The Limits of the State

You may never have noticed, but Switzerland doesn't have a President. Or a Chancellor. In fact, the Swiss Head of State is, collectively, the seven-person Federal Council. It's worked this way since 1848, and the seven between them run just about everything a central State should run. The Swiss people make sure the central State doesn't get too ambitious by limiting the amount of tax-take they can spend - about 30%. The other 70% is determined and managed locally.

You see, there's no causative link between a nation's level of taxation and the size and power of the central State, a fact that bypasses Polly Toynbee completely. Shocked by the damage that Snowden's revelations may do to the image of the benign and all-powerful central State, Lady Toynbee leaps to the defence of the Megastate. "Labour needs to hymn the good the state does and the civilising value of what taxes buy – health, education, safety, proud public spaces. All the things that people value most." Toynbee pompously proclaims, blind to the reality that the Swiss enjoy better health, education, safety and higher quality public spaces than we do, with a much much smaller central State and highly constrained taxation.

People have a perfect right to grant their governments the power to snoop on their emails, browsers and tweets - but this must be a choice openly made, with the power always to withdraw or reverse the consent. Such consent has been noticeably absent in this case.

Cameron's Hedgehog Party

Austria, at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, was always destined to carry some dodgy traffic once Schengen kicked in. Most passes through on the superb A roads, through tunnels or over high Alpine passes without incident, but just occasionally a truck comes to grief revealing an illegal cargo. So it was last week, when a vehicle carrying some 2,000 small animals overturned. Most of the cargo obediently permitted themselves to be recaptured by the Animal Welfare (well, this was Austria). The owner optimistically sent a replacement vehicle. The Authorities of course declined; the cargo would be detained whilst procedural irregularities were investigated. At the owners' expense. The irony in all this is that some 80% of the cargo was live-food for pet snakes and the like - small rodents, which the owners were now having to pay to be fed and cared for. The other 20% of the cargo was the exotic pets themselves; snakes, Armadillos and, um, Egyptian Hedgehogs. 

Hedgehogs? Since when did hedgehogs become pets? What was the attraction? I sought out an online guide to hedgehog-keeping. It consisted of page after page of advice aimed at preventing the creatures from killing or seriously injuring themselves. First, they need lots of room. "Without room, a hedgehog will show signs of depression, such as excessive sleeping, refusal to eat, repetitious behaviour, and self-mutilation. Due to their small size obesity is a very dangerous problem and hedgehogs require a fair amount of exercise to avoid liver problems due to excess weight." Uh OK a big wire cage then "Cages with wired floors are dangerous for hedgehogs because they can easily slip and get a limb caught in the wire. Multi-level ferret or rabbit cages can allow a hedgehog more room to explore without taking up extra floorspace, but when using multiple levels, keep in mind that a hedgehog has poor eyesight, can climb easily, but has difficulty descending and often does not seem to understand heights" Hmm a big cage with a safety rubber floor, then. "A wheel is necessary to provide hedgehogs with exercise. When choosing a wheel, it must have a solid floor. If an open-wire wheel is used, the hedgehog will continually fall between the bars and possibly break a leg. Wheels with crossbars can also cause facial injuries as hedgehogs have been known to look sideways out of the wheel while running." The list goes on. They are liable to amputate their own limbs with their bedding, their genitalia may get blocked with cage-dust, they are (unsurprisingly) prone to many diseases, including Wobbly Hedgehog Syndrome and commonly react to stress with vomiting and green faeces.

And then the simile struck me. Hedgehogs are the Tory Party of the pet world - intent on self-destruction, blind, incapable, liable to unintentional self-injury and deliberate self-mutilation. When threatened all they can do is roll up in a prickly ball. Suddenly gay weddings, bloody windmills, state snooping, Europhilia and all the other rubbish came into perspective; it was all Hedgehog behaviour. The party has grown into an endangered creature incapable of flourishing, subject to Wobbly Tory Syndrome and liable to react to stress with vomiting and green faeces.    

Hutton, like Dworkin, is deeply Illiberal.

There's another characteristic whine from Hutton in the Guardian this morning. The recently dead Dworkin, Hutton writes, "argued that to live well and with dignity was every human being's aim – one that law and government should support" and that this was true liberalism. Poppycock. 

Let's just Fisk that quote above. By 'support' Hutton actually means 'enable' - he sees an all-powerful State regulating individual lives and rationing-out rewards equally to all, using law to prevent the emergence of a meritocracy in a system in which all are beholden to State Welfarism and to the State alone for the fulfilment of their own lives. What a dreary, squalid Soviet Hell.

In proclaiming the virtues of a Statist, repressive and coercive vesion of what he terms 'liberalism' in the Guardian, Will Hutton demonstrates nothing but his own essential illiberality. Hutton simply can't stand the simple realisation that even the Economist has reached that many more British people, and particularly the young, are rediscovering true Liberalism. Tolerant of people's differences, but with a deep distrust of the State, the Political Class and Welfarism; we should rejoice that the new generation of Brits growing into power are likely to follow Burke rather than Engels. Hutton despairs.

Let's turn that quote around and say "Neither law nor government should obstruct, hinder or restrict every human being's aim to live well and with dignity". That'll do.

Luciana Berger - the nauseating face of the political class

Labour blow-in Luciana Berger has been in a spat with one of the local councillors in her Liverpool constituency ("They've found me a safe seat in Liverpool? Where's that? Wasn't that where the Beatles came from?") before she's even been able to remember the major street-names.

Berger of course is the poster-girl for the new breed of political class who are driving voters away from the Labour and Tory parties in droves. Like most of her contemporaries, she was privately educated (Haberdasher Aske's) and from a Labour political dynasty. And no, she's never had a proper job or done a single day's proper work in her life. It was student politics, then a bit of expenses-experience with a health quango before Parliament.

She was screwed into one of  Labour's safe Liverpool seats for the 2010 election by the party's London HQ against local opposition. As Wiki records "In the run-up to the General Election, the Liverpool Echo tested Berger with a four-question quiz on Liverpool life and history. She scored two out of four, not knowing who performed Ferry Cross the Mersey and not recognising the name of former Liverpool F.C. manager, Bill Shankly."

It's Berger and her like that that are worth 10,000 votes each to UKIP and the alternative parties; the sickening and nauseating 'jobs for the boys and girls' nepotism by the dying private clubs of the main parties being truly out of favour with voters.

PRISM story tops the day

The story shared by the Washington Post and the Guardian of how the US security services enjoy unhindered access to the internet activity of the customers of the world's largest internet corporations should surprise no one. If you weren't already aware that every single word you type on that keyboard is known to some security official somewhere you should be. US security officials have responded by calling the reports 'irresponsible' - not untrue, note - and claiming that the US's security has been damaged by disclosure that the government is snooping on everyone's email. 

It's not just the septics, of course. Our own MPs, both Tory and Labour, are pushing for even greater access to our private information under a new 'snooper's charter' but at the same time seeking to restrict radically our access to information on their own pay and expenses, and our ability (through Leveson) to share information on their badger-watching activities or to share photographs they have posted of themselves in their underwear or dressed in rubber or leather harness.

And at a time when we've lost not only Tom Sharpe but Oliver Bernard, the last and most human of the three brothers. I remember too fondly an afternoon session in the French back in the 90s with Dan Farson, Sandy Fawkes and both Bruce and Oliver - in reality the invective was poison - all of whom are now dead. I mention this only because they shared a common loathing and mistrust for anyone who presumed to know better than they what was good for them - including the presumptive and impertinent interference by the government in our private affairs. Still, the revelation that it is the US that is the world's first Police State fills me with hope; if there's a people anywhere in the world who will not stand for this, it's the Americans.  

