What's Belgium for?

What's Belgium for? I'd always imagined its principal export was young princesses with lengthy entries in the Almanac du Gotha, bred to be married to obscure outbranches of the Euro Aristocracy, but apparently it's beer and chocolate.

The Flemings are a bit like Ulster unionists, slightly embarrassing in company with their ultra-patriotism and a bit gauche, and consequently the more sophisticated Dutch are not wholly enthusiastic over the prospect of absorbing them into a greater Netherlands. The Walloons are, well, poor. The French, already pouring millions of our taxes into the Nord Pas de Calais region, are also not keen on absorbing Wallonia with its high unemployment and low potential. France and Holland are really quite happy with Belgium the way it is. There is also a tiny German minority, a few tens of thousands, and Germany alone seems eager to expand its borders by half a mile to absorb them, but then I expect it's genetic.

Belgium is no closer now than it was in 2007 when this blog started to having a stable government. The more the recession bites, the greater the pressure for a split, and Europe will have a spare king and lots of spare princesses with no country to call their own. I suppose there's a vast hotel in the South of France somewhere where they all live, those ex-kings of Greece, Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Romania and their retinues. I'm sure they'll find room for Albert.

Time to cull Bob Crow

Dinosaur Trade Union barons are almost an endangered species these days, particularly those who try to flex their muscles against a Tory Mayor and Tory government. Bob Crow is a veritable Diplodocus, but the Ice Age is here and he, too must crumble into fossil dust.

There is no 'right to strike'. Workers absent without permission can be dismissed for gross misconduct without pension payments, redundancy or lump sums. I suggest Boris takes this opportunity to thin out London Underground's bloated staffing by 15% pour encourager les autres. And Comrade Bob will fall.

Hope for Labour if it ditches Socialism - Daley

Janet Daley writing in the Telegraph this morning succinctly summarises about the only option Labour has to reinvent itself;

There is an honourable strand of Labour history which is not associated with the quasi-fascist Big State doctrine that has been its most recent incarnation – which, indeed, could be seen as antithetical to it. This is the mutualist, co-operative tradition, rooted in the idea of communal solidarity, which began with the friendly societies and the support systems that grew out of the Industrial Revolution and its hardships. There is an important lesson that this tradition has to offer to currently fashionable discussion: that self-help does not necessarily have to imply the individualistic, entrepreneurial ethic of Conservative doctrine. It can also mean mutual responsibility and community self-determination. There is more than one way to be free of government domination.

A sort of Localist - Communitarian axis, of the sort that defined the working class before the insidious effects of the 1911 National Insurance Act. But let's not forget that it was Labour and its Big State socialism, which Daley rightly tags 'quasi fascist', that quite deliberately destroyed the self-sufficiency of the working class; an independent, bloody-minded population cohort like this was antithetical to Labour's Rousseau-esque ideology of a direct relationship between the State and every individual without any intermediate institutions or competing loyalties.

Daley is therefore proposing a future for Labour without socialism; that is, without central Statism, State redistributionism and central State planning of the people's lives. You see, the problem lies in the first eight words of the paragraph above. This communitarian self-sufficiency was a strand of labour history, but not of Labour history; the Party always loathed it. When labour insured itself, when labour set up their own services and wholesalers, when labour founded their own banks, Labour did all it could to destroy this independence. State insurance replaced the industrial and provident societies, National Savings replaced the friendly societies and the NHS and State Education replaced nascent structures employing doctors and teachers at local and community level paid for by subscription.

Yet in Millipede Major Labour looks set to elect a leader committed to that very 'quasi fascist' brand of Statism that defines socialism, and with Balls as his Beria there will be little room for the grass-roots to experiment.

The East End Blitz myth?

