Mouth-breather fatboy bangs rattle on pram

Kim Jong-un, North Korea's mouth-breathing fatboy, knows something that the Western analysts don't. It could be that his prison-nation is facing starvation, or that a domestic insurgency is bubbling away dangerously, or a US counter-cyber-attack has killed his military computers, or that China has finally got tough and given him an ultimatum. Whatever the cause, the fatboy has felt it necessary to demonstrate to his slave-people his he-man credentials; for Jong-un's substitute for significance in the trouser department are his missiles. In the carefully released snaps from the fatboy-bunker they are shown as targeted towards the US - but it's also a reminder to China that they can equally easily point North, and to the North Korean people that he has the overwhelming means to massacre them should they disobey. 

Fatboy learning his letters

Unlike China's new leader, who has not been reticent in showing his glamorous wife in public, Kim Jong-un's wife has never been seen. Some commentators blame a slow-puncture problem. Others have suggested that he's eaten her.

After riddance of Miliband rubbish, what about Qatada?

Peter Oborne is spot-on this morning. David Miliband is nothing but a greedy little failure throwing the sort of petulant hissy-fit that he could have learned from Edward Heath. Yet as Oborne points out, the BBC, Guardian and Common Purpose media establishment are reacting as though JFK had ceded the 1960 Democratic candidateship to Adlai Stevenson. Miliband was no JFK. He was just a spoilt, privileged rich kid with no experience of life and an enormous sense of entitlement who believed politics was the surest route to great wealth and fame. I hope he makes a success of his new life in America, and I hope even more that he never returns to the shores of this land.

In the farce that Qatada's continued avoidance of deportation to Jordan has become, it is important not to blame our judges. Unlike the rag-bag collection of untrained, unqualified political has-beens with a key to the dressing-up box who make up the ECHR, the Master of the Rolls sitting with LLJ Elias and Richards applied the law perfectly in rejecting the Home Secretary's appeal. We've dug ourselves into this mess, and though Mr Othman deserves little more than a trip to Tower Green and the keen blade of the headsman's axe we must dig ourselves out by the same convoluted legal means.
 

Privatising the scenery

You can't blame developers. Flogging the 'view' - something that doesn't belong to them - has always been a trick in their armoury to increase profit at little extra expense. So London's river is now lined on both banks with shoddy twelve-story blocks, almost identical, with galvanised balconettes, Ogee roofline and the universal use of coloured render stripes in blues and burnt orange. Immediately behind them are wide strips of undeveloped brownfield land. Dwellings built here won't have any view of course - it being blocked by the riverside apartments. You could easily fit half a million new dwellings on London's brownfield sites - but most of those left undeveloped suffer from not having a 'view', not being near the tube or DLR or having 'bad neighbour' development adjoining. So not attractive to housebuilders.

So of course the developers are looking at London's green belt; here there are free views a plenty. Well, at least until another speculative developer builds their estate over them. Short term profit, long term losses. Louis MacNeice's verse always come to mind

Splayed outwards through the suburbs houses, houses for rest
Seducingly rigged by the builder, half-timbered houses with lips pressed
So tightly and eyes staring at the traffic through bleary haws
And only a six-inch grip of the racing earth in their concrete claws;
In these houses men as in a dream pursue the Platonic Forms
With wireless and cairn terriers and gadgets approximating to the fickle norms
And endeavour to find God and score one over the neighbour
By climbing tentatively upward on jerry-built beauty and sweated labour.

Who would lend money to a bank?

Who would lend money to a bank? Well, all of us - everyone who operates a current account. Under UK law money paid into your account is a 'chose in action' and becomes the bank's property. You become merely a creditor of the bank I was reminded of this last year - with the matter still not resolved - when I became the victim of card fraud. Or rather, the bank did. When the fraud department asked "Have you reported this to the Police?" it was a question intended to verify the validity of claims rather than to elicit a useful response; the banks know very well that the Police won't take reports of card fraud from customers, as I explained to the clerk on the phone "No - it's your job, not mine, to report it to the Police - it's your money, not mine, that's been defrauded".

It's a fundamental point, and one which I suspect is not readily apparent to account holders with Cypriot banks. The banks don't put your savings in a safe and guard them - they gamble them recklessly, squander them in ill-advised ventures and lend them to people who can't repay them, and at the end of it all if the firm becomes bankrupt you are just another creditor with a shared claim on what assets remain. The government, of course, have intervened by guaranteeing deposits up to a certain amount, but this is a policy, and not a legal obligation.