Osborne a Moron - official

Whilst I'm waiting for the boy's latest genius wheeze to add a further 20% to the value of my home here in London, there's equal satisfaction to be had from the comments of Soc Gen's Albert Edwards;

"I don’t think Andrew Bridgen at Fathom Consulting was strong enough when he described George Osborne’s scheme as “reckless”. I believe it truly is a moronic policy that stands head and shoulders above most of the stupid economic policies I have seen implemented during my 30 years in this business. It ranks above some of Alan Greenspan’s very worst blunders. And when so many highly regarded commentators speak out against it, only to be totally ignored by George ‘I know better’ Osborne, he may really deserve to be called a moron."

So what do they think the EU is?

It's always good to see the beaker people over at the Grauniad running about like puppies every time they discover fire. Today it's Seumas Milne who is granted the rare flashes of insight;

But the real corruption that has eaten into the heart of British public life is the tightening corporate grip on government and public institutions – not just by lobbyists, but by the politicians, civil servants, bankers and corporate advisers who increasingly swap jobs, favours and insider information, and inevitably come to see their interests as mutual and interchangeable. The doors are no longer just revolving but spinning, and the people charged with protecting the public interest are bought and sold with barely a fig leaf of regulation.

 It defies rationality to believe that the prospect of far better paid jobs in the private sector doesn't influence the decisions of ministers and officials – or isn't used by corporations to shape policy. Who can seriously doubt that politicians were encouraged to champion light touch regulation before the crash by the lure and lobbying of the banks, as well as by an overweening ideology?

Britain is now an increasingly corrupt country at its highest levels – not in the sense of directly bribing officials, of course, and it's almost entirely legal. But our public life and democracy is now profoundly compromised by its colonisation. Corporate and financial power have merged into the state.

And what of the European Commission and the European Parliament, where the merger has not only gone further but is increasingly more explicit? A Europe run for the huge corporations by the huge corporations, with national governments bought and sold and free market competition crushed?

Hey ho. Maybe they'll discover a use for the wheel next week.

Just more bent politicians

Did anyone really imagine that after the mass-culling of bent MPs from the Rotten Parliament that Westminster would transform into an exemplar of probity? No, of course not. The game has changed - and not getting caught is now the name of the game. To make things fair, and to balance the list of Lobbyists, Levenson will no doubt now back an official register of undercover journalists, fake sheiks and investigative reporters and make it an offence to gull an MP. 

And no one really imagines that if UKIP were at Westminster things would be much different. Already somewhere I'm sure a newly-elected UKIP Councillor is pocketing a fat brown envelope in return for believing that what his ward really needs are a few more bloody windmills built by Romanians. 

And still there are out there strident voices urging us all to support them all the same; a bit like salesmen convincing us that blue asbestos is just the stuff from which to make children's play equipment. Oh yes, they aver, Labour and Tory sleaze, corruption and fraud is completely different. Labour mostly go for money, while for the Tories it's deviant sex. Or maybe LibDems. Just shuffle back into line you lot and support detached millionaire confection Dave for top fruitcake. 

It's gone way past that of course. We'll all vote UKIP in 2014 to deliver such a kicking to Dave's curly icing that will be felt right through to his Angelica bits. And that's about as adult and responsible as it gets.

Blair MUST stand trial over Iraq

A year before the invasion of Iraq, long before the UN had completed its programme of weapons inspections, long before the Parliament of the United Kingdom had considered the matter, long before even the publication of Alastair Campbell's fraudulent and false 'dossier' and long before the exhaustion of diplomatic means, Blair wrote letters like an infatuated schoolboy to the American President assuring him that the the UK was committed to support an invasion of Iraq for the purpose of regime change. 

Fine. Except such actions are more than embarrassing - they're almost certainly illegal, contrary to international law. 

The Mail reports Cameron's refusal to release the Blair letters and attributes it to a deal for electoral support. Rubbish. Cameron and Blair are from the same mould - and Cameron is as committed to all members of the political class being immune for their actions as is Blair. Cameron is with-holding the evidence because he doesn't want to set the precedent of a politician being held accountable for his actions.   

Blair, whose 'peacemaker' role as ME envoy has become a risible parody of all the past failures there, must stand trial before the International Court to achieve what the Septics call 'closure' on Iraq. Or he will go to his grave with the 'war criminal' tag firmly attached.

A Zero-growth future?

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard's grasp of the dire state of the global economy never fails to make a dismal and depressing read to cheer me up, and his current column in the Telegraph is a corker. All that Osborne's tsunami of QE has achieved, it seems, is to have made the obscenely wealthy even richer and sent the Gini coefficient soaring. Everyone else is struggling with static incomes but increasing outgoings - a condition that suits the political-corporate class very nicely, as a population concentrating on keeping its head above water doesn't have much time for riotous behaviour. Until things reach a tipping point. 

Post-war politicians have had it easy, with continuous economic growth modulated only by the business cycle, and since the business cycle and electoral cycles are at differing frequencies each party has had a Buggin's turn of good and bad. But what if zero to low economic growth is the norm? What if, like in the century before the Black Death, wages remain at the same levels for 150 years? Where are the technological changes that drive economic growth? (no, a new model of iPad really doesn't count unless it flies alongside you and you can have an intelligent conversation with it).

Our grandchildren may have to learn to live in a very different economic world.

"UK will debate proposals, then obey them"

When the war correspondent Alan Moorehead reached Brussels shortly after liberation, he found the city's zoo being used to hold alleged Nazi collaborators. "What will happen to them?" he asked. "They will be given a fair trial, then they will be shot" came the answer. 

It seems the character of the Bruxellois hasn't changed a great deal in sixty years. The Speccie publishes the EU's programme for the latest stage in its takeover of national governments; "National ministers study the AGS and adopt conclusions" is this Winter's task for Cameron's government, and in June of next year Cameron is instructed that "national ministers discuss the Commission's budget recommendations and adopt conclusions"

Osborne is nothing but a foolish and incompetent dilettante who shouldn't be let near running a tuck shop, but at least he's our idiot. I've no confidence that the foolish and incompetent zealots from Brussels will be any better at running the UK economy than 'Boy' Osborne but why on Earth should we give them the chance? Why are all 27 EU nations included in surrendering their budgets to Brussels, not just the Eurozone masochists?

Bring on the referendum.

Real European values

This is an edited version of posts I tried making last week

The landscape here in this part what the EU is terming the 'Alpe-Adria' or Alpine Adriatic region is dramatic. Steep-sided valley sides with crystal clear rivers rushing between them, with tractor-activity on the flat valley floors but otherwise 45° farming the old way - livestock - with woodland coming in when this is impractical, up to the tree-line. Just a brief word about the tree-line: if there has been an increase in atmospheric CO2 levels, these high trees will benefit. At 2,500m trees grow very slowly due to low CO2 concentrations, and woodland is consequently extremely cheap. More CO2 means quicker growth and, er, more CO2 'locked in'. And an economic benefit in terms of increased timber production. 

Environmental quality is really important here. The mountain water is pure enough to drink, and they aim to keep it that way right down to the lakes and reservoirs, so only saily boats or electric-engined craft are generally allowed here. This extends to restricting Nitrate fertilizer use to prevent the run-off that has polluted so much UK water. And if you want instant popularity here, say 'Monsanto' and spit (hygienically, into a container, for safe disposal). They don't like GM, hate the big farming-pharma companies, loathe corporate farmers and love their bees. They could almost be Greens except that you won't find one single bloody windmill anywhere. Not one. Despite all those high mountains and strong winds, the entire skyline remains undespoiled by those useless, absurd, alien objects. 

