Head-choppers release statement on Khashoggi murder

From the desk of the Chief Head Chopper (advisor: Mr Barrister Tony Blair)

"Mr Khashoggi came to the consulate to straighten out a visa matter. Unfortunately, after he was locked in the reception room, he took fright at a number of Saudi butchers attending purely in a ceremonial role, dressed in their colourful tribal costume of forensic overalls, masks and bone-saws. Mr Khashoggi unfortunately panicked and in his attempts to open the locked door, struggled with two security heavies who restrained him for his own safety. It was at that point that Mr Khashoggi stumbled against a head-chopping sword and regrettably amputated his fingers. Whilst attempting to administer first aid, the butchers inadvertently began to dismember him from the legs upwards. Mr Khashoggi did not survive the lamentable accident.

Lessons have been learned. The butchers are being sent for first-aid retraining." 

Martin Rowson in the Guardian  - Treason May and her Shitshow ticket an' all

May's stupidity has screwed the negotiations from the start.

Mrs May caved in to Brussels from Day One. There are many who believe it has all been a deliberate plot - a conspiracy to wreck Brexit. I don't think so. I think it is rather the stubborn stupidity of a woman who values her abilities far above what they're worth. If I could buy Mrs May's strategic appreciation for it's market value and sell it for what she herself reckons it's worth, I'd make my fortune. Excluding the few wise heads in the FCO, her own cabinet and a willing battalion of external experts from the Brexit process and using instead her self-deluding small team of ditherers, incompetents, fools, cowards, Quislings and Treasury dullards, May's complicit dags, she conceded to the EU on every point. Stupid, Stupid, Stupid.

She's not fit to be Prime Minister of Great Britain. She's not fit to run a whelk stall.

Now she's faced with an impasse - either the UK stays part of the customs union for ever, a Satrap, vassal state, kow-towing to the anti-democracy that is the EU, or we split the Union. 

There's a third option. Screw them. No deal, and pick the bones out of that. 

Get rid of that Rasputin idiot Robbins. Let the Cabinet take charge. Keep the stupid woman as a figurehead, at least until next year; load her with bad-taste costume jewels and ridiculous, asinine shoes, but never, ever let her speak again.

Mandarin boss Sly Sedwill confuses with false equivalents

Sly chief mandarin Mark Sedwill is feeling a little public heat against his too-powerful central Statist mandarinate. Dominic Raab's boss Oliver Robbins in particular was excoriated by MPs frustrated that parliamentary democracy is being trumped by Sly Sedwill's unelected pro-EU consiglieri and are saying so openly for the first time.

Of course, as a diligent civil servant unable to answer back at criticism, the first thing Sly Sedwill does is write a letter to the Times warning critics of the mandarins to 'back off'. Or what? An invitation to journalists to the Cabinet Office building, where a forensic scientist and a team armed with electric bone-saws are waiting?  Remember, it is Sedwill and his cabal who are so cosy with both the EU and the KSA - against this nation's interests. Who exactly do they work for?

Sedwill can't resist raising a false equivalent. MPs and blogs such as this have criticised Robbins and Remoaner mandarins. The Head of HMRC has received a death threat from a nutter. Sedwill lost no time in linking these separate events in creating a false equivalent - “However, the anonymous sources on whose sniping it also draws should be ashamed of themselves, especially in a week when another senior civil servant reported having been threatened because of comments about Brexit implementation. This has to stop". Yep, straight from the Jo Cox school of "Jo was murdered by a raving nutter, therefore everyone who voted Brexit is a murderer". 

How the Hell has our civil service gone from a Rolls Royce to this dreary mediocre cabal of dullards, incompetents and non-achievers? Once Brexit is over, we must turn our attention to the much-needed reform of this failing sector.

Well, our senior armed forces and intelligence figures at least are fighting back. In response to Sly Sedwill's snipey whinge, they wrote their own letter to the Times.

Sir,

Sir Mark Sedwill, the acting cabinet secretary, is wrong (letter, Oct 16). It is not critics of the once great British civil service but members of that service in No 10 who need to cease and desist. Olly Robbins and his defence adviser Alastair Brockbank have serious questions of improper conduct to answer — Brockbank for the now infamous “Kit Kat tapes” on which he was secretly recorded seemingly advocating hoodwinking the 17.4 million Britons who voted Leave while covertly working to lock UK defence and security under EU control after Brexit; Robbins for failing to control him and, it appears, sanctioning the “technical note on external security” of May 24 that echoes the tapes.

Veterans for Britain has just published a full analysis of how the prime minister’s proposals put the autonomy of our armed forces in jeopardy and risk fatally compromising our “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance. It is by far the worst aspect of the Chequers deal and hitherto has not been made clear to the British public.

