Are these kids tomorrow's coal miners?

Are these kids tomorrow's coal miners?

Not a referenced post, but picking up on Steve's comments, which are worthy of a whole series of posts, on the replacement of substantial numbers of jobs in the economy by robots. But surely it's not all negative? I'd far rather send expendible robots 3,000' underground to mine coal, for instance, than men. Methane, silicone dust, explosives, flooding, rock falls, risk and injury all avoided - and mines that can work 24 hours a day without needing a town full of people built on top of them.

Well, a bit of googling found a mine robot prototyped in 2013. They must be working somewhere by now. 

Not just coal, but tin, copper, rare earths. Robot miners can exploit small seams deeper and more hostile than men can. Even underwater - what about mining the seabed within the 200 mile economic zone? Just another post-Brexit asset we've got. 

It may also be worth compiling a running list of those professions most at risk from robots. At the top of mine are fighter pilots; it makes no sense building fast jets half the tech of which are pilot UI & life support systems. Drones with just weapons and avionics can have greater endurance, greater speed, tighter G and in direst emergency can be flown into a target, all at a tenth the cost of a conventional fast jet with no risk to the highly trained pilot. RAF fighter pilots of the future can also be fat, middle aged console-kings downing Chinese Migs in their underpants, reserving our lean, fit risk lords for vital gardening, cooking and bar-service roles for which robots can never replicate human skills. 

Sajid Javid just a Marxist central statist, says Guardian

Simon Jenkins has penned a corker of a column for today's Guardian - it should be compulsory reading for every town planner, every council officer and every elected politician in Britain. I, of course, commend it to you. Just to give you a flavour;

"Demand is not need. The famous quarter of a million is crude “family formation”. The implication is Leninist, that the state’s duty is a home for every citizen, irrespective of choice, price or district. I could answer that Britain has 700,000 empty houses, and London last year converted thousands of offices into flats. Is that the end of the shortage? Only a bureaucrat in a bubble could talk such nonsense, yet the BBC trots it out as a “crisis” day after day.

By imposing one size fits all building targets on all communities across Britain, Javid is seeking total mastery of the private housing sector. He is completing a last link in Labour’s 1940s nationalisation agenda, bringing to housing the same welfare centralisation, bureaucracy and insensitivity now afflicting the NHS."

He makes the moot point that a changing, dynamic economy such as Britain's needs a high degree of labour mobility - which means that a large rented sector is better for the nation than a workforce of inflexible, static owner-occupiers. By accident rather than design, this what we've got. 

He also identifies that housing isn't a British problem but a London problem, and the answer is to increase density in London. I've been saying this for years. The photo below is of a 1920s council house estate within Zone 3. I'll bet that most are now RTBs and rented out - and that such owners wouldn't turn down the offer of a free additional rental room for every one they own by co-operating in replacing these tiny, cold houses with four storey apartment blocks lining the road frontages.  

If councils can't stomach that, I've also long advocated building on sites such as Blackheath. There's nothing natural or heath-like about this vast space; it has no more ecological merit than a municipal gang-mowed playing field. The tiny corner of original gorse-clad, undulating heathland left intact on Blackheath is used by local dog-walkers, who come to watch the outdoors homosexuals playing in the bushes. 

Jenkins is also right that money needs to be switched to managed hostels for those simply incapable of sustaining themselves in their own rented flats. Anyone who has watched an episode or two of  those TV docs that follow high court bailiffs and sheriffs will know that evictions for non-payment are generally of two sorts; those just taking the piss, who move on from private landlord to private landlord as serial rippers-off, and those who genuinely just have such chaotic lives that they can't be trusted to live independently. The latter are deserving of care, and need to live in managed units being fed if necessary, and given some pocket money for clothes and cosmetics.

Yes, I know that 300k net migrants a year are a huge pressure on housing, but as Jenkins says, such pressure is demand and not need. They will have to live in garden sheds, garages and 6 to a room in their relatives' homes if they cannot afford commercial rents. Eventually things will find an equilibrium.   

Gunning for controlled EU borders

Many of Europe's nations take a fairly laid-back approach to firearms, and do so with hardly any of their citizens being shot at all. Many others, including the UK, are constipated about weapons to the extent that even some children's toys are illegal, and lots of people still get shot. In Austria, for example, only military-style Category A firearms are prohibited; with a Weapons Pass one can own Category B arms - pistols of all types and semi-auto rifles. Without a pass, anyone over 18 can buy and own as many shotguns and bolt-magazine rifles as they like - but all such Category C weapons must be registered through a gun-shop. For black-powder weapons, cannon, older revolvers, muzzle loaders, CS gas guns, Verey pistols and the like - category D - no registration at all is needed and they can be bought by mail order. 