The story is well established in the national historical memory. Even those who should know better, such as Corelli Barnett writing today in the Indie, repeat the story to some extent. Of how the Blitz was directed against the East End of London, the docks and industries, and of how the resilient cockneys flipped the bird to Herman Goering; of how the Queen and Churchill were filmed walking amongst the East End bomb rubble, of how it was 'business as usual', of the dome of St Paul's wreathed in smoke. The East End, the story goes, bore the brunt of the Blitz.

In fact we know now that morale in the East End was decidedly shaky and close to panic. I've also seen a captured Luftwaffe training film held by the IWM, viewed on one of their huge Steenbeck flatbeds at the film archive and as far as I know never otherwise released. The film shows an approach along the ribbon of the Thames, with intermediate targets of Barking, Dagenham and the Royal Arsenal to right and left, but the destination point for the navigator and bomb aimer was Tower Bridge; once reached, the area all about was fair game.

The bombing density map below, for the period up to October 1941, declassified in 1971, tells a story that supports the IWM's training film. That in fact it wasn't the East End, but the West End that bore the brunt of the bombing. The Arsenal appears as a blank, bomb damage there being even too secret for 'Most Secret' classification.

Until further information is found we can only speculate on the 'why' of this elaborate wartime disinformation, but be wary as you watch the slew of poorly researched TV pieces on the London Blitz this month, all of which will probably repeat the myth.

Violence BY the police as serious as violence TO the police

It is absolutely right that the law deals harshly with violence and assaults upon police officers. The Police are ourselves in uniform, and an attack upon a policeman is an attack upon the rule of law itself, an attack upon the order and mores of our society, and an attack upon every lawful one of us. Those who attack the police find themselves in the Crown Court charged with indictable offences and facing long prison sentences, and this is right and proper.

But we grant policemen very substantial powers which we deny to ourselves, and their privilege in the exercise of those powers must be always and absolutely above reproach. The shocking and brutal violence used by Mark Andrews on a helpless woman has quite rightly seen him charged with a criminal offence, but I can't be alone in wondering at the corrupt reasoning that has led the CPS to present the case in a Magistrate's Court, where maximum sentences are just six months imprisonment.

Violence by the police is every bit as serious as violence to the police, and must be dealt with equally; indictable offences heard by a jury in the Crown Court with powers of long sentences held by the judge. You can bet your last dollar that had Pamela Somerville been filmed doing to Mark Andrews what he did to her, she would be facing a sentence of at least two years.

I shall be looking for some explanation of this anomalous treatment - on the face of it, it stinks.

In praise of Taschen

The deep shelves behind me house an entire row of Taschen's art books. Acquired when I was much poorer than I am now, at the rate of perhaps one or two a month, they helped turn my monochromatic appreciation of the stuff hanging in our galleries into a technicolour experience of powerful expression.

A friend, an editor at Thames and Hudson, has always jealously pooh-poohed the print quality, the quality of colour rendition of the plates and the erudition of the scholarship, but my constant reply was that I could afford Taschen's £10 books; I could never afford the same £120 edition from his firm.

Taschen are the Everyman Library of our day. All praise to Benedikt Taschen, who picks his favourite publishing moments in the Indie today.

Blunkett's stupidity still haunts us

David Blunkett is a man whose ambition was never remotely matched by his ability. His tedious, laboured and clumsy prose is indicative of a mind pushed beyond its comfort zone, not accustomed to original thought and not at home to any degree of endogenous principle. He was always struggling too hard to be successful, the struggle of a mediocre man of mediocre ability amongst those brighter and more able than himself, to pay much attention to his ministerial brief. Emotionally vulnerable, and the subject of a cruel experiment by a sophisticated and immoral woman, it was perhaps only Blunkett's blindness that prevented his colleagues long ago from quietly persuading him that he was just not up to the calibre of cabinet rank.

As Home Secretary he could have been taking his brief directly from the editor of the Daily Mail. He simply didn't have the intellectual strength to do otherwise. As a consequence, he oversaw some of the most repressive legislation to which the people of this nation have ever been subject.

