Teds and Target 2 - the coming news agenda

Slang is fascinating. A bottom-up generated change in language reflects a substantial forming or modification of outlook. I'm surprised we don't have chairs in Slang at the new universities. I write this as I found this week two new slang terms for the Germans, both words born of common parents here in the trans-Alpine region. The first is Italian. Tudro is not a kind word; it means oafish, unimaginative, lacking feeling or sensibility and is pure Italian. The second is from the British army stationed in southern Austria at the war's end, guarding hundreds of thousands of broken, dispirited, rumpled, at-heel German troops. A score could be herded by one man with a loosely carried Lee-Enfield. They were no longer Huns, Krauts or Jerries - the swagger, the insolence, the arrogance had been beaten out of them in battle. So for their British guards they became Teds, from the Italian Tedeschi. I like Teds.

With the news agenda swinging round like an oil tanker at bow-anchor to Italy, AEP starts the move with a piece in the Telegraph (£)  on how the new Italian government's finance proposals have 'enraged' the Teds. It's all about Target 2, or T2 as we shall say. There are some useful papers on T2 about - Here from FT Alphaville, and Here from Forbes, if, like me you need a crash course. I suspect over the next year we'll all be hearing a lot more about T2 in the news. The headline is that the Bundesbank is owed nearly a trillion Euros by the rest of the Eurozone, whilst Spain and Italy have heavy T2 debts. Martin Selmayr is turning his death-gaze from West to South. A couple of interesting points, if I've read the briefings right -

- National banks are given an allocation of Euros to print. Printing more than the allocation creates a debit with the ECB. Germany's Bundesbank has been printing hundreds of billions of excess Euros possibly to offset their trillion-Euro T2 credit with the ECB 

- QE money created by the Bank of Italy has been substantially invested by the Italian market in, erm, Germany, substantially increasing Italy's T2 liability and Germany's T2 credit

- Germany's huge T2 credit now forms by far the biggest asset of the Bundesbank, having overtaken in the early noughties the previous biggest Bundesbank assets of loans to German banks. 

- Germany is not quite alone in having a substantial T2 credit; the Netherlands and Luxembourg are also in the creditors club. So expect some commensurate alignments. 

Right. Off to the Herrenfriseur, then.

MPs get it right on Carillion - now we need action

I can find no redeeming behaviour on the part of the venal and hubristic directors of Carillion in the Commons select committees report. Greed, recklessness, irresponsibility, immorality - directors, in the words of Frank Field, more interested in stuffing their mouths with gold than with their fiscal and fiduciary responsibilities. 

As I've written previously, I've seen this culpable recklessness time after time in the Construction industry - loss leading bids for contracts with a naive hope that profit can be screwed from contract variations, a prioritising of turnover over profitability, a childish drive for size. It's unforgivable and I don't forgive it. 

Those who suffer are the trades, workers and sub-contractors - working people, living from contract to contract, often at the slenderest of margins strained by late payment or settlement of accounts, ordinary grafters with families and mortgages and car leases to pay. Men and women I know and like and will always defend. And those fat carousing bastards at Carillion thieved millions without compunction. Shame on them. 

Equally culpable are the crooks at the big 4 audit firms - KPMG, PwC, Deloitte and EY - also excoriated by the Commons report. In return for fat audit fees, these crim bastards send in teams of juniors and trainees to test-check documents, interrogate computer systems and generally to record time spent and accumulate fat box files of dross to demonstrate due diligence, whilst happily ignoring a global picture of impending failure. Shame on these bastards, too. 

My only solution is the American one. We don't need any more regulations, any more accounting codes, any more restrictions on doing business, any more restraints on responsible capitalism. What we have are adequate. We must not make business any harder or more onerous or burdensome. No, what we need are post-hoc retributive measures - that if a firm fails, as Carillion did, and if that failure was due to the malfeasance of directors and auditors, as it was at Carillion, it should mean long jail terms. Twenty years and more. And not for the junior trainees at the Big Four but for the directors. These bastards must face real penalties.

Miliband the Bottler crawls back - the first of many

David Miliband, the man termed a 'coward' by journalists for getting the press all excited about challenging Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership and then bottling it, has crawled back to the UK from his 'charidy work' in the US hoping no doubt to win a place leading a new left-centre party without having to fight anyone for it. Their rallying point is to reverse Britain's democratic decision to leave the EU. But then he was a man scorned as a popular brand of seedless orange - a reference to his lack of fertility rather than his faith, I gather.

Meanwhile, those on the exit side who currently have no option other than voting Conservative or not voting at all are watching carefully for the emergence of a new pro-Brexit party before 2022 for whom to cast a ballot. Nothing too right-wing - neo-Thatcherite would do nicely. With a little clear water between the new party and the politics of race-hate that characterises those scorned as 'Gammons' by the new left (who in return, it's fair to say, are termed 'Soy-Boys'). Racists in need of a home can always try one of the far-right clones on offer - I think there are currently two, but I may be mistaken. Neither will win anything, but their members can console themselves with the racial purity of their votes or something.  And I know some of you will give me a kicking for that - but I feel obliged to re-state from time to time that I support a distinct British identity open to anyone of whatever colour, creed, sex or faith, that I am utterly hostile to ideologies inimical with Britishness but welcoming to any minority persons wanting to join the club.  

New parties of left and right may rise, but they will also become subsumed into our parliamentary duopoly. Or rather 2½ party system. It all comes down to votes - the blue party now needs to consolidate Hovis-land and the red party needs quinoa-chewers and Waitrose-shoppers. 

Does this mean the poles are about to flip? That the Conservatives, traditionally the party of the South-East of England, becomes the party of the Midlands and North, whilst Labour deserts its Northern heartlands and settles-in within the M25? Interesting.

So of course we'll see all the dags, liggers and chancers such as Miliband drifting back; prepare for names and faces you haven't seen for a decade or more suddenly doing interviews on 'Today' or popping up on 'Newsnight'. We're in for another of those major political re-alignments. Now is the time for the millionaires and billionaires to place their stakes and buy their players, currently on options contracts of course until Brexit pans out a little more.  

One thing is certain; those of we polemicists who subside on a mix of satire and cruel invective won't be short of targets for a year or two.  

The technocrats who hate and fear British democracy

David Runciman, the owner of a first rate pedigree but a second rate mind, uses space in the Observer today to convince us that we don't need democracy any more. The core of his argument is that the 'wrong' people keep winning democratic elections, so democracy must be broken. How much better if things were decided by savvy, opinionated, metropolitan young things swiping their i-phone screens rather than we 'confused' voters.

This is just the latest in a series of establishment campaigns to undermine democracy in favour of direct technocratic rule by an establishment elite - and few scribblers can be more elite than the Honourable David Runciman, Eton and Trinity, heir to a Viscountcy. 

