Reasons to be Cheerful ..

Ian Dury should be compulsory for all those suffering the Brexit Blues.

Today very briefly, I offer you Farage achieving top place in the pre-EP opinion polling (which as a loyal Conservative I should deprecate cough cough) and Boris achieving top place in an Express leadership opinion poll. Add to this the spectacle of the self-loving little Sadiq Khan making an utter arse of himself in London trying to get down wiv der yoof (actually most of them went to £45k a year public schools and live in Surrey with Mummy) who in turn are pretending to get down wiv der Man.

Enough to make one smile.

Macron's 'Five year' pledge is pure fantasy

Little Macron confirmed his status as a fantasist yesterday when he pledged that repairs to Notre Dame would be finished in five years. He featured on this blog previously for his vision of Europe based on the computer game Sim City, a teenage boy's pubescent make-believe fantasy world.

Using structural steel or reinforced concrete one can create large buildings quickly. Portland cement gains strength rapidly. Gypsum plasters set almost instantly. Off-site manufacturing of entire bathrooms and kitchens which are craned into place is increasingly common. Click-together polymeric components even avoid Tadeusz, his nailbag and hammer.

However, lime mortars and lime plasters mean slow building - as does ashlar or cut stone. Lime mortars cure by CO2, and this can take months. When cathedrals were first built, the building season halted in the Autumn, before the first frosts. Recent work was covered in straw and thatched and left to cure for several months. There are no accelerants for hydraulic lime.

The damage to cracked but uncollapsed rib-vaults at Notre Dame will be infinitely harder to repair than the collapsed ones. Those flying buttresses are presently pushing the roofless walls inwards, and a temporary but substantial steel structure will be needed to stabilise the nave - wind loadings could still collapse the fragile structure.

Not to mention finding sufficient European Oak timbers. As an aside, a Nelson-era frigate took about 600 oak trees to build - and we had a fleet of 900 ships. Those oaks were planted in the 17th century by Pepys expressly for that future purpose. We no longer have a reserve of large structural oaks. For the stone, old quarries must be re-opened, masons recruited from all over Europe and the cathedral close will be alive with the clink of stone on bankers.

My own guess is twenty years. At least between fifteen and twenty-five. Something in that scale. Notre Dame will be covered with a vast temporary roof and be encumbered within by a massive steel structural frame for a generation. Macron is a fool and away with the fairies.

And now for the first of my EP election memes - I return to Twitter for such events with all the enthusiasm of a plumber clearing a blocked toilet.  

Our cultural heritage is more important than foreign aid

I wept bitter tears of loss as I watched Notre Dame burn and in pain pleaded to God for his mercy.

It is early, but this morning the structure still stands, the photographs suggesting the rib-vaulted roof over the crossing had gone, and a further part of the stone vaulting over the Chancel. However, the roof over the Nave is still at great risk - the fire will have inflicted extremes of heat and streams of molten lead from the roof covering, the cold water used to extinguish the flames then likely to crack the stone. The timber roof structure dated from 1220 - 1240 and is alas now wholly gone.

Notre Dame's 13th century timber roof over the rib-vaulted Nave

When the Germans reduced the historic centre of Warsaw to rubble in the last war, the Poles swore to rebuild it exactly as it was, and even under a repressive and authoritarian Communist regime they did so. Every roof tile and window exactly as it was before the Teuton barbarians subjected it to HE. And this was exactly the right thing to do - for our European cultural heritage has a value above rubies; our nations and our peoples, our forbears and ancestors live in these stones and in this wood and in the craft and art and love with which they proclaimed for the world to see our being, our Sein.

Here's a clear message to government and to our pathetic failure of a Parliament, both antithetical to the interests of the People. Our cultural heritage is more important by a factor of magnitude than pissing away billions of our taxes to corrupt third-world tyrants in the name of modish liberalism. Notre Dame is a warning to you; you have a duty to use every effort, take every measure, spend whatever is needed, to secure our own cultural heritage from damage, neglect, negligence or malicious damage. Your failure will not be tolerated.