If Hungary is securing 'Home, Work, Family, Health and Order' with the cudgel then Austria uses 'nudge' to promote much the same values. With the memory of Vichy France replacing 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' with 'Work, Family, Fatherland' as a national slogan perhaps in mind, there remains a certain sensitivity here towards anything too prescriptive. It's an odd contrast. As is the almost universal regard for the memory of Jörg Haider I encountered. Five years ago in Lambichl near Klagenfurt he piled and rolled his government-issued car. His death had a sort of JFK impact - of great potential cut short, and like JFK he was swiftly popularly canonised. This video is typical. Quietly, and after half a bottle of Schnapps, even an eminently sensible Ing.Dr. Frau will whisper to you that he was killed. 

There is no question about the Roma and the Sinti. They are not wanted here under any circumstances, and all means of keeping them out are regarded as fair. Generally they are picked up on the way in at the borders by the traffic cops, who rarely fail to find fault with their vehicles or documents. Those that get through are watched and caught. Handgun ownership for household protection is common here (each person is allowed one full-calibre pistol or revolver plus another up to .22 calibre) and with the Glock factory nearby, you can pick up a 3rd-generation 9mm Glock G17 for about €300. This may also be a deterrent for any ill-minded Roma.

The attitude to the EU is as ambivalent as everywhere. The strongest 'for' reasons, in order, are Security, Trade and Economy, International influence and the strongest 'anti' reasons in order are Interference in domestic matters, Corruption and pro-Corporatism. The CAP, under which (it is quoted here) France, with 15% of the EU's farmers, gets 70% of the budget, is seen as in need of urgent reform. Small, mixed, traditional farms are the norm here - not by themselves productive enough to sustain a family, but hugely valuable both for cultural and environmental reasons. A secondary income stream from employment, tourism or niche marketing of specialist products is needed to make these small farms sustainable - and if we can do it, they say here, why can't the bloody Kermits?

Oh, and finally smoking. Yes, the Austrians say, it is a bad thing and people should stop. But they must also be free to smoke if they want to. So smoking is banned in public (government) buildings only - but not in bars, hotels or restaurants. If you want a smoke-free coffee, go to the Bahnhof cafe or the Rathauskellar. This is eminently sensible and actually works very well. 

It all makes one really wonder why our politicians and civil servants are so bloody stupid. 

"Um, those are what we call clouds, sir"

Losers

Don't read too much into the barbaric events in Woolwich. All it really proves is that a couple of young black jihadists can run another person down in a car then finish them off. And these losers in their cheap Chinese polyester clothes didn't even have the nous between them to get a proper firearm. However, as tool-using primates with opposable thumbs, they did what they could. They might have used rocks or pointed sticks if they'd been unable to get hold of steel weapons. That Islam provided them with what they imagined was justification for their barbarism remains the real problem; with no recognised spiritual hierarchy to definitively interpret the Koran otherwise, Islam will always provide the enemies of our peoples with an excuse for violence against us. 

The problem is, our police and government are incapable of the sort of proactive combing-out of physically dangerous Jihadists that targets only the threats; they still insist on measures that hurt us all. Let's be honest - the Seventh Day Adventists are never going to hijack a petrol tanker, the Hasidic Jews aren't going to kidnap the Prime Minister and the Zoroastrians ain't going to fire-bomb Catterick. 

No doubt there are a vast majority of peaceful law-abiding Moslems in Britain. That doesn't mitigate the fact that hundreds of hostile, violent, immature Jihadists who pose a real threat are hiding like fish in the waters of the Islamic population. Let's have the police and Security Service bait some hooks.

I'm still here!

Apols all - my plans to blog from the mountains on my mobile have failed miserably despite daily efforts. And to be frank I'm completely out of touch with the news, immersed in local culture (read: a barrel of most at my elbow) and chasing all sorts of hares .. back to normal service soon, meanwhile 

Oxford products of first-cousin marriages?

Looking at the mug shots of the convicted Pakistani kiddy-fiddlers from Oxford, and again at those of the convicted Telford Pakistani sex gang below, it cannot but strike the viewer that they do not exactly radiate any impression of individual or collective cerebral capacity. To be blunt, and possibly offensive, many carry the look of what we used to term 'the retarded'. 

The look is not confined to Pakistan, of course. It is still common in isolated areas of Kentucky and Louisiana, and until the 20th century could be seen in parts of North Norfolk and Wales. It is, of course, the common result of a prevalence of first-cousin marriages, and particularly of parallel cousin marriages (son to brother's daughter) that produces the highest volume not only of serious birth defects but significantly increased rates of imbecilism and feeble-mindedness. This is the most common marriage relationship amongst Pakistanis. 

Back in February 2008 Labour Minister Phil Woolas shocked his constituents by mentioning this 'elephant in the room' - he was moved by the large number of hideously deformed babies he'd seen who were the result of such relationships. In August 2010 Channel 4 screened a documentary entitled 'When Cousins Marry' that further exposed the dangers of "Preferential patrilateral parallel cousin marriage". A comment at the time on the programme's website was

As a Teacher of children with severe special needs, working predominantly within the asian community, I am very pleased to see this issue being publicly raised. Along with the distress the child may suffer throughout it's life as the result of a first cousin marriages, society has a huge financial burden to bare in providing the necessary support. These include a huge range of medical interventions, paediatric care, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, specialist teaching support, respite care, transportation, building adaptations etc, etc etc.

If deviant sexual behaviour amongst the retarded but otherwise functioning young men from such relationships is now costing us to maintain some 250 of them in prison for the next fifteen years or so it may just be a cost too far. Should we now give serious consideration to banning such relationships in the UK, as many parts of the US has done, to lessen the incidence of these benighted imbeciles in our society?    

Housekeeping - spam

With apologies to all contributors I've had to turn the comments verification thingy on; the sheer volume of spam recently, between 50-100 a day, is making it increasingly hard to police manually, and I'm going to be rather busy over the next week.

We'll see how it goes.

Unofficial Conservatives win record poll share

The Unofficial Conservatives have scored an unprecedented 18% in the most recent ICM / Guardian poll, which also shows the three main parties all 4% down. I'm talking about UKIP, of course. The response of Tory stalwarts, which started by telling UKIP supporters that they were all mad, has switched to something (in Tory eyes, anyway) more subtle - telling them they're wrong. Cameron is doing marvellously on Europe they say; and anyone who patronises the ROH in Covent garden will know how effective his immigration crackdown is; his refusal of a work permit for an American counter-tenor last month was masterly. And suggestions that he is too much like the despised Blair are simply absurd; Blair went to Fettes whilst Cameron went to Eton, Blair's only worth £8m whilst Cameron's worth £12m, Blair lives in the Agaland of Bucks whilst Cameron's country home is in Rayburn shire, Oxon. They couldn't be more different.

Ed's £4m London home is a quite normal asset for any unemployed young man to have acquired, say Labour's apologists, and besides he needs it for entertaining now that he's become interested in politics. And London's full of poor people, yah? So it keeps him in touch with common people. He spoke to someone in a shop recently. 

And Nick is at pains to point out just how hard he and Miriam try to distance themselves from the Tories; in avoiding Osborne & Little wallpaper for their London home, and having to use the more expensive Zoffany instead, they spent an extra quarter mil in decorating. How's that for political dedication? 

Suggestions that they all keep bumping into each-other in the same fashionable London restaurants, shows, parties and first-nights are silly, they all say. Their diary secretaries keep in close contact to ensure this doesn't happen.