I really won't waste either your time or mine demolishing his feeble arguments one by one. It's thin, pissy, jejune stuff and you can do so yourselves. 

The differences between congruent, stable nations with stark electoral processes such as the UK and weak, unstable, fractured or dangerous nations with electoral systems designed to impede, dilute, mediate or limit the effect of democracy such as Italy and Germany have evolved in reaction to specific conditions prevalent in each nation. For all the admitted 'unfairness' of FPTP for UK Parliamentary elections, it works here.

Runciman completely neglects to mention the surpranational body that does very well with hardly any democracy at all - the EU. And it's probably just as well that the treasonous authors of the FCO EU strategy document (FCO 30/1048) from 1971 are all dead - though that would not prevent future governments, like that of Charles II on Restoration, from digging them up and re-purposing their remains. 

Runciman's musings are by no means original. "The operations of democracy seem decreasingly fitted to control the all-embracing regulatory activities of the Civil Service" wrote this dangerous mandarin with an easy acceptance that assumed technocratic rule to be inevitable, with the more 'democratic' front-dressing the EU adopted the greater and faster the bleeding of British sovereignty.  

Well, I hate to puncture the little bladders of these self-obsessed elitists, but they're wrong. Deeply, utterly, absolutely and irrevocably wrong. They're themselves only only here and free to express their deviant views because the British people fought for democratic freedom over centuries of struggle - and two aspects of that freedom, universal suffrage and the secret ballot, are not and will never be up for trade or replacement.  

The votes of the British people may appear an inconvenient impediment to these technocratic elitists, but we're not giving them up.

David Davis' next trip should be to Italy

There is a sort of universal comprehension dawning that having given Mrs May a chance on Brexit she's cocked up and will deliver no more than a dog's dinner of a mess, that Brexit may take twenty years and that the vested interests of the senior political class from mandarins to peers who have spent their entire lives helping create the EU won't end them by seeing their life work destroyed. So we need a change of tactics. The quick, clean, amicable break and then business as normal is so far off the table it missed the swill bin on its way out. So we must pursue the attritional campaign instead, and the gloves are off. 

David Davis should make Italy his next port of call. Priapic jailbird Berlusconi has been kicked overboard, wrecking the dreams of the Brussels mafia that an old colleague familiar with gross corruption, illegality, criminal governance and fraud would resurrect the old EU-Italian relationship in all its past criminality. They now have to face ideologues M5S and Lega, both committed to their nation more than they are to their offshore bank accounts and their bent chums in the Berlaymont. We should make allies of them, and offer support. The UK loves Pininfarina, Parmesan and Prosecco and there will always be a place here for Italians. We should offer the co-operation of the City in their resurrection of the Lire by the back door and help them to find a way to walk away from their Target 2 debt to Germany. 

Likewise the Visegrad group. Neither Poland nor Hungary are natural fans of Britain (Poland blames us for not intervening militarily either in September 1939 or January 1945, and I don't know why Hungarian history dislikes us, but it does) and we could use a diplomatic push mission. Poles have the lowest breeding rate in Europe and paying a bit of UK child benefit is a small price to pay to help implement the Polish government's plea to its people to 'breed like rabbits'. 

Elsewhere we should use the Secret Intelligence Service to help destabilise the EU just enough to keep them constantly on the back foot but not enough to destroy the fragile alliance. We need to support all efforts to make Germany explosively excrete her gold and demolish her Target 2 credits. We need to appeal directly to French farmers, giving vehicles bound for farmers' markets in SE England preferential clearance, quietly encouraging cross-border tax evasion and petty smuggling, the sort of thing that the Kermit farmers love but the Quay d'Orsay hates. 

We must also dismiss May with the contemptuous disdain with which we threw out the dilettante Cameron but only when the time is right. And we must prepare to allow Corbyn two or three years of destroying the country and economy.

It's time for the gentlemen to go out and for the players to come in. 

Fifty years on, it's time to raise the barricades again and pile the pavé

In 1968, fifty years ago, I was on the cusp of starting Big School. The magnitude of this event was somewhat diluted by a very palpable Zeitgeist around the Vietnam War and what was subsequently termed the Summer of Love. We lived then in the garrison town of Colchester, place of my father's final posting but also home to the newly built University of Essex. One of my lifelong comfort odours is what I call 'army smell' - open the canvas tail-flap of an army Landrover newly serviced and inhale. A mix of storm-proof canvas, paint, gun oil and clean metal. Years later I went to an auction at an army stores and almost missed the event as I stood in the shed just inhaling nasal lungfulls of the glorious smell. It was the smell of my dad's stored kit, the smell of safety and belonging. Colchester in 1968 was a mix of army smell and patchouli oil, of crop-headed lads and tie-dyed hippies. 

In the years that followed, into the '70s, as my social and political consciousness grew, I was a passionate and vocal supporter of what I shall term (with upper-case) Freedom. The Lord Chamberlain had still back then to approve each and every line of each and every stage play - Spike Milligan was almost prosecuted for departing on stage from the officially approved text. Kenneth Tynan's epic battles that led eventually to this censorship being overturned are well documented. We fought against the Establishment, against bent judges, thieving politicians, censorship and repression in every form. We read Private Eye, in those days an anti-establishment magazine, and celebrated the exposure of official cant and hypocrisy. I stood beers all night when Jean, Cardinal Danielou, the church's vocal spokesman against all we stood for, died of a stroke in a French brothel. 

The Pythons and the Cambridge footlights crowd were tame, but played their part. We preferred Peter Cook and Dudley Moore (I have only to ask "What's the worst job you ever had?" these days to see who references Jayne Mansfield and who looks blank) whose samizdat albums were played so often the grooves wore out. 

Fifty years on and the bastards are back. Labour's Noncefinder-General Tom Watson, almost as  repugnant a man as Lavrenti Beria, is seeking today to take us back to those pre-1968 days with a press censorship so draconian that Boris Pasternak would wince. Leveson I was bad enough, institutionalising the private press censor funded by the sado-masochistic sexual deviant Max Mosley but now Watson is seeking to implement phase II. Philip Johnston in the Telegraph (£) calls them the enemies of a free society, and so they are. 

Well, we fought those battles once, fifty years ago, and if need be we'll fight them again. We'll tear Labour's repressive knouts from their brutal fists - our press won't be cowed or beaten by these authoritarian bigots. 

If you've got this far you deserve a prize. Here's Peter Cook satirising the summing-up of the bent judge at the trial of Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal leader who attempted to murder his gay toy-boy

WATCH IT HERE

Whither GPS - UK?