Mental derangement by Brexit

David Lammy isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer. He's also what my old professor would have called an unlucky wight - a blundering ninny with the gift of making himself look foolish. So it's hardly surprising that Lammy should be one of those most publicly afflicted by an increasingly common condition - mental derangement by Brexit.

Boris Johnson writes with an amused tolererance in this morning's Telegraph about Lammy's uncontrolled outburst terming Johnson a 'Nazi'. In Britain this is not an offence. However, living in a country in which calling someone a National Socialist without justification in print or on screen is a criminal offence, it is instructive to contemplate that MP or not, if Lammy had said what he said here, he would find the handcuffs around his plump wrists.

And this in turn leads me to offer Remainers a crumb of comfort. Whilst the UK remains tied to the EU, calling me a Nazi in the comments will make a correspondent liable to detention and extradition using the European Arrest Warrant - if the offence includes an element of racism or xenophobia, which Lammy's jejune mud slinging appeared to have - and an appearance before a Napoleonic court of a sort unknown to British law. Brexit, my mentally deranged friends, will paradoxically free you from this risk.

And that is really exactly as it should be.

Wolf warns that wolves can kill

Readers may recall that we gone to some lengths to present evidence of the malign effects of globalism upon our nation and people. These effects are largely responsible for 17.4m people voting in the biggest vote in our history to Leave the EU and include, but not exclusively

• Increasing financial inequality
• Static or declining living standards
• People excluded from decision making
• Decline of working class power
• Globalism causing disempowerment
• Cultural loss – loss of cultural identity
• Attrition of social institutions, high anomie

Our people and our economy face a triple whammy over the next fifteen years or so. Firstly are the effects of globalism we are already experiencing – both the Elephant, and the uncorrected distortions from the 2008 crash that have left large cohorts of our people worse off but highly taxed. Secondly will be the whirlwind of the coming downturn, for which the banks are better prepared than a decade ago but the British people are not, now carrying record levels of personal indebtedness. As QE is winding down, China slowing, bond market manipulation reaching its peak and the Eurozone intensely vulnerable to shocks, the storm is gathering.

The third blow of the whammy will come from the effects of AI. I recommend a report from PwC that takes a position between other economic estimates of AI impact on UK jobs, which range from job losses of 10% to 47%. PwC estimate that 30% of UK jobs will go in the next 15 years, and the report does a fair job of rationalising the losses. However, it's what the report doesn't say that's important.

PwC and other economists assume that the negative effects of job losses can be compensated for by an increased tax-take and higher GDP from boosted productivity. This will be true - but on a global scale. The probability is, just as globalism has lifted billions out of absolute poverty at the cost of C1C2DE jobs and wealth in the developed world, that in the absence of checks on the distributional effects of the AI revolution, the same will happen. The developed world will bear the losses, the developing world will take the gains, and the global 1% will become even wealthier.

The forces driving globalism are the global corporates, backed by supranational actors including the EU, UN, IMF and OECD. And of course all their dags and ninnies such as deluded young Remainers motivated purely by selfish motives - that their Erasmus freebies are threatened, or that they can no longer wander the Med nations like gypsies, sponging, ligging and dossing their way around the Shengen zone. This short term self-interest blinds them to the real threat of supranationalism

That the current generation in the developed world is one of the most educated, and yet has lower chances of achieving the same standard of living as its parents.

Well guess what?  The OECD, one of the villains of it all, has just twigged that its policies have been killing the golden goose. Gabriela Ramos, OECD chief of staff, has warned that folk like us are waking up to the effects of globalism, and this awareness would fuel the rise of both 'populism' and protectionism. Tyler Durden writes on Zerohedge:

Leave it to Rabobank's Michael Every to break down the hypocrisy in the OECD's policy recommendations. It's not that the recommendations are inherently idiotic. It's that a supranational organization which, more than any other, represents the global elite who are largely responsible for the economic malaise gripping the developed world, is prescribing a policy regime that stands in direct contrast to the policies its members have propagated for the last four decades. How can the OECD shift from advocating for austerity and central bank interventionism, the latter of which has largely fueled the bubble in asset prices responsible for the yawning gap between the rich and everybody else, to the platform of Democratic socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Well, now that awareness of the dangers of the EU, IMF, UN, OECD and the global corporates is finally penetrating the thick skulls of the EUphiles we may just have a chance of rescuing the UK.