The EU has no business being in defence or security at all. These are either Nato or nation-to-nation matters. The UK should withdraw all proposals to the EU in these areas. The withdrawal agreement and proposed defence treaty would keep the UK under EU power permanently after the transition period. This is not what the people voted for.

Major-General Julian Thompson RM, chairman, Veterans for Britain; Sir Richard Dearlove, former chief of the Secret Intelligence Service; Rear-Admiral Roger Lane-Nott, naval board member VfB; Professor Gwythian Prins, academic board member VfB

Well done chaps. Both barrels and 10 bore to boot. 

'Head Choppers are really cuddly bunnies' says Con

It's good to see that Con Coughlin is back on form today with a glowing tribute to the selfless and altruistic kindness of the Saudis, who have nothing but British interests at heart. In return, says Con, we owe it to those kind, gentle head-choppers to defend them in 'the court of global opinion'. 

Not only are they under threat from the wicked crane-hangers, but they are currently the subject of unwarranted Yemeni aggression, says Con. If some journalist was hamburgered, and this is by no means proven, and it's possible that persons of Saudi extraction just may have been responsible for something that may or may not have happened, is no reason to obstruct KSA in exercising its kind and selfless consideration for a number of Brits who have grown immensely wealthy from the relationship, nor should our misplaced concerns over press freedom and human rights lead us to restrict those individuals from becoming ever richer from those relationships. 

Allowing the Saudis to subvert our society, corrupt our ministeries, stuff gold into the mouths of Quisling backers, pervert our laws and distort our economy to the detriment of the vast majority of British people is a good thing, says Con, and we should not allow the alleged, unproven primitive head-chopping butchery of Mr Khashoggi to impair it.

Daily Mail shares the evidence of Saudi barbarity

 

Plausible deniability - West decides to believe Saudi lies

It was the threat of oil at $200/bbl that erased any doubts in the President's mind. King Salman told him the silly Grand Vizier had done it and the US administration decided to believe it. Of course we understand, said the US ambassador. Your Grand Vizier was just a little overzealous in questioning Mr Khashoggi and instead of waving his biro about mistakenly reached for his chopping sword and chopped the poor journalist into several box-sized pieces by accident. It was a mistake anyone could have made. Phew. Well that's kicked the recession back into 2019 and we're still hoping something will turn up. 

The Saudi king has no doubt promised the harshest punishment to be meted out to the offender - his wives are to be banned from their London and Paris shoplifting trips for a month. 

Meanwhile the Salafist fanatics continue pouring Saudi blood money into Europe to subvert Islamic moderates, continue to export Islamist imams to preach hate and death and through bribes, kickbacks and corruption have fouled those charged with preventing such abuses. The dead of 9/11 cry out from their ashpit graves for justice, for the indictment of the Saudi backers of the massacre. And the Western press puffs out its cockerel chest in boast and braggadocio about press freedom and quietly closes down all news stories about the murder of a fellow journalist by the Saudis in their Turkish consulate. 

Gentlemen, you disgust me.

Con Coughlin 'owned' by Owen Jones

Readers of this blog will know we have long regarded with some humour Con Coughlin's defence pieces in the Telegraph; too many are clearly the result of a good lunch with an MoD official and a rehash of an MoD briefing to endow it with the gloss of journalism. His columns have always been useful in stating the official MoD policy without the MoD having to, erm, state its official policy. We thought everyone knew. 

Perhaps not. In a surprising piece of actual journalism, lefty polemicist Owen Jones has just taken Coughlin's entire journalistic career apart in a series of linked posts on Twitter. Con Coughlin is reported to have deleted his twitter account in response. If true and accurate, Jones has indeed 'owned' Coughlin, in the vernacular of the young. But two questions are foremost -

- Why was this not published in the Guardian? Was the story spiked on a 'dog don't bite bitch' journy-chums basis? 

- Will Coughlin now sue? 

I shall sit down with a large glass of port and re-read the whole thing again. This kind of waspish MSM in-fighting is just the thing to round-off Sunday.

Update - from this blog

27/9/17
"It's always good to know there are some certainties in life, and Con's willingness to parrot the message of his contacts at the MoD are amongst them. Sometime, though, during his most recent lunch, he must have confused the reality..."

24/12/16
"Poor old Con Coughlin must be coughing into his Christmas cornflakes this morning. Following instructions from his FCO and MoD masters, poor old Con has being doing his best to talk-up a war with Russia all year...."

6/1/16
"Con Coughlin has earned his establishment biscuit again with a crawling encomium to the sagacity, tolerance, wisdom and mercy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and urged us all to back the primitive head-choppers against the primitive crane-hangers..."

7/5/14
"One must have to be both wilfully stupid and amazingly gullible to get the defence correspondent's job on the Telegraph these days; EU shill Con Coughlin, perhaps repeating what some bloke told him in a bar, writes today..."

and so on. 