In reaction to the EU's attempted blackmail over the EU GPS system, to which we've already contributed not only £1.4bn but ground station facilities in UK territory around the globe, the Telegraph promised us yesterday evening an exclusive article by the defence secretary Buzz Lightyear. In it, we were told, would be an announcement of a UK GPS system badged at £3bn but realistically £10bn that would retain our global tech lead in the area and give our armed forces a secure and above all independent targeting system. 

This morning nothing. Nada. Rien. The original piece has been pulled and Buzz Lightyear Gavin Williamson is nowhere to be found on the e-pages of that august publication. 

Elsewhere I've seen it stated that (i) the EU system won't work without UK assistance anyway and we can turn it off (ii) EU nations have such poor security that Galileo has already been hacked by the US / Russia / China and can be disabled at will (iii) if the UK was part of Galileo's military application, we would need Herr Juncker to authorise any Trident launch. 

Something's going on. Mind you, I've never really been fond of GPS and the blue wire. I was raised on LORAN and VHF-RDF and my first real boat had a manually-turned radio signal finder atop the SSB/LW/VHF set ... I'll get my peacoat. 

Gangs of London

With yet more violent death and gang warfare on the streets of London over the bank holiday weekend, Sadiq Khan's orders to the Met Commissioner on taking office to cease regular programmed stop and search has probably been responsible for much pain and bloodshed. It matters not that the blood being spilled is largely young and black; allowing or tolerating any form of violent largesse on our streets disgraces our civilisation and, as it will spread beyond the current milieu, dangerous for us all. Here is what is at the heart of it - London's gang territories

Territories are of two types; large geographic areas bounded by roads or geographic features, and small blocks which are council or social housing estates. As young black people travel largely by bus, their journeys are sometimes circuitous to avoid routes passing through rival gang territories. How they know the origin of strangers on their turf always puzzles me - these kids don't wear 'colours' or have gang tats - but they do. Schools, work, relationships are all governed and constrained by these gang territories.

A decade ago I wrote constructively to Bridget Prentice, then my MP, about the number of these kids carrying knives. Bridget is not a clever woman (she's now an electoral commissioner) and the Commons champagne terrace was more familiar to her than the pubs and public transport of her own constituency. She poo-poohed my concerns. And that's the problem with these purblind Labour dags; it's their bloody council estates and social housing that breed the gangs that shed the blood.

This is a short bank holiday post that could easily become an essay. My own quadrant of London has warfare between the newly-arrived Somalis and the established West Indians, with Nigerian gangs dominating London's fraud capital of Thamesmead in the east. Knives have progressed to machetes and axes. 

Causes are complex, but London's housing shortage (itself exacerbated by Labour's immigration non-policy) and structural economic changes are likely to play a part. Neither Sadiq Khan nor Cressida Dick (who commanded during the killing of Jean de Menezes) has had any effect. However weak, stupid and vacillating London's current mayor is, we must now intervene over his narcissistic and pointless head.

We CAN NOT tolerate a situation in which a child's choice of secondary school and what lies between home and school can determine the risk of dying in a pool of blood. 

There's only one road for Halal-Labour

It should be remembered that Corbyn's Halal-Labour (as opposed to Haram-Labour, whose members sometimes forget and call women 'love', support the home nation team but don't support transexual toilet access, and generally enjoy a fag, a pint and a quiet respect for Israel) is officially Brexit, much to the chagrin of many remainer members. If the recent council elections cemented, as pollster John Curtice remarked, May's party as the political host of the 'Leave' soul then it also highlighted Labour's split personality in trying to be the party of Leave and Remain simultaneously.   

UKIP's voters, 4m direct electors at the party's peak and probably another 4m who held their noses and voted Dilettante-Conservative in 2010, have used the council elections to deliver a stark warning to CCHQ; you're the party of Leave, or you're finished. Polling analyst Rob Ford estimates 70% of Conservative voters are now Leavers compared to 30% of Labour voters, but that can't last. 

Corbyn is under huge pressure now from the parliamentary party, Labour peers and the metropolitan strongholds to go fully Remoaner Halal-Labour, win back a drift of the Remain vote to the LibDems and cement the power that Labour failed to secure in the megacities on Thursday. The rump of Haram-Labour and cerebral Labour Leavers can find a home in the Conservatives. Right now, Kate Hoey is more of a Conservative than Anna Soubry.

Or so goes my theory. The trick for May's party will be to occupy both centre ground and Leave simultaneously - not as easy as it sounds. And there are nascent third parties forming in the wings and attracting attention from big-bucks funders that could be insurgent contenders in 2022.  

However, I can see no longer-term downside (for us) to Labour abandoning Leave; a pure Halal-Labour will be powerful, run the large metropolii but will never be anything other than a strong opposition in Parliament. the Brexit process is screwed anyway and it will never happen cleanly - if it takes a decent majority in the 2022 parliament to make a clean break, we can live with it. We just need to be sure that May's team makes no agreement, no concessions, no treaty with the EU now that can't be reversed under a new administration.

....and they're off!

With polling stations about to open, reading the press you might wonder why bother to vote. It's a foregone conclusion, they say - a wipeout for Halal-Labour-Momentum, with the Tories kicked out of local government and Corbyn triumphant. Well, if you believe that old bollocks there's no hope. 

For a start, the pollsters can't call election results at the moment. Well, not to within +/- 10%, anyway. One issue is that people interviewed on mobile devices are less honest than those the pollsters used to call on what are now quaintly called 'home telephones'. The other is that IVR has removed 2m people from the voting rolls who should not have been there and added a missing 2m who should have been. 

I think the Halal-Labour swings will be less significant than thought but that Mrs May will still get a handbagging. Let's wait and see. The real test for me will be the turnout in the five test areas for voter ID. To those who aver that is no proven history of personation to justify such measures nationally, I say well, I'll bet you said that about child sexual exploitation in Rochdale, Telford, Oxford and all those other towns a few years ago. Not catching offenders doesn't prove that crimes aren't being committed. 

For those of you who have been out on the stump for UKIP or Conservatives or whomever, well done; you are the backbone of democracy. Win or lose, you've already won.  

Addition
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These are the comment settings, all that Blogger has available. If anyone knows how to make verification even less onerous, let me know. Blogger also sometimes decides that comments from regulars are 'spam' and since I only look at this once a week or so to free the poor trapped things I apologise for tardyness. I tried Disqus for a while but you all hated it. 

 

Yes, the Lords must go

I won't rehearse again the many failings of the political life peers, who like some malignant contagious disfigurement have destroyed the integrity of our upper chamber. Worthless dross, dags and liggers, spivs and crooks, the filth of their touch befouls anything good. And as Nigel Farage writes in the Telegraph today (£) the process of putrescence has accelerated under both Blair and Cameron - archly corrupt chisellers both, sofas and chums and honours for bribers, rent-seekers and hairdressers. I won't say it will be no pleasure; defenestrating the effete Andrew Adonis or the pervert Rennard will be fun. Calls will grow for abolition from all quarters, and the discussion must swiftly move to what we must replace it with. 

