fantasy unleashed on England by New Labour was made possible in no small part because there were so many Labour MPs from Scotland.

    It seems to me the Scottish electorate will have the boot on its foot to kick Salmond out when they see through him and that the same applies to England.

    There can be no more complaints over the West Lothian question.

    Again, all I see is power, at last, going back to the people.

  23. Joany – 21:47
    “I want the best for England, I want the best for Wales, I want the best for Scotland, but that clearly isn’t happening in the political structures that exist at present.”

    This is partly due to the unequal geometry we have, with non-English MPs influencing English Law.

    If Scotland becomes independent, why do you want “the best for Scotland”, to the detriment of England? Scotland becoming ‘Independent’ will mean that Scotland do not want the best for England, Wales and NI. They will be a little more indifferent towards us!
    Surely, the definition of being “Independent” means being independent of everyone else. We can always be allies, as we are with France(!), but we need to tell Scotland, before the vote, that they need to grow up, and Salmond’s actions infer that he is expecting unending favours!

    If they unofficially use the GBP, then it makes our currency a lot more susceptible to attacks by the Rest of the World. It doesn’t need a vindictive attack by anyone. All it requires is some sort of currency war, say on the Chinese or European currency, or on a commodity, and the pressure will build until something cracks!

    It will be our Governments duty to do everything for our country and, if Scotland is ‘Independent’, that will not include Scotland!

  24. Fair enough!

    I only note that when Labour embarked on its devolution strategy, it did so thinking it would forever hold the balance of power in a Scottish parliament because its voters there were seen as diehards.

    How quickly the voters of Scotland learnt to be opportunistic and so stripped Labour of what it hoped would be power in perpetuity in Scotland.

    Perhaps the law of unintended consequences will not strike twice if Scotland wins independence, but if it does, I hope it does so in a way that benefits both sides of the border!

  26. I agree with you to a big extent, RobertC, but I cannot see how England would suffer if it effectively has more powers of self-government?

    If it turns out that Scotland is draining the UK then I think England should take steps to stop that, but it must do at the ballot box.

    Why should the power of the ballot box be delegated to bankers?

    When I say I want the best for Scotland, the best for Wales, the best for England, it is because I am an unashamed nationalist.

    I believe in the nation state.

    I believe people work better inside a nation state.

    I simply cannot understand how the deep unhappiness in England – and it was there all through the years of New Labour using its Scottish block of Westminster MPs – cannot be helped by Scottish independence.

    Fundamentally, it seems to me that the inability to self-govern is the cause of so much unhappiness around the world, and here seems to me the perfect chance for the voters of England and Scotland to benefit: Better Apart!

    It may be a messy divorce to start off with but I really do believe that in the long run – and this is forever (I hope) – it really would be the most enormous benefit to everyone.

  27. “I believe people work better inside a nation state.”

    That belef depends on whether one considers Great Britain to be a nation in itself, or a construct of separae states. The socialists, Irish and Scottish, subscribe to the latter. Under the umbrella of the EU.
    Now, apply the same idea in the United States and watch the Civil War re-ignite, as it may well do.

  28. Worth reading how she slides from one post to another with no common ground between them.
    I would like to know how she was thought suitable to be in charge of the environment agency.
    You don’t have to tell me, unfortunately I know the ans as we all do. !!!

    The Baroness Young of Old Scone
    Personal details
    Born 8 April 1948 (age 65)
    Nationality British
    Political party Non-affiliated (Labour until 2000)
    Barbara Scott Young, Baroness Young of Old Scone (born 8 April 1948) is a member of the House of Lords. She was made a life peer in 1997 as Baroness Young of Old Scone, of Old Scone in Perth and Kinross.[1]

    Baroness Young is currently the Chief Executive of health charity Diabetes UK, a position she took up on 1 November 2010.

    Following the announcement of her appointment, Barbara Young said:

    “I am thrilled to have been given this opportunity to lead Diabetes UK. There is no doubt that diabetes is one of the most important health issues facing the UK today and is a growing challenge for the future. I’m looking forward to taking on that challenge and helping to make a real difference to the lives of people with diabetes.”[2]

    On starting at Diabetes UK, she said:

    “Taking on the mantle of Chief Executive means consolidating and improving the good work the charity does. Diabetes UK has three strategic priorities to achieve – quality care for all, healthy lifestyle and research for a better life. Everyone who works and volunteers for Diabetes UK is involved in achieving these goals… I will ensure that I lead Diabetes UK to achieve the three strategic priorities efficiently and cost-effectively, which will have the greatest impact on the lives of the people we represent.”[3]

    Before joining Diabetes UK, Young was involved in the establishment of the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Then Health Secretary Alan Johnson announced the appointment of Baroness Young as chair of the organisation on 15 April 2008.[4] The announcement followed an independent recruitment exercise conducted by the Appointments Commission and a pre-appointment scrutiny hearing.[5] by the Health Select Committee, which subsequently endorsed Barbara Young for appointment as the CQC chair. She held this position until 1 February 2010.[6]

    Prior to taking up the post of chair of the CQC, Barbara Young was the chief executive of the Environment Agency (2000 – May 2008), an appointment which led to her becoming a non-affiliated member in the House of Lords; previously she had taken the Labour Party whip. Other posts she has held include chair of English Nature; vice chairman of the BBC; board member of AWG plc; Chief Executive of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and of a number of local health authorities, including Parkside Health Authority.

    In 2010 Barbara Young was appointed Chancellor of Cranfield University.

  29. Vis a vis our debate above, there is similar exchange of opinion in this article on The Shariagraph.

    These people broadly share my view:

    RPrior
    • 2 hours ago

    −

    Cannot stand Salmond BUT:-

    With strong Scottish roots, (My Uncle had a Tartan factory in Aberfeldy) I would find the decision to vote Yes exceptionally easy.

    I do not want the EU, I am quite happy with EFTA thank you very much. A Scottish Central Bank would be a positive advantage as would a new currency. The Euro is a dead duck for most of the countries that have adopted it, and the pound is influenced by the mad policies of England’s politicians.

    Three cheers to Barroso and Cameron for making the decision easy.

    Just think about it, Scotland can control its own immigration policies – Just like Switzerland.

    6
    •
    Reply
    •
    Share ›

    Avatar
    Didimus RPrior
    • an hour ago

    .

    Scots.

    You have a wonderful opportunity.

    Don’t throw it away.

    Regain your sovereignty.

    Out of the UK.

    Out of Europe.

    Bingo.

    All in one go.

    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/iainmartin1/100259907/alex-salmonds-plan-to-win-the-independence-referendum-by-reassuring-scottish-voters-is-in-ruins/

    There are other views on there, though, that echo with some of you here.

  30. Noa, February 17th, 2014 – 19:20

    “Anderson Consulting says this conclusively proves the theory that most Retirees do not have the brains of a four-year-old.”

    It’s truly amazing what £2000 a day consultant can come up with.

  32. John birch 18th, – 07:10

    “The Baroness Young of Old Scone
    Personal details
    Born 8 April 1948 (age 65)”

    Inexperienced brat! 🙂

  33. Joany – 23:25
    “I agree with you to a big extent, RobertC, but I cannot see how England would suffer if it effectively has more powers of self-government?”

    It is not the internal self-government that is problem, and it could be done within a devolved UK! If an ‘Independent’ Scotland shares the GBP, it will be detrimental to the rest of the, current, UK. It would be dismantling Britain’s financial structures, creating a weaker Fortress Britain, and international pressures may, or will eventually, find Britain the easiest place to release the safety value.

    So why let it go ahead without sharing this most obvious conclusion with them? The Scots are hardly going to reduce their public spending, grow their industry any faster than they have recently done, reduce their benefits bill or ensure that their businesses can thrive. It is not in the nature of their politicians, especially when the Rest of Britian will be taking some of of the strain!

    Our financial security requires us to have control over what is our responsibility, and nothing more. Scotland’s financial sector would be beyond our control, yet still our responsibility! Not only will it be an extra worry for us, it will be one less for Scotland. What ever happens, the Scottish’s red whine will be heard – telling London to fix their problem which, of course, will be a never ending task. It will be like having two young teenagers with a credit card in their parents’ names – with even less responsibility than they would have without the credit cards! And I am sure that the EU would be only too delighted to create timely problems to encourage us into the Euro?

    “If it turns out that Scotland is draining the UK then I think England should take steps to stop that, but it must do at the ballot box.
    Why should the power of the ballot box be delegated to bankers?”

    The Chancellor of the Exchequer, chosen though the ballot box and some party politics, is the person responsible for managing the nations finances. The current holder of that office has told Scotland where they are mistaken. There financial plans do not add up, which is a bit of a problem in the credibility stakes!

    If the Chancellor of the Exchequer delegates tasks, or even responsibility, to bankers, then who are you to object! 🙂

    If Scotland votes YES, I would expect much of Scotland’s financial industry will depart to London. What do you propose that the Chancellor of the Exchequer does then? Isn’t it too late to do anything other than welcome the extra capital flowing into London from a foreign country? If capital flowed in from Paris or New York, wouldn’t you be pleased for the extra business?

    So if Scotland votes YES and London gets a good chunk of the business leaving Edinburgh, I will ecstatic! After all, it could have gone to Paris or New York instead.

  34. EC 18th, – 09:28

    “The Scots should be very careful about what Alex Salmond SAYS he will do for Scotland and, in reality, what he will ACTUALLY do!”

    Bit like Blair and Brown, then?

    Oh, yes, a Scot and a Scot manqué.

  35. EC – 09:28
    Reading the garbled English that is in the URL, I was surprised to read that the tattoo was on someone’s back!

  36. Joany – yesterday, 21:47
    ‘Of course Scotland can use the pound without a currency union. Jersey does exactly that’

    I don’t think Jersey has as much of a wealth draining capability as Scotland.

    It is not so much the net economic effect, as Scotland has some very wealth creating sectors. It is the large number employed in the public sector, because they are unemployable anywhere else, and the completely unemployable that is the millstone around Scotland’s neck.

    It will only take a few of the wealth creators to move south for the wheels to come off this farce, completely.

    If England is then asked for help, I am sure we could cobble together another Union, just reinforcing the fact that Scotland is sh1t at managing its own finances. But then again, do we rally want, after another 300 years of whining, to have another Salmond rise from the ashes? Probably not!

  38. EC – 10:40
    “The DT does much better class of URL.”

    Faint praise! I suppose we should be thankful that it gets something right.

  40. Noa @10:47

    Who are the Coalition’s consultants of first resort these days? Same as NuLabs?Perhaps, for the sake of balance, CH4 ought to run a series called Consultancy Crescent Britain.

  46. RobertC @ 10:34

    If Scotland were to go it alone they can always peg their currency to the pound sterling, nobody could stop them.

    Baron was rather surprised, thought it rather mean for the three party leaders to say independent Scotland cannot use the pound. The ‘ownership’ of the currency was not England’s only. When the two kingdoms merged in 1707 the Scots and the English both had pound sterling as the coinage of the land. The Treasury may have been in London ever since, but the Scottish banks are still issuing their own notes.

    For mildly nostalgic reasons Baron would be rather sad if the Scots voted to break off. There are fewer of them, yet in the history of this rain sodden island, the burghers of the land of haggis and whisky have contributed more than one would expect merely on the basis of the population numbers. No always in a positive sense though.

  48. Frank, the tower climbing link is fantastic, Baron e-mailed it to all of his friends, is told by one it made him physically sick, he froze, couldn’t stop watching it, his wife apparently said she would veto all Baron’s e-mails. You see what you’ve done?

  50. EC @ 15:42

    The boy in no 10 says we shouldn’t yet ‘learn lessons, apportion blame’, we must focus on helping those who suffer from the deluge.

    Why? What is there to stop him sacking the gargoyle Smith? The signal that would send to all the other overpaid tossers in charge of the numerous quangos would be by far more powerful than the outcome of any long winded, million pound investigation into the disaster that we are likely to wait for for years.

  51. ACP

    Korski is now a SPAD for Cameron and judging by his previous sinecures then it says a great deal about both Korski and Cameron.

    Well, at least we knocked him into shape before he took on his last role: one hopes it is his last role in any form of government.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Korski

  52. Killers of Lee Rigby up for sentencing at Old Bailey on Wednesday 26 Feb at 2pm.

    This follows a judgement in the Court of Appeal that the whole life tariff of imprisonment with-out release on parole is lawfully within Human Rights Law.

    The Judge in the Rigby murder case had suspended sentencing until this judgment had been given.

  53. Radford NG @ 17:34

    Baron bets you the two thugs will appeal to Europe, the Strasbourg judges will back them. You’ll see.

  54. Baron (16:40).

    Not sure whether you’re talking about the first vertigo/acrophobia link I posted from Gerard – or the one from Michael Roberts that he posted afterwards on that thread in the comments – qv. The last one would really get your friend (and any other sane person you know) into a spin.

    I’m sure that whatever first cause kicked off our evolutionary existence did not intend that we, as a species, should do things like that. Why do we aspire to rise about the earth when we were built for feet-on-terra-firma.

    The question should also be asked, “Why do we aspire to ever more complicated ‘intel’ when we were built for the confines of ‘common sense’ “?

    Perhaps, sooner or later, the sages of The Wall will answer these and many other mysteries. In the meantime make sure you disseminate Deller’s AGW ’10 lies list’. There are still too many of our fellow citizens swallowing the globally warmed bullshit, particularly “Après le déluge” to misquote Louis XV (or Madame de Pompadour – whichever is your belief).

  55. Baron – and I fear you are right about the judges eventually over-ruling our Appeals process in the case of the Woolwich nutters (supposing that out judges do the bizness. One hopes that the fiercest-ever legal bust up occurs if the ECHR do intercede. It would be a good opportunity for Cameron to use such ammunition to increase his popularity – but as he has no intention excising the umbilicus of the EUSSR – he won’t. Too much bunce and possible post PM kudos flowing through it for his personal gratification.

  56. Baron – 16:34
    “The ‘ownership’ of the currency was not England’s only.”
    Partly true! In fact, it is owned by whom so ever has £1 coins in their pocket. Currently the GBP is ‘controlled’ by the British Government, who are answerable to it via the Bank of England, and any sacrifices to support the currency are made by the British people (supposedly)!

    ” The Treasury may have been in London ever since, but the Scottish banks are still issuing their own notes.”
    But the ‘Scottish notes’ are currently backed up by the Bank of England, in London, part of Britain’s government machinery! If Salmond want a truly independent Scotland, he will have to back up his own currency, and not leave the burden on London’s shoulders!

    Having responsibility for what you have power over, power over what you have responsibility for, and that you inhabit this common space so you are affected by the consequences of your actions is the only recipe for a sane world.

    And Salmond is trying to create something else! He wants power, without the responsibility or the consequences!

    “If Scotland were to go it alone they can always peg their currency to the pound sterling, nobody could stop them.”

    This is true, but I am not saying they cannot do this.

    I am saying that, if Scotland uses the bank of England Pound, the following is possible:

    1) if, or is it when, Scotland makes some poor financial decisions, it could easily impact the whole Sterling area, including the rest of the UK (rUK) – for example, nationalising some ‘important’ industries, increasing the windmill subsidies, upping benefits or making poor investments in South America:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme lol

    After all, they will be ‘Independent’!

    2) when the Chancellor of the Exchequer deems it necessary to deal with any financial problem in the Sterling area, he would not have control of financial matters in Scotland, so he could not expect his changes to extend to Scotland.

    How will the English feel, with increased income taxes because an ‘Independent’ Scotland had run out of money? It is bad enough now that we have to pay higher university fees

    He could create “Scotland focused” taxes (to which the EU would object) or he could just make vague threats. He could create and encourage a subtle financial war, which England would probably win, with the Scottish financial sector moving to London! It would be defeat for Scotland and a Pyrrhic victory for England, but at least Scotland would suffer more! This is the blackmail that Salmond is using, so pointing out it will not work is the only sensible thing to do. London has already said it will take on all the nations’ debts, but I expect it will want to keep the oil revenues, and more, to help balance the books! It could leave the Royal Bank of Scotland in Scotland though!

    3) These two factors will only increase the likelihood that Scotland WILL make poor financial decisions, so return to point 1 until this sinks in!

    4) And this scenario will not need to happen for it to be a problem! The international markets will waste no time in dealing with this precarious situation and the EU will offer a hand of friendship and invite us to join the Euro, with a most disagreeable offer, no doubt, for all in the Sterling area!

  57. Here’s an extract from Jonah Goldberg’s Newsletter – always worth the time:

    Nationalreview.com

    The Goldberg File
    By Jonah Goldberg
    February 14, 2014

    Dear Reader (Hey look at me! I don’t have to change the gender settings on my salutation! Take that Facebook),

    So, imagine you’re a young Saudi guy logging on to Facebook for the first time. It asks you to state your gender. It then gives you 58 options. You take out your fingers — the simple man’s calculator — and start counting along. Male, female, whatever uncle Ahmed is . . . okay three. I count three.

    What are these other 55 things?

    You might think: Maybe those burkas don’t just cover women? It’s not often I denounce Western cultural imperialism. And I’m not really going to here. But you have to have some sympathy for people around the world who don’t necessarily want their gender horizons broadened on Mark Zuckerberg’s timetable.

    In fairness, as of now, Facebook hasn’t said whether it will make these options available on sites worldwide yet, but it’s probably coming. If Facebook would yield to the 58-genders lobby here, what is the rational argument for not yielding to it for Mexico or Dubai? Canada, I gather, is already gender-neutral. But you get the point.

    Interventionist at Home, Laissez-Faire Abroad

    It’s hard for Americans to fully appreciate the fact that America really has a culture as real and specific as France’s or China’s. Immigrants get this. Foreign tourists get this. But normal Americans tend to think the way we do things is simply the way things are done. I don’t mean this in a condescending or critical way. Rather, one of the great things about American culture is that most of us don’t spend a lot of time thinking about culture. (While we have a lot of ridiculous bureaucrats spending money on artsy stuff, if anybody proposed a national “Minister of Culture” like they have in Europe, most Americans would be horrified.)

    Not surprisingly, the further left you move the more the attitude towards American culture becomes hostile; that it needs to be changed, reformed, broadened, folded, spindled, and mutilated. Meanwhile, the conservative view is that American culture (i.e. traditional culture, broadly speaking) is pretty great, with a few rough spots here or there.