No, Mrs May - We will NEVER accept your shoddy sell-out

If both Mrs May and the capos of the EU seriously believe that 17.4 million British voters will remain quiescent following a sell-out deal that screws our nation, our freedom, our economy and our rights they are away with the fairies. 

If the EU believe that Britain will be bound by treaties and agreements signed for Britain by a political cabal acting in direct contravention of their democratic mandate, a mandate conferred by the largest vote in our nation's history, they are deluded. Tomorrow, the day after, the year after, we will repudiate those shoddy and anti-democratic scraps of paper. 

Our government has an epochal opportunity to steer this realm on a new course, on a heading outwards towards the world, to the thrusting, bursting economic growth and vitality of Asia, India, South America, over the great oceans. If Mrs May abuses this chance and tries instead to ground us on a stinking rancid EU mudbank to rot like a hulk, she will not succeed. We will not allow this nation to be so abused, so mishandled. 

A political leader with an ounce of ability could have turned this into an opportunity to win national acclaim, international respect and achieve unity and political stability in the United Kingdom. Mrs May is not that person. A political leader of integrity and imbued with veracity who had promised the country many times that we were leaving the single market and customs union would have striven over every obstruction to keep their word. Mrs May is not that person. A political leader of courage, vision and probity would have led their party effectively despite the divergences of view within it, would have had the courage to appoint to their cabinet ministers who would support their promises made to the people of Britain. Mrs May is not that person. 

One message at least should be made crystal-clear to Mrs May and her shadowy global corporatist and EUphile backers - that we will NEVER accept this shoddy sell-out.

Wood - energy costs and pros and cons

I must admit I was a wood novice before I moved here - in the UK, logs came in a sack and were for Christmas as an illegal supplement to the smokeless coal I normally used in my London Edwardian fireplace. Here, firewood provides the Autumn interest. The people of the valley take long walks on the hillside paths, estimating the size and quality of their neighbours' wood reserves. In Africa, wealth may be measured in goats; here, it's the size of your timber stacks. This week they've been thick as flies on the church road as I've been working - and having to answer several queries a day about (a) how much I paid for my bulk logs (b) who from (c) wood condition and quality. The consensus is that this year I've paid neither too little nor too much, and most have nodded in quiet satisfaction that their nephew / brother in law / wife's sister's mother could have got the same a little cheaper. All my heating, cooking and hot water comes from wood - so how does it figure out?

An invaluable guide for the obsessional is the Wood Fuels Handbook pdf. I'll cut to the chase. 

I use only air dry red beech - which given the very dry alpine air here, samples out at between 11% and 14% moisture content. It burns hot and clean and with little ash residue. I buy it split but uncut for a cost of about £66 per srm or bulk cubic metre, containing around 400kg of wood. Each m3 is equivalent to around 1,850 kWh, so a cost of about 3.6p per kWh - comparable to gas and oil in the Uk at about 4p per kWh. However, the pros and cons are significant

Cons
====
- You have to feed the stoves. I have a 23kW central heating range cooker and a 7kW oven in the Winter living room. Each day you need to carry fuel indoors, and feed the beasts every 30/40 minutes. And no, you can't turn it on remotely with your i-phone at the airport so the house is hot when you get home. 

- You need to plan. You can't burn wood on a low setting - it buggers the flues and creates tar deposits. You need a high temperature burn, so you need to capture the heat in a thermal store which then supplies radiators and underfloor heating. Cooking and living need planning. 

- You need to clean the ash out and dispose of it daily.  

- You need somewhere to store it. 

Pros
====
- The smell of woodsmoke - as Austrian as a dirndl. I love it. 

- You don't have to pay what I do. Many in the valley scavenge wood for free or buy standing wood from the Austrian equivalent of the forestry commission for very little. Your tree is marked with a number, and it's up to you to fell it and remove it. The local Council doesn't bother clearing fallen branches - every home has a chainsaw*, and they disappear rapidly

- In a fuel emergency you can burn any dry wood in the stoves - floorboards, furniture ...

- Having all your winter fuel in advance, safe from strikes, Putin, price rises etc is wonderfully reassuring.

Ready for Winter ...

* and a rifle. Even sweet old ladies will have a Moisin-Nagant and 200 rounds in the hall cupboard. Like the US, Austrians have a right to bear arms - except pistols and semi-auto weapons. Unlike the US, they very rarely shoot eachother.

May a 'walking corpse' say Conservatives

Posting is light this week as it's dry and warm and I have 6m3 of Red Beech to cut and stack in the little barn. 