Clearly, electors will expect some say in who sits in a second house, but a national election list would be impossible to administer. People are also frustrated at the domination by the metropolitan political class. The CofE bishops must go - to retain them would be to open the doors to Muslims, Jehovah's Witnesses and Zoroastrians to be represented. However, there may be a place for some appointments made by an independent commission for which the most senior of the professions and the armed forces would be eligible. 

Here's an initial suggestion (% or senate, take your pick) -

English ceremonial counties (old Yorkshire ridings etc)    - 48
Welsh counties                                                                -  8
Northern Ireland                                                             -  5
Scotland                                                                         - 12
City of London                                                                -  1
Greater London (smaller than GLA )                                 -  6
Total 'elected'                                                                - 80
Appointments Commission                                               - 20     

If we assume that the Lords in its present form will go, and concentrate on with what to replace it, I think we'll be on the right track. 

If you haven't already signed the abolition referendum petition, I urge you to do so -
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/209433

Disfunctional mandarins must be culled

You could pretty much stop any 177 bus at random in south London and comb-out a dozen illegals. At least half of them would be Nigerian - overstayers who came on student visas in the nineties and noughties with places in august institutions such as the Imperial College of Law and Business, 14 The Parade, Catford (above Morley's Chicken). The scam was known to just about everybody in the country except, it seems, the mandarins at the Home Office. When faced with a shouty minister demanding deportation targets, instead of random immigration checks on London buses (I promise you, a guaranteed haul with every stop) the muppets deported black Britons from the Caribbean, many of them a damn site more British than I am if you count time served. 

These are the same Home Office muppets that ushered scores of ex-Iraqi tank drivers into the UK because they declared that they were children. As the entire nation shouted 'Ref!' as files of men in their thirties climbed smilingly into luxury coaches those Home Office mandarins asked 'what?' It took two years to admit quietly that most of these swarthy stubbled blokes were in fact adults. 

It takes a certain stubborn stupidity to make errors so gross, so culpable, so utterly mindlessly inane and keep on making them again and again, but the senior civil servants running the Home Office have made a career of it. The minister has had to go, of course, and this is right. But if one of her muppets had explained to her that they would be deporting

... Dexter Bristol, here for 51 years, who died a year after being pushed out of his job as a cleaner and forced into penury for lack of a passport. There’s Gretal Gocan, an 81-year-old NHS nurse and granny who made her life here over decades and is now living in Jamaica, in poverty and isolation from her family, after being refused re-entry in 2010. There’s Winston Jones, a former railway worker evicted from his house shortly after having brain surgery and then presented with a £5,000 bill for his care.

then even Amber Rudd would have cavilled. 

As Brexit has shown, the top ranks of the civil service are in desperate need of root and branch reform. Criteria for promotion and selection for mandarin rank are clearly disfunctional if such pointless, useless muppets continue to be appointed to PUS and second and third tier posts. Ministers deserve more; Amber Rudd deserved more. For Gods sake, let's use Common Sense as a prime candidate criterion, not Common Purpose.

Britain under occupation

For some reason this is the season in which the German occupation of the Channel Islands is a topic for discussion. I suppose it was twenty years ago when I first visited the museum of the occupation in Jersey, telling a story much as we have all been told it. A brave uncowed population barely tolerating their boorish occupiers, small acts of sabotage and resistance that never escalated into anything for which a dozen hostages could be put up against a wall. In Jersey our maquis had no train tracks to blow up, so sneaked 'V' patterns into the new town centre paving instead. From crude memory, around a third of the exhibition I saw related to the post-June 1944 finale, when German supplies to the islands were curtailed and there was widespread hunger. For Jersey, the end of the war came when a Red Cross freighter was allowed to dock, with food parcels for the desperate islanders. 

That was of course long before Alanbrooke's uncensored diaries became available and as grown-ups we learned our superheroes were just human. Churchill raw, without the editing, revising and veto of his closest subordinates, was close to a dangerous despot. His jealous fury when he declared that Montgomery, newly elevated to Field Marshal, was to be prevented from processing down the Mall to the palace for his baton was pure jejune petulance. The adulation of the public was not to be wasted on a subordinate. He is also recorded as having responded to pleas to allow a Red Cross vessel to sail for the Islands 'Let them starve!'. Of course, it is explained, he was talking about the German garrison. But others are not so sure; Churchill, they say, blamed the islanders for quiescence under occupation; they fought neither on the beaches nor in the hills, they did not set occupied Britain ablaze, but rather won a few extra eggs with forged ration coupons and copulated with the invaders. 

We cannot today know the truth of those years or say with any certainty how we ourselves would have responded to occupation. Undoubtedly there were individual acts of defiance of great bravery, and islanders who died neglected and forgotten in Nazi concentration camps. One cannot today make moral judgements on those from the past, one can only compare the incidents in the islands under occupation to those in other places under German invasion. It was largely orderly. Grudgingly co-operative. 

The Geneva convention of 1949 made illegal two of perhaps the most unjustly-felt but previously lawful lethal measures taken by combatants during that war. The first was the indiscriminate aerial bombing of civilian towns and cities - the offensive that AM Harris was convinced could win the war. After 1949 Dresden and all the rest would be war crimes. The second was the lawful execution of civilians in reprisal for acts of violence and sabotage towards the invading forces. All those boys and farmers and priests machine-gunned against French walls in reprisal for the the acts of Francs-tireurs were killed quite lawfully; not one German officer ever faced prosecution. In the massacre of the Ardeatine Caves, in which 335 were executed, the German high command ordered ten Italian civilians to be shot for every German soldier killed in a partisan ambush. 33 Germans were killed, so the machine-gunning of 330 Italian hostages was therefore quite legal. The executioner, Erich Priebke, was only prosecuted after the war for the additional five victims he added on his own initiative. 

They were different times. Monochrome, not colour. Different laws. But do human characters really ever change that much?      

Is the government wargaming a civil war outcome?

Well, the EU has bared its fangs - Brexit is an existential matter for them. If we succeed, we encourage the break-up of their empire. As AEP has it in the Telegraph today (£)

.. this veto will be exercised unless Britain accepts EU governance over everything from tax policy to competition, regulatory standards, and environmental rules, and accepts the sweeping extra-territorial reach of the European Court (ECJ). “Nobody should underestimate the risks,” he said. Indeed not. The withdrawal treaty itself could be blocked at the last moment by the European Parliament or by challenges from any quarter at the ECJ. What is clear is that Brussels is exploiting this latent threat, hoping to pressure Britain into staying in the customs union and remaining subject to the core legal machinery of the EU.....

