Banks' greed feeds fraud

Hey ho. Your chances of being mugged on the way home from the station are now lower than ever, but the odds of someone hacking your bank account have never been greater. MPs may criticise banks for keeping quiet about the level of small-number frauds, but the banks have their reasons - and must make from increased sales more than they lose from this type of fraud. Let me explain.

It recently took a summons to the small claims court issued by me to my bank to finally sort their recalcitrance about taking the hit on a fraudulent transaction. For over a year they'd wriggled and twisted in blatant defiance of FSA rules. All quite deliberately. All the while the amount was in dispute it wasn't a liability - allowing banks to keep in suspense for up to a year the value of frauds they must write-off. And yes, in case you'd forgotten, a fraudulent transaction on your account is a crime against the bank, not against you; it's not your money once it's deposited, you're merely a creditor of the bank. So only the bank can report a fraud to the police - which, because they don't actually want a police investigation in many cases, they don't do. 

If you want to pay for an easyjet  flight online directly with your plastic, you'll need your 3-digit CVC. However, book the flight through one of the many 'B-to-B' agencies and just the card numbers and your address will do. And book a hire car through a nationally-known online agent in Paris and they won't even do an address check. Banks have left these doors open quite deliberately to make card transactions easier - but also making their money easier to steal. Never mind. First they'll try to charge it to you anyway, and perhaps a third of small scale fraudulent transactions aren't even noticed by people who don't check their statements. Then they try to impose unreasonable time limits for reclaim, or make up humpty-dumpty rules that won't stand up in court to wriggle out of responsibility. 

The truth is, if these frauds were really hurting banks they could tighten up the way they work overnight. In fact, they manage to pass most of the pain onto customers and retain the gain from increased business; in other words, it's sheer naked greed on the part of the banks that's fuelling the fraud boom.     

Still Swamped

It's damned easy to be laid back about immigration in small Suffolk market towns. The gentle burr of the regional dialect on the streets is never broken by barbaric Yoruba invective, and brownish and yellowish faces appear in just perfect proportions, as in a colouring-book on diversity produced by the Ministry of Migration. Here in South-East London we're still swamped. 'Swamped' used to be a no-no expression, but not any more. Here it's Nigerians; elsewhere it's Pakistanis, Chinese or Eastern Europeans. No-one knows quite how many, but they're filling the maternity wards, blocking transport with their buggies, needing dozens of new primary schools. About half of them (according to a Channel 4 / ippr study) work, pay taxes and contribute to GDP. And about half just consume housing, benefits and health care, adding nothing. Overall, GDP is increased - but per-capita GDP remains just the same. There's no real benefit.

Rather than start counting them, the government has hired a transit van with a sign on the back inviting them to go home. It's really not the answer. It's a tacky, clumsy suggestion that immigration is the fault of the immigrants, whom we should blame rather than the political class who are actually responsible. And of the politicians, Labour in particular - the party that betrayed this nation, trashed its people and trampled on its voters when it used open-door immigration as a clumsy, treasonous political tool. For that it must forfeit our votes forever. 

Hell near for Hoogstraten

The Mail runs a piece this morning on one of the most loathsome pieces of ordure ever spawned on these islands - the thug Hoogstraten. I have nothing to add to the fine demolition job done by the paper except to observe that, at 68, all the pains of Hell are nearing for this monstrous man, whom I hope is kept awake at night by the knowledge of his own foulness.

Banks, Big Pharma and Corporates are crims shock

It seems that the revelation that banks, big pharma and the international corporates all indulge in deeply criminal activity is news to our MPs. SOCA, in a rare and unusual effort by Parliament to exercise control over these semi-detached part of the State, has been compelled to reveal evidence that the big corporates employed criminals and criminal methods thinly disguised as 'private investigators' to carry out a plethora of criminal acts against individuals.