    What I find fascinating is how these attitudes tend to be reversed when we look past our borders, particularly on the left. The Left is forever sensitive to the idea that we not “impose” our values on other societies. At home, we need to extirpate every last hint of traditionalism. Indeed, being a traditionalist in America — which makes you quite modern by global standards — makes you a backward yokel in the eyes of the academic Left.

    Campus lefty to normal person: “Heh. You probably think there are only, like, 13 genders! What are you, a caveman?”

    (It’s hard to appreciate how thick this campus bubble is. Watch Melissa Harris Perry explain (from a college campus, no less), how we need to junk “the idea that kids belong to their parents, or that kids belong to their families.” I have no doubt she thought she was explaining — womansplaining? — common sense and was shocked to discover that in our culture we actually think our kids really are our responsibility. And when people start talking about “collective ownership” of our children, we start re-watching Red Dawn for practical tips.)

    But if I condemn the backward attitudes or customs of some foreign country; if I talk about how maybe it’s a good thing that some tribal peoples are giving up a subsistence lifestyle; if I ridicule the habit of covering your women in burlap; many of the same people are suddenly like “Whoa, whoa, whoa! Who are you to judge?” Or, “Like America is perfect?”

    No, not perfect. But much, much better.

    It’s true that conservatives are more receptive of late to the idea we shouldn’t impose our culture on others. I think this is a symptom of the Right’s general exhaustion with the Middle East and the rise of to-hell-with-them-hawkery. But the motives are far less inconsistent. This impulse isn’t driven from the view that these other cultures are in any meaningful way better than ours. Rather, it stems from the view that they’re not worth the effort anymore.

    Anyway, as America’s cultural exports — not just movies and music, but things like Facebook too — become ever more poisonous and destructive to traditional culture it will be interesting to see whether it will dawn on the left that foreign anti-Americanism has less to do with imperialism, colonialism, or a cartoonish theory of capitalism and more to do with things like exporting 58 gender categories around the world.

    Back in the USSR

    During the Olympic opening ceremonies I criticized — in the piquant flavor Twitter encourages (I believe I used the term “jagwad” at one point) — the repugnant whitewashing of Soviet history on my TV screen. In response some people on Twitter came back at me to condemn, in the words of one admittedly Canadian critic, my “ethnocentric and imperialist” tweets. So here I’m the imperialist for reminding people that the Soviets invaded, conquered, and occupied literally dozens of countries. Got it. I’m the ethnocentrist for remembering that for all the talk of internationalism, the Soviets were a thoroughly Russian empire with a population policy to make sure it stayed that way (white Russian women could receive a “Hero of the Motherland” medal if they had lots of kids. Swarthier types from the Asian colonies? Not so much).

    Communism Deserves Our Hatred

    My column today is on the aforementioned whitewashing, and I’m particularly fond of it, even though I had to leave so much on the cutting-room floor. You see, the Soviet Union really was an evil empire. (You can check my work. It murdered and enslaved millions = evil. It invaded countries, appropriated their resources, and controlled their governments, schools, and cultural institutions = empire. What am I missing?) And I have no tolerance or patience for people who roll their eyes at such statements.

    I remember when the Soviet Union started to crumble. I repeated something stupid I’d heard on Crossfire about how conservatives would be bummed at the loss of anti-Communism as a political issue. Or something like that. My father was visibly disgusted. As patiently as he could he explained the moral vacuity of the idea. It was like saying an abolitionist would regret the ending of slavery or a pro-lifer would regret the end of Roe v. Wade (those weren’t his exact words, but it was the gist). You see, real anti-Communists were really anti-Communist. Hatred of Communism wasn’t simply a position, or a foreign-policy necessity, or a cultural pose: It was a moral obligation.

    When I see hipsters wearing Mao hats or Lenin T-shirts, I’m grateful. It’s like truth-in-labeling. For now I know you are: Woefully ignorant, morally stunted, purposively asinine, or all three.

    If you aren’t an anti-Communist — a passionate anti-Communist, not an anti-Communist of the rhetorical box-checking variety — please don’t talk to me about how the Iraq War was immoral or how Bashar Assad is evil or how imperialism, slavery, and colonialism are forever stains on the American soul. Because there is no indictment of America — or any other nations! — that can be delivered credibly by someone willing to defend the record of Soviet (or Chinese) Communism.

    As I note in my column, it’s generally agreed upon that the Nazi Holocaust was worse than the Soviet Terror. I am reminded of when Robert Conquest, one of the greatest chroniclers of Communism’s evil, was asked by a writer for Le Monde, if the Holocaust was “worse” than Stalin’s crimes:

    “I answered yes I did,” Conquest recalls, “but when the interviewer asked why, I could only answer honestly with ‘I feel so.'” Nonetheless, he adds, “Whatever view one takes, without feeling the Holocaust one cannot feel, or understand, Stalinism.”

    I think this gets it as right as you can. If the Holocaust was worse it is because it feels so. But only barely and for reasons that are impossible to articulate, given the enormity of Communism’s transgressions. I agree with Conquest, but I would never want to make that case to a Ukrainian. To tally up the barbarities one-against-the-other is to translate two incomprehensible horrors into a game of points and demonic trump cards.

    That said, there is at least one way in which the Soviet horrors were far worse than the Nazis’. As a cultural matter, the Soviets pretty much got away with it. Nazism is forever synonymous with evil (at least in the West). Communism is not. Meredith Vieira would never call the symbolic end of Nazism at a German Olympic ceremony, “a bittersweet moment.” Call Hitler a monster and you are repeating a boring truism. Call Lenin or Stalin monsters and you are revealing your silly obsessions or hang-ups. “Who cares?” comes the sophisticated response or, even worse, “Who?”

    This gag would never work with an Adolf Hitler.

  59. Frank P @ 17:46

    The Shanghai climb, Frank, from your piece, quite enjoyable, too, the piece, the climb was more than enough for the barbarian who cannot even clear leaves from the gutters now, up a half a dozen rungs on the ladder, and some mythical force gets hold of his body, forces him to fall. Quite unexplainable, baffling really.

    The other Michael’s video Baron hasn’t yet watched fully, after less than a minute the arrhythmia kicks in in a big way.

  60. RobertC @ 18:23

    Please, please calm down, Robert, the posting by he barbarian ain’t worth the agro, Baron doesn’t feel that strongly about it anyway, he doesn’t have enough ammunition one way or the other, rather enjoyed your speculative essays on the subject.

  61. That’s it then, I must be a racist.

    Why? I ask myself do I always spot the non-white face.

    Almost 100% of news where a non–white face can be included it is, and what is more it takes precedence, if the news is to do with schools or education the camera will invariably pan onto an individual or group of children who have non-white faces, should the news be questioning people on the street the first face to be asked an opinion will almost always be non-white.

    Tonight’s BBC Regional News featured an advertisement for something to do with the Great War, it consisted of a confused; if not to say bemused, lost, young black youth holding a book or large card; whilst ghostly images of the World War came in and out of focus and the voice over told him that his past history was all around him.

    It isn’t, ours is.

    But then as I have already stated me seeing things in this way must indicate something, mustn’t it?

  63. David Ossitt (19:36)

    Depends on how you define racism – it is almost always racism to deliberately discriminate for the purposes of propaganda; questioning the motives for such propaganda isn’t racist. Which is what you sardonically imply, I infer?

  64. Frank P February 18th, 2014 – 23:08

    “Depends on how you define racism – it is almost always racism to deliberately discriminate for the purposes of propaganda”

    Hello Frank, yes I was being as we might say ‘tong in cheek’.

    You are right it is those who deliberately discriminate to tell their story or put forward a biased argument who are the racists.

  65. Our erstwhile young lady adversary from Trolltopia, Issy Hardperson, seems to getting lots of face time on Newsnight. She has a pleasant face and a nice – er – neckline, but her other qualifications seem a little less obvious. Does Paxo choose his guests? And if so, I wonder what criteria are applied?

  67. Baron – 19:12 ‘Please, please calm down, Robert’

    I am calm! I was trying to convey what it would be like if Scotland voted YES!

    I see Allister Heath in the Telegraph takes a similar view:
    An independent Scotland risks becoming eurozone mark 2
    The SNP is a muddled, confused blend of big state socialists, nationalists, populists and the odd genuine capitalist that will make a disastrous hash of it all
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/10647228/An-independent-Scotland-risks-becoming-eurozone-mark-2.html

    How about this:
    “There is a simple yet fatal contradiction at the heart of Alex Salmond’s case for Scottish independence. With self-government comes the need to earn economic credibility – and yet Salmond is threatening a confidence-shattering default on Scotland’s share of the national debt, is clueless about which currency he will adopt, has no idea how to retain a financial sector in Edinburgh, doesn’t have a realistic plan to deal with Scotland’s declining oil revenues, hasn’t thought through his future trading arrangements and continues to support a nonsensical, something-for-nothing approach to the public finances.
    It’s a recipe for disaster, and the very opposite of the cautious, prudent, pro-market manifesto that would be needed to make independence succeed.”

    Or this:
    “The critical issue, from the SNP’s perspective, is that independent countries that don’t control their own currencies need to be better managed than those, like the US or UK, that print their own fiat money. This requires, among other things, making sure the government has a large enough stock of cash to meet interest payments on its debt, sufficient reserves to defend a currency peg in case of speculative attack and a credible fiscal policy to borrow cheaply on the global markets.
    The chances of any of these conditions being met in the case of an undisciplined SNP administration are, sadly, almost nil.”

    So, apart from all that, there isn’t really a problem! ::)

  68. The DM has an interesting article on the PIE, though I don’t know if there is anything that is new:

    The truth about Labour apologists for paedophilia: Police probe child sex group linked to top party officials in wake of Savile

    * Harriet Harman, Jack Dromey and Patricia Hewitt linked to vile group
    * They were key figures at National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL)
    * The NCCL was an ‘affiliate’ of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE)
    * PIE members may have abused children on an ‘industrial scale’

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2562518/The-truth-Labour-apologists-paedophilia-Police-probe-child-sex-group-linked-party-officials-wake-Savile.html

  69. If there are any night-birds on line – today I bought an eBook from Amazon (Mark Steyn’s ‘Lights Out’) ho do I get it to my Nexus 7 Tablet?

    The Amazon ‘help’ chatline is hopeless (or perhaps its me).

  70. Tax exile Allister Heath has written a piece for tax exiles the Barclay twins about Scotland that amounts to the same scare story sold to England about mass immigration: if you don’t have it, you’re economy will collapse. In this instance it’s just if you don’t stay in the Union, your economy will collapse.

    Not being a Scot, I wonder again and again how many Scots are thinking what I’m thinking about the SNP?

    Underneath Heath’s propaganda I read this from one Scottish voter:

    guga
    • 41 minutes ago

    −

    Yet again the Telegraph prints an article by one of the mouthpieces for the LibLabCon evil triumvirate and the assorted Unionist and Quislings.

    These creeps only write what their masters tell them and, in the process, help to mislead the majority of their (English) readers. They are incapable of telling the truth and do not allow the Scottish nationalist viewpoint to be published. This is why so many of the English, and too many Scots, remain ignorant of the facts. How many of them, for example, have ever heard of the McCrone Report let alone read it?

    You English should be concentrating your bile on the LibLabCon evil triumvirate and their plans to sell out your country to the EUSSR and swamp England with even more millions of uneducated, unskilled and untrained benefits scroungers and their families. You are already in the minority in your own capital. Soon you will be in a minority in your own country.

    As for the SNP, their plans to remain obsessed with homosexuals, NATO, the EUSSR, the English monarchy and the English pound will be dealt a severe blow after we regain our independence, as there will have to be an election for a new government in Scotland, and these obsessions will be the downfall of the SNP.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/10647228/An-independent-Scotland-risks-becoming-eurozone-mark-2.html

  72. Joany

    I stopped reading the hate based paranoid bilge you re-digested after the phrase “you English” cropped up.

  75. RobertC @ 00:31

    The PIE story keeps coming back, never develops, too many top people implicated, is Baron’s guess.

  76. Joany – 08:01
    Most of the changes I have encountered have worked when the proposer has answers for most, if not all, the questions that the opposition raise. Even having some credible answers would be a start!

    The logic is along the lines of “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”.

    Salmond does not appear to have come across the notion.

    The McCrone Report was published 40 years ago. We now have:
    OPEC says North Sea oil output to hit new lows
    North Sea oil production forecast to fall this year, blowing hole in Alex Salmond’s economic plan for an independent Scotland
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/10633632/OPEC-says-North-Sea-oil-output-to-hit-new-lows.html

    I am repeating my last post, but it does sum up Salmond’s situation. “Up the creek without a paddle” would be funny for a Salmond, if it were not true for everyone else in Scotland:
    “The critical issue, from the SNP’s perspective, is that independent countries that don’t control their own currencies need to be better managed than those, like the US or UK, that print their own fiat money. This requires, among other things, making sure the government has a large enough stock of cash to meet interest payments on its debt, sufficient reserves to defend a currency peg in case of speculative attack and a credible fiscal policy to borrow cheaply on the global markets.
    The chances of any of these conditions being met in the case of an undisciplined SNP administration are, sadly, almost nil.”

    Internal problems pale into insignificance when external forces are able to disable the current wealth creating environment within.

  78. Peter

    Thanks. I’m sure I have kindle app on my tablet; but when I pressed all the buttons the book didn’t appear. I’ll talk to their help line and get the idiots guide. Perhaps they’re trying to sell me a kindle tablet, but I have enough bloody tablets to contend with already, one way or another. So this latest glitch is a bitter pill to swallow. 🙂

  79. Frank P. I just have an Android tablet running the Kindle app and it works great so I am sure they can fix it for you. Have you ever downloaded a book to Kindle on your Nexus or is this a first go?

  80. Frank P @ 14:02

    It may have been smarter to get a paper version of the book, Frank. There’s s friendly warmness to the touch in paper, and one can keep it for centuries, pass it to the next generation. Who knows what may happen in the future, any serious damage to the www network, you’ll be sans the book.

  81. Baron February 19th, 2014 – 16:30

    “It may have been smarter to get a paper version of the book”

    Without my knowledge my youngest daughter had noticed that my ‘The Times Atlas of the World’ was the 1988 print run and so for my birthday on the 5th she presented me with the new “The Times Universal Atlas of the World” housed in in its own matching sleeve.

    A joy to hold and use.

  83. And, now for something completely different.

    During a recent visit to a GP surgery the medical man suggested Baron has a memory check. The barbarian did, this afternoon, came back few minutes ago, had a cup of tea, and is going to share with you the harshness of it.

    ‘I will tell you a name and an address now, then we talk, and before you go I will ask you to repeat both’, the memory testing lady said to begin the test, ‘are you ready to start remembering? John Brown, 42 West street, Kensington, London’.

    After some light hearted banter with Baron expressing a surprise the name and address were not harder, the address longer, no mention of an area code, the lady ask him to draw a face of a clock, no hands. Baron did. ‘Now’, she said, ‘draw the hands showing ten past eleven’. Hopefully, you may not be surprised this task wasn’t beyond the barbarian’s ability to finish it off in any time either.

    When Baron confirmed he watched the TV news last night he was asked to recall anything he could. ‘Kiev’ unrest, an arrest of a former French policeman allegedly wiping off almost the whole British Muslim family, a dog savaging a 6 day old girl… Baron didn’t get any further because the lady interrupted. Dogs were obviously her forte, a hobby that furnished the kick because she proceeded telling Baron not only the story of her dog, Cesar, its likes, dislikes, how it fitted into her family, but also how irresponsible people are buying dogs totally unsuitable when kids were around, why the Dangerous Dogs Act didn’t stop the fatal accidents …..

    After the lecture on canines she said: ‘Here comes the hard part of the test, listen carefully. A bus goes through town 12 people on board. It stops, one passenger gets off, one passenger gets on. At the next stop, two passengers get off, two passengers get on. At the next stop three passengers get off, but four passengers get on. How many passengers are on the bus before it stops next?’ ‘A rather unlucky number’, said Baron,’ thirteen’.

    ‘Well done’, said the lady, ‘so now, can you tell me the name and address I mentioned at the beginning of the test. Baron did, and the test was over.

    ‘Nine out of nine,’ the lady said, then started chatting about the results of others, no names got mentioned, of course. Four out of ten people over 70 couldn’t draw the time properly, three quarters couldn’t finish the bus part of the test, a man of 55 couldn’t even draw the clock face.

    What do you make of it then? For Baron, it wasn’t so much the triviality of it, more the surprise so many failed to finish it satisfactorily.

  84. Noa @ 17:29

    The guy has no say what he does on official visits, Noa, he does what he’s told.

    What amazes Baron is why those who tell him what to do never learn. Recall the ghastly Blair frolicking with the Libyan colonel before the sandpit land erupted, then the acute embarrassment for the former PM after the upheaval. The Saudis are as near the top of autocratic, dictatorial regimes as it gets, sooner or later, very likely sooner, the country will erupt, too, both the prince and those who pull the strings will look complete clowns. But then, these people have no capacity for shame.

  86. Noa @ 17:29

    “The guy has no say what he does on official visits, Noa, he does what he’s told.”

    It’s his tenth visit in 20 years. he doesn’t have to go and support it by such demeaning behaviour. And unlike his global warming insults to his future subjects here, who support this benefits dependent, he doesn’t speak out against this despotic, evil islamic extremist rregime.

  87. Baron,
    you are closer to the truth than you possibly realise, I have worked in Saudi on several occasions. At first if you got to know Saudis they would open up to you, a friend of mine who had close relations with senior members of the military stated that as long as they remained in control things would not change but when the younger generation took over things would change. On my last tour of the country things had changed radically, there was no reticence, perfect strangers on first meeting would lay into the Royal Family with no prompting. All it would change for things to erupt is a drop in the oil price which would mean that there would not be enough left in the kitty to bribe the population.

  88. Noa @ 18:38

    Good point, Noa, Baron’s posting wasn’t intended to put the Royal prince on a pedestal, far from it, it may well be the Saudis are quite generous in gifting their current admirers of the same royal phylum, who knows. But in his admiration of the sand kingdom the Prince differs little from the Arabists, most of them in the Foreign Office, many of them haters of the Jewish state, who seem to dream of emulating Lawrence of Arabia.

    You are quite right, he should speak against the Saudi despot rather than give him succour when the unwashed of the country for which he’ll be the Head of State views the followers of Allah in a different light.