... A double retreat on both the single market and the customs union – clearly the objective of EU-ultras in the Lords, and Tory rebels in the Commons – would leave Britain a position that is self-evidently preposterous. This country would be emasculated, with no council veto, with half its laws passed by an alien legislature, effectively subject to a foreign supreme court – and reduced to a cuckold Parliament.

How can any British parliamentarian support such a formula? It cannot plausibly lead to a settled outcome. It must chafe so badly that passions erupt with volcanic fury within five years or sooner, further poisoning British relations with Europe, and nurturing a lethal sentiment in much of British society that this ancient island democracy has been subverted by a self-interested elite, if not betrayed by an outrageous ‘trahison des clercs’.

AEP also gives us the first explicit broadsheet reference to the potential for civil war. It's been some 380 years since this spectre first haunted our lands; brother against brother, neighbour against neighbour, a dreadful savage bloodletting born of intractable beliefs. I thought the potential was long behind us, long behind Europe - until Yugoslavia. Then people with the same cars and fridges as you and I, watching the same US TV imports, genocidally slaughtered, starved, bombed and terrorised each other. So I guess we have to accept it here as a possible, though God hopes still distant, outcome. 

How will the government be wargaming this? The police, armed forces, security services must surely be doing so. Will the army stay loyal to a government imposing a reversal of Brexit and a surrender of our nation as a slave state to Brussels? Will the security service? The targets for the insurgents that must be defended will remain as always - fuel, power, communications, nuclear and defence installations, transport - but with a few twists that will make the wargames different from those played in the '50s, '60s and '70s. 

First, our armed forces are simply not adequate if mobilised to guard civil installations. So PCSOs carrying SA80s, perhaps. Then there are the political divisions; if the insurgents target a Remoaner London, they only need to cut off food trucks for 48 hours to tip 70m people into anarchy. If they succeed in disrupting power, internet and water as well the whole country's resources will be committed to sorting the London mess.   

If the army refuses to play, stays in barracks and locks the armouries then the Brexit counties hold most of the offensive assets. East coast sailors will know how easy the unguarded seaward approach to a huge small arms ammo depot, and I suspect most of such assets are outside the M25. 

It's a ghastly topic to contemplate, I know. But I'm getting a feeling for the first time that actual plans are in preparation, old scenarios are being dusted down and decisions being made as to what to do with the Queen if it all goes tits-up. 

If your teen kids are night owls, avoid Austria

Brits may be horrified, but Austria's nine state governments have for many years been able to regulate a host of social behaviour matters from car washing and noise to teen curfews. In particular, it was this last area that locals felt was most overdue for reform; 'county lines' differences allowed teens to cross from an early bedtime state to a party state to carry-on the night. 

It reminds me of formative drinking years in Ipswich, where all pubs would close at 10.30pm without exception. On Wherstead Road, however, just outside the borough boundary, stood the 'Ostrich' - subject to Suffolk hours, and open until 11.00pm. I think they used to sell more beer in the last half hour of the day then they did all evening beforehand.

Anyway, the Austrian states have just agreed a common teen curfew. Under 14s must be safely indoors by 11.00pm, whilst 14 - 16 year olds can stay out until 1.00am. The curfews apply to tourists' kids as well as natives - and if breached can cost parents a hefty fine. Wine and beer are pretty unrestricted, but spirits can only be bought by over 18s. And from next year an unheard-of restriction bans under 18s from buying cigarettes. In one of Europe's most heavily smoking nations, it's a big move. Still, kids can still get their nicotine fix at home - the idea of 'passive smoking' simply hasn't taken root here. 

Have the global corporates robbed Brexit?

Global firms, wherever headquartered, have more in common with eachother than with the country of their parent letterhead. The members of the European Round Table, and of the CBI, are their own country; they have no allegiances beyond shareholders, no mission except growth and profit and no morality beyond the gutter. They exist in an inextricably intertwined web of mutual ownerships and territorial carve-ups, and are as predatory as gonorrhoea as they infect and consume smaller market competition. They crowd out SMEs and national firms, use wealth to bully and coerce mergers and takeovers and are beyond the control of national governments. Our pensions, savings and investments are dependent upon their profitability. 

Whatever they are, they're not capitalists. 

Conventional theory has it that capitalism arose in England in the 16th century but I long ago found it thriving in the 13th century. Rowland Parker's 'Men of Dunwich', a treasure of my bookshelves for many decades, uses ancient pipe rolls and mediaeval manuscripts in our historic archives as the author turns detective. Why did Ada Ringulf, with a cottage by St Peter's, pay only ¼d rent a year when neighbours paid 1½d?* Parker thinks he knows. Anyway, Dunwich merchants, shipowners with vessels we know as 'cogs', would speculatively take cargoes of wool, barley, cloth  to Europe and the Baltic and return with iron, wine, silk and spices. Profits could be handsome - but the loss of a cog to a hostile port, pirates, minor warlords or official blackmail could ruin a man and his family overnight. So merchants offset their risk by investing in eachother's cogs and cargoes, risking only a fifth or a sixth on each voyage. Parker has the evidence. That's capitalism. And it was happening three hundred years earlier than thought. Capitalism means risk, even if it's managed risk. What the global corporates do is risk free; monopolistic, monopsonistic or oligopolistic, they have a licence to make money with virtually no risk, by virtue of their size and power. 

12th Century seal of Dunwich showing square-rigged cog with furled sail.

Facebook has yesterday, with the flick of a button, taken 1.5 billion users from the jurisdiction of the ECJ and EU data protection law to that of the US, just by shifting a paper HQ from Dublin. The new EU law imposes swinging fines for big US tech companies, so they move paper domicile. 

And so the Telegraph carries two stories today that depress even my usual optimism. The first is Jeremy Warner's belief (£) that the markets - read global corporates - have decided how Brexit is to turn out, and it won't mean change or threat, so the £ has bounced back. The second is that the EU (no doubt with the ERT members' hands up their arses) have decided that the UK cannot escape the Customs Union (£), and must remain subservient to the Brussels empire for ever more. 

The threat to Brexit isn't from weak lunatics and purblind fools in the Lords, or the little pungent dags swinging with the stride of George Soros and his chums. If push comes to shove we can always resurrect the scaffold and lop-off their noggins. The real threat is from these big corporates - and I really don't know what we can do about them. 

These rule us now. Democracy has surely died. 