The banks, pharma companies and corporates who used the criminal 'investigators' were not alone; SOCA's interest came from the fact that organised crime used the same criminal methods and the same criminal operators as your bank. "I can do your phone tap later today, mate; as it happens I've got a burglary to do in W11 for a bank"

One of the key reasons that parts of our secret State are so reluctant to expose the activities of this criminal mileau to the light is that our intelligence services are also undoubtedly dependent on them to carry out a host of 'black' operations with deniability and no links to the official spooks. Cops on specialist squads who are wannabee spooks have also undoubtedly sought to use the same methods. And not a few of the criminal 'investigators' will be ex-cops - retired or forced out for disciplinary reasons. So it's actually "I can do your phone tap later today, mate; as it happens I've got a burglary to do in W11 for a bank and a spycam to plant up that way for the Vauxhall boys"

Even if I'm prepared to temporarily overlook the needs of the intelligence organisations, as a special case, the police and it's weird and wonderful offshoots, organised criminals and the big corporates should be treated no differently from offending journalists if they use such methods - that means dawn raids, lengthy questioning, widespread arrests and criminal charges.

HRH the Marquis of Coton

Not even the republican Indie can refrain from running the only story in the news today on its front page. The birth of a child (well what did you expect? A piglet?) to their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge is even the Guardian's lead story, with a thousand comments already, some of them chuckle-aloud amusing. The red-tops speculate widely on the young man's name, or rather speculate narrowly, veering between James, George and Charles, with never a Wayne, Darryl or Tyrone even considered. His first names are quire irrelevant, of course; he will be given about a dozen, as is normal. No, it's his title that will be critical. As the son of a duke he will be a marquis of course, but taking his title from where exactly in his father's honour? Rupert Brooke may help;

For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there's none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton's full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you'd not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.

And there you have it. For a United Kingdom with such a plethora of laws that not even the Police can keep track of them, with crimes so foul that not even the Prime Minister can name them publicly, there can be only one choice:- let's welcome his Royal Highness the Marquis of Coton to court.  

Cameron the porn crusader

The walls of Herculaneum are covered with vile pornography depicting sexual acts of amazing and imaginative depravity, painted into wet plaster with rare care and skill some 2,000 years ago. And the camera hadn't been invented for five minutes in the 1850's before it was being used to capture unfortunate young women who had forgotten to put any clothes on. Muybridge had hardly let the silver nitrate dry on his stop-action galloping horse pics before an assistant was using the technique to capture a creature with two backs; the polaroid Land camera's popularity owed little to instant photos of family birthday parties, VHS won over Betamax becsuse of Californian pornography and indeed it is estimated that one minute in three spent on the interweb is spent watching porn.

Cameron wants to draw a distinction between 'good' porn and 'bad' porn, in other words to regulate international porn on the internet in conformity with UK laws on sexual behaviour. Never mind that sex with a Turbot is legal in Kazakhstan, or miffling is permitted after dark in Tashkent. Oh well, good luck to him.

Italian collapse rapidly approaching?

Italian voters have long been fed up with their corrupt parties pigging-out on public money; in 1993 a referendum motion to end party funding was passed, only to have been completely ignored by the politicians. Recent events prompted the shaky Italian Cabinet (desperate for some populist legitimacy if lacking any such democratic authority) - to propose an actual phasing-out of funding by 2017, starting with a reduction in this July's instalment. Unsurprisingly, yesterday only Beppe Grillo's 5-Star party and Bossi's Lega Nord voted for the measure - it was defeated by all the other parties voting together. It won't, however, last for long. 

Anyone following Hatfield Girl's painful accounts of the failure of the Italian economy - and the virtual bread rationing was for me one of the most telling indicators - will realise that the crisis is deep and real. A recent piece from the LSE puts the contraction as worse on just about every measure than the 1929 - 1934 collapse, and predicts 'The collapse of the Italian state finances is rapidly approaching. It will have an enormous impact on the Eurozone and the European Union'. Ambrose in the Telegraph has been saying so now for months.

Even my nephew, a studious mediaevalist spending the Summer in Chiantishire with no desire to notice anything after the fourteenth century, has been unable to neglect the malfeasances of bankers, panderers, frauds and politicians in Italian life today for those confined to the bolgia. (in translation only for me, but my valued 1976 edition with the translation by Dorothy L Sayers remains the best)

Timing-wise, an Italian collapse around October would suit me, with the € back to 1.25 or so.

'Working at Home'

Reaching a certain level of seniority in employed work is marked by one's ability to announce breezily from time to time that 'I'll be working from home tomorrow'. Sometimes it's really beneficial, such as sorting a complex final construction account that needs quantities of ciggies and coffee only available at home. Most of the time it means a visit from the plumber or waiting for a parcel for which we senior types aren't willing to take a day's holiday. Whichever, it's a valuable privilege to be used carefully, not exploited. Except if your name is Phillippa Williamson and you work in the public sector.