Max Hastings in the Mail today calls the Cypriot action "One of the nastiest and most immoral political acts in modern times" - that is, requiring the shareholders and investors to take the haircut rather than the taxpayer. Well, frankly, it's not. Those savings haven't been 'stolen', they've been mis-invested in firms (banks) with an inherent risk of failure. One balances the risk of lending one's money to a bank and its failing against the risk of keeping the cash under one's bed and its being stolen.

And this is the real danger of Cyprus; not the legality or morality of the action, but that it may propel investors across Europe to feel better protected with their cash hidden at home than on loan to a failing bank. Once a run starts, once confidence goes, the whole fractional reserve edifice inevitably comes tumbling down.

Monday Round-up

In a frankly silly and ill-analysed piece in the Guardian this morning, Anthony Painter attempts to lump together every anti-establishment party and movement across the world as a 'populist' threat to social democracy. All are seeking, Painter says, to dominate the rights of minorities by imposing the democratic clout of populist majorities. The answer he says is for 'mainstream' parties to revitalise and respond. 

Well, I suppose for a man unable to see the world except through centralist, Statist lenses this may make some sort of sense. Painter seems unable to conceive of a desire for less government, rather than for different government; he seems unable to understand a desire for democratic pluralism and diversity rather than a cloying homogenous centralist political diktat, and he seems unable to distinguish between true liberal democracy and rule by an oligarchical political class. Above all he seems unable to recognise a desire for individuals to have more say over the regulation of their own lives rather than less say. It's not 'populsim' but true liberalism that drives political dissent in the UK. And it's as prevalent on the left as on the right - and on the perpendicular axis that has 'authoritarian' and 'libertarian' as its poles it's precisely away from the 'authoritarian' end that things are moving. 

The fact that the British people are rejecting authoritarian social democracy, with its forced equality of outcome, its manifest unfairness and its distortion of effort, merit and reward is not undemocratic in the least, nor is it 'populist'. It is Liberal, in a way that illiberal pieces such as Painter's can never fathom. 
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I've written before that Boris' sexual incontinence will rule him out from higher office, and if his appearance on the Marr show is indicative, it's certainly a painful nerve. A man unable to keep his marital trousers on is less likely to be faithful to manifesto promises, or to devote to affairs of State rather than the other kind the degree of assiduity the public expects. The days when an old goat such as Lloyd-George could get away with it due to a compliant press (Oh how the Common Purpose luvvies must hark back to those days) are long over - even post-Levenson.
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After royally screwing up the task of running the UK Border Agency, mandarin Lin Homer's promotion to the top position in HMRC left the Home Affairs select committee 'astounded' that someone of such demonstrable incompetence should be so rewarded. Never mind. Like Moira Wallace she can always find a suitable sinecure amongst the groves of academe as reward for failure.   

Bloody Windmills

One of the most effective Lent landscape-in-snow photos was published in the 'Mail' this week showing a sepulchrally beautiful moorland scene disfigured by several absolutely static wind turbines. With hardly a breath of air, one could imagine the crystal-bright icicles hanging from the tips of the unmoving blades. They will only start turning again when we don't need additional electrical power.  

Co-ordinating the UK's shambles of an energy policy is the DECC, and co-ordinating the DECC is the department's Permanent Secretary. From the department's inception under 'mentalist' Brown in 2008 until November last year DECC was run by Moira Wallace, a general careerist mandarin with previous experience of economics in the Treasury and of crime in the Home Office but unfortunately with no experience of Energy. She was replaced in January this year by Stephen Lovegrove, a former banker with previous experience of running the Post Office and on the board of LOCOG.  

Neither would have been appointed if they didn't believe in bloody windmills. So they run a department that's utterly away with the fairies; today a dossier on collecting methane from cows' bottoms, tomorrow a study on farming sunbeams and next week a plan for local councils to collect human faeces in wheely bins for power stations. All the while the most lunatic tax changes and Eurostandards are closing viable power stations, raising the costs of energy to levels that cripple commerce and industry and ladling out subsidies to every crank, fool and deluded moron with a hare-brained scheme to make electricity from daisies. 