Some ERT members - full list at https://www.ert.eu/members

    * For our many North American and (astonishingly) Norwegian readers, 'd' is the old abbreviation of penny; a quarter of a penny is a farthing, whilst one pronounces one and a half pennies as 'a penny ha'penny'

Roads and parks also the victims of child abuse

Over Christmas I supplemented the log fire, case of port and pile of new books with a few old Rumpole DVDs of programmes originally transmitted in the 1980s. Amongst them was an episode that was a savage critique of naive and credulous social workers, who had convinced themselves that some stolen carnival masks were indicative of child satanic abuse. Mortimer clearly based this on the nonsense of a contemporary Salem-type witch hunt in Scotland in which health professionals were trained to inspect school children's anuses for signs of Satanic interference. Thirty years later little has changed.

Social workers may be utterly crap at noticing real threats to children as they are happening - baby P's fractured limbs and bruises, a thousand pubescent girls sexually abused by Pakistani grooming gangs - but they're superbly skilled post-hoc in using those failures to lever-in more money, more staff, greater bureaucracy, new tax funded scrutiny and NGO bodies and so on. It's a pretty good model; every time they screw up and the public gets angry, they commandeer more tax money, all existing staff get a promotion and the pyramid grows another layer. 

Boundaries have been blurred by the merging of health, education and social work functions in local government and it's become increasingly hard to tell the cost of one part of the service from another. And of course it's not just children; council responsibility for elderly care budgets is also straining budgets to crisis point. 

As local elections are a bit more than a fortnight away, many electors are looking at the poor states of their post-winter roads. Roads and parks are the first recourse for councils making cuts; both can be trimmed attritionally year after year and nothing will collapse for a long time. Parks other than London's Royal parks have become sterile biological deserts of turf and trees, the only maintenance being a fortnightly shave with a gang mower in the growing months. Fences, gates, lighting, paths, ornamental planting are allowed to gently degenerate, the councils only intervening when a H&S risk arises. Roads are the same - I can't remember the last time I saw a B road regularly resurfaced. Roads and parks can be cut year after year and the effects will be far less noticeable than closing a library, for example, or shutting a day centre. All the money that used to pay for parks and roads is almost certainly sitting in the council's extensive meeting suites having case conferences. 

It can only go on for so long, of course. Eventually local tax payers, faced with ever-increasing bills and ever-poorer refuse collection, street lighting and sweeping, road maintenance, parks, libraries and leisure facilities, stuff people actually don't mind paying a reasonable wedge for, will demand change. 

But not this year. Yet. 

(London is insulated from much of this by the massive TfL budget being largely ringfenced to, erm, transport and very hard to transfer to social workers, and the high standards of the Royal parks disguise the poor condition of other council parks)  

Reprieve for Fisheries Protection Vessels - but no crews

The story so far ...

The UK had four lightly armed and armoured Offshore Patrol Vessels highly suitable for Norway to Gibraltar service on Fisheries Protection, Maritime patrol and SAR operations. These are known as Batch Ones. These are due to be 'replaced' by Batch Twos - battle-hardened and with enhanced combat versatility. The MoD were pretending that these were a replacement for the Batch ones but in fact they're destined for Gibraltar, Bahrain, the Falklands and the Caribbean to plug a Frigate-hole in the Fleet. The four Batch Ones were due to be scrapped or sold out of the Service, and indeed one of them, HMS Severn, has already gone. 

However, our esteemed and respected Sea Lords hadn't expected Brexit, and the need for enhanced patrol and protection of the UK's new 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone from 2020.

HMS Tyne

Well, good news - the three remaining Batch Ones, HMS Tyne, HMS Clyde and HMS Mersey are to be retained and 'kept in a state of operational readiness' - i.e. not crewed or stored, but not abandoned and cannibalised. Their Lordships will need a little extra budget to actually crew them.  

It's not just protecting our waters against Dutch and Spanish pirate trawlers stealing our fish. Since the dear old Nimrod ("Ten thousand rivets flying in close formation"*) went our near-coastal ASW capability has been compromised - and with the integrity of our underwater comms cables ever more essential to national security, we need to be extra vigilant. A combination of long-endurance drones and response vessels with RM boarding parties and RIB fast launch and recovery kit for both constabulary duties and escorting foreign warships making passage in and over our waters mean the Batch Ones will have a use for many years yet. 

*Oops - as SW points out, this refers to the Shackleton. Here's a pic of one. 

How endemic is German corruption? - Europe's crooks trample on legality

The rise of German economic corruption appears to have two phases. From the turn of the new century to 2012 / 2015 low level economic corruption became endemic throughout Germany as German manufacturing and industry expanded output and sales. A change in German law in 1997 had allowed prosecutors to investigate corruption proactively - previously firms had to report themselves. However, authorities were also then starved of resources to investigate and bring corruption actions - in effect giving official German government approval to allow corruption to flourish. As a consequence of this official 'fair wind', industrial giant Siemens distributed over €400,000,000 of bribe money to secure bent deals around the world.

As the New York Times reported in 2007:

Wolfgang Schaupensteiner has never been so busy. From an office in central Frankfurt that is decorated with cartoons about corruption, Schaupensteiner has headed the tiny financial crime unit for this city, Germany's financial capital, since 1993. These days, his backlog of bribery, fraud and other white-collar crime cases runs into the hundreds, and he says he has a simple explanation for it.

Corporate profits have surged across sectors ranging from finance to autos to energy, as German executives have turned the country into one of the world's largest exporters over the last five years. Illicit dealings helped create their success, he asserts, and that in turn has encouraged many executives to believe that crime does pay.

On Wednesday, prosecutors in the southern city of Nuremburg raided multiple locations of the offices of Siemens, one of the country's most prominent companies, on suspicion that certain bribes may have been concealed as payments for services that were never provided. In recent months, DaimlerChrysler, BMW and Volkswagen have also been raided, put under investigation or even had employees taken into custody. "Globalization has become a motor for corruption in Germany," asserted Schaupensteiner, 58. "It creates dangerous potential if you do not control it."

More recently, in 2017 Ernst & Young investigated the extent to which corruption has become embedded and institutionalised within the German economy. This second phase roll out of German corruption proved as insidious as an invasion of Japanese knotweed, with crooked tentacles reaching into every crevice of German economic life. The rapid growth of online trading in Germany in the last five years has exacerbated the criminality - German firms trade corruptly and criminally with impunity on the internet as the German legal system provides few affordable remedies for their victims. And all this is done with the complicity and support of the German government.

A staggering 43 percent of German business executives polled by EY (formerly Ernst & Young) think bribery and corruption are fairly commonplace in Europe's economic powerhouse. That's a big jump from just 26 percent in 2015.

In Germany, 23 percent of the managers polled admit they would act in an "unethical manner" to move up the career ladder or secure higher salaries. Roughly 10 percent of German executives polled wouldn't rule out deliberately providing false information to others to help their own careers and fill their pockets.