Phillippa decided she wanted it all - a top London public sector job-for-the-girls, a fab home in the Lake District, a child and a family life. Her first grab was at HM Revenue and Customs, where she persuaded them to let her do a five day job in four, permanently 'working from home' for the fifth. Then she took the job as Serious Fraud Office chief where (so ironically) she not only decided that she only needed to work three days a week in London, but that the taxpayer should pay for her travel and accommodation when she did so; she changed her job into permanently working at home, with additional payments if she had to come into the office. And all for the wholly selfish and self-interested reasons - to spend time with her teenage son at her beautiful home.  ‘Now I have a Black-Berry, a webcam, I can teleconference – it’s amazing how it’s all changed. Part of my job is to think about where we are going to take the organisation and I do that more contemplative side better in my home environment.’ said Phillippa to the Mail in 2009, when the direction she was taking the SFO was straight down the shitter. With an absent boss who had already decried that the SFO shouldn't tackle any cases that were 'too expensive' to investigate - those against large global corporations - Phillippa could chillax by the Lakes at the taxpayer's expense.

The Commons PAC yesterday published a damning report on what to many eyes amounts to a serious moral fraud. The Chair of the PAC said;

“Mr Alderman provided the SFO’s Chief Executive Officer Phillippa Williamson with a contract specifying that her place of work was her home address in the Lake District. She worked there two days a week. When Ms Williamson worked at the SFO’s London offices three days a week, taxpayers paid for her travel and hotel costs to London, at a cost of nearly £100,000 between 2008 and 2012. For the CEO of an important public body such as the Serious Fraud Office to be granted such arrangements is quite astounding.

“Furthermore, a payment of over £400,000 was made to enhance her pension, even though the necessary approval from Cabinet Office to do so was not in place. The Cabinet Office should explain how this payment was allowed to go ahead without being approved."

And exactly why is no-one going to prison for this?

Labour can't be trusted with the NHS

Voters in the North East are learning painfully that Labour is best when it's, er, Tory. Having failed dismally to manage any sort of economic resurgence in the old Northern heartlands, Labour actually managed to widen the gap between rich and poor in the UK, had more young people out of work than any other post-war government, destroyed working-class communities with reckless immigration and so criminally maladministered the nation's finances that the great-grandchildren of all voters will still be paying for it. But it's with the NHS that Labour betrayed its own voter base most grievously. 

After throwing a tsunami of cash at an organisation unable to make good use of it Labour managed to double GPs' salaries to over £100k but cut their work to M -F 9 - 5, managed to pay NHS executives salaries and bonuses many times the Prime Minister's own salary, and fostered a culture of carelessness and irresponsibility that was ultimately responsible for over 13,000 needless pointless deaths in just 14 hospitals from poor care, medical errors and inadequate management. As the Telegraph points out, for Andrew Burnham, one of the Labour politicians responsible, to defend indignantly his own reputation whilst 13,000 families have lost so much more is behaviour of the most revolting self-interest. But what would you expect from a professional politician?

As with the banking and financial debacle, people should be in prison for what happened in the NHS under Labour - perhaps including Andrew Burnham. Why aren't they?

The Wisdom of Crowds - 47

The poor old Indie runs a piece this morning following research by the Royal Statistical Society and KCL that 'proves' that the public is 'wrong' on a whole range of social issues; for instance "Benefit fraud: the public think that £24 of every £100 of benefits is fraudulently claimed. Official estimates are that just 70 pence in every £100 is fraudulent - so the public conception is out by a factor of 34."

To a point, Lord Copper. It depends how you define 'fraudulently' - the researchers interpreting it in the strictest sense, whilst the public no doubt including 'undeservingly' in their definition. And the public's view that one-in-four on the dole needn't be is probably more accurate. Nil points, KCL. 

Likewise 'Teen pregnancy' - the public figure almost certainly includes single mums in their early twenties who may have been older than 19 when they gave birth but are included in the generic cohort . And immigration. And crime. 

In fact, all that Hetan Shah's little exercise proves is that on a sensible definition of social issues the crowd one again has the wisdom whilst the officious office-holder is exposed as a nitpicking disingenuist. No doubt there is research that 'proves' that only 0.87% of them actually are ....