Moira Wallace, as is the way with Whitehall's most dismal failures, has returned to Oxbridge to become Provost of somewhere or other. Lovegrove has already been decorated with a CB, like a small Christmas tree at the inception of its dressing with balls and tinsel. And the rest of Britain shivers and faces gas-outs, power cuts, food shortages and thousands of premature deaths.

Beware the FSB

The use of offshore companies including Arivust Holdings in Cyprus by Russian government officials, including many from the FSB, to stash their stolen taxes is well known. When Russian lawyer Sergey Magnitsky exposed a €175 million tax theft by tax department husband and wife team Olga Stepanova and Vladlen Stepanov he was promptly murdered. 

The EU in this case has been the irritant the Kremlin has tried hard to disregard. Von Rumpy's Human Rights Council's working group has been carrying out its own investigations into Magnitsky's murder, and the fragrant Catherine Ashton's External Action Service has been dogging the steps of the stolen taxes from Russia into EU banks and then into property. The Russians have treated Ashton's enquiries as risible; in response to requests, Russian interior ministry spokeswoman Irina Dudukina said the state cannot trace any of the funds in the Magnitsky-exposed tax fraud because a truck containing the relevant documents had "exploded."

However, a haircut on Cypriot accounts will be taking money directly from the pockets of Russia's most senior corrupt officials - and the FSB are involved up to their necks. 

With no fear of carrying out high-profile international assassinations to underscore their point, they may be considering how much the West would care if either, say, Catherine Ashton or Herr Von Rumpy were tied to a chair and thrown into a swimming pool ...

The Tyranny of Gas (2)

As I write, the temperature's dropping and the heating's dead. It's really all my fault. My 12 year old range cooker was feeling it's age but still soldiering on, until an oven element went. A new one was £26 and I could have fitted it by removing the oven door and removing a panel. Instead I stupidly opted to replace it with a new cooker. Oh, regrets. You see, not wanting to risk the validity of insurance policies or anything else I called in a Gas Safe bod to make the mechanical gas connection - a simple 1/2" BSP fitting - and you can guess the rest. At the testing stage, he found a minor drop in pressure at the boiler (within acceptable limits), started poking about with the boiler and found something else - an incorrectly routed pressure relief valve. Formal caution issued for boiler. Then re-testing pressure drop, he found a 1/2 millibar pressure drop on the pipework from the meter. You're allowed a 4 millibar drop with appliances connected - but zero with appliances capped. Another caution, meter capped off. So I now have to put my hands in my pocket for a horrid new condensing boiler and a replacement supply pipe. 

Words cannot describe my frustration. So, reader, if anything goes wrong with your gas cooker rebuild it in-situ, every single part if necessary, except the one single gas connection that must be preserved intact at all costs to keep the installation valid. The entire gas related industry is just one huge mutually beneficial con, a scam that even I have fallen victim to.

'Dismal economics'

'Dismal economics' is the general verdict on Boy George's election-focused budget; the Speccie gives us some graphics to illustrate quite how bad things really are. Meanwhile in the Eurozone things are hardly better; they're knotting and splicing like frenzied creatures to keep the masts upright as shrouds part all over. At a local level, there's a severe outbreak of 'I really can't be arsed' as firms, contractors, suppliers just seem to be going through the motions of doing business - somewhere the stress, the urgency, the pressures seem to have been lifted and things are coasting. Don't ask me why this seems so universal, but it does. Reps who once would have stalked with the tenacity of piranha fish make follow-up calls as though it's just a way of passing time; estimating departments have become positively Mediterranean in their speed of response.

Has the entire country gone on strike and I missed it?

Toynbee's triumphant turds

The Rubicon, it is true, flows through Emilia-Romagna to the east, which allows Lady Toynbee of neighbouring Tuscany to be sniffy about its flow. Toynbee, champion of crooks, spivs, deviants, druggies and third-raters everywhere, the queen of the D-list, defender of the faithless, protector of liars, cheats, fraudsters, thieves and hypocrites in Parliament, is naturally in ebullient mood today as she awards medals all round. 