  89. Noa February 19th, 2014 – 17:29

    “HRH continues to hedge his bets”

    What an absolute twat. He is not getting the right kind of advice.

  91. Baron February 19th, 2014 – 17:32

    “And, now for something completely different”

    Baron in the bus conundrum the questioner gave you the wrong answer, let me explain.

    If the bus had twelve people on board only eleven would be passengers plus the driver = 12.

    And so after the minus one plus one, two off two on, three off four on, the answer is 12 passengers plus the driver.

  92. David Ossitt

    “What an absolute twat. He is not getting the right kind of advice.”

    Can he not think for himself? Does he have to have SPADs and spokesmen to do this for him?
    After all he can insult us as ‘Climate Change Deniers’ in his own right, even as he benefits from the revenues of the off shore wind farms.

  93. We are all complicit in supporting the regime in Saudi Arabia and China and everywhere else that is a despotic tyranny. Blaming Prince Charles conveniently absolves us of any responsibility.

  94. Stephen Maybury 18.45

    An insightful post. It seems that the tenor of political debate in Saudi Arabia has changed somewhat since I lived there. Though the Saudi Royal family has always kept the lid on dissent by a mixture of bribery, fear and religion. These are, after all, the tools by which political elites and absolutist rulers control their populations.

    However the House of Saud can no longer depend on the support of an energy independent US and a weak, declining West, and so look to make new allies elsewhere. The trading dependency of China and India on Saudi oil may secure their future for a while longer. But when the revolution comes there it will establish a islamic fundamentalist state which will further subvert the West.
    And the Sauds will have long gone, to enjoy the unimaginable wealth they have stored in the west.

  95. Peter

    Don’t, please, trot out the ‘we are all guilty’ line.
    I feel no responsibility whatsoever for the governments of China or Saudi Arabia. They were there before I was born and changes to them, and indeed to the government of my own be-knighted, threatened and despoiled country are beyond my wit, or indeed any single person to change.
    That said I see no reason to accept in silence the sword waving antics of HRH, the product and consequence of gene-depletion.

  96. I didn’t say we are all guilty. But it is a cheap shot to pick on Prince Charles if we are happy supporting the same regime. If you are not responsible for Saudi Arabia then neither is Prince Charles.

  97. Baron;

    I do buy Mark’s dead trees, but it’s handy to have it on the android when I’m watching telly with the T ‘n’ S. I find that the way they bind the books now makes it difficult turn the pages; they seem to bury some of the text in the spine.

    For example, I’m reading the Alex Boot saga “How the Future Worked” at the moment; gripping and funny and fills in a few dotted lines for me from the time I was knobbing the Soviet and their satellites’ traffic when I was in ‘the mob’ in the early Fifties. ***

    But though I paid about thirteen quid for the book, thinking that would be a hard- cover jobbie, it turned out to be a paper-back when it arrived; and bound like a penny dreadful, to Boot (ha) – difficult to manipulate smoothly.

    Which is a pity, because the book is a cracking piece of cold war history and as you suggest, I would like to pass it on ere long to my saucepan lids (and theirs) who are all au fait with the techie shit. They are, however, more likely to use a ‘file’ than a poorly bound paperback. So I wish I had downloaded it – and perhaps I will if I can finally get the hang of the Nexus.

    *** Btw, We used to draw cartoon faces of the Russky, Polak, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, etc. characters knocking out their morse traffic, and give them names, as we were logging their radio traffic.

    Like handwriting, morse sending had recognisable characteristics, which not only varied by nationality, but also had personal individual traits. Very useful in tracing and identifying military units and their movements. Though the ‘potential enemy’ (ha! again) tried to avoid tracking from interception, by changing call-signals, boffins from ‘the funnies’ back in blighty already had cracked their call-sign obfuscation procedures and they supplied us knobbers with the sign changes and radio frequency changes, daily, before they even effected them; that’s how good intel was, even in those days; but it was also useful for them to know individuals and their peregrinations, too. So we had ’em covered every which way. Gawd, sixty years on – I wonder what GCHQ and the NSA are capable of now? Which is why I lose patience with those who think all garnering of intelligence is “Big Brother” snooping. We need some benign big brothers to keep an eye on this era’s bad bastards. It’s not all Orwellian, With checks and balances – it’s essential defence of The Realm.

    Snowden should have been liquidated by now. I remember a colleague of mine from the Unit I was posted to in Austria, getting three years in Biederfeld Military slammer in Deutschland for dropping a top-secret log-sheet, which he had discarded after wrapping his sandwiches in it before going off watch. A Yugoslav refugee cleaner found it and tried to smuggle it out of the camp!

    I know what they would have done with the likes of Snowden and Wikileaks whacko in those days. They would have thawed Snowden out and turned Assange into a red blancmange. And you would never have heard about it, either.

  98. Baron

    Regarding Mann’s ‘action’. It won’t get to the court imho. But he can cost Steyn a fortune in the preliminary legal chicanery , there’s the rub. And there’s plenty of dosh swilling around in the coffers of the AGW scamsters to encourage the buggers.

  99. “If you are not responsible for Saudi Arabia then neither is Prince Charles.”

    Facile and ingenuous. I am not the next Queen.

  100. And if you were you would appreciate that you have to deal with lots of regimes around the world and don’t have the same luxury of armchair ethics that your subjects do. If you boycotted Saudi goods your criticisms would have some weight.

  101. Boycott Saudi goods? And what are they pray, other than oil? Will you give up your car?
    And your attempt to insult me by inferring that I do not understand the subtlies, or rather the sophistries of an absolutist inclined, intellectually lazy future monarch to whose considerable wealth and vanities I must perforce contribute.

  103. David Ossitt @ 19:20

    You should be setting the Oxbridge entrance exam, David. You are right, but neither those who set the memory test, nor the poorly educated Slav with his Alzheimer infected brain, or what’s left of it after decades of abuse figured it. Mind you, the way she asked the question may not have been ‘twelve people on board’, but ‘twelve passengers on board’. Baron canno remember, his memory fails him, it must be eight out of nine then. Arghhh

  104. I, like you, am forced to pay the Green levies which fund the crown estates. Those who are born to privilege and wealth have a concomitant responsibility to behave with respect and decorum.

    And I’m not advising HRH, I’m criticising him. As I have every right (still), to do.

  105. stephen maybery @ 18:45

    Let’s hope you are right, stephen, and the constructs folds up soon, who knows, petrol may be cheaper, fewer of the younger Saudis may stay put rather than come here plotting to hurt us.

  107. As to the Crown estates themselves, they are the very considerable remnant of the time when the monarch was the absolute owner of all land. The settlement of a substantial income from Parliament (i.e. the taxpayer) in perpetuity, was, and is, a very acceptable settlement to the Orange and Hanoverian successors to the House of Stuart. Especially when the alternative is generally the fate suffered by the Bourbons and Romanovs.

  108. Frank P @ 21:00

    Pretty rough then when you were co-running the show, Frank. It seems that everything was kind of clearer those days, don’t you think, one knew where one stood, who were one’s friends and enemies, also, people may have been poorer, fewer trappings, consumer trinkets, but there was more of a community spirit, and not only in the packed, smoke filled pubs, and most people, at least those Baron camee across, felt proud of their place under the sun, even if the place was just being a car fitter, a machinist in a factory.

    How about penning the other side of the coin of the past to Boot’s narrative, ha?

    Between you, Baron and the twisted pair of the copper wires that will carry it, Baron got somewhat put off buying the tome Peter keeps plugging for perhaps a trivial reason. The barbarian lived in Moscow roughly when Mr. Boot was a young man there, has some first hand experience, too, and found the few instalments we were treated to on Mr. Boot’s blog abit, how shall the barbarian put it, detached from the reality he found in the capital of the Russians, not alot but just enough to pause. Perhaps, the book was intended more as a satire of the life under the Red Menace, and Baron doesn’t get it.

    Still, Baron’s glad you’re enjoying the book, just treat it with care so that there remains something of it to pass to you niece. Ha, ha, ha

  109. “The Crown Estate is one of the largest property owners in the United Kingdom, producing £211 million for the Treasury in the financial year 2007–8.[3] and with holdings of £7.3 billion in 2011.[32] The Crown Estate is not the private property of the Monarch. It cannot be sold or owned by the Sovereign in a private capacity,[33] nor do any revenues, or debts, from the estate accrue to Her. Instead the Crown Estate is owned by the Crown, a corporation representing the legal embodiment the State. It is held in trust and governed by Act of Parliament, to which it makes an annual report.[32] Revenue from the Crown Estate is thought to be due to double in real terms in the period to 2020 with additional lease revenues deriving from the development of offshore wind farms within the UK’s Renewable Energy Zone,[34] the rights of which were granted to the Crown Estate by the Energy Act 2004.”

    Extract from Wikipedia -“Finances of the British Royal Family”

  110. Frank P @ 21:10

    Good point, Frank, except that Mark says he wants it to go the Full Monty. Whether he succeeds is another matter, but Baron can understand why he wants a judicial judgement. It would, amongst other things, encourage those scientists who are somewhat anxious to speak out against the imbecility to come out.

  111. I mainly look at American media and I’ll post this link from the US version of the Daily Mail. This story has been big here in America but not in Britain, partly because the names are not famous, but stuff like this is never reported in the UK anyway (and not when the bien pensant are drunk on lauding 12 Years A Slave).

    I could post hundreds of links to stories like this here in the US and they all boil down to one thing and one thing alone – the failure of multi-culti.

    If Britain got the ball rolling with multi-culti, in the past 12 years America did multi-culti and did it as the US always does things: BIG.

    And after Obama, oh hell, yeah, a lot of people did multi-culti.

    The problem is that outside of your own culture, your brother, your sister, your father, your mother, your uncle, your aunt, your best friend’s boyfriend – none of them, or anyone else can help you as they might do if you stayed inside your own culture.

    This is Obama’s America (the words won’t tell you the story, but the pictures will – can you guess what they show? Yes. You’re right.)

    Happy multi-culti ever after:

    Shocking video footage shows Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice drag his unconscious girlfriend out of an Atlantic City casino elevator

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2563240/Shocking-video-footage-shows-Baltimore-Ravens-running-Ray-Rice-drag-girlfriend-Atlantic-City-casino-elevator-legs.html

  112. Wonderful slip of the tongue from The Shariagraph’s star columnist Sharia O’bore (strangely silent these days on why we should all love Baroness Warsi, remember her, out of the spotlight but living it up on a Lords salary for the rest of her useless life).

    O’bore writes:

    ‘the signs are that the Tories might even get away with it’

    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100260287/the-tories-are-playing-an-expert-game-and-setting-ukip-infeasible-targets/

    Get away with it.

    Too right, you propagandising scumbag.

    And wouldn’t that just suit the owners of that paper and their Tory mates?

    Get away with it.

    That, to me, sums up all opposition to UKIP and Scottish independence, the MSM sock puppets just want to sell the same old, same old.

    ‘Hold on to nurse, for fear of something worse.’

    How much more worse than the LibLabCon can it get?

    To me that’s the point of UKIP and Scottish independence – the UK cries it is de profundis, well it will only sink lower if people don’t do something and sharpish.

    How many more times are LibLabCon going to get away with it indeed.

    That is the question,

  113. While the forces that brought you the European Union manoeuvre “the people” to attack the elected government of the Ukraine and burn the capital from one end to the other, all is quiet along the watchtowers of the Coffeehouse Wall.

    If by some miracle UKIP were to be elected and pull us out of the EU and as we sleep along the watchtowers dreaming of the world that might follow that act of independence, we have now been warned.

  114. Frank P @ February 19th, 2014 – 21:00

    Ah, the old Defence of the Realm defence! or DORD’s army- beloved of authoritarians of every shade and stamp, of every time and place, from the Kremlin, through the Praetorian Guard, to the rabbit runs of rural Norfolk! If I have to breach embedded constitutional rights, violate my oath of office, abitrarily legislate where no power to do so lies, liquidate a chap here, turn into a red mush a child there – well the responsibilities of deciding what’s good for the Realm have ever laid heavy on the shoulders of the Just and let us pray they bear such burdens manfully.

    And thus clad in the armour of light, we have little need to stop and ask ourselves: are we naive? are we gullible? might it be possible that it is not really the realm which is being defended but something far more serpentine and stinking that a genuine conservative would want to analyse, identify, and expose?

  116. Malfleur (03:31)

    Bwaahahaha! Thought that would flush you out, so to speak.
    You do come the boil quickly, don’t you? Tell me, did you ever take the Queen’s shilling? And if so – in what capacity? And no, I’m not talking about one of the old queens who used to infest the ‘cottage’ in Dansey Place, Soho. I mean did you ever serve Queen and Country? Just askin’.

  117. John Birch (05:25)

    I’d love to, but it’s behind a paywall. Fuck that for a game of soldiers.

  118. Baron (22:55)

    I understand where you’re coming from regarding Alex Boot’s latest little effort, but I promise you, it’s worth the cover price. I’ll attempt a little review when I’ve finished reading it to my wife; she’s enjoying it. Of course some of it is apocryphal – he coughs to that, but the flavor of the zeitgeist of the post-war era jigs with me. Some of the anecdotal cameos are rich and substantial. I had already guessed the parental environment from his previous blog essays, which are a daily feast for me.

  119. Frank P, I am trying to get Alex Boot to record some of the material in his latest book as a series of short audio pieces. I think it would be enjoyable to hear him recounting his experiences in part as much as it is to read them.

  120. Peter

    I’m surprised ‘Book at Bedtime’ hasn’t snapped it up. It’s a bit – er – bawdy in bits, as I’m sure you noticed; but not gratuitously so. Life in the raw in the Moscow flat complex could hardly be otherwise and, frankly, some of the localities I policed back then in my days on the beat and in the area cars were no better – or worse – depending on your perspective. Moreover, his whimsical narrative strings it all together with his characteristic panache; a mixture of philosophical wit and earthy reportage.

  121. Try this frank

    In the early 1970s, my dad was a singular sort of feminist. As well as working all night in a factory, he had banned my mother from the kitchen for as long as I could remember because, and I quote, ‘Women gets hysterical and you needs to be calm in a kitchen.’ He also adored tough broads: ‘There’s a lady!’ he would yell appreciatively at Mrs Desai when the Grunwick strike came on TV, the Indian women wearing English winter coats over their hard-core saris. ‘Thass a lady too!’ — May Hobbs, the pretty leader of the cleaners’ strike. ‘What a woman!’ he would swoon when the lesbian tennis champ Billie Jean King shrugged off yet another trophy.
    Only once in a while did his righteousness get on my wick, like the Christmas when he heard there were some striking bakers nearby and he made my mum pack our Christmas dinner (with all the trimmings!) into Tupperware boxes so he could take it down to the starving brothers freezing around the brazier down on the picket line
    ‘Mu-um!’ I whined, full of tweenage self-pity (if nothing else), ‘They’re ba-akers! I dunno, why can’t they… BAKE something and have that instead?’ My mother didn’t miss a beat, shoving chipolatas into the squashed smorgasbord with real savagery: ‘Because if we don’t do it, your dad’s gonna be miserable all day. Best get it over with.’
    It’s easy for me to sentimentalise those days when the trade unions held sway, chiming as they did with the calf country of my communism, but whatever their beery and sandwichy limits, they were far better than what replaced them; the politics of diversity. While working-class left-wing political activism was always about fighting the powerful, treating people how you would wish to be treated and believing that we’re all basically the same, modern, non-working-class left-wing politics is about… other stuff. Class guilt, sexual kinks, personal prejudice and repressed lust for power. The trade union movement gave us brother Bill Morris and Mrs Desai; the diversity movement has given us a rainbow coalition of cranks and charlatans. Which has, in turn, has given us intersectionality.
    We only become truly brave, truly above self-interest, when fighting for people different from ourselves
    Intersectionality may well sound like some unfortunate bowel complaint resulting in copious use of a colostomy bag, and indeed it does contain a large amount of ordure. Wikipedia defines it as ‘the study of intersections between different disenfranchised groups or groups of minorities; specifically, the study of the interactions of multiple systems of oppression or discrimination’, which seems rather mature and dignified. In reality, it seeks to make a manifesto out of the nastiest bits of Mean Girls, wherein non-white feminists especially are encouraged to bypass the obvious task of tackling the patriarchy’s power in favour of bitching about white women’s perceived privilege in terms of hair texture and body shape. Think of all those episodes of Jerry Springer where two women who look like Victoria’s Secret models — one black, one white — bitch-fight over a man who resembles a Jerusalem artichoke, sitting smugly in the middle, and you have the end result of intersectionality made all too foul flesh. It may have been intended as a way for disabled women of colour to address such allegedly white-ableist-feminist-specific issues as equal pay, but it’s ended up as a screaming, squawking, grievance-hawking shambles.
    The supreme irony of intersectionality is that it both barracks ‘traditional’ feminists for ignoring the issues of differently abled and differently ethnic women while at the same time telling them they have no right to discuss them because they don’t understand them — a veritable Pushmi-Pullyu of a political movement. Entering the crazy world of intersectionality is quite like being locked in a hall of mirrors with a borderline personality disorder coach party. ‘Stop looking at me funny! Why are you ignoring me? Go away, I hate you! Come back, how dare you reject me!’ It’s politics, Jim, but certainly not as my dear old dad knew it.
    In-fighting and backbiting have been raised to the level of a very sad Olympic sport — that’ll be the Special Olympics, of course, the real ones being ‘able-ist’. Every thought is an ism and every person an ist in the insania of intersectionality, where it is always winter and never Christmas — sorry, ‘Winterval’. (Mustn’t be Islamophobic.) But sexism, interestingly, isn’t really the hot ticket there; women get picked on — or ‘called out’, to use the approved phrase — more than anyone. Natural-born women, that is. When it happened to one of my dearest friends last year, I became an unwitting participant in this modern danse macabre.
    One Friday in January 2013, I was showing off on Facebook of an afternoon — as is my wont now my career’s gone up the Swannee — when it was drawn to my attention that my amica of several decades standing, Suzanne Moore, was being ‘monstered’, as modern parlance has it, on Twitter. She’d actually been driven off it for refusing to apologise for something she’d said, subsequently becoming the target for all sorts of vile threats, including having her face ripped off and fed to feral dogs. Always up for a fight, I hurried through cyberspace, only to find my homey the target of a thoroughly monstrous regiment of bellicose transsexuals and their bed-wetting ‘cheerleaders’. Both groups had taken exception to the following line by Suzanne from an essay on female anger: ‘We are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual.’