No, no they're all completely unlike each-other, totally distinctive, all very different, lots of clear blue water between them. Not at all like each-other. Not at all all the same. Got it?

Rerum Novarum again

Regular readers will know that Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum has long been a favourite of mine; its unequivocal condemnation of socialist doctrine and of the interference of the State in personal and family life stands the test of years. Yet it not only condemns socialism but corporatism; making wealth is fine, and retaining wealth so that capitalists and their families may live 'becomingly' with their station in life is also fine, but excess and conspicuous consumption, or wealth for power is not. The wealthy have a duty to use any excess of wealth to the benefit of their fellow man. 

Paradoxically, as the Telegraph (£) reports today, the EU's crisis is driving people to reject the authority of the corporatist super-State and reinforcing the authority of the family and the local community. The role of the churches and their charities such as Caritas have also been enhanced and they have gained authority. The Bishops of the European Community are in conference and due to meet in October under the chairmanship of Cardinal Marx. But don't worry. Cardinal Marx supports Marxism in the same way as Cardinal Sin supported Sin. Rather, it is hinted, COMECE will look back to Leo XIII. 

All the gains of the political class and their corporatist allies over the past decades are being washed away like sand by the tide. Europe is turning away from its politicians, bankers and global magnates; their authority is eroded, their status derided, their pretences popularly ridiculed. The Telegraph reports the Archbishop of Toledo as saying that the roots of the debt crisis lie in the "moral disarmament" of the last quarter century. A `get-rich-quick' culture of "stupid consumption" and "deranged indebtment" has corrupted public life. Children have been brought up to wallow in self-gratification. "This is common to the whole of Western Europe. It goes back to the core issues of moral philosophy, of what we are as human beings. It is here that we must search for a way out of the impasse," he said.

The Devil has all the best tunes

Understanding the far right in Germany takes a paradigm shift in thought. Imagine an earnest group of young folk musicians from Cumbria with a repertoire dedicated to the courage of their grandfathers at Tobruk, ballads celebrating the advance of the Royal Tank Corps at El Alamein and sweet guitar riffs backing songs about their love of their folk customs. This approximates the narrative behind much of Germany's far right; that the Wehrmacht was the finest war-machine ever created, that German soldiers in WWII performed nobly and with outstanding courage against overwhelming odds, that their grandfathers were true heroes. It's as if Nick Griffin were suddenly to produce a Spanish guitar and began to strum chords declaring "I'd like to share something I wrote recently ..." . To us, where the liberal-left seem to have a monopoly of the performing arts, it seems strange indeed.



All this of course is 'wrong' and contrary to the official post-war narrative of guilt and liability established in Germany. Right-wing parties in Germany however have been pulling a worrying number of votes - up to 15%, and enough for the Government to set up a Commission to counter the growth of the movement. In seeking to re-write Germany's recent history, to give meaning to those five million Wehrmacht dead, these young people can perhaps be understood. And the German government will have a hard time of it - there's nothing so hard to suppress as a song, and the Devil always has had the best tunes. 

BBC alone report new Asian child sex ring

Sentences of 18 and 14 years for the two ringleaders Ahdel Ali and Mubarak Ali (top) and others making a total of 100 years for a further seven Asian men have been imposed as a major new trial of Asian child sex offenders - this time operating in Telford, in Shropshire - concludes. The news was the second item on the BBC R4 6 o'clock radio news last night.

Following the mass convictions of Asian men in Rochdale earlier this year for child sex offences, and the scale and severity of the sentencing, the BBC were right in the priority they accorded this news item. The written story on the web site is somewhat harder to find; you need to navigate through to BBC Shropshire to see it. And apart from a brief and well-hidden mention in the online Mail, that's all the coverage the UK national media gives to the story.

The Guardian reports the arrest of a double bass player who allegedly groped someone at a music school, but not this. The Indie wonders whether animated faces in our text messages are dumbing us down but is not nearly so curious about mass long term child sex abuse. The Telegraph warns its readers to get their money out of Spain quickly. 

So why this MSM silence on the Asian sex gangs? We're now filling the best part of an entire prison with Asian men serving hundreds of years for the sexual abuse of white girl-children and this isn't something we should be talking about?

And after Rochdale and Telford, where the hell else has this been going on, and how many more mass-trials of these ugly perverts are we going to see?

Lady Toynbee like Cnut against the tide

As the Labour tide is turning, as those on the left are just waking up to the real dangers and evils of the EU, Lady Toynbee plants her chair firmly in the sand and commands the seas to retreat. Her Euro-sceptic colleagues on the left are really anarcho-conservatives, says the archetypal hereditary capitalist-socialist, who should learn to love centralist, dictatorial institutions for their own good. The people don't know what's best for them and can't be trusted to make the right decision, declares Lady T; and they should not be let anywhere near the ballot box, especially in the downswing of a recession. 

If we left, Lady Toynbee wails, the same isolationism would sweep us out of the European human rights convention too. Do we want to be Belarus? She asks. Um, what, and be able to expel Islamic terrorists at will? Be able to deport prisoners after their sentences are served? Have the ability to allow our own highly skilled, just and capable courts to make case law? Well, yes please, actually.

Just as Toynbee's purblindness cannot imagine a Britain that for eight hundred years led the World in human rights without any assistance from European institutions, she cannot imagine our unique advantages in global location, language, historical links, economic strength and pre-eminence in international institutions amounting to much without Europe's parasitical deadweight. 

Luckily, those on the left who work for a living and don't belong to Lady Toynbee's privileged left-liberal aristocratic and hereditary mileau have always been as sceptical about voting advice from the Big House as they have been of foreign interference in British ways. And when the Referendum comes - and it will - half of them will vote 'No' to the EU.

Price fixing and energy saving subsidies

Suppose the government wanted to encourage the take-up of wood pellet burners. To do so, it introduces a 50% subsidy on purchase cost. Good news all round, you would have thought; manufacturers sell more boilers, householders buy more and the government reduces the nation's CO2 output. Except, of course, it doesn't work like that and never has done. 

What actually happens is that the manufacturers and retailers of the boilers in the subsidised nations double their price. The government subsidy then goes directly to the retailers. Householders see no great price advantage and don't buy, and the government ends up spending a lot of money with no real reduction in CO2.

Take a look at http://kotly.com/ then take a look on eBay UK. Most of this kit is built not in China but in Eastern Europe; it fully meets CE standards and certification and can be installed in the UK without problem. And it's half the price of the same stuff sold domestically.

What's true for solar thermal above is also true for solar PV, except that most solar PV is made in China. Good news for Euro governments intent on increasing PV take-up at minimum cost to the taxpayer, one would have thought. But no. As Der Spiegel reveals, the reaction of the EU is to impose swingeing tariffs on Chinese PV to protect overpriced Euro manufacturers, fat margins and bloated profits. Yet again money is going straight from taxpayers pockets to fatcat corporate investors, revealing again the green-scam for what it is; a business opportunity for the big boys. It's got nothing to do with CO2. 

£30bn a year better off out

The latest CIVITAS paper estimates the benefits of withdrawal from the EU at around £30bn a year. Of this, it estimates the saving in the cost of regulation at about £20bn. As heavyweights such as Lord Lawson start to get behind the figures, we can expect a strong counter-reaction from those firms who benefit most from regulation - the large corporations.