Miliband tops Lady Toynbee's honours list, for exhibiting preening self-love above and beyond the call of party leadership. The second round of medals - 'For Meretricious Service' - go to the twenty Tory rebels who would rather keep their first-class freebies and crystal grapefruit bowls on expenses away from the curious gaze of the public. There are more medals all round; the Murdoch Star goes to all MPs outraged at seeing Neil Kinnock's head in a light bulb and seeking revenge; another cohort get to wear a bronze polished turd on their medal ribbon for getting a mention in Hansard from this historic debate. Already the united general staffs of the joint front benches are planning a new campaign - this time against IPSA, to reverse the reforms made after Toynbee's chums' Rotten Parliament and restore a proper secrecy to Parliamentary fraud, corruption and peculation. 

Be in no doubt. This is legislation by and for the wealthy, the privileged, the metropolitan political class and the whole exploitative kleptocracy. And be its justification as shallow and muddy as Toynbee's laboured prose, the Rubicon has been crossed.

Press finds its balls

In December 2012 Fraser Nelson set the ball rolling by committing the Speccie not to co-operate in any Parliamentary regulation of the press. The Guardian - torn between its desire to support the luvvies wing of Common Purpose and remembering that it, too, is supposed to be a newspaper - reports that the Sun, Telegraph and Mail may all boycott Parliamentary regulation. Meanwhile all devote much column ink to defend the freedom of the press, and none more effectively so than the Sun, which manages to include not only quotes from both Churchill and Hitler but Ralph Miliband. The Sun's editorial is a delight:

IT is the year 2024.

Ten years after the 2014 Regulation of the Press Act, MPs are fiddling expenses on an industrial scale. But Sun readers have no right to know.

Our Boys are fighting another war with shoddy kit while their families live in squalor on MoD bases. But Sun readers have no right to know.

Indeed in 2024 you know nothing of any Government failings or the personal activities of MPs, peers, judges, celebrities or sport stars.

Such stories fall foul of Privacy Czar Lord Grant, the Labour Peer once known as Hacked Off Hugh, who can veto them under draconian amendments to the 2014 Act which ended 300 years of Press freedom.

Let's see what the day brings.

Gauleiters who will gag our anti-EU voices

The British press poses the only serious threat to the Berlaymont's propaganda war against the people of Britain. The EU Federasts have billions of plundered tax money at their disposal, whole floors of skilled propagandists and the friendly ear of the BBC. Their job is to persuade us that the loss of our freedom and democracy is a cheap price to pay for being one of the bigger Gau in a new European Superstate. Against this behemoth stands a small army of bloggers and commentators - and a free British press. 

That's all likely to change on Monday when the Federast Gauleiters-in-waiting of the British Gau, Miliband and Clegg, sell their birthright for a mess of EU pottage by loading the press with the chains of State censorship. In a devastating act of political treachery, they will hand control of the free British press to the EU bureaucrats in Brussels.    

In a classic 'Think of the children!' ploy, the press-enslavers are claiming to act on behalf of 'victims' of the Press; for the most part these are sexually incontinent actors, talentless 'B' listers, coke-snorting game show hosts, perverted soccer players, adulterous politicians, toilet-trading Mandarins, DJs with rotten septums and publicity-seeking nonentities. The true 'victims' of the rare cases of culpable misreporting, such as Christopher Jefferies, have adequate existing recourse and have been well compensated.

No, the real agenda is the gagging of the only powerful voice speaking against the machinations of Brussels. You can be sure the Berlaymont is happy to pay their Gauleiters more than thirty pieces of silver to secure this end. And once they have defeated the British press, our blogs will be next.

Powerless against Maladministration

Simon Jenkins puts his finger on it in the Guardian. Our inability to prosecute politicians for Maladministration leads us instead to hound them on whatever grounds we have - like jailing Capone for not filing a tax return. It's Gordon Brown and Ed Balls who should be in Barlinnie prison, it's Bloody Blair who should be slopping-out in Wandsworth and it's Blunkett and Smith who should be doing several hundred hours of community fence-painting. Huhne, for the lunacy of planting 32,000 bloody windmills across Britain as our energy supplies collapse into Brownout, deserves every second of his sentence - but not for the trivial matter of penalty points. Pryce is just collateral damage. As Jenkins writes;

In Britain there is no committee or tribunal to charge Huhne with his time at the energy department. He left power stations unbuilt and energy supply at risk, while pursuing an obsession with giving rich landowners millions of pounds of other people's money to erect senseless wind turbines. Let him answer for that.