His cautious misgivings now in the Mail about his signing away of our defence against vexatious extradition cuts little ice. This was an act of unbelievable stupidity, an unforgivable erosion of our most fundamental rights. This, together with our caving in, under the terms under which the European Arrest Warrant is empowered, to every tin-pot Balkan village magistrate, Greek Anglophobe or Spanish fascist, have undermined the most fundamental raison d'etre of the State - to defend its citizens. Blunkett and his like have abrogated this duty to the lesser breeds without the law, and in doing so have betrayed their own people.

Whether Theresa May is the man to reverse or limit this iniquitous perfidy remains to be seen. But Cameron's government will be judged not on its fiscal nous but on the extent to which such repressions are lifted from our backs.

'Brown will help poor nations for free'

"Hullo? Hullo? Is that the President"

"Yes Mr Brown; I'm sorry I missed all your previous calls. It's the Yam harvest haha and the people expect one, you know .."

"Look, I'm ready to fly out and fix your economy. First we need to increase taxes for everyone who owns more than three goats, and send the army in to dig up those silver Maria Theresas they've got buried under their hearths for retirement, then we can sell your mineral reserves off to the Chinese, introduce a new market stallholders tax, charge 30% duty on home-brewed Millet beer and seize all cars under three years old in private ownership and sell them to Yemen ..."

"But why? What will we do with all the extra money? Presuming the people don't storm the palace and saw my head off first .."

"Then we can make the people healthier. It's the right thing to do. Look, your life expectancy is just 38 years and half the people have limiting long term sicknesses. We can employ healthy lifestyle co-ordinators to get them walking more, for instance .."

"But our people are starving; 20% already have to walk six miles a day to get clean water"

"Salad. Salad's the answer. We'll give a free salad to every child and mother. Lettuce. Cucumber. Tomato. We'll fly the salad in from Holland. We'll employ Salad Officers with powers to force-feed Celery to delinquent children"

"Mr Brown, you must excuse me ... pressures of State, you understand .."

"No! No! Don't hang up please, listen, we can install CCTV cameras in every Kraal .. Damn! Operator? This is Gordon Brown. Get me the President of, let me see, Mali please ..."

Polly, love, the word is 'betrayal' not 'treason'

Predictably, Lady Toynbee is first on the barricades screeching 'Nous sommes trahis!' and perhaps she really does believe that the Labour Party IS the State and that to act against the Party is 'treason' - in any case, that's her accusation against Blair.

Polly, love, Blair's betrayal of his Party is just betrayal. It's his betrayal of his country that's treacherous.

Always answering the wrong question

That scientific double act, Hawking and Dawkins, are both without doubt clever chaps, but sometimes one regards their cleverness in the manner of a dog that dances, or a goat that can do addition with its hooves. Somewhere I encountered the tale of a primary school teacher who would ask her pupils 'What is the best colour?' to which the correct answer was apparently 'blue'. Hawking and Dawkins have spent substantial parts of their careers trying to answer the theological equivalent of asking 'What is the best colour?' to which the correct answer is apparently 'not God'.

Hawking and Dawkins are both in their own ways trying to devise an SI unit to measure love. Well, if one can measure mass, velocity, brightness and loudness, why not love? How many mountains can 10⁵ units of love (lets call them 'Joys') move? What's the peak reading of a Western teenager during the heights of their first 'crush'? Well, let them continue. It does no harm and keeps them busy, always trying to answer the wrong question.

The dreariest and longest journey

The beaten road

Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread

Who travel to their home among the dead

By the broad highway of the world, and so

With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe

The dreariest and longest journey go

Blair belongs amongst the dead. His continued presence in the world of the living is an affront, an insult to life and joy and goodness, and yet even death seems reluctant to claim his lie-raddled corpse. Every further word of lies, every self-pitying self-justification, each deluded post-hoc self justification, every falsely pious homily, every deluded narcissistic encomium to his own greatness heaps insult upon insult and affront upon affront.

Take this putrescent little gobbit away from our sight and hearing.