Take the food allergen labelling regulations. A small high street baker, you're adding a fruit cake to your range. It will take you three hours to make and bake two dozen fruit cakes - but thirty hours to find, research, correspond, query and prepare legal food labels to stick onto the packaging. The Allergen Labelling Regulations, for example, compel you to declare any traces of Celery, Cereals containing gluten, Crustaceans, Eggs, Fish, Lupin, Milk (including Lactose), Molluscs, Mustard, Nuts, Peanuts, Sesame seeds, Soybeans or Sulphur Dioxide.

Of course Megapolis Foods and their ten-acre cake factory has no problem complying with all these regulations; they have an entire department for it. They even pay a lobbying firm in Brussels to persuade MEPs and the Commission's officials that even more regulations are needed. If you bake a million cakes a year the overhead costs of regulation are small; if you only bake 500 they're horrendous. 

The incestuous links between the large corporations and Brussels go much further than this. Brussels regularly uses taxes raised from EU nations to stuff the mouths of the big corporations with gold; just take a look at the UK recipients of the EU grants programme HERE to see who will be opposing any withdrawal from the EU. It won't be Britain's small firms and SMEs, the economic powerhouse of growth and the sector most likely to retain economic benefit in the UK. 

During 2011 big corporations shared an EU bribe pot of €4,509,352,492.66. So when you see the Chairman of Global Foods plc on the TV opposing EU withdrawal, check the database to see how much tax money he's had before you believe him.   

Thank goodness for Sir Cliff

As figures from the world of 'light entertainment' as it used to be called tumble like ninepins as sexual delinquents one can only be grateful that one figure at least remains aloof from the whispers and rumour. Sir Cliff has often been derided for his chaste and disciplined life, one underpinned by his Christian faith. Now as his contemporaries are facing public disgrace and prison he can feel vindicated. 

Of course the focus must now move to the eighties and the excesses of the new generation of variety performers and light entertainers; the generation of Ben Elton, Rik Mayall, Rowan Atkinson, Ade Edmondson, Alexei Sayle, Pamela Stephenson and their media contemporaries. There are dark tales of illegal drugs, alcohol in excess and sexual perversions. 

Then of course the nineties and the new media stars such as Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond must come under the witchfinder-general's spotlight. Surely the trio cannot be that cheerful without having committed some gross breaches of good behaviour?

And when of course the deviants themselves and all record of the miscreants, all their shows and recordings, have been removed from broadcast and consigned to a secret locked archive and only Sir Cliff remains as fit to transmit we will all be happy. Won't we?

Whoever

Sometimes you can't have everything. I'd like a cheap and very robust tablet with integral GPS that runs marine chart software and does office functions. I don't need a megapixel camera or to store half a million MP3 songs. In the end, of course, I'll pick the best fit available. And this, I think, is what we will also do with our new choice of four main parties. Out of the Eurofederacy but in free-movement Europe? Tick. My borough no longer over-run by Nigerian women having babies? Tick. H.M. Armed Forces properly financed and effective? Tick. No more bloody windmills? Tick. And most importantly Are they listening to me or just talking at me? Tick.

Ryan Shorthouse, Director of 'Bright Blue' advises Tories today that “Conservatives should not panic and react by trying to be more hardline than UKIP on welfare, Europe and immigration. Instead, we should convince voters we are the only party with enough experience, gravitas and compassion to be really trusted - with the difficult and complex job of government, to sort out the public finances, and with supporting the vulnerable and those struggling in these challenging economic times”

The problem is, people just don't believe it. It lacks sensible credibility. The voters know that if they were stuck changing a tyre on a lonely rain-swept road at night it would be Nigel and not David who stopped to lend a hand. 

UKIP's success also spells the death of the LibDems. The corrupt and crooked party funding proposals first from Hayden Phillips and then from Christopher Kelly that would reward the three incumbent parties on the basis of their last voting share - so long as they had MPs sitting - was designed to maintain the status quo and keep the LibDems afloat. Any attempt now to introduce such a scheme would quite rightly provoke a march on Parliament with pitchforks and burning brands. The LibDems, with probably no more than 40,000 members and bereft of all their opposition cash, are now up against the ropes. 

Phillips, Kelly and all the rest of the cosy political establishment have taken a slapping. The real kicking will come with next year's Euro elections - when there's everything to play for.

Reasons to be cheerful

Sorry, no post this evening. I only had £100 on at 5/4 for more than 100 UKIP gains, but when they paid out at about sixixh I found I could afford some alcohol ...

UKIP for change

The problem of warnings that 'Vote UKIP - get Miliband' have is that people really don't care - most can see little difference between Miliband and Cameron and want neither of them equally. I've said on this blog time and time again that people are hungry for change, that they're not 'apathetic' but fed-up with a political class that has betrayed them. Europe has failed, globalisation has delivered benefits to everyone but the West, Corporations have prospered, the obscenely wealthy have become more so, self-interest and greed characterise all our most senior public servants, MPs scrabble with their snouts for yet more money, third-world standards of electoral distortion are maintained for party advantage, immigration has changed the face of our nation without the people ever having been asked about it, the ancient hills are littered with bloody pointless windmills and still they distort and pervert science for lunatic ideology. 

So No Mr Cameron and No Mr Miliband and No Mr Clegg  I really don't care what UKIP's policy on plastic surgery is, or how their sums on the aggregates levy add up. You see, I loathe you all so very, very much right now that I will vote for anyone to slap hard your silly smug privileged faces. 

And however bad the UKIP candidate may be, they're infinitely better than the alternative slaves of the existing metropolitan political clubs.

France and Germany

We may have been mildly shocked at crude and insulting semi-official comments directed at Cameron from the French government. Governments don't speak to each-other in this way, do they? As with John Major, opponents may be 'the Bastards' in private but 'valued colleagues' in public. The Kermits, however, seem to have lost it.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard catalogues, the latest exchange of insults between France and Germany is quite unprecedented. And France started it. The problem is that the garlic-munchers blame their woes on everything and everybody but themselves; their sclerotic economy and productivity, an industrial sector on the Liverpool Death Pathway, more hands grasping rewards from the tax-till than can be re-filled, an agricultural sector that takes most of the CAP budget - 22% of CAP money goes to France, which has just 7.8% of the EU's farms over 1 European Size Unit (ESU) - and outdated beliefs in 'Gloire' that make France look as decayed and absurd as Miss Havisham in scarlet lippy. 

It's not just Germany that must contemplate whether to bail-out the Kermits yet again; they cost each working Briton a fortune, keep food prices artificially high, decimate our fish stocks and are taught at birth to sneer. Despite not having produced an international pop star since Edith Piaf. Turkey may once have been the 'sick man of Europe' - but today it's France and not just diplomatic flu, but a basket case. 

But like a huge art-nouveau ocean liner sinking beneath the waves, she'll pull us down too if we're too close to her. And voting for UKIP is important for this alone; who cares what their policy on bloody dormice is when we're struggling to stay alive. 

Beez

TO DO LIST

1. Kill all the bees

2. European farmers pay billions to hand-pollinate crops

3. Sell our special GM self-pollinating varieties at a bit less than (2) costs

4. Collect Knighthood


"The House of Commons environmental audit committee concluded that "neonicotinoid pesticides are not fundamental to the general economic or agricultural viability of UK farming". In fact they can prevent a more precise and rational use of pesticides, known as integrated pest management. The committee reports that all the rape seed on sale in this country, for example, is pre-treated with neonicotinoids, so farmers have no choice but to use them, whether or not they are required." Guardian

Women on banknotes

I am all in favour of depicting women on our banknotes so long as they are Britannia, Boadicca, Queen Victoria or Florence Nightingale. I would add Mrs Thatcher, but the previous convention seemed to be that they were 'historical' figures, from the 19th century or earlier. As Winston will now adorn the fiver perhaps these things are flexible. The problem is, there are few truly famous women from past ages, and it will only be in the 2200s that we'll start to feature the rich seam of more contemporary achievers. If we have to do it now, let's at least make-up some historic figures rather than keep re-using the two worn-out obscurities we have:-

Ethabell Scrathwick - Leader of the Luton Spoon-planishers strike of 1873, demanding equal wages with knife-grinders and price-controls on Bengal grit, the essential material for her trade, then a monopoly commodity in the hands of the Marquis of Slough. Transported to Australia for 7 years. 