I'd love to see Plumbers in Parliament

Supporters of the Trade Unions have only got it partially right in their condemnation of Miliband's metropolitan elite party; they're not opposed to having working-class union members in Parliament; like their chums in the Conservative and LibDem parties, they're opposed to having anyone in Parliament who is not a dedicated member of Oborne's Political Class. Chair of the sixth-form debating society, Vice-President of the SU at Uni, internship at the UN then a 'job' as a researcher for an MP is the perfect resume for today's ambitious politician - just so long as it doesn't show a real job anywhere. 

And the system delivers to Mr Ed wholly inexperienced blow-ins like Luciana Berger (above) who can be parachuted into any convenient constituency in the country. 

Frankly, I'd love to see more plumbers in Parliament. And bus drivers, surveyors, army officers, farmers, WI Chairladies, small businessmen, nurses and merchant seamen. In fact anyone who has ever lived a real working life, whether a member of a Trade Union or of the Chamber of Commerce. I'd love to hear a Parliamentary debate thick with regional voices and local expressions, rather than dull Oxford English politicospeak. I'd love to see independent MPs balancing the gains to Anglia against the risks to Wessex when considering legislation.  

What I'll never agree to is an unjust impost that robs ordinary people to keep those like Berger in Schmuck and Schmutter.

Back to State party funding

The three dying private political parties would just love to be State funded in line with Christopher Kelly's and Hayden Phillips' proposals. They would become permanent Parties of State and assume a constitutional position and legitimacy that they completely lack under current arrangements - yes, any of the three can still be reduced to nothingness merely by the British people casting fewer votes for it. So far the Tories have prevented them all signing up to it - even with LibDem partners gagging for cash and on the verge of bankruptcy. Now the pressure is on from Labour, making the point that the party belongs to the professional metropolitan political class that staffs it and not to the Trade Unions and Co-operative Societies that fund it. 

The fraud and corruption inherent in Kelly and Phillips' proposals are likely to become nakedly apparent in 2015. UKIP are forecast to win a large and substantial share of the popular vote - but if they fail to get two MPs in the house, they get zero funding. The Lib Dems, even if they score a third of the popular vote that UKIP gets, would get £5 a vote so long as they had the minimum two members. And as the funding will always be based on the results of the last election, the incumbent parties will never lose their advantage. 

Both Kelly and Phillips realise their proposals are hugely unpopular with the British people, and for that reason both have denied any choice to the voter on whether parties are funded in their name. If you vote, they fund. And if five million of us choose not to vote in protest, they simply increase the funding per vote by 25%. Under their squalid, third world banana republic crooked little scam of a deal, the three big parties would never lose. 

Party funding is the most important item on our domestic political agenda - and the thieving class are just waiting for the right time to introduce it.  

New Australians eat sashimi

For me, the archetypal Australian is a small, pale, mincing management accountant or HR professional living in London with an expensive gym membership who likes to get back annually for the gay festival, or a humourless fat-arsed administrator married to an Aussie vet also working over here ("Darryl doesn't do small animals") with fantasies of über-feminist superiority. Today, Australia is a gay-friendly, social-democratic part of south-east Asia with traces of European culture, a sort of Sweden of the southern hemisphere. As with cannibals with bones in their hair and steaming cooking pots, the beer-swilling Aussie lad in shorts and cut-sleeved shirt is a historic stereotype, no longer recognisable as a parody of the actuality. Except of course to some Twat called Guy Rundle who for some unknown reason the Guardian has permitted to pen a column.  

Guy, sweetie, your 2,000 word winge is thirty years too late. Those Fosters lager blokes are ironic anti-parodies, dear, not stereotypes. Today's Australian has a lisp and likes sashimi for lunch.

Why I support the Qat ban

From the Guardian;

"They are always talking about a ban," said one Somali man in his 20s, who chewed qat from a blue plastic bag while sitting on a table where paperwork recorded the day's deliveries. "But if they ban it, I will go back to my home country," he said.

All your vinyl belong us

I've still got a shelf-full of fine vinyl; all the Floyd's early albums, everything by Bowie pre-1990, all the old standards and a good selection of embarrassments (Shakatak?). There's no question in my mind that it's all mine - subject to fair restrictions, of course. It's fair to digitise it so I can listen to it on different machines. It's not fair to sell copies on the interweb, or even to give copies away anonomously. 