"VW's emissions-cheating scam, the Libor rate-rigging scandal, and [unlawful] collusion among companies as well as a raft of compliance violations have made the headlines quite frequently of late," says Stefan Heissner, who heads EY's Fraud Investigation & Dispute Services division.

He adds that stricter compliance rules that have appeared in the wake of major corporate scandals have not really changed the perception of widespread corruption in Germany.

Whilst Germany is not alone in seeing a rise in economic corruption, the country is unique in being able to roll it out on an pan European industrial scale, leading an entire continent in implementing then covering up emissions testing, and now corrupting the trade in two-thirds of the continent's gas imports. The corrupt appointment of the German zealot Martin Selmayr to the heart of the EU raises suspicion that the repression of the truth and blocking of all measures to tackle corruption has begun with a German takeover of key appointments. Germany's scoring on independent international indices was summarised by a correspondent in response to the post below; 

Unlike the EU the UK does not attack commercial competitors using the legal system: the EU attacks companies like Intel, Google/Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Chrysler, Fox, Facebook, Starbucks, Apple, Sony et al by using antitrust charges to further the interests of Eurozone technology companies.

Circa 2016 - in terms of shareholder protection the UK is 4th in the world behind Hong Kong, New Zealand and Singapore: France is 29th: Germany is 49th.

In terms of creditor protection: Germany is 28th: France is 79th.

No other EU country can match the UK on Rule of Law: the UK is 3rd in the world for property rights protection: 2nd in the world for Investment Freedom: 3rd in the world for Financial Freedom. As The Wall Street Journal’s Jon Sindreu has noted: “most international financial contracts are written in English law.”

The World Ranking of Judicial Independence cites: UK 6th - Rwanda is 23rd, Germany 24th, France 28th, Saudi Arabia 30th, India 53rd, Spain 58th and Italy 65th.

The EU is like Volkswagen writ large: when they can’t hack it – they crook.

This deep and endogenous German economic corruption will not play well in the rest of Europe. The UK, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian nations, with low levels of corruption and high scoring of commercial rectitude and probity, will be feeling fouled by contact with German corruption - and will now be adding up the commercial losses that German crookedness has cost them. The southern nations will be aggrieved that they have been bullied, coerced and hectored by a deeply crooked nation wearing a false disguise of moral superiority. And eastern nations such as Poland and Bulgaria, countries Germany has robbed of billions of Euros in corrupt complicity with Gazprom, will be looking at concrete measures to get their money back.

Frankfurt may attract a few McMafia Russian banks, a BCCI or a handful of Ponzi scammers, but chances now that any reputable international financial institution would want to be mired in the filth of institutional German economic corruption are slimmer than ever.

German corruption will rot the whole EU fish

Fish they say rots from the head. The Telegraph details an explosive leak of documents (£) from the EU itself detailing EU collusion in illegal Gazprom trade terms - the analysis of which I'll leave to our valued and wise colleagues over at Capitalists at Work - it emerges that Germany enjoyed Russian gas at up to half the cost of her poorer neighbours, and it's suggested that this sweetheart deal kept a lid on the whole corrupt and secretive arrangements for so long, arrangements that beggared Germany's neighbours. It also helps explain Germany absenting herself from both European and international sanctions and other measures against Russia.

Institutionalised German corruption is a new idea. Those of us who've always thought of Germans as upright rule-followers obsessed with their stools may have to revise our opinion of them to Italians with a savings habit. The Volkswagen emissions scandal - again, a German leading role given the scale and value of German car production - was also known about throughout Brussels. But we've always known that the EU is irredeemably corrupt. And Martin Selmayr, the Federast High Priest, most recently appointed corruptly as head of the EU's civil service giving the corrupt Germans one of their own at the heart of the EU. 

Germany scores low on international indices of commercial rectitude. Her courts are corrupted and she scores lower than many second-world nations on WEF indices. But the main problem with German corruption is that they're so damn efficient at it on such a large scale - they've industrialised it. An entire continent's car production, an entire continent's gas consumption, both fouled by deep rooted and well-organised national corruption. And no, the French or the Spanish or the Italians would not have done it if Germany hadn't cheated and manufactured a cover up. 

That Germany's corruption is known and supported not only by the German government but by the whole EU is evidenced by the utter absence of criminal actions flowing from the diesel scam. This was not a victimless crime. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the emission standards, the facts are that car makers lied and cheated and as a consequence millions of diesel owners have effectively lost money - in some cases many thousands. So far the only car executive to face jail time is a German Volkswagen VP who failed to escape from the US in time. 

The EU has only one member that comes close to the UK in terms of low corruption, business rectitude, judicial independence and other Transparency and WEF criteria and that's the Netherlands; in many cases they score better than the UK. No surprise. The Dutch have long been both valued and admired as allies and rivals. Fish rots from the head, and the EU's uncontested head right now is Germany. If German corruption and hegemony is unchallenged, the EU will putresce. However, if a combination of the Netherlands and the Visegrad group move to wrest power from a sclerotic and corrupt Franco-German grasp, the UK may enjoy the benefits post-Brexit of a reformed Europe.  

Are the bastards lying to us again?

The British public is getting used to being lied to. Blair destroyed the credibility of the intelligence services, the BBC destroyed the credibility of national broadcasters and MPs by their venality and crookedness have virtually destroyed popular trust in Parliament. A whole host of national and international trusted figures have been caught telling lies in an effort to persuade the people not to vote for Brexit. So now many people - possibly even most people - treat whatever they're 'officially' told as suspect, with caution, and always subject to being proved. And increasingly that proof is sought through social media. 

What social media is saying about the latest Syrian 'atrocity' is that it's bollocks. They're saying there's no independent verification that a chemical incident took place, no UN observers, no news crews. People ask 'why would he?' when he's pretty well won and the US has announced it's giving up. And oh yes, they're asking, why do these alleged incidents happen just when the US is ready to withdraw?  They're laughing at pictures of a staged 'bomb' placed gently on a chipboard bed, at video showing rescuers with no masks and no protective gear entering a CW contaminated area, and they're asking why these alleged CW incidents only happen in places where the White Helmets are active. In other words, ordinary people on social media are asking all the questions that the MSM, parliament, analysts and observers should be asking. 

To we folk outside the establishment circle, it seems we're being asked to use massive military force against a sovereign nation on the basis of some short indistinct video clips showing a number of anonymous dead children who could be rebels, or their hostages, and who could have died from anything from Carbon Monoxide poisoning to EColi. No identification of the dead. No independent post-mortems, no chemical swabs, no testing of clothing. And yet within minutes of this footage and the allegations (Who made the allegations? The Al Qaeda rebels? Their white helmeted chums? ) it seemed the great and the good of the UK War faction were calling for Assad's blood, cruise missiles, reasons to keep the US in theatre.