Meena Jones - Daughter of Lascar parents who both worked as stokers for the Red Star Line (and therefore black) she married Hywel Jones of Swansea. She never forgot her maritime ancestry and spent her life providing comfort to wounded sailors. She also cooked them favourite Goan dishes. 

Lily Priestley -  Scientist. She noticed that larks boiled in saline and Orpiment produced a gas she called 'demelancholised air' which she recorded in her journal for 1758 'produced amongst those servants I tested it on great gusts of laughter and joy'. She is credited with discovering Nitrous Oxide but passing the facts to her son, Joseph, as women were not then permitted to be clever. 

Ada Crabbe -  Daughter of a Methodist clergyman, Ada invented sex education in 1894 but was so shocked by what she had discovered she died, still unmarried, shortly after. Her journals were discovered in 1986 and are now held by the Winnie Mandela Cultural Institute in Tottenham. 

Where did crime go?

News this week that I live in the most violent borough in Britain induced a slight frisson of unwarranted pride, I'm afraid. Unwarranted because I've lived here since 1995 without once having been the victim of crime, excepting being defrauded by my bank (which took a County Court summons to solve). Mine is typical of several wealthy inner London boroughs; three or four massive council estates separated by swathes of middle-class Victorian terraces, two or three town centres and a score or more tube, rail and DLR stations. The violence happens around the council estates and town centres late at night, when we gentrifiers are either abed or on our way home from the opera to our safe local station. The last burglary in my street was in 1997. Then there was the prolonged shouty incident of 2001, in which two black women spent twenty minutes verbally abusing eachother over a distance of fifty metres. Despite a keen middle-class audience peering from every window they declined to fight, however. Life in Britain's most dangerous borough is, er, safe, unworrying and comfortable. So where did all the crime go? Look at the graphics below;

Since the turn of the century, crime has plummeted everywhere. Andrew Rawnsley writes in the Observer today seeking the reasons why, and finding multiple credible answers but no single cause. And there is no correlation whatsoever between the number of police officers and levels of crime. Nor has it risen again since 2008, as predicted (wrongly) on this blog and elsewhere.

Are the buggers putting bromide in the tea or something?

More cruelty than justice in these prosecutions

Prosecutions that are unreasonably delayed often have more cruelty than justice in them; defendants may have lost access to evidence to disprove stale prosecutions, and with the exception of the abilities of new technologies such as DNA identification, if a plaintiff has a good cause of action they should pursue any claim with diligence and timeliness.  

The Charging of Max Clifford for alleged offences committed between 29 and 47 years ago brings to mind several similes which I cannot lawfully share with you, this matter now being sub judice and any comment a contempt of legal process, so please be careful if you leave your own comment.

The attempts in Germany to charge and jail 50 men who are thought to have served with the SS-Totenkopfverbände before they die of natural causes is an even more extreme example of justice delayed - in this case some 69 years after their membership, there being no actual evidence of any offences on which basis to charge them. 

My own view is that a 15 year limitation for prosecution of the most serious offences is appropriate, with a 5 year limitation on minor offences. But then I also believe that we will all be judged and have to answer for our lives.  

Two-Up

In case you missed it, yesterday was the day it was legal to play 'two up' across Australia, despite state laws prohibiting the unbelievably simple gambling game. ANZAC day is also the day on which 'gunfire' - coffee with rum - is traditionally drunk at breakfast. As the centennial anniversary of the War next year approaches, and the last survivors of those battles have been laid in their graves, one touching tradition continues to be observed on ANZAC day. 

At 5am yesterday at Hyde Park Corner the dawn 'stand to' was called, commemorating the call of Reveille in the still empty moments of first light that preceded so many attacks. Likewise in Australia and New Zealand, soldiers (largely) will have turned out at dawn to commemorate their predecessors. It started as a quiet, wordless gathering of old soldiers alone, before the later 11am commemorations involving family, dignitaries, bands and public occasion. Now it's become something of a matter of pride for those serving in the Australian and New Zealand armed forces to attend. 

Events a century ago have seared themselves into our collective psyche like no others; did they still remember the 30 years war in the same way in 1748? Or Crimea in 1954? There is something so epochal, so important about the Great War that we have determined collectively to remember it always. 

UK Left falls out of love with EU

I seemed to the UK left like they were so well suited; the EU was redistributionist on a massive scale, enforced an equality across whole nations, regulated the minutae of people's lives 'for their own good' and governed by centralist command-and-control with all the panoply of quotas, rationing and allocations. What was there not to like? 

Then the doubts started to creep in. The EU was favouring banks and big corporations at the expense of labour; crushing wage rates were being used to devalue the Euro. That fabled equality wasn't equality after all, but corporate homogenisation. And all that command-and-control meant that they had no say in decisions that were being made. Then there were all the little signs that maybe they didn't love us back; they wanted access to our bank account but wouldn't share theirs, there were secret meetings with other nations from which we were excluded. And they ate all the fish. And at first when they sent their mates round to stay for the night it was OK; we got some decent plumbing repairs and some good tiling out of it. But now they were sending some very odd sorts with no skills at all except emptying the biscuit tin. 

Earlier this week a Mr Barroso, an unelected functionary styling himself 'President' of an unelected cabal of functionaries calling themselves the 'European Commission' complained that his dream of an unelected Europe was being undermined by ordinary people committed to democracy. So when the Guardian published the results of a recent Europe-wide poll showing a continent wide slump in confidence in the European project, you might have expected the CIF comments to the piece to have been a rallying-call to back the Eurocrats. Not a bit of it. The comrades are truly out of love with Mr Barosso's European project. Some are positively savage. Many are satisfyingly staunch in their defence of democracy, if perhaps a little late at the table. All of which must now send Mr Miliband a-thinking. 

Paying less, caring more

Do a rough mental calculation. Take half your annual Council tax and multiply it by four. The result is roughly what you're paying in tax each year to 'protect' other people's children. As Christopher Booker has catalogued in his Telegraph columns, the child 'protection' racket has grown into a national industry, fully sanctioned by populist horror at baby Peter, Victoria Climbie and all the other tragic victims of adult abuse. Your local council will close every library, see each street lamp doused and let rubbish pile-up in windrows on the streets before they will willingly cut a single pound from their child 'protection' budgets.

And yes, of course 'protection' is in quotes. Most children taken from their parents into the care of the State are at infinitely greater risk under the State's 'protection' than without it. Edward Timpson MP writes in the Telegraph this morning on the recent abuse of young girls by Moslem men in Rochdale, girls without exception in the 'care' of the State. Other enquiries are examining allegations that powerful Tory figures grazed à la carte on young boys being held in a State 'home'. Suicide and self-harm figures for children held by the State are abnormal. So yes, under the State's 'protection' is the very last place you'd want a child to be.

Timpson is acting the Muppet in calling for even more investment and greater spending to prevent another Rochdale. We need a radical alternative. We need to make major cuts to State spending, and child 'protection' is a massive one; we really have to face it. Cityunslicker writes on the C@W blog

However, there are no votes in this approach from a populace used to the Nanny state; so what to do? I can see the default position being minor cuts, more tax rises and a slow Japan style death with the national debt slowly climbing towards Italian and then Japanese levels whilst politicians hand out the treats to harvest votes.