I'd be pretty miffed if the record companies wrote to me to say that Oh no, I didn't actually own that music at all; and that to continue to hold onto my vinyl, I must pay an annual license fee or give the records back.

But this is exactly the pricing model that the information industry is now working towards. The first step is 'cloud' computing - moving both programmes and data from your own magnetic memories to their server farms. Then instead of buying a programme you'll pay an annual fee instead to use the latest version - Microsoft has already gone over to this for new Windows versions. When sufficient people have signed up they'll implement a no pay - no access policy - guaranteeing them an enhanced and secure revenue stream.

And they're all at it. Google Chrome's thuggish and crooked efforts to install itself covertly on my machine every time I updated some other programme, or the efforts of some positively repugnant search engine called 'Babylon' to replace Google as my default did neither any favours in my mind. I have become more committed than ever to open-source software running from my own hard drives. You can't trust any of the buggers.

Cull the gluttonous scum

The reckless abandon with which the BBC threw around the TV tax in a series of pay-offs and golden handshakes, with faceless and pointless executives troughing hundreds of thousands each, unearned, unjustified, is really just the tip of the iceberg of feckless gluttony from those who have their grubby little fists on our public funds. For an organisation that so pompously sets itself up as a guardian of the public morals and a model of rectitude, the reality is a grubby, chiselling crooked peculation of public funds by managers for whom probity and stewardship are moral concepts as alien as modesty and humility. 

This latest episode must surely now convince everyone that the BBC simply deserves no place as a tax funded body in its current form. Only when those gluttonous scum are taking the money from the pockets of their shareholders rather than from the helpless British public will there be a chance that their greed can be curbed. 

Public Sector 1% - MPs 32%

Yep; at a time when, quite rightly, we're holding the public sector down to a 1% pay rise MPS have told the IPSA that they're grossly underpaid and deserve at least £86,000 - a whopping pay increase outstripping any corporate current pay deal anywhere.

Let's allow them to do it. In fact, let's encourage the purblind, snuffling shit-faced toads to go for £100k after the 2015 election, with increased subsidies for their bars and restaurants. But let's also demand from each candidate standing in those elections a statement on whether they'd support or oppose the proposal - and cast our votes accordingly.

You'd need a heart of stone ...

Beekeeping has traditionally been considered the preserve of harmless old buffers, retired clergy and the like - a gentle, peaceful occupation, tending the hives in veil and gloves, wielding the smoke-puffer with gentle care. So one can only speculate at the arguments, militancy, schism and heartbreak that has split the world of beekeeping in Austria; the Austrian government now recognises not one but two bodies authorised to licence the movement of hives to high Summer pastures; 

The Landesverband für Bienenzucht (National Association for Beekeeping) I'd guess is the older association, for the Landesverband für zukunfts- und erwerbsorientierte Imkerei (National Association for forward-looking and profit-making beekeeping) rather gives it away in the title. No doubt the ideological differences are passionately debated in the tavernen and schenken ...

The Gloomy Trousers of Uncle Vanya

Terry Pratchett coined the phrase to describe a canon of literature so utterly negative that no redeeming virtue could be salvaged; such is the interview by Slovenian philosopher Renata Salecl in Der Spiegel.

All life is misery. There is no joy. We have too much freedom, and too great a choice. There is no happiness. There is no alternative. Capitalism is neurosis.

Yep; what we all need is a big, responsible State to make all those awkward consumer decisions for us; Can't choose between ten brands of washing machine? Let the State allocate you a place in the two-year queue for a single government brand instead. Don't shop - just receive a ration that the State decides for you. Don't think - the State will do all the thinking that's needed. 

It's a lesson I suppose that some people - clearly poor Renata included - are just pathologically incapable of benefiting from freedom. Of course, Communist nations used to keep tame philosophers on the payroll. These days the buggers have to earn a living. No wonder some of them aren't happy.

UK's Stasi upsets Fritz and Michael Eavis

A glance at the following images will explain why the Germans are so miffed at GCHQ copying all the traffic that passes through the UK's big IP pipes;

Practically all of Europe's IP traffic either passes through the UK or through undersea cables close to our shores - and which the Navy have long practice at accessing to attach 'hoovering' kit. It's really no good William Hague telling the Germans that we're stealing their data for their own good - they had that from the Stasi for a number of years and are no longer inclined to give it credence.