When a Conservative MP writes "Conservative MPs may vote for a walking corpse, but the electorate will not" and hardly anyone notices, one knows it's a time of great schism in the Party. Yes, against all common sense, against all probabilities of self-survival, against the entire national interest and of benefit only to the global corporates and EU27 economies, both of which seem to inspire Mrs May more than her own party, she seems determined to pursue a Customs Union. I've never read so many voices counselling against this folly, so many fellow members of my Party for whom this would be a final step too far. Yet it seems the shoddy Robbins plan, dead everywhere in the UK and Europe except for Downing Street, is still twitching, absent a stake through its heart. Mrs May's stubborn stupidity will cost our Party and the country dear; as Allister Heath writes in the Telegraph (£)

Jeremy Hosking, a City financier and major Tory donor, has carried out private polling in a number of seats that shows “clear support” for a new party that would help achieve “what the electorate thought it would be getting”. Others are thinking carefully about similar options if May decides to keep us permanently in the customs union. A Vote Leave-style party could grab 30-35 per cent of the vote in swathes of the country, destroy the Tories and win seats even in a first past the post system.

I don’t wish for this outcome: Corbyn would seize power, with cataclysmic consequences. It would be infinitely better if the Tories could do what they do best, come to terms with Brexit, find a new language to sell capitalism and reinvent themselves, absorbing and civilising the new populism. The question is: do they have the guts to listen to the voters? Or do they have a political death wish?

In these desperate times, my only hope is for the Eurozone economy to collapse before Corbyn comes to power. 

Europe's ethnic powderkeg

Eighty years ago, on 29th September 1938, Britain's then Prime Minister signed an agreement with the German Leader, Adolf Hitler, that signed away large areas of western Czechoslovakia to the German Reich. The Czechs were not consulted. There was a pretext for the land grab; the areas in question were largely inhabited by Germans, Volksdeutsch, who were suffering from discrimination, harassment and victimisation at the hands of a nationalistic Czech nation. 

In 1945 the Czechs, together with every European nation that suffered under the Third Reich, took their revenge. Up to 14,000,000 ethnic Germans, most of them women and children, were expelled from homes and communities, some of which had been settled since the twelfth century, in the largest such movement in human history. Between 500,000 and 1,500,000 died * - of cold, hunger, mass murder, locked in cattle trucks or confined in the concentration camps that had just been liberated. This ethnic cleansing was carried out under the noses of  and with the full knowledge and consent of the allies. The extent of this shameful post-war inhumanity is little known, even in Germany. For my young German chums it puts into context oral history from older relatives, post-war episodes they had regarded as isolated incidents, as this post-war ethnic cleansing is barely taught in German schools for fear of stoking the embers of German nationalism.  

In our own lifetime's experience we have seen in the Balkans how swiftly Europe can return to savagery and primitivism; friends and neighbours, who had lived together for generations, turned on eachother on ethnic lines. The men shot, the women and children turned out on the road, their homes looted. 

It is not hard to understand why a resurgence of nationalism is so feared in Europe. It's something one can't see from the British Isles - but living here, it's easy to understand why ethnic nationalism, identitarianism and the like are so readily suppressed, so deeply distrusted. Take a look at this extract from a pre-1914 ethnographic map of Europe; 

Before the 20th century, national consciousness was minimal. Communities of ethnic Germans (pink on the map) thrived in eastern Europe, some areas the size of Norfolk, complete with German schools, cultural infrastructure and few problems with their neighbours. Versailles and the drawing of national borders on ethnic lines sowed the seeds of a violent nationalism, not only German but Polish, Czech, Hungarian and so on, that drove the ethnic hatreds of the second war. You may notice one small Volksdeutsch community on the map, to the west of Krakow. A place called Auschwitz.

And although I can understand why many of those who support the EU do so because they believe the EU's open borders, Shengen and freedom of movement can return us to those idyllic halcyon pre-1914 days of no passports and live where you will, too much has changed for that ever to be possible again. The twentieth century and its post-war ethnic cleansing established national identity more strongly than ever before; in the 19th century, Europe was an ethnic and linguistic hotch-potch. At the end of the twentieth a Ruthenian of German origin and a South Tyrolean of German origin could not even talk to one another. 

And now in the twenty-first century we walk a razor edge between proper patriotism and dangerous nationalism, between beneficent internationalism and destructive globalism. Already, the anti-tourist graffiti is going up on walls from Venice to Valencia, and the knuckle-dragging ethnic purity thugs are pulling on their boots. 

The EU changes course more slowly than the largest supertanker. The longer Brussels pursues the notion of a homogeneous Europe, a Europe devoid of national identities, the more they stoke the dangerous fires of nationalism in Europe's nations. Ever closer union - or attempts to force it on the people of Europe -  can have only one outcome that I can see, and that is the conflict that for seventy years we have avoided, through NATO and consumer capitalism. Please God they see their folly before it's too late. 

*Orderly and Humane - The expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War, R.M. Douglas, Yale University Press, 2012

EU gearing up to implement Press Censorship

Like all anti-democratic authoritarian regimes, the EU can't stand criticism. A robust democracy such as our own makes space for savage satire, popular contempt, the slings and barbs of insult, the razor-pens of cruel cartoonists and the dagger-words of writers. The discomfort of our politicians and others who place themselves in positions of power over us is the price they pay for the nation's long-term political stability, the engagement of voters with politics and a healthy democracy. Hence, as I've examined below, Britain's lack of criminal penalties for defamation or abuse of politicians and State officials. 