Anyone but Blair

As reported in the Ephraim Hardcastle column in the Mail this morning, Baroness Thatcher's death leaves a vacancy in the Order of Merit, limited to twenty-four living holders. In fact, there is not one but two places vacant in the list - in which technologists, scientists and historians figure largely. Denying the atrocious Blair a place is a sine qua non, but who to appoint to block him?

Well, the waspish David Starkey must surely be a prime candidate (Antony Beevor and John Keegan may have to wait as Michael Howard holds the incumbent military historian spot). As must both Brian Eno and Peter Maxwell-Davies, there being at present no musicians in the Order. And if Tom Stoppard is a member, why not Alan Bennett? Or even David Hare?

There are clearly many millions of Britons more deserving of public honours than Blair, surely it can't be that hard to find just two?

French and German woes

The Telegraph terms it 'disillusionment' that has come to France, but it could as well be the realisation that the post-war model of ever-increasing national wealth funding ever-increasing social welfare has come to an end. The astonishment is that the character of French rural society has survived despite this post-war wealth rather than because of it; "That spirit of solidarité – the instinct of people to help their fellow man — runs wonderfully deep here. The sun is still shining and the trains still run on time. Entire villages conjure up feasts and sit down to them together, just as they always did". It is, in human history, more frequently adversity and shared hardship that forges bonds of community.

In Germany, the wheels are falling off the Industrial-Educational compact. If the essence of France is the bond between commune and terroir then the essence of Germany has been its system of industrial apprenticeships. As Der Spiegel reports, a dual-track system of vocational and academic educational streams has helped maintain Germany's competitive advantage. Now, just when the UK is moving to adopt the German model, Germany is moving to adopt, er, the British model. 

And in the UK it's with mixed emotions that I must report the demise of the Quantity Surveyor; India and Malaysia both still base construction mensuration on SMM7, published by the RICS, and consequently 'taking off' a bill of quantities from a set of drawings is something that can now be done in Mumbai or KL at a fraction of the cost of employing a chap from Richmond. Consequently, QSs have been re-inventing themselves as Project Managers or Cost Consultants, and the merest suggestion that they might usefully do a bit of taking-off is met with the expression of a surgeon asked to change the patient's bedsheets. Ah well.

Asparagus and Strawberries

Native, English Asparagus and native, English Strawberries, of the sort growing not in polythene tunnels but in the open air, are set to be delayed this year. Bad news for Asparagus, which can only be picked until mid-summer's day, but possibly good news for consumers, if a sudden glut of fat, pale spears hits the market and pushes prices down. But not, alas, for April - the one month in which in good years one can enjoy a dozen Colchester natives and a plate of fat spears on the same table. Ah, such is England.

Ditch this wretched shackle

Against every military maxim, the EU Parliament and Commission are hell-bent on reinforcing failure. The Euro is crippled; like the Heer in 1945 it lacks metaphorical air cover, fuel, munitions and transport but keeps surviving due to tactical moves of desperation, sometimes brilliant, that squeeze every gram of advantage from each embattled position. 

And now with proposals for Euro-wide extraordinary wealth taxes - preferably in a form that will also catch non-Eurozone EU nations - it is moving to the equivalent of calling-up 15 and 16 and 65 and 66 year olds. Already parts of Europe are plunging into real poverty, and the spectre of disease and hunger, of Typhoid, Diphtheria and Cholera, not seen in Europe for seventy years, broods menacingly over the economic wreckage and spoilation caused by these zealots. With a fanaticism bordering on lunacy, they will see Europe burn to cinders before they will relinquish their belief in the Euro. Human lives and an ocean of human misery are of little consequence to the Berlaymont Gauleiters strutting like fat pheasants in their insulated, privileged world of make-believe.

But across Europe ordinary people are coming to recognise the enemy in Brussels, and the danger it poses to their very way of life. It's not 'populism' but a hunger for real democracy that is driving members to UKIP and its equivalents across Europe. People are choosing between freedom and the Empire, and more and more are backing freedom. The harder the Empire tries, the more support it loses.

Margaret Thatcher - Stateswoman

The release of Baroness Thatcher's death certificate describing her occupation as 'Stateswoman' was something that could be disclosed without fear of contradiction from any quarter. Even her enemies would concede that she strode the world stage with the foremost of that breed. Statesmanship is not something that can be acquired by an individual; it must be bestowed by a caucus of informed opinion.

Blair's tragi-comic cavortings in his attempts to reach that status keep us all entertained, but besides real statesmen he is a pygmy. And Brown seems sensibly to have avoided the ridicule that such a bid on his own behalf would earn. Both will be there tomorrow, still in Margaret's shadow as just ex-Prime Ministers, not as elders and Statesmen. One has only to imagine, in the event of the sudden death of either, the snorts of derision that would be caused if either's death certificate made that absurd claim. But for Thatcher, the term is no more than the simple truth.  

Polly's wish may come true

Lady Toynbee has long urged the governments of Europe to tax the wealthy in order to fund the recession. Now, it seems, not only will her wish come true, but Polly herself will be able to share in the noble sacrifice. If Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph is right, and EU finance ministers move to taxing holiday homes, Polly's Tuscan retreat will certainly give her the personal opportunity to contribute a great wodge of cash to the tax-starved club Med administrations.

No doubt readers will share Polly's undoubted joy at the news.

Thatcher Library

A Thatcher Library, in the form of those US (ex) Presidential libraries, will no doubt be a good thing. American Presidential libraries are actually public libraries, administered at taxpayers' expense by the National Archive and Records Administration (NARA) under the Presidential Records Act. We don't have such provision in the UK, so Margaret's would have to be privately funded. And perhaps this is more suitable, under the circumstances. Part archive, part museum I would expect permanent exhibitions on both the Berlin Wall and the Falklands. And just as the Reagan Library sells copies of the famous RR Stetson at $209.95, the Thatcher Library could vend tasteful copies by Mulberry of those handbags at a similar price point. Or the 'Thatcher Steampunk tank Pashmina and goggles' perhaps. 

Of course no Thatcher venture would be complete without some hideous embarrassment caused by her wayward son, so we'd have to expect a concession stand run by Sir Mark offering gay men's underwear with 'Thatcher' embroidered on the waistband and no doubt these will prove popular also with the gangsta types who wear their jeans half way down their bottoms.

Thatcher and Sid

The pub juke box was belting out Boy George for the third disk in a row; eyes were fixed on the mechanism as the arm lifted the 45 single, jerkily returned it to it's slot in the fan-array of black plastic ... and then returned back to the same place to lift it out again. There was a soft groan from the bar. The London after work pub crowd was complacent; it had been three years since the IRA's last major mainland bombing and Londoners, who recover quickly anyway, had almost forgotten the threat. This was a workers' pub, which is to say well-frequented by students and the unemployed with a leavening of actual tradesmen - mostly painters, for some reason - having an after-work pint. 

" 'Ere maigh, izzat your Standa'?" Came a voice in my ear. I nodded and passed it across. "See 'ow me shares have done today" the voice explained. It didn't need to explain further. Thatcher's Gas privatisation in December 1986 had made shareholders for the first time of hundreds of thousands of small investors. Though some had taken to buying the FT on the basis of a £250 shareholding, thereby wiping out their dividend, most relied, in London at least, on discarded Standards to keep track of the share price. 