    ‘Fiona, we’ve got a Cheshire mouse.’
    Repelled by the filthy threats which were flying fierce and fast at my friend, I began to talk trash on my Facebook page — though even my trash-talk, it must be said, has a vicious elegance that most people’s A-game lacks. I opined that a bunch of gender-benders trying to tell my mate how to write was akin to the Black and White Minstrels advising Usain Bolt on how to run. I stated that it was outrageous that a woman of style and substance should be driven from her chosen mode of time-wasting by a bunch of dicks in chicks’ clothing and their snivelling suck-ups. The usual cool, calm and collected sort of consideration I’m famous for.
    It was interesting to me that, rather than join Miss Moore in decrying the notion that every broad should aim to look like an oven-ready porn star, the very cross cross-dressing lobby and their grim groupies had picked on the messenger instead — presumably in order to add to their already flourishing sense of grievance. Suzanne is a life-long left-winger and a feminist — why, I wondered, were fellow travellers threatening her in so rabid a manner? But this, I was to learn, was par for the crotchety course.
    Suzanne’s crime, it transpired, was to be ‘cis-gendered’ as opposed to transgendered (that is, she was born female) and not to have ‘checked her privilege’ — what passes for a battle cry in certain ever-decreasing circles these dog days. It’s hardly ‘No pasarán!’ — rather, it declares an intention that it is better to be nagged to death on one’s knees rather than stand by one’s principles on one’s feet. Consider how lucky you are, born women, before you raise your voice above that of a trans-sister! — that veritable cornucopian horn of plenty which we lucky breed fortunate enough to be born to a sensory smorgasbord of periods, PMT, the menopause, HRT and being bothered ceaselessly for sex by random male strangers since puberty take such flagrant delight in revelling in, shameless hussies that we are. Add to this that Suzanne was, like myself, born into the English working class, and therefore marginally less likely to have beaten the odds than a dancing dog or busker’s cat to have become a public figure, and I was buggered (not being homophobic, there) if I was going to put up with a bunch of middle-class seat-sniffers, educated beyond all instinct and honesty, laying into my girl.
    But it wasn’t just that. It was an instinctive desire to defend the socialism of my dead father. Because intersectionality is actually the opposite of socialism! Intersectionality believes that there is ‘no such thing as society’ — just various special interests.
    In my opinion, we only become truly brave, truly above self-interest, when fighting for people different from ourselves. My hero as a kid was Jack Ashley — a deaf MP who became the champion of rape victims. These days, the likes of those who went after Suzanne would probably dismiss him as a self-loathing cis-ableist. Intersectionality, like identity politics before it, is pure narcissism.
    Though it reminds us ceaselessly to ‘check our privilege’, intersectionality is the silliest privilege of them all, a gang of tools and twats tiptoeing around others’ finer feelings rather than getting stuck in, mucking in, like proper mates — the ultimate privilege, which is to serve each other with collective love and action. The most recently inter-species ruckus happened when the Deirdre Spart impersonator Laurie Penny wrote a passionate defence of the pixie cut in the New Statesman, only to get it in the sleekly shaved neck from women who accused her of not taking the different behaviour of African hair into consideration. When I asked a supporter of this lunacy whether she thought that every subject of interest to women should have every type of woman weighing in with her written opinion, she answered that yes, she did. Seriously? I don’t think my heart can stand the excitement of a weekly Staggers the size of a telephone directory.
    I personally can understand black women occasionally getting teed off with their apparently carefree Wash’n’Go white stepsisters. But the most recent and reactionary development within this hissy-fitting hothouse — the insistence of intersectional feminists on the right of transsexuals not to be offended — tells you all you need to know about the essential stupidity of the movement.
    The idea that a person can chose their gender — in a world where millions of people, especially ‘cis-gendered’ women, are not free to choose who they marry, what they eat or whether or not their genitals are cut off and sewn up with barbed wire when they are still babies — and have their major beautification operations paid for by the National Health Service seems the ultimate privilege, so don’t tell me to check mine. Here’s hoping that the in-fighting in-crowd of intersectionality disappear up their own intersection really soon, so the rest of us can resume creating a tolerant and united socialism.
    Julie Burchill is a columnist, author, and self-proclaimed ‘militant feminist’.

  122. Frank, the line about the Cheshire mouse was under a joke which didn’t copy.
    It’s a bit odd unless you know that .!!!!!

  123. Someone in ‘The Daily Telegraph’ Comment Section mentioned Yewtree. I’m not sure if he was being ironic but he asked…

    ‘Why have only ‘naff’ entertainers been arrested in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal?
    February 20th, 2014 10:29′

    Surprise surprise, comments were closed, but I’m determined to help & on holiday so I’ve the time.
    I posted the following on his previous day’s post about the Ukraine where comments are open. I’m interested to know if it’ll get me barred from the Telegraph.
    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/colinfreeman/100260317/ukraines-decades-of-stagnation-have-led-to-this-bloodshed-and-may-break-the-country-up/

    ‘Yet one question continues to perplex me about the Savile scandal, and
    all those caught up in Operation Yewtree and its associated inquiries.
    Why is it that nearly all of the celebrities are naff?’

    Your quote from above is from your post today.
    Some silly ninconpoop at the ‘Telegraph Blogs Team’ has accidentally hit the ‘Comments Closed’ button but don’t worry!
    I can help by answering your question here instead.

    You question is fine but you could equally ask,

    ‘Why is it that they are NOT the cabinet Ministers and minor royals and High Court Judges that are responsible for KILLING multiple (boys) innocent victims over the years?’

    After raping & sexually torturing them in gangs?
    After getting their victims from Children’s Homes that are used by these powerful individuals as though they were child brothels? Lewisham being the example that we all know about. Oh, and North Wales, another one we all know about, Liverpool was less well reported outside the city.

    After linking up with numerous elements of Social Services to organise the abduction, drugging & sometimes murder of these (boys) victims?

    Good question Mr Freeman.

    The answer is that ‘Operation Yewtree’ is a massive fraud.

    It is a huge cover story. It is a corrupt and self conscious attempt to protect powerful, murderous sexual perverts who in many cases ARE the ‘establishment’. That includes the ‘old’ establishment of Judges & sworn officers and the ‘new’ establishment of politicians and ‘government officials’.

    ‘Operation Yewtree’ has several obvious objectives.

    When all the transparently innocent ‘celebrities’ have been cleared of the allegations against them (that are NOT even alleged pedophile offenses) it will be easier to dismiss the inevitable revelations regarding the truly powerful. That one in Blair’s cabinet who was detected using child porn by the Americans (by Operation Avalanche that became operation Ore in the UK) and was allowed to ‘retire to spend more time with his family’ for example. People like him and the group that killed children who were ‘connected to No10’. People like that.

    Who knows, with enough acquittals ‘they’ might even be able to ‘poison the well’ regarding any ‘historic cases’ to the extent that even the killers of Elm House all get away Scot free?

    I come from the Leicester West constituency so that wouldn’t surprise me.

    So that’s why ‘Operation Yewtree’ is so crap and pathetic; it is supposed to be.

    Hope that helps to answer your question and if you leave the ‘Comments’ section open in future you will doubtless get even more help & advice regarding this topic.

    J.Richardson’

    Drat!
    When I hit ‘Enter’ it went straight to ‘Your Comment is awaiting Moderation’.
    Does not usually do that on the ‘Telegraph’.
    Foiled!
    Either they are smarter than I thought, or I’m dumberer than I thought or more people tried to do the same than I thought.
    Or something.

  124. Peter 1152
    Alex Boot is a major contributor to political thought and his book should rightly be heard
    Mr Boot is unafraid of controversy and refutation and I am sure would welcome comment from even the likes of me
    Are you now up to this challenge?

  127. John birch @ 12.35

    Still on the Julie Burchill’s piece in the Spectator:

    The far more enjoyable bits are the comments, here is one from krissy:

    “TERF: Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. A term first used by non-trans feminists, it indicates that a particular brand of radical feminism which declares that the gender of trans people is determined by their assigned sex at birth is not accepted by the wider radical feminist movement.

    Cis: Short for cisgender, it is the opposite of trans (ie: transgender). Much like cis is the opposite of trans in chemical terminology, cis refers to the quality of having a gender identity that matches that which was assigned at birth.

    I utterly fail to see how these are nonsense terms, and fail to see how they are derisive to an even greater extent.

    Perhaps the problem is that it’s preferred that prevailing understanding is there are normal people and then there are trans people who aren’t normal. After all, once you start accepting that if you aren’t trans then you must be cis, you have to start considering that trans people are actually your equals in the world”.

    Another disgruntled aggressive feminist calling herself Aura Willow Hazel writes:

    “OK miss Burchill, if we trans folks have it so easy can you explain to me why 41 percent of us are dead by age 20? Here’s a hint being trans is not cushy, you get attacked, threatened, see friends killed, and still have to contend while dealing with that with a medical condition that causes suicidal depression. Of all LGBT individuals trans are at highest risk of homelessness, workplace discrimination, assault, and murder. There aren’t a liot of us only a few thousand in the entire country. If we get divorced our spouse can stilol even AFTER divorce veto our medical care alongside a few of our other hman rights. Yes we are SO FREAKING LUCKY TO BE BORN TRANS. Oh and as an added bonus we get articles by windbags who decide our humanity isn’t worth inconveniencing themselves by respecting. Both you and your ilk, and conservative lobbies who don’t like anything they can’t understand. Oh and for the record when you spout your working class credentials you forget some of us still live in the villages that were left once the pits were gone. Some of us STILL aren’t rich, unlike yourself yet somehow we manage”.

    and one Flaming Fairy pointing out to Aura Willow Hazel her handling of statistics ain’t exactly up to scratch:

    “Where do you get your stats from? Everything I’ve seen shows 41% of trans people attempting suicide, not dying”.

    Reading the stuff one has the feeling of a world many light years away from ours. It is at times like this Baron thinks perhaps a doze of sharia wouldn’t come amiss.

  128. Thanks for that baron,what on earth have we got ourselves into.
    Still, it keeps middle class women (who otherwise would be unemployable ) looking after the mess we have created.
    The chaos causes lots of employment for the output of universities .

  130. Fears for the elderly under new NHS drugs policy – Telegraph
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk › Health › NHS
    It seems that not content with murdering unborn babies, and calling it termination, the elderly can go on what is daintily termed as a ‘pathway’. It seems reminiscent of the World War II Nazis.

  131. Anne,
    As usual you are bang on the mark, not only that, we have made our contribution through a lifetime of hard work and if the bastards who rule us think we will go quietly while they squander billions on benefit tourists, then all I will say is that they are in for one hell of shock, starting in May.

  132. Anne Wotana Kaye 1 – 17:57

    A pathway to anywhere but Liverpool, even if it was the European Capital of Culture!

    Better make that neither Liverpool nor Hull (, Kingston upon)!

  133. Some weeks back I wrote to my MP to complain the criminal Vicky Pryce was now back on the Governments Economy Panel.

    His reply to me that I received just after 5pm this evening is repeated below, it just confirms my opinion the LibDems in general and Vince Cable in particular (not just him alone) are without honour, she will have been attending whilst still tagged.

    Dear David,

    Thank for your email. Re Vicky Pryce.

    What can I say….typical of the Lib Dems. Vince Cable approved her re-appointment personally to the ‘monitoring the economy’ panel under his stewardship at BiS. The decision is his and his alone to take and he is accountable for it. I would add, however, that she is not paid to sit on this panel which I suppose is something to be relieved about.

    All best wishes,

    Alec Shelbrooke.

  134. “The Man Who Fought the Planners:the Story of Ian Nairn” Tonight;BBC 4 (with Jonathan Meades).

    Nairn;a man whose blistering attack on the soulless destruction of Britain by shoddy postwar planning caused a stir……(His) angry and emotional appearances on the BBC proved to be refreshingly unconventional.(Source;Radio Times)

  137. Frank P @ February 20th, 2014 – 09:41

    Oh you cunning old rat!

    I have to say that I was unable to get past the early reference to your testicles in your latest piece, Bad Boy, but I doubt if I had taken an ounce of civet and soldiered on I would have found anything there by way of reasoned response to allegations of widespread criminality in the US security services. There are certainly none in your bizarre effort above. As New Labour didn’t “do” God, so you don’t “do” reasoned response. Perhaps though you have a medal from DORD’s Army and your loyalties re elsewhere than the consitution. Keep mum, Frank, keep mum.

  138. Malfleur (23:29)

    Reasoned responses only proffered to reasoned assertions, so in your case I shall indeed keep mum (other than to note your avoidance of my question). 😉

  139. John Birch

    Thanks for thwarting the Speccie pay wall. She gets crankier by the day. The left are now eating their own tail. The unconscious irony is delicious.

    She gets crankier by the day

  140. Seems the Labour Party is knee-deep in pervs.

    http://labour25.com/

    Thoughts from Millipede & Balls? Perhaps the Union leaders might comment on why they are spending so much to support a bunch of deviants?

    Shame the Mail couldn’t bring itself to admit who did the hard work, whilst they were turning a blind eye like the rest of the media over the years. It strikes me that this is a last-minute attempt to argue that they are doing something about it now when the truth is that the dead tree press and the Biased Bollox Corp have known about this and been part of it all along.

    And if Harpie has grandchildren, they should immediately be taken into care to be on the safe side – after all, Granny and Grand-dad believe and support kiddie-fiddling and if that ain’t grounds for the SS, I don’t know what is – whilst their parents are interviewed to see if they suffered abuse. After all, Hewitt is Godmother to one of Harman’s kids.

  141. I quess it’s unlikely I’ll get an answer, but as a staunch and unwavering leftie, so self-righteous that he can’t accept a Tory could do anything right, I thought I’d drop the attached to the Beast of Bolsover. I’m sure of 2 things – he’ll blame the Tory press (for telling the truth?) and he’ll circle the wagons to guard the shits he (politically) lies down with.

    “Mr Skinner (for that is how he asked to be addressed)

    Given your propensity for unsubstantiated attacks on Tories just for being Tories, I would be grateful to receive your thoughts and comments on the current proven stories about your colleagues Harman, Dromey and Hewitt, together with any observations you might have on those featured on this website:

    http://labour25.com/

    No slights or insinuations here, they’re all proven, supportable facts.

    I know it’s arguable that all Tories are rich Toffs but it’s seem much more evidential that all Socialists are deviants.”

  142. A new survey proclaims that the first 25 years of life are the best, and like all these interminable surveys is pure unadulterated bollox. I have enjoyed all my decades, never a dull moment. I have lived on a deserted island in the Indian ocean, from where I was rescued by helicopter, I did not want to be recued and was stark naked at the time. I went through the Iranian revolution and was in Baghdad at the hight of the Iraq/Iran war. Saudi, Libya, you name it I’ve been there. In Siberia I lived in a hotel where the mafia had taken over an entire floor and filled it full of hookers, not much I could have done about that except to endeavour to keep my end up under trying circumstances. I am now a successful author.

    I was once having a drink with a friend, he said “Stephen, if I met you in a pub and you told me your storey I would think you were bullshitting but I know you and you do these things” I was about 23 at the time, dear God, I had not even got started. On turning 60 I took stock of my life, which I realised what a prat I had been, that was when I realised I was unlikely to improve in the time I had left. Carry on regardless!

  145. Radford NG
    February 20th, 2014 – 19:23

    It was bloody good. For follow-up, I recommend the opening pages of Museum Without Walls by Jonathan Meades, available via the Kindle preview on Amazon.

    ‘[The BBC] is, incidentally, waiting for the French government to come round to its way of thinking.’

    Go, Johnno!

  146. Baron
    February 20th, 2014 – 17:26

    How very dare you, you bitch. Anyone would think that there hadn’t been yet another split among the increasingly failing transgender political coalition, as the minority of trans who agree with increased treatment options get tossed yet again under the bus by pro-surgical anti-feminist transgenders.

    http://gendertrender.wordpress.com/2011/03/19/transgender-time-to-change/

    Ooh, scratch your eyes out. I’m a trooper, I’m a trooper. They call me Gladys Cooper.

  148. EC (11:44)

    Please tell me that’s a photoshop jobbie, per-lea-sssss-e!!

    EC (13:0)

    Wow. I hope Mann has enough retrievable dosh to make it worth Mark’s while. But it’s a pity he has to waste his time on the charlatan.

    OTOH, I s’pose all copy or legal action that exposes the AGW scams various is good; so let’s hope the by-product is plenty hire for the Steyn industrial scale literary output. He’s one of the heroes of the age imnsho.

  149. So Julie Burchill, a female madder than a mad ferret lost in a warren full of tranny killer rabbits, generates a dozen or so speckle-flecked paragraphs pointing out that there are women even less ephemerally acquainted with reality than her, and Admiral Fraser Nelson of the farting terroire considers these civit droppings worthy of a fast bake in his oven?

    The key is in the frenzied woad covered pseud-bitch scream of the final sentance.
    May the devil take them all to hell on a bendy bojo bus before Fatty Smith falls drunkenly out of the Admiral Duncan on a Friday night.

    “Here’s hoping that the in-fighting in-crowd of intersectionality disappear up their own intersection really soon, so the rest of us can resume creating a tolerant and united socialism.”

    No! Here’s hoping the lot of ’em vanish up the irrelevant intersectionality (what IS that? FFS?), before the rest of us boring normals have to endure another moment of their perverse, self congratulating irrationality!

  150. Clear Memories

    Keep hammering away, cobber. The litany is impressive. Put into the context of Gramsci’s, the Frankfort School’s and Alinski’s dictats to the Long Marchers to undermine the western capitalist culture by attacking the sexual mores from top to bottom (so to speak) it’s compelling evidence that the commie moles heeded the call and proceeded apace. Even the current exposure of past scandals hasn’t halted them in their tracks – indeed they have, in some cases, used it to advantage. They will stop at nothing. It will be interesting to see what develops from your billet-doux to The Bolsover Beastie. I’m betting he has neither the wit nor the inclination to reply.

  151. EC

    Thanks for that photo link, its seems that, as so often, Pat Condell’s withering sarcasm has caught the nub of my argument with a single photo.

    And a loud silence from Peter too, on Alexander’s comments on Willie the iconoclast. How very dare the Russian put the Boot into the gibbering, sorely depleted gene pool that, more and more has the look of the Hapsburgs about it.
    One may see more intelligent carp in the local aquarium that the hereditary scions paraded daily on page 3 of the Daily Mail as the royal future of Great Britain.