However the EU, in the words of one of our finest comedy writers, don't like it up 'em. And they're gearing-up to censor it. 

First Věra Jourová, the unelected EU official in charge of Justice, indicated that the EU had plans for press regulation to deal with an impertinent press and media. Then, Herr Tusk complained about a 'lack of respect' by the British press for unelected EU officials (in this country, chum, respect must be earned). And finally, yesterday, Herr Juncker himself chipped in with “The British press is such that I will not miss it. It is, in part so, that they do not respect the human rights of political actors at all. Press freedom also has its limits … One should not bring people in privacy in distress.”. 

And there you have it. Press freedom has its limits - and those limits include taking the piss out of unelected EU officials. The EU has the power. And will use it to limit what the press says about them. I expect it's this sort of thing from the Sun that angers them;

Or perhaps these sort of headlines, disrespecting Herr Juncker's 'sciatica' -

But those unelected EU officials should take care. Every regime in history that censored what its people wrote and said about it fell. Just thank God that from March next year their nasty repressive little laws and corrupt courts hold no sway in Britain.

Edit
====
Jean Quatremer has much more on Drunker's 'sciatica' in the Speccie

EU gearing up to censor UK Free Press

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/06/juncker-criticises-british-media-and-urges-limits-to-press-freedom

Restoring British Liberalism means freedom from both Brussels and Whitehall

Mrs May, the consensus goes, did a fairly good job of reading-out at the party conference the words written for her. Most agree it has bought her at least another two weeks in power. But like one of those theatrical-cuisine meals with drizzles, one wonders after leaving the restaurant whether one has actually eaten at all. Allister Heath has pinned down the problem (£)

Ban, tax, regulate and intervene some more: Britain’s new modus operandi is grim indeed. The stream of silliness never ends; petty, meddling officialdom, empowered by the most controlling, puritanical government in living memory.

Only fashionable freedoms, such as the ability to get divorced at will, are promoted; unfashionable ones, such as the right to eat whatever we wish or to keep more of our hard-earned cash, are trampled upon in extraordinary fashion. There is ever-more red tape, and the tax-to-GDP ratio has reached its highest level in decades. This is neither real conservatism nor real liberalism: it is mushy, unprincipled, command politics, a regression to the Whitehall-knows-best mentality of the disastrous Harold Macmillan era.

This is the consequence of having since 2010 first the dilettante Cameron in Downing Street, and then the Whitehall puppet May. Neither have an innate understanding of the meaning of Conservatism or of true Liberalism. Until we finally break Whitehall's 1940s grip on power, a wartime-only grant of British freedom which ever since they have  refused to relinquish, we will never regain our true freedom.  

Meanwhile, Herr Tusk, one of the EU's unelected presidents, joins the Brussels grumbles about 'lack of respect' for the EU by the British press and commentators, after the Foreign Secretary's comparison of the EU to the Soviet Union. I for one have the greatest respect for the EU; in particular for

• Being able to subvert billions in national taxes to return as 'gifts' 'grants' or 'investments' to those who paid the taxes in the first place
• Allowing the fraudulent use, theft, peculation and false accounting of millions more in citizens' taxes in ways that shame crooked Russian oligarchs as GRU-type amateurs
• As a public body, hiding, refusing access to, distorting, misrepresenting and omitting financial information at all levels, from crooked expenses to institutional malfeasance, to prevent any meaningful scrutiny of fiduciary probity
• Enabling the capos to crookedly appoint as consigliere Martin Selmayr, a man whose principles are flexible enough not only to accept the appointment without shame but allow him to develop with Teutonic aggression the organisation's institutional corruption
• Stifling, choking and suffocating democracy in Europe whenever Europe's citizens dare to exercise their fundamental Human Rights at the ballot box; universal suffrage and the secret ballot are the weapons the bent capos of the EU fear most, and are most determined to destroy
• Destroying an entire bedrock European nation - Greece - to save the French and German banks. As Jonathon Bond writes in the Speccie, €230 bn of the €280bn 'aid' package for Greece has gone straight to EU banks without rescuing a single impoverished Greek.

Above all, I respect the EU's simple and powerful Mission Message "Ever Greater Power and Corruption".

Whitehall, of course, has been for forty years no more than the branch-office of the Berlaymont, deepening and furthering the crooked destruction of British liberal democracy by the EU. It is time to clear the thigh-deep shit from those Augean stables - but for that we need a Conservative Leader.