What they do with it once they get it is also questionable; as the Guardian reports today (and as reported here yesterday), shady police units maintain secret police records on law-abiding individuals; 

"Another activist, Guy Taylor, 46, who campaigns against capitalism, discovered that he was spied on while attending Glastonbury festival – which is known to have been frequented by a number of police spies in recent decades. He and Catt are among the thousands of activists who have been categorised as domestic extremists on the unit's files. The Met previously used the term "subversives" to describe citizens with radical political views whom it was spying on."

Poor Fritz, whose every search for images of "bauernmädchen mit oven gloves" is now recorded at Cheltenham, isn't happy. And for once, this is a good thing. 

ACPO's poisonous convenience

I have no doubt that the appalling revelations about the 'Special Demonstrations Squad' have their origin in the mindset that made use of ACPO as an alternative to democratic policing. ACPO offered Home Secretaries and Chief Constables an easy and unaccountable way in which to do all sort of dodgy and questionable policing that wouldn't stand the scrutiny of democracy in the light of day; the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (which infiltrated environmental groups with agents provacateur) the Confidential Intelligence Unit (which created threats from innocent political activists) and the national Extremism Tactical Co-Ordination Unit (taken away from ACPO by the Met Commissioner from 2011) are all examples of the type of unregulated, uncontrolled semi-detached policing that the 'Special Demonstrations Squad' appears to have been. 

The one lesson in this is that the public can never, ever trust the police to govern themselves. At senior officer level they're profoundly corrupt, seduced by power and purblind from ambition. Not one single Chief Constable in the land can be trusted to run his own force without effective public and civilian oversight and governance. Let this lesson never be forgotten. 

Will cyclists face ban from London offices?

You may have noticed that the anti-smoking bigots have now moved onto the fantasy dangers of what they are terming 'third hand smoke' - meaning the smoke smell that adheres to the clothing of smokers. Smokers, they declare, are covered in nasty PMs and carcinogenic PAHs and BaPs and they should wear disposable plastic onesies every time they have a fag.

No one, ever, has died from second hand or third hand cigarette smoke. Meanwhile, 5,000 Londoners a year are actually dying prematurely from the effects of vehicle air pollution. This blog has pointed out before (HERE  HERE and HERE ) that London's roadsides actually expose one to many times the levels of harmful particulates, chemicals and benzene derivatives than being locked in a closed car with a chain-smoker. London's worst roads have eight times the concentration of harmful substances than a smoky car, according to Aberdeen University. 

Now a lobby group called Clean Air in London has squeezed a full set of London air quality data out of Boris and the real situation is worse than anyone imagined; the worst roads for PM 2.5s are actually as follows;

Now you have to feel sorry for cyclists - I mean those who commute to the office by bike. They're actually exposing themselves to the very worst levels of air pollution, far worse than making the same journey sealed inside a car with a smoker. And when they get to the office ... yep, they're covered in nasty PMs and carcinogenic PAHs and BaPs and all the things the third-hand-smoke faddists rant against. So will cyclists who don't shower and change clothes when they arrive at work be banned from the workplace along with smokers?

GM? We just don't trust them.

I've no idea what Monsanto has done specifically to annoy so many Austrians, but the very word was a curse amongst almost everyone I met there recently; the agrigiant was held liable for everything from bee-deaths, declining wildlife, nitrate contamination and aphid infestation to the poor weather. Needless to say they're firmly against GM foods - but not for the reasons that Boy Dave and his trusty sidekick Owen Paterson are campaigning against. 

Cameron has gone on the offensive in defence of GM foods. Emulating the great Gummer, who force-fed his daughter Cordelia with minced horsemeat to prove that beef was safe to eat, Dave has invited the world's press to his table to witness him feeding his family with a plethora of GM foodstuffs. He's addressing the food safety aspect  as though this is where the public objection lies. Which is utterly pointless.

The reason most people oppose GM is that they simply don't trust Monsanto. Their grain is sterile by design in the F1 generation, meaning farmers can't simply retain 1/10th of each crop to sow for the following year, they have to buy each year's seed from Monsanto. Any firm whose business model is based on establishing a monopoly supply position can't be trusted. And until the US has been growing the stuff for 50 years and all the negative environmental effects become apparent there why should we pollute our own farmland?

Sorry, we simply prefer the alternative that has already improved crop yields a hundred times more than Monsanto could ever achieve. By selective breeding. 