As ORF reports this week, when police investigated a weapons-pass holder over an unrelated matter recently, in addition to an arsenal large enough to equip an assault platoon with pistols and semi-auto assault rifles (all legally held) they found fragmentation grenades, light machine guns, fully auto assault rifles and other Cat A kit. They told him he was very naughty, confiscated them and fined him €6,000. 

In the UK I expect the Cat A haul would have earned him 20 years. This enormous disparity in criminal law is just another fundamental reason that the 'convergence' needed to create a united Europe is many, many generations away. 

An Austrian schoolgirl returning home from a school trip to London was stopped at airport security late last year with a CS gas spray in her hand luggage. Cue panic and armed police. She explained that many schoolgirls in Austria carry them quite legally, given the new threats in public places, and that she had brought it into the UK with her. She had no idea she could get 5 years chokey in Britain for it. Thankfully, on this occasion she was allowed to go home without charge. 

As long as Europe's nations value their own standards and want to retain their own customs and laws on these matters, borders are needed - needed for all our good. 

The mostly-legal gun haul - only the grenades earned the owner a fine

Art is Art, Crap is Crap

It was in 1985 that I sat spellbound in Ronnie Scott's at Nina Simone. A musician, songwriter and performer of the most superlative talent, whose cadence, timing, keyboard touch and vocal skills are simply utterly brilliant. I'll remember that gig all my life. She had me, soul and heart, and that's what real art does.

However, this is where the logic of the illiberal left falls. "Nina Simone is Black. Nina Simone is a great artist. Therefore all black people are great artists" is simply a logical fallacy. I've tried and tried, for example, to see any merit in Maya Angelou's dreary words. Agaist Seamus Heaney, Robert Graves or even Larkin her verse is clumsy, ugly, untalented stuff, dross that should never have escaped from some smudgy gestetnered student rag.

Corrupt EU Nomenklatura miffed at Romanian justice win

Political corruption is endemic throughout Europe, and Britain can only boast that our populist checks and balances make it harder here for bent politicians to cheat, steal and defraud than elsewhere. Despite a Parliament-wide expenses fraud scandal in the UK, jut a handful of the most egregious thieves were jailed. The political establishment rapidly realised that the Commons green benches would be empty if all the crooked MPs were acted against. The rest remain on probation, watched by the hawks of a free press that they yearn to muzzle. 

Elsewhere, auditors simply refuse to consider the EU's risible offerings of accounts. So mired by fraud and corruption, so deeply infiltrated by organised criminal networks, so abused by bent and hungry power-seekers are the Federation's finances that no one in Europe regards seriously their fatuous offers of financial records. The EU is corrupt to its core. 

I must admit that my previous confident prediction that François Fillon would walk the French Presidential election looks somewhat shaky now. It emerges that he fraudulently bunged his family members hundreds of thousands of crooked stolen Euros on the pretence that they worked for him - much on the same basis that our MPs claim their young nieces are qualified parliamentary assistants worthy of a £30k salary. It's just theft. Just not the sort of theft that earned a young rioter who stole three bottles of water six months banged up in a Victorian cell with a Muslim rapist and a bucket to shit in. 

So when Romania passed a decree legalising theft, fraud and crookedness by politicians and public officials provided the sums stolen came to less than £38k, bent little ears pricked up all over Europe. This may be small beer in the UK, where £38k is just a year's worth of flipping homes by our MPs, but in Romania it will build you a tasteless vulgar palace with gold taps and individual stables for the goats. I'll bet the EU nomenklatura were particularly interested; if they exempted all transactions of less than €0.5m from accounting transparency, they might just be able to find a bent auditor somewhere in Europe to sign off their accounts. All seemed well and establishment politicians and public officials were rubbing their hands.

Then the people of Romania took to the streets. The politicians remembered what happened the last time they did so, and rapidly backed down. The thieves decree was rescinded. All over Europe one could almost hear the gentle hiss as miffed politicians abandoned dreams of new scams and frauds and let the air out of the hubristic pomposity that criminal immunity confers. Little tear-soaked tissues were flushed from the cloaca of the Berlaymont. Empty Sancerre bottles crashed inverted into Westminster ice buckets. We, the people, have won this round - but the price of a Parliament free from corruption is eternal vigilance.