We are powerless against Maladministration. The political class, who have more in common with each-other than with us, protect themselves, confer a mutual immunity from prosecution. This is not good enough - we need a new law or a new tribunal to deal wit it - and to see politicians in jail for the right reasons, not the wrong ones.

The bar must be high for prosecution. Collecting unassailable evidence may take years; only after Chilcot, for example, will we have enough to prosecute Blair. The truth of the depths of Brown's Maladministration has not all yet emerged. The sanction must not be used for spite or revenge or abused by a change of administration. And it should cover the actions of the Speaker.  

Localism, not anarchy

I'm happy to take up the challenge set by Nick Drew over at C@W - the thorny issue of planning permission and localism. Nick cites the case of a London faith community seeking to take advantage of the government's initiative to localise planning decisions, as they feel the existing planning authority are acting unreasonably in refusing their applications to build faith schools and house extensions to house their large families. No, it's not Muslims in Newham or Tower Hamlets - it's ultra-Orthodox Jews in Stamford Hill. If local councils lose control of planning, the theme goes, what will we end up with?

OK. Firstly Localism is about devolving collective administrative functions down to their most appropriate level; it doesn't mean everything has to be at the neighbourhood level. Defence and air traffic control can only be done nationally. Minerals planning may best be done on a regional, geological, scale. State education planning may work best at the County level. However, asking the Secretary of State to rule on replacement glazing or front-door colours in conservation areas is clearly inappropriate. So we need to agree criteria about how far to devolve.

The regulation of built development is only legitimate so long as its necessary for the common good. We have Building Regs to ensure structures don't collapse or go up in flames like BBQ fuel, and planning rules originating on Public Health grounds to ensure people don't build unduly crowded, insanitary, disease-liable rookeries; there are standards for maximum bed spaces per acre to stop the Rahmans of this world erecting instant slum tenements, and a whole range of rules to constrain the negative externalities of inappropriate development. There are some alternatives. If we stop people building on their gardens because it reduces permeable ground and places additional costs on the rest of us to deal with their rainwater, we can always pass on the entire marginal cost instead. Yes, you can build on your garden, but it will cost you an additional £500 a square metre in Council Tax each year. And Yes, you can build a house without any parking space - but you must pay an additional fee of £20,000 for the road congestion that you will cause. 

The problem with communities such as the Stamford Hill Jews is that they are seeking to impose all the negative externalities of creating a dense, crowded religious shtetl on the rest of us without meeting the cost. That's not localism - it's anarchy; 'gaming' the planning reforms isn't localism - it's asocialism. Either there's a robust framework of rules that allocates the full cost of development back to the developer, or decisions need to be taken at the lowest level at which decisions can properly be made on behalf of all those affected - and that's not the Rabbi and his mates.    

Blair's crooked cons undone

That bloodsodden shyster Blair has been popping his spray-tanned head above the parapet in recent days in an effort to get a final word in before Chilcot delivers his verdict; Iraq wasn't about WMDs at all, oh no, says Bloody Blair, it was about regime change. As an attempt at falsifying history it's not the smartest of distortions. Most people not suffering from Alzheimer's can actually remember the events of ten years ago, and can remember it was very much about WMDs - not one of which, not the trace of one of which, has ever been found in the length and breadth of Iraq. 

Hugh Sykes has made a useful two-part programme for radio on Iraq ten years on. Even bloody Blair is allowed to deliver his fatuous little platitudes with patent insincerity. Cleverly intercut with the views of a range of actual Iraqis, who make it clear they would love to see Mr Blair again - swinging on the end of a rope in Baghdad. 

There's also a long whine emerging from the Guardian this morning at the rebalancing of official British history from the Blair version, in which everything was bad before the founding of the Labour Party, and in which the UK reached its zenith in 1997 with New Labour to a backing of the Spice Girls. As fatuous as Blair's pronouncements on Iraq, the Labour history must have puzzled foreigners, wondering why the Sheffield Knife Grinders Strike was more important than Agincourt. The Guardian whines that the chapter on the Holocaust has been removed - well of course it has, you ninnies; in what way was the Holocaust an event in British history? 

New Labour's breathtaking arrogance in assuming that by re-writing history they could embed political allegiance has been as misplaced as a Spice Girls single at a funeral. And it's about time we saw the machinations of these shoddy little crooks undone.