Addendum 
The following taxonomy may assist a confusion in the minds of some of our readers

Progressives – post-globalists. Internationalists, Localists, committed to democratic outcomes and social equity. To sovereign states. Radical reform of tax and welfare systems, renewal of political identities, encouraging responsible capitalism to generate wealth , recognition of the deep and fundamental changes that AI and technology will bring, committed to achieving a Burkean social integrity and coherence in contrast to a globalist anomie

Globalists - Committed to global government, a world-wide constitution and harmonisation of everything, open borders, unrestricted global economic activity, worldwide legal, judicial and justice systems, abrogation of personal freedoms to a class of benign appointed experts who will act in the general good, the growth of the 'citizen of everywhere', the rule of benign technocracy over 'old fashioned' democracy, the supremacy of supranational State authorities – EU, UN, IMF.

Finally - Newspaper polls are self selecting. I suspect if the Guardian polled 20,000 readers, the TIGers and Corbyn's Labour would be neck-and-neck on 40% each, but there's something joyful about the pride with which the Express reveals today its own poll. My poor party barely scrapes 1% - and if there's a message here, it's that MAY MUST GO NOW.

Parliaments we have known

British Parliamentary sittings have, over the years, been characterised as individual and distinct epochae taking their character from the sum of their members; we have

The Short Parliament
1640,  Sat for only three weeks

The Long Parliament
1640 - 1660 England was much engaged during this time with other matters

The Rump Parliament
1648 - To convene a court to lop off the King's noggin

The Rotten Parliament
2009, The Brown ministry, when MPs were found out in theft, fraud, peculation, lying and gross misuse of public funds. Everything from moat cleaning, duck houses, crystal grapefruit bowls, Bang and Olafson hi-fis was charged to the poor taxpayer, but only three of the hundreds of crooks ended up in prison

The Quite Short Parliament
Parliament sitting under the gaze of the diminutive Speaker Bercow, whose little legs swing boyishly from the Speaker's Chair without an elevated footstool. Like many small men, he compensates for lack of size with an outsized ego and profusion of self-love

The Anal Parliament
Going beyond the Rump, the 2017/19 Parliament is entirely up its own arse, incapable of representing the people by whom it was elected but unwilling to surrender power and privilege by facing those electors in the polls.

With the Maybe Parliamentary session that started in June 2017 now coming up to two years without a State Opening, the tourist industry, robe-making and carriage-wheeling industries are suffering and the sovereign must surely be wondering whether she'll manage another one in her reign.

One Parliament however that has been entirely unknown to British democracy since Edgar summoned his first Moot over a thousand years ago is the Honest Parliament.

Conservative Leadership Contest

Six months. Not enough time for RII unless it happens in October (which we would win again), but long enough to replace May.

She won't go until after May 2nd, around three weeks away, and I'm sorry for the decimation of sitting Conservative councillors that will occur, but go she must. Members haven't had the chance to elect a leader since 2005, and given the schism between the parliamentary and ordinary party means there will be many Red Tories who will want another Parliamentary stitch-up to prevent the over 70% Brexit grass-roots party from finally democratically electing our Leader. However, the new leader will welcome the delay of a full election - the process won't be complete in time for the EP elections on 23rd May, which is likely to see both UKIP and the Brexit Party take many of the existing 19 Conservative seats. Thus the inevitable EP wipeout will still be yet another May disaster without tainting her successor.

Usefully also, party members are beginning to realise that the truly dreadful Hague party constitution is in deep need of reform. It is a patrician stitch-up that institutionalises the power of the party grandees and reduces members to the level of dumb leaflet deliverers. A petition of members will need 10,000 signatures to start with just to change the 12-month rule - to twist May's arm if she digs her fingernails into the Number 10 door posts. Where do I sign?