BBC & RT news rivalry can only benefit the public

The chap criticising RT on the Today programme declared that it was a state-sponsored national broadcaster subject to government control and which represented the views of the establishment, before pausing awkwardly for a second or two as the leaden weight of the irony filled his soul. It was, I imagine, as he glanced about him with a sinking feeling knowing where he was and who was broadcasting his opinion.  Yes, of course RT and the BBC are equivalents; of course both broadcast untruths and of course both represent the view of their controlling establishment through biased production values that no-one is advised to take at face value. 

And that is exactly why their news rivalry is of the greatest public benefit. With RT exposing the BBC's fake news and the BBC doing likewise to false RT stories, by flicking between them one can get an approximation of the reality. 

The watershed was Aleppo and the BBC's mythical White Helmets reporting from the besieged enclave. Except they weren't there. They didn't exist. No-one there had seen them, and when the final rump of rebel fighters surrendered there was no trace of them. Either they escaped to Idlib disguised as rebel fighters - hardly the behaviour of an aid organisation - or they were never there in the first place. Despite which the BBC continued to broadcast their fake accounts of life under siege until near the end, accounts in all probability originating no further from White City than Vauxhall. 

Have you heard a single mention of the White Helmets since the fall of Aleppo? It's as though the MSM has realised that the secret is out and is desperate for people to forget all the past lies. 

Back at the height of the Cold War I used to tune to Radio Moscow on a short-wave valve radio receiver whose qualities I now greatly miss; the xylophone gongs of the 'Moscow Nights' station ident before the news quavered over the ether, with an impression of great distance. The Soviet news if all was well would be predictably dull; a speech from the Agriculture Convention of the 34th Plenary of the Uzhbek Soviet, mine production output gains in Novobyersk and so on. The absence of war rhetoric was, at the time, some sort of assurance that the 4 minutes had not yet arrived. 

Now forty years on we're back in the same place - trying desperately to find the truth in the ground between the liars. 

Christian crosses to stay in Austria - and Britain

Austria is going ahead with a ban on the Niqab and Burqa in public venues - places where there is an expectation that people will show their faces. I don't think this is anti-libertarian, and I apply the same policy personally; I simply refuse to hear or recognise anyone whose face I can't see, including anyone who tries to talk to me whilst wearing mirror sunglasses. They don't exist and are ignored. 

The backlash has come already in Austria, where the majority of public venues including courtrooms are graced with a Christian crucifix. Having a cross bearing Christ crucified in the judge's line of vision seems a compassionate boon to defendants, surely, as a constant reminder of love, goodness and mercy? Some judges have taken to removing them when sitting, but should I ever find myself in an Austrian court I should insist they were restored. Take every help you can. A legal attempt here (should we start terming these vexatious actions as 'Miller cases'?) to class crucifixes in the same way as Islamist head-bags* has already failed, and the crosses stay. 


We also have ubiquitous crucifixes in the UK, though somewhat more discreet.

On every police helmet, pillar box, court or government building; on every government report, paper, news release and letterhead, in and on every thing in the realm that bears an image of the sovereign's crown, we have the Christian cross. Mounted on the orb that is this world, it surmounts all - world, monarch, realm and people. And it says without any ambiguity Christus regnat!

We're not quite finished yet.

*OT but true ...
==============
As a callow youth first in London at a time when Jim Davidson and his ilk regularly termed ill-favoured women as 'double baggers' in their acts, and the parlace of 'yeah with a bag over her head ...' was the disgraceful sexist banter of the public bar, I was nevertheless actually shocked to see a large market sign declaiming "Head bags - 2 for £10". Well I was from Suffolk, so how was I to know that 'Head' brand bags were a London fashion item? For several months I actually believed that Londoners had recourse to bespoke tailored full-length hats for their women ... 

We must help the EU turn from self-destruction

A European customs union in which goods, services and capital can circulate freely is a pretty good idea. The power of Europe's 440m people as a trade bloc, the internal savings from lower frictional costs of trade and the spin-off advantages of a talking-shop at which representatives of the national governments meet to discuss trade matters are all powerful benefits of such a union of convenience. 

Unfortunately, what the EU has become is an unelected cabal of little men from small nations who want to be big. Maltese, Luxembourgers, Belgians and Dutch like the ability to talk on equal terms at France, Germany and the United Kingdom. Sadly, it has led to delusions - delusions that the EU can be a global superpower, and all it needs is an army to go with the flag and the anthem. Germany, the only member with the means to pay for this jejune fantasy, will only go along with it all whilst she is able to exploit the enforced poverty of all the nations of southern Europe that keeps German exports cheap. 

