Grenfell: The only winners will be the fee earners

It is not just Building Regulations in the UK, but the official guidance to the Regulations that must be followed for any new construction project. With an industrial scale laser printer and a few reams of A4 you can, given time, print the whole set of volumes yourself. Unlike British Standards and suchlike, Building Regs are free for all to access - so no reason for anyone not to comply. I frequently have to explain the UK system to the natives. In Austria, only a qualified and licensed Baumeister can build commercially, and written Building Regs are limited to two or three sides of A4 as reliance is wholly on professional competence. In the UK, I explain, anyone can be a builder, yes, anyone - even those with criminal convictions, perhaps especially those with criminal convictions in some cases ... but they must follow this stack of rules we call Building Regs. 

The consequences are as you might imagine. Here, builders are very expensive, very conservative and will over-engineer even the simplest jobs to absurd lengths. Design of new domestic dwellings is banal, even ugly, but massive. Any nester looking to construct an innovative, beautiful house incorporating the latest building technology and cutting edge materials would be better off moving to the UK; here they will be met with noisy tooth-sucking and head-shaking. And builders here are very, very, stubborn. 

My new roof - one of the few jobs here for which I used a profi - is to my eyes still a travesty to which I am not used. The old roof was a lovely 18th century testament of settlement and minor movement, gently undulating with dips, fold and curves. Having worked with English Heritage many times in the UK - very amicably - my instructions here to the builders were to retain the historic form and character in the new covering. No. They spent weeks and threw away a deal of profit on eliminating every historic irregularity with shims, packers and counter-battens to achieve a millimetre perfect regularity. The rows were intense. Three times I threatened to throw them off the job. All to no avail; I could not have found a roofer in all Austria who would build a crooked roof. For their part, having never seen an English restoration, they were convinced I was mad and needed to be over-ruled for my own good. 

What a roof restoration should look like ... unknown to Austrians

Would Grenfell have been done here? Probably not. Contractors here have very much more power and stubbornness than in the UK - the Baumeister has personal liability for failure. They would have used the best materials - with a hefty factor of safety on top - and it was the Client's job to pay whatever it cost. There is little incentive to do otherwise. And as I found, once a contractor is appointed, he very much takes control of the job; the Client is just an irritating noise to be ignored.

So I already know the outcome of the Grenfell enquiry. The mob need some red meat, so a scapegoat or two will be found. We will be told pompously that lessons have been learnt. And above all, new regulations, controls and standards will be legislated to make it more difficult for our bucaneer, unqualified construction industry to flout official intentions. It will not in future be left just to building inspectors to police the Regs. And this will mean a fee bonanza for the suits - I can almost hear this morning the discussions as professional service firms contemplate creating new compliance divisions.

Creating creativity

The old Colony Room club of fading memory had a fair share of LSAs - less -successful artists, as I termed them, to complement our first division YBAs. For every Damien Hirst there was a Justin Mortimer, for every Tracey Emin an Alyson Hunter. As I combed through a pile of crap from the woefully stupid public sector and cynically manipulative private developers for yet another fully-designed 'creative quarter' to an area of south London, I asked several LSAs what they looked for in workspace. The answer was pretty much a Zone 2 Tube station and £4 a square foot. 

The irony is, of course, is that this combination only exists in the little pockets that have remained untouched by the dead hand of Planned Development - old machine shops and assembly plants deserted by industry, the scruffy bits of graffiti-scarred rough common brick and asbestos-cement roofed clutter at the back of council estates unsuited for residential conversion. A whole roomful of economic development officers, town planners, architects and commercial developers can no more create a creative district than they can populate a bijou shopping parade on demand with an organic fish merchant selling grilled sardines, an independent coffee shop and a hipster designer-porridge outlet. 

Simon Jenkins in the Guardian is smart enough to know this. Writing about social-engineering plans to distribute the New Illiberalism that characterises Channel 4 to an area of Britain other than London he writes

There is nothing more gauche than Whitehall “being nice” to the provinces. Its attempt to force Channel 4 to move north from London has felt akin to the Victorian church sending missionaries overseas to civilise the heathen. As austerity descends over museums and theatres across the land, the culture department wants to dispatch a few television executives to live among the natives, to introduce them to kale, quinoa and turmeric lattes. That should cheer them up. Whitehall also seems to want to have some fun. No one has instructed Channel 4 where to go. Instead, the provincial cities are told they must line up like children in a workhouse and beg. London will decide who gets the smashed avocado. There will be two consolation “creative hubs” for the runners-up, wherever the judges can find something approximating Shoreditch High Street.

Still, we should all support this. If only for the chance to seriously piss-off the sanctimonious bigots at the TV station forced to uproot from Blackheath to Burnley or wherever. The more we can disperse these destructive zealots amongst ordinary folk and dilute their malignant influence, the better.

Remembering Ronnie

I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing in the early hours of the morning in the UK when it was confirmed that Ronald Reagan had won the US presidency. At the time we were appalled - a 'B' movie actor, a rather stupid and vain man who dyed his hair, a man unacquainted with the complexity of realpolitik, we thought. East Anglia back then was little more than a vast USAF airfield; F4 Phantoms and A10 Thunderbolts screamed overhead at low level from dawn until dusk, the last of our own fantastic Lightnings having been retired from RAF Wattisham in 1974. The faint stench of unburnt kerosene hung in the air and on our clothes and somewhere over to the east vast Soviet tank armies and millions of jackbooted killers stood ready to steamroll over Europe headed for Southwold and Walberswick.