EU's Hungarian lies

The EU has been flexing its bully-boy muscles again to Hungary. The Magyar refusal to toe the Berlaymont line has in the past led to outright threats of fund-cutting, and little Herr Von Rumpy is now set to wag his finger again at Budapest. The issue is Orban's action later today in ignoring Hungary's constitutional court to get new laws through. The new laws he's trying to pass are being presented in the Euphile press as 'radical' and 'right wing' but are really nothing of the sort. 

Firstly, he wants to fine or jail homeless people who live in public spaces. Um, exactly like our own Vagrancy Act of 1824, in fact. But without the 'vigelante' element of s.6 of the Act, which allows any person without warrant to arrest any person "wandering abroad, or placing himself or herself in any public place, street, highway, court, or passage, to beg or gather alms, or causing or procuring or encouraging any child or children so to do... every person wandering abroad and lodging in any barn or outhouse, or in any deserted or unoccupied building, or in the open air, or under a tent, or in any cart or waggon; every person wilfully openly, lewdly, and obscenely exposing his person with intent to insult any female; every person wandering abroad, and endeavouring by the exposure of wounds or deformities to obtain or gather alms; every person going about as a gatherer or collector of alms, or endeavouring to procure charitable contributions of any nature or kind, under any false or fraudulent pretence every person being found in or upon any dwelling house, warehouse, coach-house, stable, or outhouse, or in any inclosed yard, garden, or area, for any unlawful purpose"

Secondly, he wants to ban paid political advertising on private radio and TV stations. Exactly like the UK, where the ban extends to matters of political controversy and to printing and publishing by third parties. Or like, er, France, Ireland and Belgium, all of which have absolute bans on paid political advertising on TV and radio. 

Thirdly, he wants to compel graduates who have received State scholarships to work in Hungary for a number of years after graduating. Now we don't have a law against this but perhaps we should have. Just as our newly-qualified nurses and doctors depart for the US and better pay as soon as they can, after getting long years of state-subsidised education, so those from eastern Europe do likewise. 

There's much to be critical of in Hungary, but I don't think these three laws are amongst them. The real issue is a constitutional court loyal to Brussels blocking an elected government ready to defy Von Rumpy. And as Peter Frankopan in the Guardian reminds us this morning, the Byzantine Empire had its own Von Rumpy - and knew how to deal with him;

Those responsible for the crisis were shown no mercy. The Herman Van Rompuy of the time, a eunuch named Nikephoritzes, was lambasted by an angry population faced with price rises and a fall in the standard of living and was eventually tortured to death.

We wish.

May for PM, Farage for Deputy PM?

We all have our dream tickets, and this combination has to be one of mine. 

Theresa May is of the background that yeoman-sorts such as myself know well - she's one of us, vicar's daughter, local grammar, state primary and a million miles away from the Etonian County class. She's only been an MP since 1997, having had a proper job previously, combined with local council experience. Above all as Home Secretary, she's dealt with all the crises that hit the Home Office - so often the graveyard for incompetents, as Blunkett found - with unflappable aplomb. Strongly Eurosceptic and in support of Britain's withdrawal from the ECHR, and having rolled-back many of Labour's more lunatic initiatives she nonetheless also earns the grudging respect of the left, who lack anyone remotely of May's capacity themselves. 

Farage of course is the bloke next door; you'd not feel awkward borrowing a hose from him. His many positive qualities and ability to engage effortlessly with ordinary people outweigh his failings as a party leader - he needs an environment in which he has license to speak the thoughts of the ordinary man. As May's Prescott (and one really hopes he's capable of keeping his trousers on) he can be a hard-hitter and destroy the amateur Marxian dilettantism of the sixth-form Labour front bench. However, unless there's another by-election he won't be in Parliament by 2015 - unless a new Conservative leader persuades one of the party's giant tortoises in the Commons that it's time to move down the corridor.

Cameron is finished unless he pulls some extraordinary rabbit out of the hat. And Boris needs a place in government - though given his sexual incontinence not in a post from which he can't be sacked without collateral damage when the next story breaks. Exciting times.  