Tusk is one of Europe's little men who wants to be big. He is also literally a small man, with all the comedic chihuahua snappishness that comes with Small Man Syndrome. As the EU crumbles around him, all he can think of to say is "Everyone is against us. Therefore we must have even less democracy and a big army, now". Sadly, it is this sort of blind stupidity, remote from voters and the reality of democratic elections, remote from all modern reality in the make-believe Brussels bunkers, that will hasten the EU's failing. 

But it's neither in Britain's or Europe's interest to see it all crash. We must now work to turn the EU into what it should have been all along - a trade bloc that benefits its members, not a clumsy attempt at a Ruritanian world power run by the Mayor of Gozo. There's no point talking to fools such as Verhofstadt - they're all away with the fairies. We need to take a dialogue directly to the peoples of Europe's nations and plant the idea of a fundamental reformation of the EU.

USA & Australia set the new standard for immigration

The majority of illegals held after trying to enter Australia are not Indonesians, Thais or Vietnamese but Iraqis, Iranians, Sudanese and Libyans. Australia's uncompromising migrant policy sees them held in camps on Nauru and Manus. They will not get in. 

Trump's measures, though they will result in many injustices for those who are true friends of America and who have the economic capacity to contribute, are no greater than the measures that Australia already has in place. Both nations now make it easier for the UK to make migration policy more targeted - excluding nationals of the 7 banned nations, but plus Pakistan and Bangladesh, from whence much of the UK terrorist threat comes.

The outcome is that Anglophone nations are now making the point that the world is not some free, open, ownerless place in which migrants hungry for wealth unavailable in their home countries can move freely en masse and without restriction . They are making the point that nations are already owned by the people that live in them and whose ancestors have fought, bled suffered and struggled to make them what they are. The message is 'Go and make your own'. The message is 'If we want you, we'll call'

The United Kingdom now has the opportunity to join two other great anchors of the Anglophone world. And despite Trudeau's words, migrants will find it a lot harder to get into Canada than they might imagine. 

The Roots of Evil

SS-Sturmbannführer Ernst Lerch started adult life working in his father's cafe in Klagenfurt. A secret Austrian Nazi, when war came he served with the infamous Otto Globocnik in the purges of Jews in eastern Europe, being deeply implicated in the extermination programme. After the war, and whilst the British were occupying Kärnten, Lerch sneaked back to more or less openly run the family cafe. Oh, both the Brits and the Austrians tried to prosecute him, but not very hard. A charming schmaltzy character who presided lovingly over the Tanzcafe Lerch whilst tipsy British officers waltzed with dirndl-clad Mädchen. A loved and respected family man, he lived until Tony Blair formed his first government in the UK. A new play here, 'Tanzcafe Treblinka', explores the myriad issues around the astonishing tale of the man implicated in over a million murders. 

Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, was of course also Austrian. He was captured in 1970, and in the brief period between incarceration and death was interviewed at length by Gitta Sereny, whose book, Into That Darkness, remains one of the most profound and affecting books I have read. She believes that when he finally allowed himself to admit his guilt, the weight of his evildoing crushed him. His heart attack struck him 19 hours after the admission.

When I search for common characteristics, common backgrounds, amongst these people, not monsters of horror but ordinary, dreary men - Arendt's 'Banality of Evil' - I find unquestioning conformity, a willingness to believe, respect for bureaucracy and hierarchy, trust in the establishment, unwillingness to voice contrary opinions, dogmatism and, yes, limited emotional intelligence. All the characteristics, in other words, that you and I spend our time on the interweb decrying, destroying and combating, whether we find them in individuals or institutions. 

Every illiberal bully who wants to ban and control thought and language, to restrict personal choice, to subvert democracy, to limit people's control over their own lives, to coerce and twist and emotionally blackmail, has the potential to grow into an Ernst Lerch or Franz Stangl if allowed enough oxygen. Our work in checking them can never be done.

EU Disinformation Unit 'clarifies' Bulgarian Snowman Story

For non-readers of Cyrillic (including me) the headline in the Bulgarian Times claims that the EU intends to ban Snowmen as racist and sexist - unless they are non-white and recognisably female.

An EU spokesman immediately branded the story as nonsense, and the EU Disinformation Unit clarified the misunderstanding as follows: (unverified)

"The Commission merely reminded the Bulgarian government of the EU Public Actions Directive, which requires that European governments and local authorities undertake service provision in line with anti-discriminatory EU law. In this case, snowmen erected by government or local government staff, or erected in public parks, or on public highways, or military bases, or any land, locus or place on land or water owned or controlled by a governmental or quasi governmental organisation, must undergo a full Risk Assessment, be constructed in accordance with a written Method Statement, with any significant costs (e.g. for carrots or pieces of coal) submitted to the EU under the State Aid regulations, including the requirement for a 'Nil' return, and that each Snowman erection must be documented in an Equal Opportunities Achievement Statement. The erecting authority must demonstrate and publish electronically how the Snowman helps achieve the EU's aims in the Year of Organic Diversity of sustainable craft development and in imprinting the semiotics of diversity. 