  152. Noa, I have a life and I’ve been busy living it. I don’t need to respond to every republican who thinks they have managed to argue the monarchy to death because of the condition of one or other monarch. You have failed to understand the monarchy at all and are manifestly not a conservative if you think the election of Cameron or Blair as President would ensure the success of our nation. Alex Boot doesn’t actually say anything you suggest he does beyond that as a young man he needs to speak with less haste. The rest is all your own opinion. I’ve heard it before and don’t need to respond to it.

  153. Frank P

    And Following own from the crazed Burchill bitcholeogy is the lead aricle in this week’s Spectator.
    Being almost a tight as me, a Lancastrian held in awe for his tightness by the stingiest of his Yorkshire friends neighbours, you won’t have seen it, so hoping that the copyright politizi don’t force its removal I reproduce it below, considering whether,and how, the putative new word leader on conservative values, is now (Vladdy to his mates) Putin.

    “It’s been a generation or so since Russians were in the business of shaping the destiny of the world, and most of us have forgotten how good they used to be at it. For much of the last century Moscow fuelled — and often won — the West’s ideological and culture wars. In the 1930s, brilliant operatives like Willi Muenzenberg convinced ‘useful idiots’ to join anti-fascist organisations that were in reality fronts for the Soviet-backed Communist International. Even in the twilight years of the Soviet Union the KGB was highly successful at orchestrating nuclear disarmament movements and trade unionism across the West.

    Now, after two decades in the economic basket, Russia is decisively back as an ideological force in the world — this time as a champion of conservative values. In his annual state of the nation speech to Russia’s parliament in December, Vladimir Putin assured conservatives around the world that Russia was ready and willing to stand up for ‘family values’ against a tide of liberal, western, pro-gay propaganda ‘that asks us to accept without question the equality of good and evil’. Russia, he promised, will ‘defend traditional values that have made up the spiritual and moral foundation of civilisation in every nation for thousands of years’. Crucially, Putin made it clear that his message was directed not only at Russians — who have already been protected from ‘promotion of non-traditional relationships’ by recent legislation — but for ‘more and more people across the world who support our position’.

    He’s on to something. Ukraine’s near-revolutionary turmoil this week pits East versus West — but it’s also a culture war between social conservatives and social liberals. The forces against the government in Kiev tend to be aligned with the EU and modern ‘democratic values’, including gay rights; whereas government supporters tend to be more Russophile and their banners include ones that say ‘EURO = HOMO’. These are precisely the battle lines on which Putin has raised his conservative ideological standard.

    A recent report by the Centre for Strategic Communications, a Kremlin-connected think tank, neatly summarised Putin’s ambition: it’s entitled ‘Putin: World Conservatism’s New Leader’. The report argues that large, silent majorities around the world favour traditional family values over feminism and gay rights — and that Putin is their natural leader. ‘The Kremlin apparently believes it has found the ultimate wedge issue to unite its supporters and divide its opponents, both in Russia and the West, and garner support in the developing world,’ says Radio Free Europe’s Brian Whitmore. ‘They seem to believe they have found the ideology that will return Russia to its rightful place as a great power with a messianic mission and the ability to win hearts and minds globally.’

    Putin’s siren call has found support in some unexpected quarters. The conservative American commentator — and one-time arch anti-communist — Pat Buchanan was one of the architects of the Reagan-era ‘Moral Majority’ movement which heralded the rise of the Christian right as a political force. Now he’s full of praise for Putin’s ‘paleo-conservative moment’. The great ideological struggle of the 21st century will be between ‘conservatives and traditionalists in every country arrayed against the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite’, Buchanan wrote in a recent blog post. ‘While much of American and western media dismiss him as an authoritarian and reactionary, a throwback, Putin may be seeing the future with more clarity than Americans.’ The Illinois-based World Congress of Families, an organisation that promotes family values, has already accepted an invitation to hold its eighth annual International Congress in Moscow. ‘Russia could be a great ally for conservatives, on issues like defending the family, abortions, even strengthening marriage and promoting more children,’ the Congress of Families managing director Larry Jacobs told the state-run RIA news agency.

    But the Kremlin’s true target audience is not on the right-wing fringes of western politics but people in what was once called the Soviet sphere of influence in the former Soviet Union, Middle East and Africa. Russian diplomats and academics have taken a leading role in promoting an anti-gay-rights resolution in the United Nations’ Human Rights Council in Geneva, building a coalition of conservative nations behind a resolution declaring that human rights had to be subordinate to ‘traditional values and cultural sovereignty’. (In 2011 the US backed a resolution explicitly protecting sexual minorities under the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights — but Russia stepped in to lead the counteroffensive.) ‘Russia has been using this issue to develop a constituency in Muslim and African countries,’ says Mark Gevisser, an Open Society Fellow who is writing a book on the global debate on gay rights. ‘This brand of ideological moral conservatism was originally minted in the US. It is highly ironic that these countries are mounting an anti-western crusade using a western tool.’ Moscow plays on opposition to gay rights most effectively closer to home. Last November, when it looked like the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was close to signing an Association Agreement with the European Union, billboards appeared across the country warning that the ‘EU means legalising same-sex marriage’. The campaign was paid for by Ukraine’s Choice, a group associated with the Kremlin-connected politician and businessman Viktor Medvedchuk.

    But Putin’s new mission goes deeper than political opportunism. Like the old Communist International, or Comintern, in its day, Moscow is again building an international ideological alliance. The Comintern sought to bring ‘progressives’ and left-wingers of every stripe into Moscow’s ideological big tent; Putin is pitching for moral leadership of all conservatives who dislike liberal values. And again, like the Comintern, Putin appears convinced that he is embarking on a world-historical mission. It’s certainly true that such a moral mission has deep roots in Russian history. Many previous occupants of the Kremlin have set themselves up as defenders of orthodoxy and autocracy — notably Nicholas I, the ‘gendarme of Europe’, and the arch-conservative Alexander III. Putin quoted the 19th-century conservative thinker Nikolai Berdyaev in his Duma speech. ‘The point of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward,’ Putin said, ‘but that it prevents movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.’

    It would be easy to dismiss Putin’s conservative Comintern as another Sochi-style vanity project if it weren’t for the fact that Russia’s hard power is growing in parallel with its soft power. For the first time in a generation Moscow called the shots on a major international diplomatic issue last year, when Sergei Lavrov’s plan to supervise Syria’s chemical weapons disarmament derailed US plans for military strikes on Damascus. Over recent years Moscow unsuccessfully backed local despots in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, and Libya — and they lost their heads, just like old Soviet clients from Afghanistan to Yugoslavia. But with Syria that run of failure is finally changing. Moscow’s diplomatic protection in the UN, backed by Russian weapons, intelligence and military expertise, finally means something again. If Harry Truman wanted to make the US the arsenal of democracy, then Putin seems to have a similar plan for Russia to be the arsenal of reaction.

    There’s a third plank to Russia’s ambitious programme to shape the world in its image: an ongoing campaign to redesign the global architecture of the internet to allow more control by individual states. Since the foundation of the world wide web, its effective control centre has been at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — known as ICANN, the non-profit organisation that assigns internet addresses and traffic routes based in Los Angeles, California. Russia has long demanded that ICANN be moved out of the US — and has been quick to seize on the leaks of the National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s reports as a tool to topple the US from the moral high ground of internet user freedom and embarrass Washington.

    Last November a delegation of Russian senators and Foreign Ministry officials paid an official visit to the US to complain to American service providers for failing to guarantee user privacy. They also renewed demands to reform ICANN. A logical enough demand, on the face of it, after Snowden’s revelations revealed deeply flawed oversight systems over America’s spies. But the problem with dismantling ICANN is that it could lead to an increase in the control allowed to individual states not only over their own internet space — which they have already — but over the entire world wide web. In other words, Russia could block someone it doesn’t like in Germany by invoking an anti-terror clause and shutting down opponents’ domain name server, or DNS, the basic address book of the internet. Without a DNS, web pages become unfindable and effectively disappear.

    The issue of who controls the internet will be debated at a major international conference next year, the biggest such confab since 2005. Strategically, Russia has clearly set its sights on two goals: wresting control of the internet away from the US, and creating a new definition of ‘cyber-terrorism’ that’s as loose as its own legislation on ‘extremism’, which has recently been used to prosecute eco-activists, peaceful protestors, independent media outlets and gay activists. Russia’s suggestion is to shift control of the internet away from ICANN to the International Telecommunication Union or ITU, the United Nations agency responsible for co-ordinating global use of the radio spectrum and satellite orbits. The ITU’s basic charter guarantees freedom of access to the internet — except, crucially, in cases of cyber–terrorism. Over the last ten years Russia has tried three times in the UN and once in the Organisation on Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to push through resolutions on cyber terror on the internet. But such legislation has been opposed by the US and Europe because ‘the only practical implications of such a move would be to allow countries to suppress dissent,’ says Alexander Klimburg, an adviser on cyber security to the OSCE.

    Conservative values, international diplomacy, the architecture of the internet: apparently diverse areas where Russia is exercising international influence. They are all united by a common theme, the same one that is trumpeted very plainly by the Sochi Games: Russia is back as a major global player, and doesn’t care how much it costs to show it. The scheme has feet of clay, of course, as does Putin’s rule itself, insofar as it is founded on sky-high energy prices which are already beginning to tumble under the assaults of cheap shale gas and alternative energy. But for the time being at least, Putin has the means and now the plan to project Russian power, both hard and soft, beyond Russia’s borders for the first time since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

  154. Normally I do not condone criticism of the Royal Family which is usually fuelled by that deplorable British trait of envying anyone better of than you. In this case I will make an exception, William is making a complete arse of himself by promising to destroy works of art carved from ivory. On has to wonder who the prat was trying to impress. What were his advisors doing in letting him stream forth with such fatuousness.

    However, having said that, give me the Monarchy any day as the alternative is unthinkable. People say that the Sovereign is not elected but we elect our politicians and just look what we have ended up with. If we had a republican head of state we would be saddled with a self satisfied political has been who thinks a total lack of intelligence coupled with a boozer’s hooter is a suitable qualification for public office.

  155. Peter

    A tetchy response! Speedy too, given your busy schedule.
    I understand the monarchical, as opposed to any other system of government perfectly well, though I’m unconvinced that you do.
    Indeed you don’t need to respond and you certainly are entitled to your opinions. You are incorrect to equate monarchists with conservatives and republicans with…what, precisely? Republicans are amongst the staunchest upholders of conservative values of personal liberty and opportunity.
    Or would you seriously argue for the restoration of the divine right of kings and the absolute authority of monarchy?
    And better a time-limited elected President with defined powers in a balanced, inclusive political system than a hereditary monarchy supine in the face of the growing, closed party totalitarianism that is now the British state.

  156. Noa (14:37)

    Good to see back on Messi-like striking form, but you’ll have to mug up on ‘intersectionality’ in Wiki and the Urban Dictionary. The neologisms of the nutters are difficult to keep up with I know, but I urge all conscripted counter-counter-culture warriors to try harder.

    When I lived in a Section House in Soho in the 50s, The Admiral Duncan still had an eclectic mix of punters, including some of my inquisitive colleagues, an assortment of snouts, toms, my occasional self (seeking information), a smattering of Billy Hill’s and Italian Albert’s gangster heavies and street bookmakers; a medley of Maltese midget marauders and ponces, all shoulder-to- shoulder with the arty-farty Bohemian mix. Wait, I forgot the contingent of Grub Street hacks sniffing for copy, or mumping booze, including Duncan Webb, who had his head so far up Billy Hill’s arse, he sometimes failed to notice his suppurating farmers, of which BH complained persistently, putting their existence down to the Dartmoor diet (though I would have thought porridge would have obviated the condition)

    I hear that the current clientèle is somewhat different, to put it mildly; that the heady smell of ganga blending with the oily reek of KY jelly, blended with disturbed shite and cheap perfume, puts off all but the brotherhood of buggery and the louche legion of the Lesbianary. And that’s not even getting into the ‘trans’ this ‘n’ that, which is far too complicated for me to assimilate in my dotage.
    (When did you imbibe therein, btw – and why?).

    As for ‘intersectionality’? Fuggettabahtit!

    It would be enough to Make Noel Coward go straight if he were to pay a visit now. “Too much is more than enough, Dear Boy”.

  157. Stephen Maybury
    “William is making a complete arse of himself by promising to destroy works of art carved from ivory…”.
    Indeed he is. And I wondered who it is is the owner of these objects d’art? The Queen herself? Or the taxpayer?
    If the former how does she feel about her grandson blethering on about smashing her property? In most ordinary families that results in an automatic exclusion from the Will (sic), no ifs or buts.
    If its us, through the Crown Estate, we are surely entitled to have our property protected from such vandalism or be compensated for it.
    In either event such behaviour is absolutist and arrogant. Such items are, ultimately, in his custody for safe keeping, not for destruction as though by communist revolutionaries in the Tuileries or the Winter Palace.
    The parallel with Trierweller and the broken Sevres vases is inescapable though. If he carries out such vandalism, it is, as Aleander Boot pointed out elsewhere, not he but we, who always pay.

  159. I am a monarchist on two grounds. If we must have a sovereign, it should be above party, thus reducing the opportuinty of the Westminster maggots to ponce about on ‘The World Stage’ to the absolute minimum. Secondly, for their tabloid value and comic potential. To this end, they should be as effete and gaff-prone as possible.

    If I were the monarch, I would, by Royal Command, make the Prime Minister turn up to his weekly audience in a ‘onesey’ and eat his tea and biscuits off the carpet, George Galloway style.

  160. Frank P,

    The CHW has been far too quiet, though I’ve always enjoyed your wickedly knowing posts and those of the other stalwarts, its been uh, too sterile. And I’m not sure the proffered sacrifice of the dodo and stalinist Telemachus offers us any substantial meat for our worn incisors.
    Your posts often evoke an era which has now vanished completely and that view of the Admiral Duncan does so wonderfully. I’ve no doubt whatsoever that its as colourful today, but more dangerous and much more alien. One feels that, somehow, we had a mastery and control over such people, events and our own destiny which we lost shortly after.
    As to the Admiral Duncan, business often took me to into London to meet with City lawyers and financiers in putting together PFI proposals to the MOD. A hard days bamboozling by them was as often followed by serious socialising as by a visit to a Barbican concert. It was a few years ago, and merely one of a number of places visited, though your hilarious description is apt. I looked in wonder, an invisible barrier between me and its other customers:-

    “Oh wonder!
    How many goodly creatures are there here!
    How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
    That has such people in’t.”

  161. “It is impossible for a Republican to be a conservative. Ask Alex Boot.”

    Utter nonsense. The American and many other constitutional models have operated very successfully for centuries. It is conservativism and monarchy which are ultimately, always antithetical.

  162. Andy

    If only tea with the Queen were so! But on historic precedent its more likely that it’s the PM who would have to watch the monarch dribbling their Twinings English Breakfast and fiddling with the buttons on the back of their jacket.

    A state of affairs which seems likely to be resumed in the near future…

  163. Noa February 21st, 2014 – 16:22

    “It is impossible for a Republican to be a conservative.”

    Absolutely 100% correct.

  164. Noa February 21st, 2014 – 15:30

    “Republicans are amongst the staunchest upholders of conservative values of personal liberty and opportunity.”

    The Republican Party in the good old US of A, might well have these said values.

    But every ‘republican’ that I have ever met or witnessed in the UK have been from the most unpleasant sections of the Marxist/Gramsci/Trotsky/communist/socialist Common Purpose brigade.

    Shit heads all.

  166. David Ossitt – 17:02

    “But every ‘republican’ that I have ever met or witnessed in the UK have been from the most unpleasant sections of the Marxist/Gramsci/Trotsky/communist/socialist Common Purpose brigade.

    Shit heads all.”

    David.

    Your comment says that you are judging the people you’ve met, rather than the respective merits of the monarchical v republican argument doesn’t it?

    So your view is based on emotion, not reason.

  167. Peter

    You may feel you need Alex Boot’s advice to form your views and opinions but I don’t.
    I’ve lived and worked in the States, Australia and elsewhere and can assure you that like their middle class counterparts in Britain, they are inherantly and instinctively conservative.
    And unlike us, their rights and obligations are defined and protected by their constition.

  168. David Ossitt – 16:49

    “Noa February 21st, 2014 – 16:22

    “It is impossible for a Republican to be a conservative.”

    Erm. No! You’ve quoted Peter. Who quotes Alexander Boot, who probably quotes someone else…but it’s not me.

  170. You are of course at liberty to trust whom- or whatever you choose. In this instance, however, your deference to authority makes your justification entirely circular.

  172. Oh, it shouldn’t matter at all, oh petulant one. IF you have no interest in arguing the point.

    And no, deference (implying trust) is not an *entirely* or even half-way reasonable (logically argued) position to take. From someone who professes to take an interest in matters theological, the quality of that retort is somewhat disappointing.

    And before I go, Boot, who once impressed me enough to introduce him to you, is not the oracle. I caught him plagiarising from Theodore Dalrymple without acknowledgement a couple of weeks ago (see conversation with Baron). You know what they say about the Russians, don’t you? Voruyut. They steal.

  173. ACP, you really do want to milk the fact that a long time ago you pointed us to Alex Boot’s blog as if it required unending thanks! You have already been thanked several times. And I am genuine in offering thanks again since I now have a very good friend whose judgement on many things I do trust.

    I don’t profess here to take an interest in theology. But in the Church deferring to proper theological authority is the natural attitude of myself and all my fellow members. We do not set ourselves up as the Pope.

    As for plagiarising Theodore Dalrymple, perhaps you are unaware of the relationship between them and the mutual benefit which they produce in each other’s work. There is no need for either of them to acknowledge that which they have discussed together.

  174. Peter

    You’re entitled to think what you like and I will be the first to stoutly defend your right to do so. And of course your right to choose someone else to do your thinking for you.

  175. Noa, likewise. You are always welcome to post whatever you want here. You have not met Alex Boot, nor spent many hours in his company. You would be more impressed if you had. I am not afraid to disagree and contradict him, and in some areas I have greater knowledge than he. But on the things he is an expert on it is a pleasure to learn from him.