The idiot boy clearly has a political death-wish in lining himself up with yet another issue utterly antipathetic to the public view. What on earth will he support next? Free broadband for kiddy-fiddlers? Early release for Ian Brady? Banning the flag of St George from churches?

On the side of the Angels

Simon Jenkins has a decent dig at the crooks, shills, shysters and frauds who run FIFA and the IOC this morning; after conning the UK out of £9bn for their beanfest of Lithuanian tarts, blacked out limos and goody bags packed with Columbian marching powder, they imagined that squeezing £12bn out of the favelas of Rio would give them another go, this time with sunshine and bronzed bottoms. Back here in 2012 we cynics predicted a popular uprising against the Zil lanes, with IOC functionaries being pelted in their limos with ordure mid-pipe. It never happened - they just added half a billion to the security measures and another £250m to the publicity budget. But I'm not so sure it couldn't happen in Rio in 2016; it's therefore imperative that we do all we can to encourage the most lavish, extravagant and wasteful games ever.

After all, it may be our last chance to see crawling on hands and knees an IOC member stripped naked by an angry Brazilian crowd, his Lithuanian tart dismissed and his IOC limo jacked up on bricks while youths high on his IOC drugs-packet nick the wheels. It would be worth every penny of 2012.

Meanwhile our own crooks, shills, shysters and frauds who ran the CQC find themselves unexpectedly exposed; Cynthia Bower, Jill Finney and Anna Jefferson have been named as the scum who tried to cover up a negative report. Despite the redacted report trying to hide them by naming them as 'Mr' alphabet letters. I think it's also time that all UK public sector senior managers who are members of Common Purpose to have to declare it - as Masons do. What's the betting that at least two out of these three are CP shills?

NHS loses its Halo

Just two or three years ago even implied criticism of the NHS was unthinkable. It was the nation's sacred cow, free to wander unhindered and unquestioned; it defined 'Britishness' and even to hint that it was less than perfect was alike to declaring one's support for kiddy-fiddling. 

How things have changed. The accepted view is now that the NHS is an out-of-control behemoth, unmanageable, our hospitals death-factories, contaminated with deadly bacteria and viruses, uncleaned and unhealthy, staffed with uncaring incompetents, our GPs overpaid fat-cats who golf at weekends while patients die. Above all, we have accepted that NHS management is not only wholly disfunctional, but criminal in its negligence and grossly culpable for its cover-ups.

And now, to little surprise, the Care Quality Commission, the body that itself should have policed standards, has been caught in a massive cover up. This time it's new born babies that have been dying in Herodian proportions. And all the while the top guns, like senior bankers, escape jail. 

The reality is that there are many more good, professional, dedicated, caring and committed professionals in the NHS than there are incompetent fraudsters, shysters and other senior managers. A large part of the problem has been a culture of Managerialism that has robbed the professions and the Royal colleges of their authority to secure professional standards. 

But not until we have strangled the last NHS bureaucrat with the small intestines of the last NHS board member will we be able to reclaim a useful health service.

A bit of a Brazilian

The event that must be sending little frissons of unease amongst the besuited oligarchs at the G8 is the spontaneous demonstration by about a million Brazilians last night. The Guardian reckons it was prompted by another rise in bus fares, but El Pais has the better story; it was unplanned, entirely unexpected, not organised, without leaders and with a simple and universal message "We want to change Brazil". Young and old, from all classes, they just appeared, committed and angry. El Pais quotes Brazilian historian Francisco Carlos Teixeira as explaining that people felt that politicians "no longer represent them". 

It really does seem that this is more than just a temporary though global crisis of confidence in our political systems. It's really no good telling people they're being silly, it will all come to nothing and they're best off putting their trust in their local Tory MP and carrying on. That response misses the mood by a country mile and marks the responder as remote, out of touch and actually part of the problem. 

Of course (whilst avoiding potentially racist national stereotypes etc) it's possible that Brazilians are a tad more spontaneous than the inhabitants of Esher, or that Brazilian Monday night TV is even more banal than our own or that the Brazilian streets are actually not a bad place to be on a weekday evening, but it's the sheer unexpectedness of the thing rather than its size or actions that is the key point. And that's why there will be a few anxious phone calls home today from Loch Erne

Broken China

Ambrose turns his basilisk gaze to China in his latest Telegraph column, and what wondrous gloomy reading it makes. Not all his readers are happy that his focus has shifted from Europe, though;

China China China... I am sick of these doom and gloom stories about China. I want to hear some good news... like that Deutsche Bank is not broke, or that Credit Agricole is not a zombie that needs a bailout, or that there aren't 470 billion euros of construction loans sitting on the books of the Spanish banks... enough bad debt to sink the entire euro zone, and all from one misguided property boom.