So you will see this is no prohibition and there is no new legislation - the existing Directives, agreed democratically in secret by several commissioners democratically appointed by other commissioners - are quite adequate"

Good. Glad that's clear.

...And now for the Peers

I'm going to skate over comments on the Brexit court decision yesterday; everything has already been said elsewhere. Suffice to say that Gina Miller is no angel but just a rather petulant, selfish rich woman used to applying wealth and sharp elbows to get her own way, and we will be glad in the end that Parliamentary sovereignty has been adjudged supreme. Despite my initial anger.

Now for the hurdles in the Commons and particularly the Lords. Even though the government has offered to allow the Lords to "talk until they wet themselves", the place is unfortunately full of the corrupt, the venal, barrators, panderers, frauds, hypocrites, thieves and peculators and all the other rancid filth swimming in the festering ordure that is the output of the life peerage system. A vast number of these slime-coated denizens of the Eighth Malebolge owe greater allegiance to Brussels than to their sovereign. 

Which is exactly the reason I'm willing to allow my name to go forward to become one; if Mrs May has to pack the place with 'sunset peers' who are available to take up voting immediately, I'm happy to do my duty. The per diem and the decent bars and restaurants will more than make up for a few weeks of all night sittings, my bladder is strong and I'm both eloquent and erudite and used to speaking in such settings if required. And I won't mind if in February Mrs May then abolishes several hundred life peers from sitting, including me. 

I'm sure many regular readers are in a similar position. A regular luncheon table in the Lords licenced cafeteria made up of blog commentators would be rather fun. 

English Law - our £25bn a year service asset

I'll bet that if I mention Carlill -v- Carbolic Smoke Ball Company at least half of you will get the reference. For any that don't, it's one of the first contract law cases that English professionals from all sectors learn when first at the teat of contract law & tort. I aced law, and kept up with it all through my professional career, through both the Times law reports and those in Estates Gazette. Over the years I've come not only to respect but to regard with a deep affection the wonderful, elegant and self-evolving way in which the corpus of civil law works in England and Wales. No other nation could have developed a separate, parallel stream of law such as Equity - a shield, not a sword - to use when the mainstream was lacking. And the Chancery barrister from whom I first learnt my law was equally in love with it all. My final act before I retired was to wholly resist a claim of £1m under NEC3 at adjudication with the law supplied by an eager young chap from one of the big city firms. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. There ain't nothing so elegant as a 300-item Scott schedule with our column totalling to zero. 

Anyway, that little encomium apart, the Standard recognises the importance of it all both to the City and nation;

The Justice Secretary, Liz Truss, identifies one of them today in her summit with leading law firms. She promised to protect Britain’s status as the world’s biggest legal capital — a status which is worth some £25 billion a year. More importantly, it adds to the country’s historic reputation for probity, integrity and fair dealing. English contract law has evolved over centuries and it is used in contracts between individuals and countries which have little to do with England or the UK. Then there is the  reputation for professionalism of the English legal profession and the independence and quality of the judiciary — however much the judges may occasionally irritate us. And if England is the centre of the legal world, London is the centre of the centre.

Our justice system could of course be improved, notably the efficiency of the courts. But the Government is right to do what it can to safeguard the lawyers’ position. It should sign up to the Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements immediately after Brexit — it cannot do so while we are in the EU — and seek a replacement for Europe’s “Recast” rule. This is crucial. Let’s look to our strengths; right now we must make the most of them.

With English law, rather than Euro Napoleonic codes, forming the basis of North American and much of Asian-Pacific law, we are wise to pull it away from the perversion and debasement of inferior European jurisdiction. It is self healing, and the Euro errors of the last 40 years can be healed and absorbed. With TTIP dead in the water, and CETA peculiar to the Euro Napoleonic 27, we stand in good stead to continue as the world's tribunal capital. In relation to 'recast', Allen & Overy have published an opinion, but it can be summarised in their graphic 

Brussels Regulation: Article 23

Brussels Regulation (recast): Article 25

"If the parties, one or more of whom is domiciled in a Member State, have agreed that a court or the courts of a Member State are to have jurisdiction to settle any disputes which have arisen or which may arise in connection with a particular legal relationship, that court or those courts shall have jurisdiction. Such jurisdiction shall be exclusive unless the parties have agreed otherwise."