  176. Peter
    Thank you
    You have no need to defend Mr Boot to me. I enjoy his mordant wit as much as anyone.
    That was not my point. But I defer to no one in my right and ability to have my own opinions. And I am always prepared to review them in the light of a better argument.

  178. stephen maybery @ 15:19

    Agreed, stephen, seconded, the lot. If the boy wants to get rid of the ivory trinkets, he may put it in an auction, donate the cash to pay for guarding the ivory growing animals.

    For Baron, the monarchy is the link with the past, and since the barbarian worships Burke and his bridge doctrine of what a society is, he cannot but be in favour, strongly in favour. Also, just look what happened to powerful nations that decided to dispose off the institution.

  179. I am not a follower of the beautiful game, but it seems to me that £300,000 a week, yes, a week is a lot of money! Will it make Rooney a better person, stop him being a lowlife? His wife, Colleen, will certainly stick by him more than ever, with wages such as he is pulling in. I am jealous, of course I’m jealous. A lifetime of hard work, and never saw such a figure as £300,000 after years of slaving away, let alone for a week. It a’int bloomin’ fair, no it bloody well a’int!

  180. Andy Car Park @ 17:57

    We all borrow from each other, Andy, some are more of the borrowing predisposition like Baron, the more gifted of us are on the lending side.

    You remember your answer some years back to someone who said ‘the society’s responsible’?: “Responsible, who, moi?’ Well, Baron has used it once or twice, will use it again if an opportunity arises. Is the barbarian wrong?

    Baron enjoys Boot’s short essays alot even if and when he disagrees with the great man. As a contemporary polemicist, he’s there, near the top, and his style fits exactly what’s needed what with time being at a premium.

  181. Anne Wotana Kaye 1 @ 19:26

    When England won the World Cup in 1966, the players were roughly on an average wage. Today, the likes of Rooney wouldn’t turn up on the pitch to fart for that sort of money.

    And the reason why the ‘stars’ are paid so much is not unakin to why some of the bankers get their massive bonuses: a limited number of clubs in the Premiership (20), and a huge boost to the amount of money going into it in the last 20 years or so what with sponsorships, TV rights, billionaire owners and stuff.

    You right, it’s sickening, but there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Life, Anne, can be fugging unfair.

  182. Noa February 21st, 2014 – 17:11

    “Your comment says that you are judging the people you’ve met, rather than the respective merits of the monarchical v republican argument doesn’t it? So your view is based on emotion, not reason.”

    Only half right, you are correct in that I do judge the people I meet, as do most of us quite instinctively and probably subconsciously, and that is my right and my privilege, I am a free man.

    You are entirely wrong to say that my views with regard to the respective merits of the monarchy v republican are based on emotion and not reason, it is my firm belief that the monarchical system as practiced in the UK and in a handful of other European countries is vastly superior to any and all republics.

    In republics where the President is in effect an elected ‘temporary monarch’ as in the USA, vast sums are spent over a two year period in order to get elected and well before the first term is ending this rigmarole is repeated in the hope of securing a second term.

    In republics where the President is a titular head such as in the Republic of Ireland and where power is with the prime minister, this often results in nonentities being placed as president by whosoever is in power.

    Our system is not by any means perfect but it far, far, better than that of any republic.

  185. David Ossitt. 20.07

    A fair response and clarification, though you appreciate that I can only evaluate your views on what you wrote, rather than what you think. So my judgement of your original post stands; not wrong or half right but right. You played the men and not the ball. Take the red card with good grace, this isn’t football.
    As to the ‘vast sums’ spent in US elections, so what? You use a straw argument. That is their right. And if presidents must act with circumspection before an election, again, what is wrong with that? Unlike our own politicians they must heed their electorates or be gone. Which, unlike a hereditary monarchy, receives its salt regardless of its subjects and does not answer to them.
    You are on stronger ground in pointing to the puppet presidents of Italy and Eire, but then again, what you are really highlighting are constitutional flaws in the balance of power between the legislative and executive functions. Flaws incidentally, which those functions themselves are unable or unwilling to address.
    In their case the parallel in Britain, with its single chamber legislature, an unelected Prime Minister with Presidential aspirations and similar powers, and a powerless, decaying sovereignty is striking.
    It is not more monarchy that is needed Baron, to preserve the Burkean vision you hold dear, but major, inclusive constitutional reform. The solution that was evolved in 1688 was broadly, satisfactory for 200 years. As we look to the possible dissolution of the UK and its de facto absorbtion into the Behemoth it will clearly no longer suffice for even another 20.
    In saving our very civilisation then can be no sacred cows, no room for sentiment.

  186. Anne Wotana Kaye 1 – 19:26

    Anne. You are right as usual. It is entirely wrong that the likes of Rooney can receive £15 million a year for and a half years. There is certainly no right or justice in this.
    I contrast him to Sir Tom Finney, a great sportsman and more importantly a true gentleman and a fine man, who I once had the honour of meeting. He passed the true test and challenge of life for us all, which is to behave with humility and dignity treat all people equally and place others before yourself.

    http://www.lep.co.uk/sport/pne-news/pne-legend-tom-was-the-greatest-1-6455220

  187. Frank P
    February 21st, 2014 – 15:32
    Please forgive me for using this CHW to write a private letter to Frank P. Frank, you wrote of Soho in the 50s, and I wonder if you knew the places I frequented as a horrible, precocious 14 year old? Each Saturday, I attended the Italia Conti Stage School which was on Archer Street, near the old Windmill Theatre. After quoting from Shakespeare and other classics, I would wander out of the door and across the narrow road to the Harmony Inn. This was the haunt of jazz musicians, the usual dross that hung around Soho, and some very interesting characters. I’d have a cup of tea, and made the acquaintance of Ronnie Scott (before he became famous), Bennie Green, Joe Harriot and many other wonderful musicians, who I expect are now making sweet music in the blue yonder. Oh, happy days.

  190. Those who think it might be prudent to follow events in the United States rather than watch interminable football matches will remember that a strong inference can be drawn that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was nobbled in order to obtain the outrageous decision favourable to the Executive on “Obamacare”.

    John Roberts it will also be remembered is Chief Justice of the courts “overseeing” the National Security Agency (NSA). He is in this way head of the revival of Star Chamber across the pond which goes under the name “the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” (FISA Courts).

    So evidence suggest that Chief Justice Roberts is bought and sold and oversees the secret courts that decide on any matter arising from the nation-wide surveillance of every Tom, Dick and Harry in the USA and then some.

    Every contraction of Frank P’s testicles (to summarize in language that he might understand) is monitored and assessed for implications which might be baleful for THE STATE – but which, as Frank will assure you, has only our good at heart. In this way, a man in some uniform or other might stop Baron in the street and say “show me your testicles”. Baron, in a second before prompt compliance, might think “Silly to object, really. Man’s only doing his job”.

    Meanwhile, the larger question of where western civilisation is headed is addressed by a Hong Kong investment manager, William Kaye, who, like our worthy Canadian Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, is a former Goldman Sachs man.

    Good God, he appears to share the analysis of Alex Jones – so even if he is making pots of money in Hong Kong, he must be a raving lunatic, let’s turn him off, shut him down. block our ears, close our minds:

    http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2014/2/20_The_Elites_Horrifying_Sabotage_Of_Western_Civilization.html

    “…policies that are not working the way people are told they are supposed to work, but that are really designed to further enslave and control populations….unfortunately most people in the West, and certainly in America, are too busy being distracted by the mainstream media and television networks to see what’s unfolding. So people in the West are increasingly distracted and are not paying attention to individual liberties being eroded, and the bleak future that lies ahead… never thought I would see anything like this. The way that Americans have allowed their liberties to be stolen from them, I did not think I would witness this in my lifetime or my children’s lifetimes. This is very disheartening and sad. I keep wondering when people will get fed up and not be willing to take it anymore. … in the larger scheme of things, I believe this is all part of a much larger move in the West toward a centralized government, with an increasingly fascist control of the economy and the populations of the various Western nations…”.

    But my observation a few weeks ago that the Obama regime hand-out published on this site through the good office of the Gogolian Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, while it mentioned that the Afghan share of the heroin trade had increased from about 7% to 90% under the expert advisory organs of the West, did not touch – perhaps understandably – on what is known to those who look a little deeper or more honestly at such figures, that the business is largely run by United States government agencies.

    Ah, well, it’s all in defence of the realm, isn’t it Frank?

  191. Yes Anne, you and I exchanged mutual memories of Soho and Fitzrovia some time ago; not sure now whether it was on the Speccie blog, or at the birth of this one, but it was good to be reminded of the old patch and its numerous exotic faces – mostly now departed to the Great Oblivion to be made whole again within the Great Scheme of Things (GSOT).

    I think you told us that you were born in Berwick Street, one block from the Met Police ‘Section House’ (then bachelor quarters for C Division officers) where I lived before I married?

    If you had walked through Archer Street on a Monday (as no doubt you did) in those days, when it was closed to vehicular traffic for the benefit of the nation’s dance bands – they all met there to hustle for gigs once a week – you may well have seen yours truly’ stroll through, past the Harmony Inn in full regalia at regulation three-and-a-half mph, be-gloved hands clasped behind back, chin-strap on jutting jaw, pausing to exchange pleasantries with Oscar Rabin, Ronnie Scott or Joe Loss, ‘keeping the Queen’s Peace’ (when she was just a slip of a gal) and soaking up the unique buzz of the postwar ‘naughty square mile’. That was the time when Londoners were attempting to shake off the austerity of the Forties and everyone went Up West at least once a week to enjoy what were comparatively innocent pleasures. As you say, happy, happy days! I’ve promised my wife that, before I pop me clogs, we’ll have one last stroll around Soho, to pass judgment on the current Zeitgeist and have salt beef on rye in the Nosh Bar opposite the Windmill ( if it’s still there). I do miss The Smoke. What a wonderful Metrollups it was, before … Well! Need I elaborate? Not to you, I would guess.

  192. Frank P
    February 22nd, 2014 – 01:56
    Frank, the Nosh Bar has gone, and only a memory of it remains. The Wimpy Bar too has vanished, a place where I first tasted milk shakes after the austerity of the war years. My husband and I took a stroll there, but somehow it is easier to remember it as it was than searching for familiar places down “memory lane”.

  193. Why would anybody ask to see your bollocks, me old fleur? They can read them in your every comment. 🙂

  194. Sorry Anne (02:10) – I was swatting a gnat (02:18).

    Yep, you’re probably right – hindsight with rose-tinted spectacles obviates disappointment and most memories are auto-emended. Conscience doth make cowards of us all.

  195. First there was Prescott and croquet – now Clegg and tennis!
    Alex Boot on TFIF:
    [His latest blog post].

  196. I struggle to understand in what sense Frank P is a conservative at least on the question of security services breaking the law and government involvement in heroin traffic. His testicular meme is reintroduced however in his learned analysis of my comments as “bollocke’ – Bad Boy! Thus we may never know the basis of his conservative credentials in these areas.

    When we look, for instance, at the increase of Afghanistan’s percentage of the world heroin trade from 7% to 93% under American tutelage, the concept of a Special Inspector General of Afghanistan Reconstruction sounds a somewhat ironic note. But 7% to 93%! Surely THERE’s “reconstruction” for you1

    Frank P though doesn’t want to talk about this. Perhaps he thinks that a suggestion that the American government is involved in any way in this burgeoning business is “bollocks” and needs no further comment. What kind of “conservatism” is this.

    I had to check on the definition of “cottaging” in an earlier deft riposte from our Bad Boy, though I had a general idea. It was, one guesses, part of the ethos of the young police constable or trainee plain clothes man in central London in the 1950s. Frank will be quick to correct me if I am wrong, but wasn’t this where a young detective might cut his teeth by entrapping criminal male deviants in the “Gentlemen”‘s in Piccadilly Circus Underground station by tempting them with flashes of his- well, meme time again? I may here be maligning our 1950s force, but I suspect that there was a darker side to the rich life of post War SoHo. But that’s a world, like the Afghan heroin trade when it was hovering down around the 7% level, that some might like to conserve.

  199. Frank P @ 11:31

    If you were to join in, Frank, with your acerbic humor, but of course only after you’ve swatted a gnat, you’d be a superstar.

    Baron knows what your view of the rag is, but it can be fun.

  200. Malfleur @ 00:30

    It gets rather boring to hear it again and again, the current favorite put down of Baron’s, but Malfleur, are you sure you were facing in the right direction, head and leg wise, when you penned this rant?

    What TF is wrong with you, we’ve been through it before, signed a gentlemen’s agreement t, agreed to differ. What;s the point of your new tantrum then, and anyway, Baron likes watching football, having his testicles felt, because who knows, what if the feeling is performed by a gorgeous blonde who …

  201. Baron (12:10)

    It’s not my ‘view of the rag’ that got me blackballed from Frasier’s fiefdom, it’s orders from above, I suspect. Bear in mind that we rather rough on Korsi and he is now stroking CMD’s dick in No. 10. Never mind, I can always lurk and watch you take ’em on. I’m not proud. I am sad that they shit-canned Austin Barry – the best wit on the intertubes IMHO.

  202. Frank P 22nd, – 01:56

    ” ‘keeping the Queen’s Peace’ (when she was just a slip of a gal)”

    Yeah. And what age were you at the time?

  203. Ostrich (13:22)

    🙂 By the time I was in my early 20s I was already 40 – the vicissitudes of life were already bearing down heavily upon me by then and HM and her naughty sister HRH Maggie, who visited the West End frequently, each had the appearance of teenagers when I first donned the blue melton. HM still puts us all to shame, of course. But Maggie fell in with the wrong crowd and spent too much time in Harry Meadows’s bordello in Chesterfield Gardens in Mayfair – and thus, sadly, got old before her time. But she was a little doll before they broke her heart, melting many a copper’s cynical carapace with her smile en route to her assignments and the theatre. That evil bastard Johnny Bindon (he with the 14 inch dick) corrupted her. The Townsend – Princess Margaret story is the most poignant of the modern Royals saga imho. Much sadder than that of dopey Diana and her escapades.

    But warts and all, the Constitutional Monarchy is still the best available for we quirky Brits. Can’t support Noa on that Republican issue and I’m a little surprised that a wise owl like he waves the Republican flag. Not official Ukip policy is it, Noa? Didn’t see that in any of the glossy literature they sent. Btw – who funds that bumf? They must be out of pocket already vis-à-vis my Membership sub. (already tendered before Nige suddenly blew it with his ‘decriminalize drugs’ shtick).

  205. Rather unwisely (he’s already suffered one heart attack), driving, Baron was listening today to the Any Question slot on the BBC4, intermittently as he had to switch off to pop into shops. Amongst the chosen panelist someone called Laurie Penny, a journalist and feminist activist from London, a contributing editor at the New Statesman, and the author of Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism.

    The one question one would have to ask about her is why hasn’t her flesh been yet devoured by anyone or anything either capitalistic or not. The world would be a saner place without her.

    There was none on the panel with whom Baron felt in total agreement, or even had much rapport with. Either Baron’s grown too old, or the world has turned loopier, or more likely abit of both. How could anyone say, and get away with it, that ‘paying people what they need helps competitiveness becaause it makes them happy. Arghhhh

  207. Frank P @ 14:15

    You, Frank, and other Wallsters may, of course, be aware of it, Baron has so far restrained himself using it in his argument how to solve the perceived greatest threat to the indigenous culture since William, the one who conquered, but it would be of interest to the barbarian to hear your take on the Queen being descended from the prophet Muhammed. The Burke Peerage says so, and who’s Baron to challenge them. Anyone has any other insight on it ?

  208. Peter from Maidstone @ 15:09

    Is it not ironic, Peter, that whilst the political elites in the EU, Russia pursue policies aimed at uniting the disparate European clans under their respective wings, the hoi polloi pull in the other direction? To Baron, it smells of a painful clash at some future point.

  209. Frank P @ 14:39

    He is good, isn’t he, Frank. It’s short, lucid and so beautifully crafted, it cannot but make everyone envious of the man’s talent. Aren’t we supposed to be all equal? Shouldn’t the equality peddling fruitcakes tell either Nature or Him to do something about it?

  210. Frank P @ 12:48

    The barbarian gets blocked sometimes, too, for some unexplained reason it never lasts, possibly because he has been subscribing to the rag since the days of the great Alexander Chancellor.

    You should try to find a way in again, you were, and would be again the top, your talent for wordsmithing beats almost everyone on both the blogging side and the paper itself. Even the Baroness, who says Baron should be sanctioned for his blogging, is getting fed up with some of the top columnists, says she no longer reads them, they infuriate her.

  212. The Guardian knows Britain’s place in the world!

    “Pope Francis is putting a personal imprint on the group of men who will choose his successor, tapping like-minded cardinals from some of the world’s smallest, most remote and poverty-wracked nations to help him run the Catholic Church.

    Alongside Archbishop Vincent Nichols, the leader of the church in England and Wales, those elevated will include ……”

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/22/pope-new-cardinals-archbishop-vincent-nichols

  213. Baron February 22nd, 2014 – 14:59

    “Amongst the chosen panelist someone called Laurie Penny, a journalist and feminist activist from London, a contributing editor at the New Statesman, and the author of Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism.”

    And what a silly girl she turned out to be, the stupid woman demanded that all public schools should provide 50% of their places free to the underprivileged and hates grammar schools.

    And yet when ‘Johnathan’ asked where she had been educated her answer was “private school from age seven” like all better off socialist/Marxists she wants private for herself and kin but third rate schools for the multitude.

  214. Nigel Farage will take on Nick Clegg in a debate on the European Union after the UKIP leader accepted a challenge from the Deputy Prime Minister.

    If there has been comment here regarding the challenge by Nick Clegg to Nigel Farage to publically debate their quite opposite views on whether we should be in or out of the EU, then I have missed it.

    I was quite flabbergasted to hear this news, in a one to one debate Nigel would strip Clegg to the bone and show him up as the duplicitous nonentity that he surely is, however I did not expect Nigel to be as clever as he most certainly is, he accepted the challenge but with one caveat that being that Ed Miliband and David Cameron should also be invited to the debate.

    This clever man has scored an immediate win, if they accept it raises his status, if either or both refuse (as I think the will) it will give him a superb advantage and fill his political ammunition pouch to the full.

  215. Anyone following events in he Ukraine?

    The EU apparatchiks’ meddling will lead to the country’s breakdown, and to what purpose? It was obvious to the blind the country has split between the pro-West west, and the pro-Russia East. Instead of calming things down, working on a compromise, the EU has negotiated a deal, which the opposition tore apart minutes after it was agreed.