And I could be wrong, but to my ear what most people are asking most of all is "Are the bastards lying to us again?"

Sorry Herr Juncker your woes are just starting

Later today or tomorrow senior EU official Herr Juncker will publish his official letter to the elected Prime Minister of Hungary, Victor Orban, congratulating him on his victory like an MD sending a memo congratulating his sales manager on winning the shiny shoes competition. Juncker will write of his hope for Hungary's participation in ever closer union, oblivious to the reality of democratic choice. 

The EU is quite clear however that it stands as the champion of democracy, just not the kind of democracy that involves people voting. No, for the EU democracy means compliance with the EU's standards and rules - any departure indicates a drift towards un-democracy that must be checked by sanctions and punishments, even if people voted for it. The EU's democratic principles, you understand, trump stuff like elections and voting; they are a purer form of democracy, crafted by unelected officials and demagogues free from popular approval. And yes, there are many in Brussels who actually believe all that. 

Meanwhile the Eurozone economy is stalling just as QE has reached its limit and its just one set of figures away from slipping into the first stage of recession. With the global economic cycle due to downturn next year anyway this could be a biggie. Deutschebank is slipping under the waves like some great ocean liner, each week bringing the share price closer to zero. Italy is working on a parallel currency. And now the Visegrad Four are confirmed and strengthened. Let alone Brexit. 

At home PTSD Andrew Adonis and ACGrayling are ever closer to complete meltdown, Adonis throwing petulant tantrums at the BBC for no longer being 'binary' in its output; i.e. for no longer reporting that 'Remain' has an equal chance of winning. With this degree of self-delusion, he's a natural for a cushy job in Brussels. Or rather he would be if we weren't leaving. Which raises the question; what on Earth will all the PTSD Adonises do after next year?

Sadiq Khan on the back foot, Tower Hamlets on Lockdown

London mayor Sadiq Khan was completely absent from the TV and radio studios yesterday, and it wasn't because he was visiting crime scenes or consoling bereaved relatives. It emerged he was hiding in his City Hall office. At the moment when London needed resolute leadership, the little man had locked himself away from view.

It would be foolish to suggest the Mayor is responsible for a dramatic spike in violent crime that has seen London's murder rate exceed that of New York for the first time. But for a mayor who spends the bulk of his time and effort self-publicising, with a thumb in every issue from global warming to meetings with the EU's Brexit team, his lack of engagement with the death and bloodshed on his own streets makes him look silly and trivial.

Back in November he made what looked like a state visit to India and Pakistan, a tour that involved several changes of local native costume each day, with internet bandwidth straining to convey the tsunami of publicity pictures sent back to London. It was all intended to sell Khan to every south asian community in London, and all at the taxpayer's expense. However, Khan's vanity, his overweening narcissism, his ambition and his high opinion of himself aren't helping him; though his ratings in London appear high, I suspect this is artificial, and that his true support is a thin shell. People expect officer-like responsible behaviour from their leaders, not craven excuses and hiding from view.

It is encouraging that despite the mayor, rather than because of him, the London Assembly has taken full charge of arrangements for the May 3rd elections in Tower Hamlets. Following the crook Lutfer Rahman's defenestration as London's most corrupt mayor and the borough being run from Whitehall under emergency measures, the GLA is determined not to allow any repeat. The transcript of the March meeting of the Police and Crime committee is here - detailing measures that include

•  A ban on the use of any language other than English in polling stations
•  Police guarding every single polling station
•  Staff & Police with body-worn cameras to record breaches of the RPA
•  Taped 'no go' areas marked outside stations to exclude Muslim intimidators from getting too close to voters
• Training in election law / RPA for all 620 Tower Hamlets officers
• A specialist election law squad to tackle VIP and high profile Muslim intimidators (imams etc)
• All police leave cancelled for May 3rd
• Electoral Commission have carried out special checks on the Electoral Register
• IVR making good progress, all HMOs scrutinised

It's all generally good stuff - they're clearly determined to run a British rather than a third-world election this year in Tower Hamlets, even if they don't hit the right note all the time:

Chief Superintendent Sue Williams QPM I have also invested in my Faith Officer, who in the last election, the general election, went around to all the different faith establishments and talked about spiritual influencing, talked about electoral fraud, and was able to give people a little bit more information about what is right and what is wrong, because a lot of the general public do not understand. What we have said is we would be happy to repeat that process with the Faith Officer leading up to the mayoral election as well.

So, a useless mayor on the back foot and being exposed for what he is, and Tower Hamlets being recovered for democracy with a strong pushback against Bangladeshi electoral fraud and intimidation. Reasons to be cheerful.

Praying for a second term? Khan affected a variety of native costumes on his tour

Alison Saunders - a vile monster who should never have been appointed DPP

There was a degree of celebration yesterday at the defenestration of Alison Saunders, the most vile, unsuitable and disastrous DPP in living memory. The woman is a monster, driven by a bigoted ideology that has led to gross injustice and a neglect of police time spent on rapidly increasing crimes in categories other than the targets of Saunder's twisted zealotry.

As Allison Pearson writes in the Telegraph (£)

What the CPS statistics did not reveal was the embarrassing number of men brought to trial for rape on wholly inadequate evidence, and swiftly acquitted. Saunders wasted huge resources on her hobbyhorse, particularly high-profile campaigns relating to often imaginary historic sexual abuse.

Meanwhile, the crimes most people care about – burglaries, stabbings, shoplifting, public disorder - were booming. Home owners were told that they should not expect to have break-ins investigated, as the police were too busy (quizzing schoolboys who had shared photos of their genitals on Snapchat, no doubt.) At the weekend, it was confirmed that the unthinkable had come to pass: London now has a higher murder rate than New York.

and

The worst DPP in living memory, a person who politicised and poisoned the criminal justice system, seemed to regard trials as an annoying impediment to locking up the accused, causing untold misery to innocent men and their loved ones.

Good riddance to utter rubbish - but she should never have been appointed in the first place.

And not for the first time the probity of the members of the Electoral Commission has been called into doubt after four of them were caught making public anti-Brexit statements. The role of a Commissioner requires absolute public political neutrality. 

Again, perhaps not a surprise - these key quangos are still packed with Neolib ideologues spreading their poison long after their political and professional death. 

There needs to be a mass cull of all vile monsters, the placeholders, the has-beens, reptiles, dinosaurs and saboteurs still crowding our national institutions. They will hold this nation back, stuck in a state of monstrous injustice, bias, vile prejudice, establishment self interest and corruption. More than ever we need fair, balanced, open, equitable, democratic and representative appointments to these posts and these bodies. This old dross must be culled.