"If the parties, regardless of their domicile, have agreed that a court or the courts of a Member State are to have jurisdiction to settle any disputes which have arisen or which may arise in connection with a particular legal relationship, that court or those courts shall have jurisdiction, unless the agreement is null and void as to its substantive validity under the law of that Member State. Such jurisdiction shall be exclusive unless the parties have agreed otherwise."

Germany deeply resentful of Trump Presidency

If you thought the snowflake whining in the US and UK reached a pitch of irritation yesterday at Donald Trump's inauguration, this is as nothing compared to the wailing, gnashing of teeth and rending of garments in Germany's government districts. Der Spiegel devotes an entire issue to Trump-hate and Trump-fear with no equivocation whatsoever - they make the post-truth Guardian look balanced. "Trump is the end of the world as we know it -- that much is clear", states the paper boldly. Trump's presidency is a particular problem for Germany for the following reasons;

• Trump has previously identified Germany and Japan as the most prominent enemies of US manufacturing - "Our 'allies' are making billions screwing us" - blaming high state subsidies for aiding product development while free-riding on US defence expenditure. 
• Trump knows that the EU is basically a vehicle for German hegemony and allows the sort of economic imperialism that enriches Germany at the expense of the southern states; he doesn't see this as a good thing
• Germany leads Europe's demonisation of Russia. Quite why Germany fosters such hostility is a puzzle; she is safer from Russian military threat than at any time since 1949, yet still bullies the rest of the EU in maintaining sanctions when many EU members - notably the eastern nations and Austria - want to wind them down. Without strong US backing, Germany fears the EU will fracture on the sanctions issue, and Trump is no fan of the sanctions
• On NATO and defence, Trump has made it clear he will not support the EU's free riding, and Germany will have to spend far more on her own defence. Add to this the lunatic narcissistic folie de grandeur in a Brussels that wants its own independent army and Trump's scepticism as to Germany's motives and it's clear a crisis is coming
• The EU is planning to throw a huge 60th birthday party for itself in Rome in March - at a time when the UK is submitting Article 50 notification. Germany fears this could be the zenith of the EU's growth; Trump sees the reason for the EU is as an economic rival to the US, and he will try to split EU nations to weaken the risk. Already eastern nations in tune with Trump ideology are gaining confidence at defying German hegemony, and Berlin fears this will grow
• Trump's direct criticism of Merkel's migrants policy and his identification of Islam as the greatest threat to western civilisation undermine Germany's policy of destroying European national identity to create a homogeneous consumer mass with no allegiances for the benefit of the global corporates. Germany fears that the resurgence of both American and British patriotism will encourage the EU's satrap states to rediscover their national identities.

Underlying all of this is a deep existential angst that America is now challenging the illiberal consensus of central State control, bullying and coercion. The very last thing that administrators such as Merkel want is a reversal of the policy so eloquently catalogued by Brendan O'Neill:-

It happened because you banned super-size sodas. And smoking in parks. And offensive ideas on campus. Because you branded people who oppose gay marriage ‘homophobic’, and people unsure about immigration ‘racist’.

Because you treated owning a gun and never having eaten quinoa as signifiers of fascism. Because you thought correcting people’s attitudes was more important than finding them jobs. Because you turned ‘white man’ from a description into an insult. Because you used slurs like ‘denier’ and ‘dangerous’ against anyone who doesn’t share your eco-pieties.

Because you treated dissent as hate speech and criticism of Obama as extremism. Because you talked more about gender-neutral toilets than about home repossessions. Because you beatified Caitlyn Jenner. Because you policed people’s language, rubbished their parenting skills, took the piss out of their beliefs.

Because you cried when someone mocked the Koran but laughed when they mocked the Bible. Because you said criticising Islam is Islamophobia. Because you kept telling people, ‘You can’t think that, you can’t say that, you can’t do that.’

Because you turned politics from something done by and for people to something done to them, for their own good. Because you treated people like trash. And people don’t like being treated like trash. Trump happened because of you.

The joys of Localism

Scotland is large scale proof that Localism works. As the Telegraph reports, Sturgeon is making an absolute cods of running the place; business rates through the roof, high income tax, dearth of investment and a failure to deliver the improvements in life quality that this all was promised to bring. And now she is being made dole monitor. Welfare spend is the latest bit of government to be devolved, and Nicola is wriggling like a drowning worm to find ways to distract the Scots from her new and unpopular rationing role. I suspect the canny Scots will kick Sturgeon out the next time they are let near the ballot box.