 Meanwhile Boy George thinks that property booms are quite useful tools for bribing the electorate and his doing his best to stoke the UK furnace

Another commentator notes that since Chinese lenders and borrowers both are the same State there is no crisis; it's taking money from one pocket and putting it in the other. Whereas (after bailouts and nationalisations) British lenders and borrowers are ...oh, I see what they've done there

'Someone's got to win the next election'

'Someone's got to win the next election' runs the headline for a Speccie piece by James Forsyth, making the point that even though the electoral prospects of Conservative, Labour and LibDems are equally dire, the 2015 intake of MPs will come from their ranks and a government must be formed.

And this will be the case even if turnout falls to 20%, if only one in five of us bother to vote. Unlike true democracies, our corrupt third world standard electoral quotas (maintained by Labour and the LibDems), widespread and acknowledged electoral fraud and electoral malpractice, which places the UK beyond all European standards of electoral probity, will put an MP into Parliament if two bribed electors and a dog called Bert submit ballots. 

The 2015 ballot is shaping up to be a contest between the UK Political Class and the people of Britain. That neither will score an outright victory is perhaps less important than the watershed that may occur; either the Political Class realises it faces a deep crisis of democratic legitimacy and sacrifices Party for democracy (yes, unlikely isn't it?) or it is effectively abandoned by a population no longer constrained to accede to obedience.

Syria - a game of two halves

Bluntly, there's no mileage for the UK in any active involvement in or support for either side in what is squaring up to be a very bloody sectarian war. The choice is between supporting Hezbollah and the mad Mullahs of Iran, or Al Quada and the insane Imams of Pakistan. This is a Shi'ite / Sunni war, not a proxy for East vs. West or communism vs. capitalism. This is Islam eating itself, and the harsh reality is that every Jihadist from either side who succeeds in killing themselves in Syria is one less that we have to worry about. 

The press may be concerned about the several hundred Pakistani youths reported to have left the UK to fight for the rebels. They shouldn't be. Those few that aren't killed by Assad's forces should be arrested, convicted and imprisoned if they try to return to the UK - either way, they're out of action. 

As in the Iran / Iraq war, the two sides will only have the will to stop fighting once a certain level of blood has been spilled; we're nowhere near that point yet in Syria. Both sides still believe victory is possible and are negotiating for weapons, not peace. The best thing we can do is stand back and let them get on with it until they're both exhausted, then step in with the reconstruction contracts.

EDL? UAF? Not PLU.

Simon Jenkins has penned a fine piece for the Guardian on the impact of real rather than virtual demonstrations, and the role of the city square in rocking the foundations of government. All quite true. No amount of interweb polemic can equal the image on the evening news of a copper's cudgel rising and falling on the person of some patchouli-scented crustie. However, it's probably harder than you think to get folk out on the streets and squares if I'm any example to go by.

I've been on exactly two 'demonstrations' in my life; the first was the Countryside Alliance march against the Hunting Ban, the second the anti Blair-War march in February 2003. I thoroughly enjoyed both of them. And on that limited experience, here's my checklist for bringing Britain's silent majority out on the streets:-

1. The ostensible reason has to be intellectually defensible with a degree of moral respectability 
2. Fellow protesters and march organisers must be law-abiding and committed to peaceful protest
3. Demonstrable shared values help; I remember how all we men doffed our caps as we passed the Cenotaph on the CA march
4. The likelihood of bumping into people you will like and may nip-off for a pint with should be high
5. The march route should pass a few decent restaurants for lunch (a Westminster to Mayfair leg at about one-ish is ideal)
6. Above all, fellow marchers must be PLU. There is nothing more guaranteed to prevent a Brit marching than the possibility of being accidentally photographed with someone whose acquaintance they would normally avoid. 

Oh, and until Waitrose start selling Throwing Vegetables in 450g blister packs ("perfectly decayed, piquant with sulphur and squishiness, firm enough for a decent lob but deliciously rotten") these things must be entirely non-physical. 

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.