Britain WILL leave the EU

Mrs May read-out

Boris - Chequers cheats the electorate

Text of the final part of Boris' speech - with apologies to ConHome
Full text at ConHome HERE

So now therefore is the time truly to take back control and make the elegant dignified and grateful exit the country voted for. This is the moment – and there is time – to chuck Chequers, to scrap the Commission’s constitutionally abominable Northern Ireland backstop, to use the otherwise redundant and miserable “implementation period” to the end of 2020 to negotiate the Supercanada FTA, to invest in all the customs procedures that may be needed to ensure continued frictionless trade, and to prepare much more vigorously for a WTO deal.

And if we get it right, then the opportunities are immense. It is not just that we can do free trade deals. In so many growth areas of the economy this country is already light years ahead. Tech, data, bioscience, financial services, you name it. We can use our regulatory freedom to intensify those advantages.

And of course our European friends know that is possible – and that is exactly why they want to constrain us. Yet I would argue that it is actually in their interests too, to have the fifth biggest economy in the world, on their doorstep, acting as a continuing brake and caution to the over- regulatory instincts that have held the EU back for so long. Instead of being relentlessly homogenised, we can actually learn from each other again, in the spirit of friendly emulation that inspired the renaissance of European civilisation.

If we get this right, it can be win-win for both sides of the Channel.

If we get it wrong – if we bottle Brexit now – believe me, the people of this country will find it hard to forgive.

If we get it wrong, if we proceed with this undemocratic solution, if we remain half-in half out, we will protract this toxic tedious business that is frankly so off-putting to sensible middle of the road people who want us to get on with their priorities.

If we cheat the electorate – and Chequers is a cheat – we will escalate the sense of mistrust. We will give credence to those who cry betrayal, and I am afraid we will make it more likely that the ultimate beneficiary of the chequers deal will be the far right in the form of UKIP.

And therefore the far Left in the form of Jeremy Corbyn – a man who takes money from Iranian tv, who can barely bring himself to condemn the Russian state for the Salisbury atrocity, who indulges anti-semitism, and who by opportunistically committing himself to the misery and farce of a second referendum, has finally revealed himself to be the patsy of the EU as well.

We cannot allow it to happen.

We must not allow it to happen.

And so for one last time, I urge our friends in government to deliver what the people voted for, to back Theresa May in the best way possible, by softly, quietly, and sensibly backing her original plan. And in so doing to believe in conservatism and to believe in Britain.

Because if we get it wrong we will be punished. And if we get it right we can have a glorious future.

This government will then be remembered for having done something brave and right and remarkable and in accordance with the wishes of the people.

May and Hammond preparing to sell-out Britain?

If the story in the Times is to be believed, May and her Remainer ally Hammond are preparing to betray the UK's interests in favour of the wishes of the global corporates. On past form she will deliver a twisted-mouthed mendacious speech at conference that will be aimed at placating Brexiteers with oily words and smooth insincerities whilst all the while caving into the demands made by an intransigent Brussels.

May and her Remainer team are simply not up to the job of defending the UK's interests. They trust neither the British people nor the assurances of our many friends across the world who wish us to do well. They would rather we remain a Satrap nation under the authoritarian rule of an anti-democratic and unelected cabal in Brussels. 

Make no mistake; if May attempts to follow the route suggested by the Times, our children and grandchildren will weep bitter tears of regret at her betrayal of their future.
 

Global Corporates ramp up Brexit scares

The biggest threat to the future success of the United Kingdom is pinning our economic hopes on the global corporates, yet this is exactly what Mrs May, under the brainwashing of the CBI and Oliver Robbins, is trying to use Brexit to secure. Neither are the globals themselves backwards in adding their own lies to Project Fear; the latest last week were from the international car makers. 

What they forgot to mention is that in ten years or so their cars will be banned for sale in Europe, their plants just so much scrap metal and wasteland, and their vast Euro workforces all redundant. That's not the fault of Brexit but of technological progress. An electric powered car has just something like 15% of the parts of an internal combustion engined one. So why screw the entire British economy, as they want May to do, to prolong their JIT uselessness by a few more years? The sooner the UK bites the bullet and attracts investment into 100% UK assembled electric vehicles the better. 

It's not just carmakers. We've reached peak global. The corporates are simply unable to increase their profitability from their operations by a single cent more - only a continuous process of mergers and takeovers generates new money, and we're at the end of that road. We're way past Standard Oil, and now only a radical rethink of Conservative capitalism can rescue the British economy. Sadly, Mrs May, with her limited understanding and abilities, is not the Prime Minister to head this process. Tenacity and resilience are only positive virtues when exercised in following the right path.

Steve Baker in the Telegraph today (£) and Janet Daley yesterday are both singing the same hymn. A party for a young, energetic, entrepreneurial, internationalist and enterprising Britain doesn't shackle itself to the dead-weights of the terminally-ill global corporates and the CBI. Our future Conservative membership is waiting for a party that articulates their hopes and aspirations, their knowledge and world-view, yet Mrs May wants to lead the party into failure and error, wants, like Corbyn, to lead a party stuck in the 1970s and unable to progress. 