Many preferential small shareholders cashed in immediately, walking away with a fat profit, but no matter; share ownership, once something arcane and foreign to most people, had become commonplace, something of which your neighbour had experience. Those who recall the impact that it had didn't find at all extraordinary Vince Cable's suggestion that the government's bank shares be sold off preferentially to small investors; most folk can find £500, particularly if this represents a real discount on the share market price. Unlike the feeble-minded Osborne, Thatcher could see the scale of social impact such a move would make.    

Thatcher and municipal anarchy

On the roof of County Hall, the GLC's offices across the river from Parliament, a massive banner proclaimed the daily count of London's jobless. Red Ken's direct challenge to the government didn't end with annoying MPs using the terraces; a series of refusals, obstructions and challenges led the government in a fit of pique to abolish it - and didn't they wish they could have abolished every large metropolitan council in the country. This was the era when a new rainbow alliance of lesbians, greens, socialist workers, radical feminists and academic Marxists had displaced old Labour from the town halls; the archetypal Labour councillors - male, middle aged, white, ex-manual workers, proud to wear a suit, and who called the cleaners 'love' and 'petal' without thought - had been ousted.

In place of men who had done their national service we had Greenham Wimmin who promptly declared their municipalities nuclear-free zones, a Chief Executive who used 'sexist body language' was dismissed, and flying tribunals to root out sexism and racism swept the country. In the People's Republic of South Yorkshire attempts to eradicate 'love' 'flower' and 'pet' from the language met an unexpected reactionary pushback - from the Yorkshire miners, who could no more stop using these terms to their canteen ladies than they could understand their own inevitable demise. 

In the face of this municipal anarchy, Thatcher centralised with single-minded ruthlessness. She took from local councils whole rafts of powers and competencies they had enjoyed for generations and instituted Direct Rule from Whitehall. It may be that she had little choice. But the effect was to mortally wound her own party; over a million members of the Conservative party walked away between 1979 and 1997, many because they had, at local level, been disempowered. Local government, in the form in which had previously existed, ceased to be. Councils became what they are now - branch offices of Whitehall departments, taking instructions predominantly from Brussels and Westminster rather than from their own aldermen, portmen and burgesses in Council assembled. 

Homeopathy on the NHS

Justifying the £4m - £12m spent annually by the NHS on Homeopathy, Dr Sarah Eames claimed it worth it on the basis of 'positive patient outcomes'. Now given that Homeopathic remedies can have no physical effect whatsoever, any statistically significant patient outcomes must be down to the power of mind over body, or the benefits of positive thinking. And if Homeopathy, then why not Crystal Healing, Shamanism, and the people who tinkle little bells over the unwell? In fact, why not do away with conventional medicine altogether and administer cheap chalk placebos to the ill?

The earliest Christian doctors - monks and friars - fortified by arab scholarship soon learned that faith and waiting for God were not enough, and that the scalpel and Henbane could achieve so much more. By all means let cranks of all varieties do their good for the sick, let's have Nigerian tribal fetishes set up on the nursing stations and Dayak hermaphrodites doing the frog-spirit dance in the aisles, let's have joss sticks, tinkling bells and glittery crystals hanging from the light fittings, but for goodness sake let's not waste money on it. The perpetrators should do their thing for free - and be grateful they're given access to ward-fulls of sick people to play with.

Lady Thatcher

The greatest post-war Prime Minister, and thank God she was in office when Argentina invaded the Falklands. There are negatives, but they're for other times. My favourite scurrilous and apocryphal Spitting Image anecdote? The Prime Minister took her Cabinet out to dine at a conference restaurant. The Maitre d' approached her to order.

"I'll have the British steak"

"And the vegetables?" the Maitre asked

"They'll have the same."

Welfare slavery reprise

It seems some on the left are actually catching-on. Back in September 2012 I wrote

By reserving to itself the duty of care of our less fortunate fellows, the State also creates a barrier to the fulfilment of our own obligations to our neighbour and community; Welfare measures intended with best intention to end the human indignity of the Poor Law and the stigma of poverty have themselves at the start of the 21st century created a Welfare slavery that condemns entire generations of families to a culture of idleness and ill health, deprived of the dignity of work and belonging, alienated from the mutual rewards of citizenship, barred from fulfilment and deprived of that human solidarity "of the poor among themselves, between rich and poor, of workers among themselves, between employers and employees in a business, solidarity among nations and peoples ". Surely to God it's time to end their captivity.

Now Simon Danczuk writing in the Telegraph today;

Anyone who has lived with or spent time with people capable of working that have been parked on benefits for a decade or more will know the tragedy I’m talking about. We should all experience the feeling of satisfaction after a hard day’s work, the pride at getting a promotion, the sense of achievement from making a difference in the workplace. But for those trapped in welfare dependency these experiences will never happen. This is a criminal loss of human potential and something everyone interested in progressive politics should rail against.

IDS reforms are not the answer - but they're a start. 

Army manoeuvres 1913

1913 was, weatherwise, generally a rather dull and cool year in which both sunshine and rainfall were limited. Perfect, in fact, for the second of the large scale army manoeuvres carried out before 1914. The first, in 1912, had exposed Haig as dangerously incompetent. Haig commanded a crack Aldershot 'Red' force with an established command structure, against Grierson's rag-bag 'Blue' force made up of scratch units including Yeomanry and cyclists (classed as cavalry). Despite having all the advantages, including being the attacking side, Haig screwed up monumentally and Grierson walked all over him. 

The 1913 manoeuvres again had a crack 'Brown' force under French of two Infantry corps and a cavalry division against a scratch 'White' force under Monro of Territorials and Yeomanry. This time there was no mistake and Brown duly won. White, however, did remarkably well - making excellent use of aircraft as spotters, motor transport and cyclists, by now correctly classed as mounted infantry. French had not done well, however. The problems in co-ordinating the movement of 50,000 men and 25,000 horses in the field had not been overcome and the generals were then practising very much a war of rapid movement. The stars were the aircraft, and they were to prove their worth in 1914 at the Aisne and the Marne.

Yet the following year it was French and Haig that led the BEF of 75,000 men in Belgium. Grierson died of a heart attack shortly after landing.  

Between now and next year there will be a great deal of guff that portrays farmhands and factory workers flocking to the colours in August 1914 and 'in the trenches' a month later. This will all be bollocks and can be disregarded. The trenches didn't come until later, and the only men sent to France and Belgium were the BEF and slightly later those trained men in the reserve. That first phase of the war, very much a war of movement, was fought by the professionals and no doubt lessons had been learned at Brigade level and below from the 1912 / 1913 exercises that served them well.

Dead sheep

Hill sheep are not entirely stupid. In a driving blizzard, they will huddle together in the lee of a stone wall. Normally it works. But when the snow just goes on and on and the drifts cover them they die where they shelter, only to be found by the hill shepherd's dog, or when the snow thaws. 

Radio 4's 'On Your Farm' broadcast this morning is shocking and powerful, all the more so as it features only the voices of a single reporter, Sybil Ruscoe, and those of hill farmers now burying their dead stock. Hill farmers are as tough as their stock, and their voices were steady, but beneath the laconic accounting of stock losses the tension they were feeling was audible, a quiver in the voice that they could not disguise or repress. The loss is not so much the lambs but the breeding ewes - and to lose 250 from a flock of 500 may be a terminal event. 

There will be no government aid, and this is ideologically right, though it means a further diminution in those working lives we used as a nation to hold iconic of our island breed - the hill farmer, the trawlerman, the forester - and no doubt the survivors will be the toughest and most resilient of their kind. 

But please, no whining or pleading today for the indolent urban welfare underclass and their 42" plasma TVs. I'm really not in the mood.