And so to Surrey County Council, which will ballot its citizens over a 15% rate rise to pay for old people's homes (not that they're called that any more - they're social care establishments or something). The vote may depend on how officious the Council has been in issuing parking tickets, nagging people about using the right bins or telling them not to smoke. The people of Surrey may well say no, and encourage the Council to lose even more staff. 

That these exhibitions of growing Localist importance are possible despite the dilettante Cameron rather than because of him is extraordinary. Cameron promised Localism in 2010 but delivered a change as insipid and homeopathic as the pre-referendum offer he brought back from Brussels. That man really was himself a useless streak. 

Still, more please. The closer we move to the Swiss model of devolved tax and spend the better, to the extent that central government commands barely a third of tax income to pay for essential and truly national agencies of the State. And the more that local politicians are held to account by local people the better - not Little Britain, but the hallmark of a great nation.

Is Soros behind anti-democratic Brexit law suits?

Whilst the secret funding behind Gina Miller's attempts to subvert the will of the British people is still mired in mists of secrecy, four more stooges and plants have popped up to use someone's secret funds to try to derail Brexit by law. Only these stooges don't fancy the publicity - so have asked if they can bring their secret funded case under conditions of, er, secrecy.

I strongly suspect that Soros is behind all this. Soros wants British national identity to be destroyed and replaced by a homogeneous consumer lumpen mass with no competing allegiances who will surrender to the serfdom of the global corporates. He has funded street violence, nihilistic 'actions' and the no-borders idiots and, in a campaign of social attrition, every day provokes small acts of disorder and fear. He is a thoroughly evil old man and the enemy of the United Kingdom.

Well, we have no great history of secret justice in England, and no reason why the latest stooges should sneak around like thieves in the night hidden from daylight and public view. If they believe in their cause, rather than in the pieces of silver with which their backer has stuffed their mouths, let them come forward.

And I don't know whether they seek an equitable remedy, but I once learnt that he 'who comes to equity must come with clean hands' - and it's a good principle also for those who seek to challenge the will of the majority of the British people. Let's see 'em. Let the papers get digging and chase the money. We need to uncover the seditious dogs behind them.

No more Courgettes, thank you

Back in the late '70s and in the last year of my teens I bought my first home - a two-up two-down Suffolk flint rubble cottage with pantile roof, massive open hearth that dominated the parlour and a large plot with half a dozen apple trees. It cost £5,750. This was the age of Richard Mabey's 'Food for Free' and a sort of trancey sun-dappled hippyish 'back to the garden' ethos. So I kept hens under the apple trees, brewed beer and grew food while in an undemanding student job. 

That was my gap two-years - though we didn't know the term. One of my horticultural successes were courgettes. I was advised to line a long trench with old newspapers before mounding soil over and planting. The Sun shone. I was a diligent waterer when sober. I had such a glut of courgettes that in the end even the hens wouldn't eat them. I couldn't give them away to Suffolk natives, whose closest experience was of stuffed and roasted marrows. Friends shunned me in case I arrived bearing a box of courgettes for them. I had no recipes for jam or pickle - this was pre-internet. All Summer and well into the Autumn the bloody things just popped up and swelled their little bodies and still I felt obliged to pick them and not waste them. Well, after that, it was fifteen years before I could face a courgette again. 

With many thanks to whoever recommended David Archibald's Twilight of Abundance - so far, I'm about 70 pages in, and it's uncompromisingly depressing. I hope it has a happy ending. Its cataloguing of the arguments in favour of global cooling, a reduction of between 1° and 3° in Europe, may mean big changes in food growing. And shortages. So when I saw this article in today's Guardian I thought immediately of my fecund Anglian earth back in the heat of the '70s;

The Guardian of course fails to use the cold snap (weather) as a useful segue to discuss global cooling (climate). And will no doubt continue to do so as crops fail for real all over Europe's salad belt. Hey ho.

Russia - good fences and good neighbours

At the home in which I grew up, our plot was separated from the narrow country road that ran along a boundary by a 2m wide strip that belonged to Suffolk County Council. It was annoyance at the Council's lack of maintenance that drove my mother to add its grooming to my boyhood task-list of mowing and trimming. So for a length of 70 or 80m as the road ran alongside our land, an unkempt, blowsy country roadside assumed a neatly trimmed tidiness. It took three or four years for the Council to twig that we were maintaining their roadside - whereupon, they started regularly to send out a maintenance gang to pre-empt my efforts.

My mother took it as a sign that local bureaucracy was amenable to her own particular form of 'nudge', and was happy that she had a neat boundary. I was happy at losing the task of maintaining it. Now, of course, I realise that the Council had been prompted not by a sense of obligation to a ratepayer but from fear that if we maintained it for 12 years and they didn't, we could claim ownership of the 2m strip from them through adverse possession. I'm glad my mother had no knowledge of this quirk in British law - it would have prompted her to surreptitiously expand on all borders. 