    The key question for the country is this: Could the West ever guarantee Ukraine’s long term security? In Baron’s humble view, it cannot what with Russia just round the corner. The Ukrainians are Slavs, many a family are of mixed marriage, most of the country’s industrial economy is coupled with that of Russia, the agricultural sector is massive.

    The only reason so many Ukrainians are in favour of the EU rather than Putin is the hope of juicy financial ‘assistance’ from Brussels. They’ve seen Poland, other new entrants getting large chunks of cash aimed at levelling living standard across the whole of the EU, they reckon Brussels will do the same whilst also opening the EU labour markets to the Ukrainian unwashed.

    They may be disappointed. Europe’s drowning in debt, it’s also very unlikely the unwashed in countries that have bore the brunt of East European immigration (Britain?) will stand for another wave of cheap Ukrainian labour. And the last thing the EU neeeds is another Common Agricultural Agreement covering the Ukraine.

    The EU may have won a skirmish, it will lose the battle. Lunacy.

  216. David Ossitt @ 17:03

    A smart condition, that to have the other two boys present. Baron though is still unconvinced the In-Out referendum is the way to go, he does fear the elites will engineer an In outcome, and we’ll be stuck with the monstrosity for at least a couple of generations, and then it may be too late to do anything.

  217. Hi Baron, I attended a conference in Scandinavia at which Metropolitan Hilarion and my boss spoke. He was in my breakout group so I got several opportunities to have a conversation with him. He is very impressive.

    After reading Alex’s comments I am glad I was busy yesterday as it would have been a waste of a day.

  218. Baron

    John Goldberg’s newsletter this week follows your (and Alex Boot’s) train of thought on Ukraine. It’s, as always, quite long, but worth the read:

    The Goldberg File
    By Jonah Goldberg

    February 21, 2014

    Dear Reader (Including the trench-coat-wearing FCC minister with breath like he’s been sucking a urinal cake looking over my shoulder, tapping his BIC pen on his glass eye, and sighing every time I write something he doesn’t like),

    I’ve got to bang out this “news”letter pretty quickly. I’m sitting in a too-small fake wicker chair at the coffee shop at the Broadmoor (one of my favorite hotels, btw). The time difference here puts me two hours behind at six in the morning. Plus, I don’t want the housekeeping staff to find the body in my room. If I didn’t need coffee so badly I would have taken care of that already. But one must prioritize. I think the high altitude here is making my brain itch.

    Fascism, Again

    Timothy Snyder has written the best piece I’ve seen on what’s going on in Kiev. It’s worth reading just as a primer. But it’s also interesting in other ways. I had not read a lot about the “Eurasian Union,” a proposed counterweight to the European Union, in much the same way the Legion of Doom is a counterweight to the Justice League. Putin and a band of avowed “National Bolshevik” intellectuals are in effect trying to put the band back together. Snyder writers:

    The Eurasian Union is the enemy of the European Union, not just in strategy but in ideology. The European Union is based on a historical lesson: that the wars of the twentieth century were based on false and dangerous ideas, National Socialism and Stalinism, which must be rejected and indeed overcome in a system guaranteeing free markets, free movement of people, and the welfare state. Eurasianism, by contrast, is presented by its advocates as the opposite of liberal democracy.

    The Eurasian ideology draws an entirely different lesson from the twentieth century. Founded around 2001 by the Russian political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, it proposes the realization of National Bolshevism. Rather than rejecting totalitarian ideologies, Eurasianism calls upon politicians of the twenty-first century to draw what is useful from both fascism and Stalinism. Dugin’s major work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, published in 1997, follows closely the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi political theorist. Eurasianism is not only the ideological source of the Eurasian Union, it is also the creed of a number of people in the Putin administration, and the moving force of a rather active far-right Russian youth movement. For years Dugin has openly supported the division and colonization of Ukraine.

    The point man for Eurasian and Ukrainian policy in the Kremlin is Sergei Glazyev, an economist who like Dugin tends to combine radical nationalism with nostalgia for Bolshevism. He was a member of the Communist Party and a Communist deputy in the Russian parliament before cofounding a far-right party called Rodina, or Motherland. In 2005 some of its deputies signed a petition to the Russian prosecutor general asking that all Jewish organizations be banned from Russia.

    Some of this was news to me. I was familiar with the National Bolshevism of the early Nazi years. Thinkers like the Ukrainian Bolshevik Karl Radek and the Nazi Otto Strasser dabbled with the idea of merging Bolshevik and Nazi ideology. After all, if you’re already a National Socialist it’s not that long a trip to being a National Bolshevik, now is it? Some left-wing members of the Nazi military described themselves as National Bolsheviks as well. But ultimately, National Bolshevism as an intellectual movement died in the crib. Or so I thought.

    What I did not know is that National Bolshevism is making such a comeback. And while, it’s evil and a national-security threat and all that, I can’t help but smile.

    The Opposite of Opposites

    National Bolshevism must strike some on the left as quite perplexing. After all, Bolshevism and Nazism — like fascism and socialism — are opposites, right?

    If you read my book, you’d know I consider this the greatest myth and/or lie of the 20th century (coming in a distant second: the idea that there is a difference between good flan and bad flan).

    Funny enough, the Eurasianists are counting on this myth for their propaganda campaign. They insist that the protesters in Kiev are trying to stage a “brown revolution” or fascist coup. In other words the de facto fascists are calling the anti-fascists “fascists.” And apparently lots of folks are falling for it. Snyder again:

    Why exactly do people with such views think they can call other people fascists? And why does anyone on the Western left take them seriously? One line of reasoning seems to run like this: the Russians won World War II, and therefore can be trusted to spot Nazis. Much is wrong with this. . . .

    The other source of purported Eurasian moral legitimacy seems to be this: since the representatives of the Putin regime only very selectively distanced themselves from Stalinism, they are therefore reliable inheritors of Soviet history, and should be seen as the automatic opposite of Nazis, and therefore to be trusted to oppose the far right.

    Again, much is wrong about this. . . .

    Snyder’s rebuttals are good (I’ve trimmed them mostly for space). But they don’t cut to the heart of it.

    First, let’s clear some underbrush. The idea that Communism and Nazism are opposites is more of a utilitarian idea than a core conviction for the Left. It is a rationalization that allows the Left to cut around the historical tumor of Nazism and fascism and say, That has nothing to do with us.

    But the simple fact is that the hard Left has always endorsed or at least sympathized with national-socialist countries. What do you think Cuba is? It’s nationalistic and it’s socialistic. Venezuela under Chávez and now Maduro is nationalist and socialist. Nicaragua in the 1980s, etc., etc. Read a speech by any socialist dictator and swap out the word “socialize” for “nationalize”: The meaning of the sentences doesn’t change one iota. Nationalized health care is socialized medicine. Even Obama’s weak-tea socialistic rhetoric is usually dolled up in the rhetoric of nationalism, even militaristic nationalism. Let’s all be like SEAL Team Six! Let’s make this a ” Sputnik Moment.”

    Most of the Left in the U.S. didn’t really hate the German national-socialists until Stalin told them to. That the useful idiots thought Stalin’s command to turn on his one-time Nazi ally was rooted in deep ideological conviction just proves the depths of their idiocy.

    After all, it’s not like the Left suddenly turned on Stalin when he embraced nationalism wholeheartedly and talked of fighting the Nazis as part of the “Great Patriotic War for Mother Russia.” But, hey, maybe I’m missing the deep Marxist themes in the phrase “Great Patriotic War for Mother Russia.”

    North Korea by Another Name

    If you think this is all semantic faculty-lounge argy-bargy, consider the fact that North Korea is in many ways as “Nazi” as the Nazis were. It’s a nationalist country that subscribes to eugenic theories that it uses to justify the industrial torture and slaughter of its own citizens. In fact, North Korea’s eugenics is crazier than Nazi Germany’s was. I’m not trying to minimize the evil of the Holocaust, but “Jew” is a real category of human being and eugenics generally weren’t discredited in the 1930s. Eighty years later, North Korea believes that the political views of people are genetically heritable for generations. So you can get sent to a death camp if your great uncle said something nice about America or if your second cousin lives in South Korea.

    But because of the emotional and political investment in the idea that Nazism has nothing to do with Communism, North Korea is put in a category of lesser evil. If the Kims just described themselves as Nazis — but kept all of the same policies — it would be vastly easier to rally public opinion against their decades of murder. But when you talk about the evil of Communist regimes, a lot of people idiotically roll their eyes. Everyone is a brave anti-Nazi now that they’re all gone, but many are afraid to devote a fraction of that passion when it comes to the heirs, imitators, and competitors of Nazism.

    Heresies of Heresies

    Richard Pipes had the best pithy summation of the difference between Nazism and Bolshevism. They aren’t opposites, he argued, they’re both “heresies of socialism.”

    I agree with this entirely, but step back from that a bit. Socialism itself is a heresy — a heresy of tribalism. Socialism is simply an attempt to gussy up ancient tribal tendencies in modern garb. Nazism was tribalism of one race. Communism is tribalism of one class. Italian fascism was tribalism of one nation.

    There are of course, better and worse forms of tribalism. And, I would argue that a little tribalism, like a little nationalism, is a healthy thing, insofar as communities aren’t held together by reason alone. They’re held together by a complex set of sentiments, and a politics that doesn’t take account of that will necessarily fail. As Edmund Burke writes, “politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.”

    But here is the important point. Looking back on the long history of humanity, tribalism — simple or complex — was the norm for 99 percent of our time on Earth. It wasn’t until 200-300 years ago that a different path emerged. (Yes, Christianity was a big leap forward in advancing a universal conception of humanity, in principle. But in practice it was often coopted by tribalism in one form or another. We can talk about that more another time.) The different path emerged largely in England and spread from there. This different path recognized the sovereignty of the individual, the necessity of the rule of law, democratic legitimacy, and private property, and the inherent dignity of bourgeois labor.

    As I’ve written before, what makes America special is that we took England’s culture of liberty and broadened it out into a virtual tribe of liberty. I say virtual because we took the ethnic and racial components out of it (and, no, we didn’t do it overnight). You can be a progressive or a liberal or a social democrat and still believe in all of the things that define the tribe of liberty. You can also be a nationalist, a patriot, or a traditionalist and believe in all of these things. But go too far in either direction and you can fall off the path. Perhaps path is the wrong word. Bridge might make more sense. After all there’s a left side and a right side of the road. But if you fall off a bridge, all you do is fall down.

    Seen from this perspective the differences between Bolshevism, Nazism, Maoism, Italian Fascism, North Korean Juche, et al may be interesting or meaningful (the differences between football and rugby are interesting and meaningful, but at the end of the day they’re both just games). But seen from the broadest perspective, they’re simply different ways to fall off the bridge and back into the wilderness below.

  219. Sorry That’s Jonah Goldberg, not John.

    My auto spell-checker/corrector is an intrusive twat, on occasions. And it thinks I spelled ‘twat’ wrong too. Know-nothing, interfering douche-bag. Probably American, as it keeps replacing esses with zeds.

  221. Baron
    February 22nd, 2014 – 18:52

    “Anyone following events in he Ukraine?”

    Hi Baron, yes and I commented briefly above a few days ago amid deafening silence.

    I am trying to understand. My best efforts have me believing that the National Socialists in the White House have an ambition to place missiles on the Russian border and to that end have, together with backers such a Soros, funded and armed national socialists in the Ukraine whose aim is to seize power and force the Ukraine to join the European Union – most recently against the wishes of wiser heads in Europe such a Angela Merkel who took fright at such provocation.

    I have just read that the Ukrainian Nazis have overrun the presidential palace in Kiev.

    We are in the grip not only of enemies of our liberty, but of warmongers.

    Please tell me I have it wrong.

  222. Hi, Frank!

    Bet it complained about your spelling of esses and zeds too!

    Wait…mine’s only complaining about the former…

  223. Frank P,

    Fair play to HRH Charles, I say. At least he got off his arse, got down to Somerset to highlight the plight of the drowning peasants. When when he attributed the flooding to climate change” he was unwittingly partially correct. The misguided policies of the AGW goons within EA & EU were to blame for exacerbating the effects of a spot of wet weather that was perfectly within normal bounds of that which had occurred for centuries. No AGW required!

    Having shamed the politicians into donning their green wellies for “we really care” photo ops Charles lost no time in discarding his own and jetting off for a spot of R&R with his chums in the Saudi Royal Household. (where they know the true meaning of deference)

    http://english.alarabiya.net/en/perspective/photo-gallery/2014/02/19/Prince-Charles-dances-Saudi-style.html

    Let us hope that he didn’t get so carried away that he forgot to flog ’em a few armaments whilst he was there! [thereby hopefully safeguarding BAE’s pension plan, Noa? 😉 ]

  224. Re: Ukraine

    “Unlike Syrians, Ukrainians are lucky they didn’t give Obama the chance to negotiate for them. Yanukovych would be at the table, not running.”
    Garry Kasparov

    “The lesson for dictators is don’t have a place called “Independence Square.” “
    Brian Sack

  227. Ukraine. Is this the new approved style for overthrowing elected governments? Perhaps we should try it. Would be get EU and USA backing?

  228. Are we allowed to question the prudence or necessity of the EU risking war with Russia to obtain another member? Or is this a Defence of the Realm matter which, as some fellow Wallsters might assert, is off-limits to the ordinary subject? I am sure that whatever decision is made for us by the Commissioners and Mr. Obama and his security services will be for the best.

  229. EC (09:47)

    Very pleased to see the heir apparent enjoying himself; throwing himself into the festivities with gay abandon (in the old fashioned sense, of course). So it wasn’t a Photoshop rig-up? Oh dear!

    I note that the name of the dance they were performing was ‘Arda’. Do the form a circle as the do it and shout, ” ‘Arda, Arda!”

    That would be a bit dangerous, given the look on the face of of the dusky moustachioed fella behind the Prince, wouldn’t it?

  230. EC – 09:47 ‘the Somerset Levels’

    The mostly unraveled tale is here:
    http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=84737

    The instigators are mentioned in this bit:
    “The Moor had been drained since the 13th century, but the plan now was to flood Somerset back into the Middle Ages. To achieve this, the scheme included the purchase of a 200 [494 acres] hectares area of farmland by Natural England, used to create a winter habitat for birds when, as the Met Office was already predicting, climate change brought drier winters.

    This was where November’s forecast came in, because it led the Environment Agency deliberately to flood Southlake Moor in the expectation of a dry winter, keeping the water levels up, to “maintain the conservation interest”. Using a special inlet built for the purpose, water was poured in from the River Sowy, instead of being discharged to sea.

    When, contrary to expectations, the rains of December and January poured down, this large expanse of water-sodden ground blocked the draining to the already horribly silted-up Parrett of a much larger area of farmland to the east. An area which could have been used as an emergency overspill was already full.

    This was made even worse by the lack of that Dunball pumping station at the end of the King’s Sedgemoor Drain, vetoed by Morley. As the water levels rose, there was no way of getting rid of the excess water, as the discharge sluice could only be operated at low tide.

    Thus came about the disaster which has filled our television screens for weeks, The hydrology of this entire vast area had been sabotaged by the Labour Government’s deliberate EU-compliant policy, directed by the Environment Agency, in partnership with Natural England and the RSPB.”

  232. RobertC (11: 23)

    Indeed – and the Murgnahan show this morning has been wall-to-wall pro-European propaganda with no mention of the issues you cite. They even got the senile old spiv Tarzan Hassletime out of his flea-pit for a reprise of his egregious self-serving spiel. Ye Gods!

  233. Frank P

    Intersectionality?
    You were right, understanding its innumerable inanities and insanities was a waste of time, I soon discovered, stepping down those paths to which you had already trodden.

    Still I was fascinated by the ‘rubber dollers’ the DM has exposed. Just the sort of thing I imagine fellow Wallsters, looking for a new interest in retirement, might well consider.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2565884/The-men-masks-The-peculiar-world-female-masking.html

    Given that masking seems to attract hetrosexuals one wonders what the reaction is from Stonewall and the multi-variants of milly-tant sex deviance lobbyists? Do they approve or are they contemptuously intolerant?
    If I took it up (or er missus!) would I be welcome in the gents at the Duncan or not? Do we have any pioneers here willling to give it a go?

  234. Frank P @ 01:07

    Thanks for posting it, Frank, Long? yes, but more to the point, Baron could never, will never be able to fathom the squabbling about the massive pools of the disparate isms. It’s pointless, one can never get an agreement on which ism is what, evryone has his own definition, which is the worst and stuff like that.

    Perhaps the best bit of the piece is where the chap says “Nazism was tribalism of one race. Communism is tribalism of one class. Italian fascism was tribalism of one nation”. Pity, he doesn’t follow it through defining EUroism as perhaps the tribalism of the elite?

  235. RobertC @ 11:23

    This should be the front page of all the MSM, it sums up neatly what has been going on behind our back in just this one specific area. What else have the Brussels apparatchiks together with our Quislings been up to, we haven’t been told about?

  236. Noa 1310 23 Feb

    “I suspect that this nasty little change has been made primarily at the request of editors. The lefty dross that passes for such much of journalistic comment attracts much forthright criticism and both editors and journalists, who nowadays have the impertinence to think they should lead and direct their readers opinions, rather than listen to and respond to them, fear for their livelihoods when the precise extent of their unpopularity with their audiences is displayed for alll the world to see.
    And of course we live in a world where the powers that be do not like us to give offence, however much they think nothing of giving offence to those from who they extract their wages.”

    I hesitate to reply at Coffee House for fear of upset of the Colonel, formerly of this parish.
    However I have it on good authority that the vote down was seen as a way of demoting good, but not sufficiently right wing posts, that had a lot of genuine upvotes, by right wing posters acting in concert.

  237. EC @ 09:52

    Gary Kasparov’s right except that Yanukovych, or someone like him will be at the table in the end. The top elite in all the former communist countries are almost without exception linked to either the party, or mor elikely to the security services. More to the point, many MEPs from the region are.

  238. EC -09:47

    “…Let us hope that he didn’t get so carried away that he forgot to flog ‘em a few armaments whilst he was there! [thereby hopefully safeguarding BAE’s pension plan, Noa? ;-)…”

    Yep, and not just BAE pensioners! Though we may wiat with trepidation whilst Cameron and Osborne may renew their efforts to flog off Britain’s remnant defence capability to Frau Merkel and the fourth reich. We should all be grateful for the skills, knowledge and assistance to our export efforts provided by HRH (PBUH), and Price Andrew. Nor should we forget the noble and selfless efforts of patriotic conservatives like Mark Thatcher or Jonathan Aitken in their support of our national interests.