For the sake of Brexit, and for the sake of Britain, she must now resign and hand over to a Leader who can do the job.

Back to the Future

"Thanks Gloria. And two digestives this afternoon, eh? It being Friday?"

"Tea's just mashing, Mr Scroggins. Shall I bring cups for the assembly line shop stewards?"

"No, No. We'll be here all day. And porcelain upsets them. Show them in". As he looked out of his  steel Crittal windows over the vast Leyland car plant, George Scroggins' heart surged with pride, pride at the haze from the leaking steam pipes, the cracked and patched asbestos cement roofs, the grimy and cracked windows and the plywood-patched skylights. From this plant came the finest automobile in Britain - the Austin-Morris Allegra. The noise of  the broken door closer woke him from his reverie.

"Come in! Come in! Arthur, Frank. Sit thee down.  Now I don't expect this to be a lengthy meeting ..."

"That's why you always see us at three-fifteen on Fridays, Mr Scroggins. To be fair."

"That's not wholly true, Frank, no, no .... now this is about young Donald Higginbottom I gather?"  

"Foreman suspended him, yes. Unwarranted victimisation. We're demanding full restitution."

"But Arthur, he was fixing gearbox gaiters with two inch nails. He ruined nearly two hundred cars before Quality Control noticed, half of which have already been sold."

"Not his fault, Mr Scroggins. Supply shop ran out of that size of machine screws, and the screw shop said they weren't scheduled to turn any more until November. Donald was on gaiter bonus for twenty gaiters a day - not fixing gaiters would have taken food from his childrens' mouths. So he used what he had. You can't blame the lad"

"Arthur, I have to support my foremen. I have to uphold the suspension."

"We'll bring Number Two Line, the rubber shop, the window shop and the carpet-cutters out unless he's revoked. Higginbottoms are big in the eastern sheds."

"Wait wait Frank. There's no need to be precipitous. Digestive biscuit? We've had two strikes already this month, if you recall. Now what if I say he's only provisionally suspended, permitted to work as normal until his hearing, on full pay, but nominally suspended?"

"On full bonus? Even if screw shop can't supply gaiter screws?"

"Yes yes. Alright? We'll ask the Welsh Megra plant if they can lend us some screws. Otherwise we'll go with the two-inch nails. Now about next month's cars. What have we got?"

"There's plenty of bright red upholstery vinyl, so we can switch all production to that. On the paint side, there's four thousand gallons of that yellowy-brown - 'Curry' the paint shop named it."

"Head office vetoed 'Curry' as an Allegra colour, Frank. It's not the best word, is it? Reminds me of that German mustard we had at BMW last year ... I know! Let's rename it the German for mustard - Gloria! What's German for mustard?"

"Moutarde, I think, Mr Scroggins"

"That's it. Tell the dealers they'll all be getting Moutarde Allegras with pillar-box red upholstery next month, Gloria. Now, lads, was there anything else?"

"There was a suggestion that in future customers might be able to choose their own body and seat colours, Mr Scroggins. And that the waiting lists might be cut from four months to ten days"

"Bloody scaremongering. Don't pay any heed to that rubbish, Frank. I promise you, under Mr Corbyn, such things will never happen!"      

Trump speech - the bits you won't read in the papers or hear on the BBC

The text of Trump's speech reads as though written by two separate people. There's the Steve Bannon bits, all bull and braggadocio, pumped with adolescent hormones, in which the Donald claims that his conker is a sixer and will take on all-comers. Then there are the Trump administration's strategic drivers, delineating clearly an intellectual vision of America's place in the world. The quotes below are from the latter passages. 

UNITED NATIONS, 25th September 

Each of us here today is the emissary of a distinct culture, a rich history, and a people bound together by ties of memory, tradition, and the values that make our homelands like nowhere else on Earth.

I honor the right of every nation in this room to pursue its own customs, beliefs, and traditions. The United States will not tell you how to live or work or worship. We only ask that you honor our sovereignty in return.

Many nations in this hall will agree that the world trading system is in dire need of change. For example, countries were admitted to the World Trade Organization that violate every single principle on which the organization is based. While the United States and many other nations play by the rules, these countries use government-run industrial planning and state-owned enterprises to rig the system in their favor. They engage in relentless product dumping, forced technology transfer, and the theft of intellectual property.
 
But those days are over. We will no longer tolerate such abuse. We will not allow our workers to be victimized, our companies to be cheated, and our wealth to be plundered and transferred. America will never apologize for protecting its citizens.

I spoke before this body last year and warned that the U.N. Human Rights Council had become a grave embarrassment to this institution, shielding egregious human rights abusers while bashing America and its many friends.