And so with Russia. Russia will expand in any direction that is not clearly and signally defended and 'owned'. That includes land, sea and air. It doesn't make Russia any more of an enemy than cutting a verge made me an enemy of Suffolk County Council; Russia acts in a very proper Adam Smith type of economic self-interest. And peace is best served by NATO and the UK maintaining forces, fleets and air patrol and response capacities that signal clearly and without doubt where the boundaries are. A minimum of 2% of GDP but ideally for the United Kingdom, a spend that gives us a standing army of 100,000 men and a fleet of 50 warships. 

That Russia also must be an ally in the coming conflict with African mass migration, Islamist aggression and Malthusian challenges doesn't mean we shouldn't also keep clear boundaries and military parity in sight. The EU of course is blind to the realpolitik and risks conflict through its insane territorial ambitions - a dangerous stupidity that needs the UK's level head to counter. If Theresa May makes Presidents Putin and Trump her key diplomatic priorities, she is doing absolutely the right thing.

Vaclav Klaus pierces EU pomposity again

The EU's pomposity and Folie de Grandeur needs pricking from time to time if only to suppress the Federation's insufferable senior unelected official, the egregious Herr Juncker. The former Czech President Vaclav Klaus does the job superbly;

I am a very known critic of the European integration process, everyone knows it, so it will be no surprise to hear from me that I am not so happy with what has been going on, and I was very much in favour - it was still in the dark communist days - I was really in favour of the European integration process, but this process has been switched, transformed by the Maastricht treaty, 25 years ago, and especially now by the Lisbon Treaty, later, to something totally different, and I call this a move from integration to unification. This was the beginning of the negative, wrong development, as I see it.

Klaus has previously provoked a walk-out of snowflake MEPs during a speech in which he said

There is also a great distance (not only in a geographical sense) between citizens and Union representatives, which is much greater than is the case inside the member countries. This distance is often described as the democratic deficit, the loss of democratic accountability, the decision-making of the unelected – but selected – ones, as bureaucratisation of decision-making etc. The proposals to change the current state of affairs – included in the rejected European Constitution or in the not much different Lisbon Treaty – would make this defect even worse. Since there is no European demos – and no European nation – this defect cannot be solved by strengthening the role of the European Parliament, either

It is difficult for the Establishment to brand a Czech anti-totalitarian warrior, who as a child resisted the Nazis and as an adult helped topple Communism, as a right-wing nutter or a fascist; as President of a NATO country he was also privy to highest level defence secrets, so hard to brand him as uninformed. Klaus is that rarest of creatures in Europe these days - a Statesman. 

I commend the RT interview - and I'll be clearing snow this morning with a smile.

Eyeties, Nips and Krauts

What's the betting that the 'Eastenders' scriptwriter who allowed the archaic term 'eyetie' to sneak into the programme's script is a bloke in his 50s? I'll bet he never imagined he would draw the wrath of the racial righteous upon his head, with the term being damned as a 'racial slur'. Well, yes and no. 

As old soldiers will know, in order to get large numbers of men ready to kill large numbers of other men without second thought, reflection, introspection or moral equivocation, it is necessary to pre-dehumanise the enemy. This is the kindest and most efficient way of doing things in the long term - you are not killing brothers but vermin. So wartime propaganda and military training invents derogatory terms and images for the enemy. 

Quite why these terms were still used in boys' comics up until the 1970s I'm not sure. But they were. Even though the poor eyeties by then were characterised as unwilling warriors, conscripted waiters ready to fall on their knees, wring their hands in surrender and cry 'Mamma Mia!' at the first sight of khaki. The Japanese became bandy-legged dwarves with buck teeth and milkbottle eyeglasses. Only the Germans remained lantern-jawed giants who could absorb vast amounts of lead in battle. 

As a boy who grew up with these comics, you can no more remove these crude stereotypes from my brain than you can all the Saturday morning cinema 'B' reels of bare breasted African girls grinning like watermelons as they danced in formation with lots of stamping to give the cameraman maximum jiggle. Surely their donning Western clothes is cultural appropriation? Perhaps not.  

We can pretty much learn not to use now the easy terms of our youth - including a Spanish mate who was quite happy to be nicknamed Spic from primary school - but the youngsters need to know we never, ever used them as 'racial slurs'. We just knew with absolute certainty from an early age that British people are superior to anyone else on the planet, and that we could use nicknames for other, lesser breeds with the gentle affection of an indulgent master.