  239. “…I have it on good authority that the vote down was seen as a way of demoting good, but not sufficiently right wing posts, that had a lot of genuine upvotes, by right wing posters acting in concert.”

    Well Telly, it you have it lets see your evidence for that. We’d all like to know how ‘right wingers’ act in concert I’m sure.

  240. Malfleur @ 08:22

    At the cost of making you see red again, Malfleur, you seem to view the Kiev’s revolt through the same prism you look at everything else, that of the wholesale conspiracy of the Western leaders. Things may be shaping up not to many people’s liking here, but let Baron assure you, the West remains by far better preposition that Putin’s Russia or the Ukraine. Trust Baron, he knows, he’s been there and here.

    The obsessive desire of Brussels to get Ukraine attached to the club stinks, but not because anyone wants to encircle Russia, threaten the country militarily. If the Yanks haven’t got the willpower to defeat a bunch of goat herding cave dwellers, how on earth would they have a go at the Russians, ha?

    What bothers Baron is this: How could the Brussels tossers believe one can reverse the natural, centuries evolved affinity btween the Russians and the Ukrainians at a stroke beggars belief. It has been hard for the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians who had been closer to the culture of the West, had more business ties with it, for the Ukrainians it would be immeasurably harder still. It;s not doable, coupling Ukraine with the EU will create another spot of unrest not dissimilar to the Balkans.

  241. For anyone (?) who might be wondering what telly is wittering on about, Colonel Mustard posted the following comment about the change to disquis, which means that readers can no longer see the number of negative mticks against a comment. His comments is reproduced below. Significant isn’t it, that he comments here rather than at the Speccie?

    “Giving up on this site. The situation with telemachus dominating every thread and comment is a joke and now there is not even down-voting for the swine.
    Here we have a supposedly right of centre magazine harassed and spammed relentlessly by a deranged megalomaniac Labour party supporter.
    Get on with it then. Tired of telemachus. Tired of the causes of telemachus.”

    http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2014/02/who-would-benefit-from-a-ban-on-fobts/#disqus_thread

  242. “Significant isn’t it, that he comments here rather than at the Speccie?”
    Significant yes.
    At last bullied into silence there.

  243. Who the hell is Brian?

    Well, Brian is the bloke who got home late one night and Marilyn his wife says
    “Where the hell have you been?”
    Brian replies… “I was getting a tattoo”!
    “A tattoo”? She frowned. “What kind of tattoo did you get”?
    “I got a Fifty pound note etched on my privates” he said proudly.
    “What the hell were you thinking of?” she said, shaking her head in disgust.
    “Why on earth would a Chartered Accountant get a Fifty pound note tattooed on his privates”?
    “Well, one, I like to watch my money grow. Two, once in a while I like to play with my money.
    Three, I like how money feels in my hand. And, lastly, instead of you going out shopping, you can stay right here at home and blow Fifty quid any time you want.”

    Brian is now in Bournemouth General Hospital, Critical Care Unit, Room 233. No visitors until further notice.

  244. Naughty niece has had an Australian communique from a cobber over there:

    “I was reading an article last night about fathers and sons and memories came flooding back of the time I took my son out for his first pint.

    Got him a Fosters ….. he didn’t like it – I had it.

    Then I got him Carlsberg, he didn’t like it so I had it.

    It was the same with Guinness and Cider.

    By the time we got down to the whisky I could hardly push the bloody pram.

  246. Noa @ 16:13

    Priceless, the Brian sorry story, Noa, but hard to remember, and say well. It’s a test for the Alzheimer infected brain of th barbarian.

  247. Frank P @ 17:28

    Careful, Frank, the progressive mob will get you for cruelty to children, but it’s an easy one to remember and repeat. Pity, you didn’t post it earlier today, Baron was amongst men, who would have roared with laughter. They will, next week.

  248. telemachus @ 15:14

    telemachus: “However I have it on good authority that the vote down was seen as a way of demoting good, but not sufficiently right wing posts, that had a lot of genuine upvotes, by right wing posters acting in concert”.

    Next time before you post, telemachus, wake up, it’ll help.

  249. Frank P 17:33

    Little to disagree with Peter Hitchens, Frank, except he may have mentioned what Baron keeps repeating for it’s a key to understanding the region. Those who box for power, well, almost all of them (one of the politician is indeed a former boxer) are former security or party officials whether they admit it or not.

    This isn’t a judgmental comment, it’s simply stating the obvious. None of the countries could have kept on ticking after the collapse of communism if these well connected, capable (capable of everything, but capable nevertheless), ambitious people were to be removed from power. It they were got rid off the countries would have gone through what Iraq went through when the Yanks, after the invasion, foolishly disbanded the police, the civil service, the lot of the old administration – an anarchy.

    For the transitional phase, the unwashed of the region, the West would have to live with it.

  250. Baron (18:07)

    Thanks for your insight as an erstwhile sufferer under hammer and sickle.
    Susan Rice invaded my lounge a few moments ago via the medium of Sky news. Didn’t get the gist of what she was on about as I was waiting for her to blame the Ukraine revolt on the Life of Mo video.

    How dare she pontificate on British TV about anything: a proven liar and traitor to the West?

  253. I hate to prick Christopher Booker’s bubble trying to lay the problem at the feet of the 2009 Government
    It actually originated on John Major’s watch

    The Environment Agency stopped the annual dredging of the rivers Parrett and Tone 18 years ago, saying it was not economic, and since then the rivers have become so clogged that last year they could only 60 per cent of their capacity.

    Read more: http://www.cheddarvalleygazette.co.uk/Somerset-floods-latest-Floods-embarrass/story-20409548-detail/story.html#ixzz2uAy1AjO7

  254. Peter from Maidstone February 23rd, 2014 – 18:43

    “The truth is really coming out now. But will heads roll?”

    This all started under the stupid woman who chaired the E.A. prior to this incompetent fool the ugliest ‘Gay’ in Britain Lord Smith.

    When she was the head of the RSPB we nearly closed our membership after fifty years because of her very worrying views (we eventually cancelled last November ‘wind farms on bird sanctuaries’ was the final straw) this woman is a menace, she as well as Smith must be made to pay by being sacked from every quango that the leach our moneys from.

    One thing they, the EA complain about having to get rid of staff but have been recruiting in their hundreds this past year.

  255. Peter (18:43)

    Whaddaya mean – the truth is really coming out now? It was out weeks ago in detail on this very blog – linking North’s pieces (and others) on the EU’s involvement in this scandalous vandalism of British interests. Will heads roll? DMAFF! Of course they won’t! The whole corrupt establishment of the con-libdem-lab racket is involved in this gigantic scam on the world’s taxpayers. A belated jump on the news bandwagon by the torygraph, when its sister rag, the Speccie, had already covered it, is hardly a startling development. Whose head and by whom, are you asking for? As Booker implies, all the Somerset victims of this scam should sue the EA and enjoin those in the EU responsible. Even then, win or lose the taxpayer would pick up the tab. Egregious bastards, the whole rotten political class.

  256. Frank P, coming out manifestly does not mean being spoken about for the first time. Most people don’t read this blog so posting something here is ardly the same as ‘coming out now’. It means that it is in the MSM and cannot so easily be ignored and will become the subject of legal claims I am sure.

  257. Frank P @ 18:27

    Frank: “How dare she pontificate on British TV about anything: a proven liar and traitor to the West?”

    Quite.

  258. Baron

    Here’s one which isn’t too testing to remember.

    There once was an Indian who had only one testicle

    And whose given name was ‘Onestone’.

    He hated that name and asked everyone not to call him Onestone. After years and years of torment, Onestone finally cracked and said,’
    If anyone calls me Onestone again I will kill them!’
    The word got around and nobody called him that any more. Then one day a young woman named Blue Bird forgot and said,
    ‘Good morning, Onestone.’
    He jumped up, grabbed her and took her deep into the forest where he made love to her all day and all night. He made love to her all the next day,
    Until Blue Bird diedfrom exhaustion.
    The word got around that Onestone meant what he promised he would do. Years went by and no one dared call him by his given name until a woman named Yellow Bird returned to the village after being away.
    Yellow Bird, who was Blue Bird’s cousin, was overjoyed when she saw Onestone. She hugged him and said, ‘Good to see you, Onestone.’
    Onestone grabbed her, took her deep into the forest. Then he made love to her all day, made love to her all night, made love to her all the next day, made love to her all the next night, but Yellow Bird wouldn’t die!
    Why?
    Oh, come on… Take a guess !!!
    Think about it !!!

    Everyone knows..

    You can’t kill Two Birds with One Stone.

  259. Noa @ 19:14

    Thanks. Baron hasn’t got the time to even scan some of the websites, only on occasions looks in Peter H’s blog, must have missed this one.

    We should have learnt a lesson from the North African fiascos. Those who man the barricades are fanatics of one breed or another. What the majority of the unwashed want is peace, the rule of law, jobs. Why should the EU back one tribe of the angry mob against another beggars belief.

    Hopefully, Putin will not react the same way he did when Georgia erupted. If he does, we may be in for a shock.

  260. Noa @ 20:14

    Shall Baron be honest with you, Noa?

    The ending isn’t strong enough to justify the length, but not bad, and as you say, easy to remember. Baron will try it on his the crowd he sees most weekends next Sunday, will report back their reaction.

  261. telemachus @ 19:47

    The EA stinks, telemachus, it should be disbanded, the power to do what’s needed pass back to where it rested before the quango was set up. When the locals were in charge the region had contained floods better than under the EA. And the ghastly Lord who chairs the EA should be summarily sacked, a clear signal to sinecure occupants in other quangos.

  262. I’m reading a research paper my eldest is submitting as part of her teacher training on gender bias and am shocked at the rubbish she is being forced to regurgitate. One particular reference is an angry leftist woman complaining that schools are “teaching boys to be men and girls to be women”. Of course this gender specialist would prefer to succeed in her ambition to teach boys to be women and girls to be men.

    Apparently one of the worst aspects of all this is that British history has tended to focus on white men. I think the implication is that white men are to be equated to paedophilic mass murderers and eliminated from the curriculum.

    There seems to be a recognition that very young boys want to do active and exciting things but the answer required seems to be that the boys behaviour and aspirations need to change to accomodate a more feminine curriculum rather than that two curriculums should be run in parallel.

    I well remember as boy being excited by all the stories of the Second World War which were published in appropriate language for boys of my age. Now I would have to learn about Mary Seacole the bogus black nurse of the Crimea.

  263. Peter from Maidstone

    I remember at school as a young boy being handed out every now and then cards about the size of the old cigarette cards each one representing an English hero such as Sir Francis Drake. We had a copy of “The Boyhood of Raleigh” on the classroom wall as well.

  264. Baron-20.29

    Honesty is always best Baron, indeed is should be mandatory. In Noa’s pub social outings timing is everything; in the telling and the waiting. Some jokes stand up best at the second pint, others the third or fourth. This is one of the latter.

  265. Peter

    Do you remember separate schools for boys and girls? There was good reason for that. Aside from the post puberty distractions the two sexes have diferent interests which were more easily addressed in those single sex schools.
    Mixed sex schools were always a deliberate attack on traditional values, ideas and morals.

  267. Baron
    February 23rd, 2014 – 15:50

    I did indicate that I was trying to understand and invited, politely I believe, your correction of my necessarily flawed understanding so far. I am therefore happy to hear that the USA has no interest in placing missiles directed at Russia in the Ukraine.

    Some other, more idealistic, explanation will no doubt be found for “the leaked telephone conversation between the U.S. Ambassador and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, in which the latter told him to “Fuck the E.U.” (h/t Breitbart) which took place shortly after EU leaders had begun to take a more prudent line following their formerly whole-hearted support for the Ukrainian opposition.

    Why it has been necessary for George Soros, US and other interests to become involved in funding, and apparently arming,the opposition and whether that opposition is benign and democratic in its violent opposition to an elected, albeit somewhat beastly, government remains to be clarified.

    Does this foreign interference in the Ukraine’s affairs risk war? I guess we may find out.

    If UKIP is successful in democratically removing the United Kingdom from the European Union, may we by the same token expect George Soros, the United States, and other interests to turn their attention on us in a more focused manner to encourage a swift and perhaps bloody reversal? Or perhaps you believe it is a mere conspiracy theory that the old nazi collaborator and his ilk have any such involvement behind the scenes and that everything is as it seems on the surface? The ancient philosophers tried to disabuse us of that folly. And in practice, in England’s green and pleasant land the view that all is as it seems, which is the main lesson which government propaganda around the world wants to embed in the people, can lead us to saying ‘yes sir, no sir’ to anyone dressed in a little brief authority who tries to con us into thinking that he has a constitutional right to shake us down.

    As to a prism of conspiracy, it would be prudent to examine the facts rather than attempt to disarm criticism of events by a well-thrown cliche. For instance, there was a pamphlet in circulation in Egypt at the time of the Mubarak/Morsi events which appeared again in Kiev, with necessary changes in language of course, with an identical lay out of images prepared to advise protesters how to dress and ready themselves for battle with government forces. Now my point is not that such pamphlets have no place in constitutional opposition to tyrannical government, but that the coincidence requires the thinking man to raise and examines the question of conspiracy.*

    In that context, I note that you have not expressed your informed opinion or drawn on your knowledge of the Ukraine to respond yet to what I may have wrongly concluded are the origins and traditions of the opposition in Kiev to the population which supported and collaborated with the German Nazis in World War 2 and have, as some claim, kept those traditions vigorously alive to this day.

    I am willing to stand corrected. I am always – well, almost always…- willing to accept the truth, especially in historical and political matters.

    ________________________________________________________________
    *Footnote: “A copy of the pamphlet that was given out to opposition protestors in Kiev has been obtained. It is a word-for-word and picture-for-picture translation of the pamphlet used by US-financed Canvas organizers in the 2011 Cairo Tahrir Square protests that toppled Hosni Mubarak and opened the door to the US-backed Muslim Brotherhood… “. I just gooled for this information. I do not give the website, because it is a bit “iffy”, but I had seen the story elsewhere previously with photos of the two pamphlets, Egyptian and Ukrainian.

  268. David Ossitt – 19:47 “incompetent fool the ugliest ‘Gay’”

    When he (call me Lord) appeared, I thought I was watching Spitting Image!

  270. Peter from Maidstone February 23rd, 2014 – 20:49

    “Now I would have to learn about Mary Seacole the bogus black nurse of the Crimea.”

    Who it is writ kept a boarding (bawdy) house, for the R and R of the troops.

  271. Why not a modern action film about the Raid on St Nazaire? Or any of those heroic feats of the Second World War. I know I enjoyed reading about them aged 10 or 11.

    My own technical drawing master was a Spitfire pilot and featured in the wartime book Ten Spitfire Boys. We thought he was a Lancaster tail gunner and called him bomber. But he was a quiet hero who never spoke about his brave service.

    Instead the TV is filled with low life celebrities who should hide in shame but are paraded as the paragons of the new amorality.

  272. The Daily Telegraph tells us that George Osborne will be ready with your chequebook to rebuild the Ukraine after the recent nazi putsch (Baron, please amend my vocabulary as appropriate, I am only a poor, uncultured, barbarous Anglo-Saxon in these matters).

    I hope that the English will not be too stupefied by consumerism, government hand-outs and a general I’m-alright-Jackismo to tell parliament that we are not going to war with Russia over the Ukraine whatever the criminal government of USA tells us, whatever the hands-in-the-till-until-bedtime Commissioners and other Troughers of the EU direct, or whatever the Soroses, the JP Morgan’s, the Rockefeller family, and the whole motley crew of you – stand up and be counted you barbarous yobs – think might make their life-experience more interesting.

    I also hope that the gangsters who are saying that “it would be a grave mistake” for Russia to send troops to the Ukraine to support the elected government from rent-a-mob and who have captured the USA from its politically gutless military that took an oath to defend the US Constitution from domestic enemies (yes, folks, Thomas Jefferson for one thought there might actually be some at a future date) will not any time soon be appointing a Special Inspector General for Ukrainian Reconstruction.

  275. Nigel Farage on good form across a range of matters. At about 14.00 minutes in,he offers a cautious warning against engagement in Ukrainian affairs. I was sorry to learn that he recently underwent major surgery, but he seems as undimmed and feisty as ever. His announcement on this LBC show a couple of days ago that he would debate Nick Clegg is possibly a further watershed in UKIP’s fortunes. It says much about the political values of Cameron and Milliband that they have not agreed to participate.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LW0BD-I-lo&feature=share&t=2m14s

  276. In Maidstone the Grammar School for Girls was always that. It was intended to provide Grammar School education for the girls of the town and was established in 1888.

    High Schools were the non-Grammar Schools.

  277. Peter.

    Interesting, didn’t realize there were regional differences.

    In our town, primary education was mixed sex (only two sexes in those days) and passing the 11+ resulted in boys attending the local grammar school and girls attending high school both in an adjacent town. The losers went to mixed ‘secondary modern’ in those days before the system was wrecked by the Comprehensive fiasco as the Long March gained pace.

  278. Here in Maidstone there were also two Technical Schools. One for boys and one for girls. These became Grammar schools just before I transferred there, so we have four Grammar schools in town. The books were all still stamped Maidstone Technical School for Boys.

  279. All this mention of boy’s schools / girl’s schools (mine was boys only) reminded me of an article a young male teacher wrote, I can’t remember in which paper.

    His first job as a teacher was at a mixed sex junior school, until he arrived the staff were 100% women and had been for years, so much so that a gent’s staff toilet had to be designated for him.

    At his first interview with the ‘Head’ he was given a long list of problem/hyperactive children and was told to keep a careful eye on these troublesome boys.

    What he actually found was that these boys were all bright, intelligent, excitable and energetic, in other words boys being boys, he recognised that his female colleagues were comparing these boys with the more placid quieter girls and jumping to the silly conclusion that these boys had problems, when in fact it was these women teachers who had no empathy with young males.

  280. David Ossitt
    February 24th, 2014 – 11:59
    Hello David, When I was a child, the village school where I was evacuated had an entrance for Girls, Boys, and Mixed Infants. I wondered wht Mixed meant!

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