Our Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, laid out a clear agenda for reform, but despite reported and repeated warnings, no action at all was taken.

So the United States took the only responsible course: We withdrew from the Human Rights Council, and we will not return until real reform is enacted.

For similar reasons, the United States will provide no support in recognition to the International Criminal Court. As far as America is concerned, the ICC has no jurisdiction, no legitimacy, and no authority. The ICC claims near-universal jurisdiction over the citizens of every country, violating all principles of justice, fairness, and due process. We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy.

America is governed by Americans. We reject the ideology of globalism, and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism. Around the world, responsible nations must defend against threats to sovereignty not just from global governance, but also from other, new forms of coercion and domination.

It has been the formal policy of our country since President Monroe that we reject the interference of foreign nations in this hemisphere and in our own affairs. The United States has recently strengthened our laws to better screen foreign investments in our country for national security threats, and we welcome cooperation with countries in this region and around the world that wish to do the same. You need to do it for your own protection.

We recognize the right of every nation in this room to set its own immigration policy in accordance with its national interests, just as we ask other countries to respect our own right to do the same. That is one reason the United States will not participate in the new Global Compact on Migration. Migration should not be governed by an international body unaccountable to our own citizens.

The United States is committed to making the United Nations more effective and accountable. As part of our reform effort, I have told our negotiators that the United States will not pay more than 25 percent of the U.N. peacekeeping budget.

In America, we believe in the majesty of freedom and the dignity of the individual. We believe in self-government and the rule of law. And we prize the culture that sustains our liberty -– a culture built on strong families, deep faith, and fierce independence. We celebrate our heroes, we treasure our traditions, and above all, we love our country.

Sovereign and independent nations are the only vehicle where freedom has ever survived, democracy has ever endured, or peace has ever prospered. And so we must protect our sovereignty and our cherished independence above all.

When we do, we will find new avenues for cooperation unfolding before us. We will find new passion for peacemaking rising within us. We will find new purpose, new resolve, and new spirit flourishing all around us, and making this a more beautiful world in which to live.

So together, let us choose a future of patriotism, prosperity, and pride. Let us choose peace and freedom over domination and defeat. And let us come here to this place to stand for our people and their nations, forever strong, forever sovereign, forever just, and forever thankful for the grace and the goodness and the glory of God.

Press censorship: Europe's most repressive nations

It was the Sun that set the standard back in the days when John Major was trying to fool the UK into giving away our financial freedom to Europe; 'Up Yours, Delors' was the unequivocal message that set the tone for a generation. And last week the paper was again on a burn, with its depiction of Herr Macron and Herr Tusk as armed gangsters:-

The Sun in its inimitable way embodies all that's good and right about press freedom in the UK - indeed, so used are the British to the exercise of this form of critique of the great and good, the entire population has taken it up on social media. Woe betide the inflated ego of any self-loving politician, the self-worth of dreary, humourless self-regarding Eurocrats and the pomposity of third-rate bling medal collectors, whose sciatica must surely blind them to the absurdity of their vulgar Ruritanian pretentions.

In fact, we probably regard the freedom with which the British press, British satirists and cartoonists and British sketch writers portray self-regarding nobs as being normal, Liberal and proper, but this is far from the case. The Sun's headline was just too much for the delicate sensibilities of the EU's unelected official in charge of Justice -  Věra Jourová, whose name must have been cut-and-pasted a thousand times by those too lazy to hunt for unfamiliar HTML code. You might think having an EU official in charge of Justice is a bit like having an Admiral on the government payroll in Switzerland, but there you are. Vera, let's call her, is distinctly unhappy, particularly with the Sun, and as she told the Guardian, she has a post-Brexit plan for a "European approach to media based on quality and smart regulation" that will deal with this British lèse-majesté.

I read that as her desire for an EU firewall that shuts off from the gentle sensibilities of the unelected masses in Brussels any access to the Sun. In fact, shuts off from the EU any foreign papers, news channels, blogs or other media that fail to recognise just how brilliant all the unelected officials are. Well, good luck to her. The EU is already far gone down that road; two images for you. The first, those nations in which it's a criminal act to be rude about a foreign Head of State, the second, those in which Defamation generally is a criminal offence punishable by imprisonment (dark red) or other penalties on conviction (light red)  

For the former, Germany, Denmark and Poland have the most draconian sentences of up to five, four and three years respectively. Poland will also jail citizens for three years for insulting their own Head of State - and the liberal little Netherlands will bang you up for five years for the same. 

I'd suggest that nations that appear on both maps are Europe's most repressive countries. Step up to the Iron Mask, then, Germany, Poland, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden. If you're a politician from these nations, Britain's unbelievably lax press laws must chafe something dreadful.

Never mind, dears. From next year you can cut yourselves off in fairyland and enjoy awarding eachother colourful little medals. Until the whole edifice comes tumbling down.