Cameron's Roma future

Roma gypsies are tough. You really have to take your hat off. Never welcome in western Europe, we used to hang any who made a nuisance of themselves. The French shaved their heads and branded them, and the Czechs cut their ears off. They are one of the few races that sought refuge in Russia as a place of tolerance. The Nazis consigned several hundreds of thousands to the death camps but they found no respite in the post-war communist world. The Czechs had given up on cutting their ears off and removed their wombs and testes instead, in a programme of compulsory sterilisation. Yet they survived, stronger than ever, and now there are well over a million of them in Romania and Bulgaria all set to desert their villages and head for Dover and a life on British benefits. 

As I've written many times before, you can't blame immigrants for immigration. It's not their fault. It's the fault of either treasonous and poisonous governments such as Labour's last administration, which used immigration as a tool to destroy domestic opposition, or of spineless and pusillanimous governments such as Cameron's, whose brave words aren't matched by his vacillating and ineffectual actions. But the Roma as the Press describes them are lawless; they're thieves, scavengers, squatters, polluters and destroyers, and will deface and despoil all they touch. The Mail chronicles the effect on a German town of the arrival of just 400 Roma gypsies. 

There are difficulties. Roma form a minority of Romanians and Bulgarians, the majority of whom are no better or worse than any other east European migrant workers. Their originating nations don't want them and would be glad to see them depart for other European countries. And we can't make laws that target only Roma. They do apparently have some peculiar taboos - hens' eggs and frogs are both anathema to them - but staffing the benefits offices with amphibians is simply not practical. 

However, this what politicians are elected to office to do - find ways through the difficulties. And when the results of both the Euro elections in 2014 and the general election the following year may well be conditioned by voters' experiences of the depredations of the Roma in their own neighbourhoods, if Cameron does nothing he will have only himself to blame for an unprecedented electoral drubbing.

A tribute to Danish School

To: The Editor, The Guardian. Dear Sir; should you require the services of a freelance caption checker ... 
 
There are few artists remaining of the calibre of Danish School (1740 - 1798) who remain unknown and un-honoured by a blockbuster exhibition, but School's work remains the provenance of specialist art historians and the occasional doctoral candidate at the Courtauld. Perhaps it is time to raise his profile a little.

Danish School - another howler from the Guardian

Danish was born the son of a Portsmouth fishwife, Ada School, and with his brother Hamish received a rudimentary eduction from the church school. His proficiency at 'limning' or drawing swiftly drew him to the attention of a wealthy local landowner, Sir Jeremiah Wart, who commissioned from the young School a series of portraits of members of his prized herd of pedigree Manx goats. This led rapidly to commissions from Wart's neighbours for portraits of their daughters and families, and it was a delicate and fresh piece, a head and shoulders rendering of Miss Ephah Bunion nibbling a washing line, seen in the London home of the earl of Liphook, that advanced School to the rank of Court Painter at the age of nineteen.....

Waste of effort

As previously noted on this blog, the only true beneficiaries of 'recycling' domestic waste are those companies with a stake in waste collection and processing. The EU directive concerned only sets targets for the percentage of recyclable waste collected, not the percentage actually recycled. As a consequence, as long as waste collection authorities collect recyclables separately, they are then free to dispose of the arisings as they wish - as fuel for a CHP plant, to landfill, or for sale. Further, as the High Court in Cardiff has now ruled,  there is no requirement to split the collection of recyclables. All recyclable waste can go in a single bin. 

A consortium of green do-gooders and minor waste industry players had sought judicial review to enforce the separate collection of five different recyclable waste streams. They failed. What's notable, however, is that all the big waste players were absent from the joint action; the international manufacturers and patent-holders of wheely bins, the constructors and operators of massive and expensive automated waste sorting plants (MRFs), the makers of waste collection vehicle bodies and gear, the manufacturers of anaerobic digestion plants were nowhere to be seen. Indeed, they will find the High Court's ruling most unwelcome, and the attempted action ill-advised. 

The big boys prefer to operate through the industry bodies, through Whitehall and by lobbying Mr Pickles. They cultivate waste management contacts with local councils, and they seek to persuade all concerned that the Waste Directive requires massive public investment to satisfy.  Some councils and administrations are more gullible than others. My own, Lewisham, has only ever required the separation of two waste streams. Other councils have jumped the gun and already issue a plethora of bags, boxes and containers. The recent High Court ruling now leaves such eager gold-platers with the prospect of explaining to voters why they're spending so much money when there's no need to. Even DEFRA admits that much of the recyclable waste collected is unusable, unsaleable or there's no market for it.