The fear of nuclear war was endemic and ever present. Our rural counties had ICBMs targeted at them, we knew. Members of the Royal Observer Corps, normally village postmen or somesuch, would don their berets each day after work and scuttle down into their holes in the ground, mashing-up forty feet below the fields, with the milk rota pinned up next to the expected megadeaths from various megatonnages of nuclear blasts. We were terrified that the stupid, ignorant, blundering Reagan would provoke war with Russia, that he was gambling with our young lives. 

Well, we were as wrong as were the nation's finest economists who scribbled chain letters explaining why the housewife Margaret Thatcher would be a disaster for jobs and growth. And of course we've heard it all again about President Trump. And on past form, that's why I'm less concerned about a trade war, tariffs and sanctions, mutual economic destruction and all the rest than I should be. In fact, the more that the world's economists are shrieking how dreadful it all is, the more experience tells me that it may just work, but perhaps not in the way that Mr Trump thinks it will (those US rust belt jobs will never return - but tax cuts, deregulation and fracking will compensate). Reagan never expected the wall to come down, after all. 

EU tariffs on cranberries, bourbon and denim jeans? Give me strength. BTW, preiselbeere or Lingonberry sauce is a perfect substitute for cranberry sauce - sold in big, cheap jars and also perfect with venison, I wouldn't use Bourbon to clean the sink and my denim is made in China and SE Asia by slaves. If I couldn't get hold of Dickies shirts and boots, on the other hand, that would be a disaster ..

Tommy Robinson jailed - rightly

The British have long tried to apply injunctions, superinjunctions, gagging orders and censorship edicts to the activities of the judiciary and establishment. At the time of the Abdication, they imagined they could keep the news of the King's unlawful infidelity a secret from the nation at a time when whole column metres were devoted to reporting it not only across the Atlantic but across the Channel. As an aside, one of the great freedoms that smaller nation-states can enjoy when not part of a global or continental legal jurisdiction is popular knowledge of establishment wrong-doing. If the EU survives, I pity its poor citizens - who will have to depend on British or US sources for the truth once Brussels closes down internal free information, probably on the grounds that the wealthy and powerful have an absolute right to privacy, even when exploiting the poor, stealing from the state, subverting democracy or stuffing their mouths with gold by criminal malfeasance. We can call this the [NAME REDACTED] school of media licensing. 

It now emerges that there were not one but two Censorship Orders issued around a criminal case now being heard somewhere north of Watford. The first we have referred to below, referring to the case itself. This is still in force. The second, now withdrawn, related to the arrest of Tommy Robinson. He has subsequently pleaded guilty to contempt of court - that his activities were sub judice and risked prejudicing a fair trial for those currently in the dock. Frankly, his activities were asinine and in my view his sentence is deserved. Those inclined to protest may consider whether they would also have defended the rights of the brownshirts to smash shop windows and burn books - activities equally anti-democratic and as harmful to us all as disrupting the exercise of justice. Smashing shop windows and burning books are not 'freedom of expression' - they are acts of shameful intimidation. Our courts must be free, open and independent for all our sakes. This is why even though I am deeply suspicious of the first gagging order - censoring any mention of the case in progress, even normally permissible factual reporting - I will uphold it on this blog. 

When the trial is over we will learn the judge's reasons for imposing this restriction. If it proves to have been for sound reasons in the interests of justice, fair enough. If it proves to have been made for reasons of political expediency, or for protecting the establishment from scrutiny, then is the time to take to the streets. Until then, we must all pretend we know nothing.

As many Tommy comments as you like in the comments folks but NO mention of the case, the town, the court or the defendants that are the subject of the Censorship Order, please.

I think Guido's Monday Morning view rather cruelly makes the point;

  

EU kicks Italian can down the road

In President Mattarella, the EU has a head of state wholly committed to both the Euro and a Federast union - a safe pair of hands for the German empire. Under the Italian constitution, the President not only appoints the Head of the Council of Ministers (the PM) but must approve the appointment of the ministers. Normally a rubber stamp process, Mattarella has used this power in his first blocking move to delay the Lega / 5 star coalition from taking power.

It now looks like another election for Italy, with an EU approved technocratic government installed by Mattarella in the meanwhile. This time the EU is expected to pour in hundreds of millions in black publicity to swing the result away from the populist parties - but in the slim chance that Italian voters dig their heels in against the Germans, Mattarella has more shots in his locker to enable the EU to keep kicking the Italian can down the road for as long as possible. 

The EU Satrap President of Italy can also veto bills going before the Italian parliament, and send passed acts back for 'reconsideration' if he doesn't like them. He can also issue emergency laws by decree - though these are time limited to 60 days unless made permanent or extended by parliament. So plenty of scope to keep the can bouncing down the road for months or even years.

The only light at the end of the tunnel is Mattarella's age - he's 77. 

[REDACTED]

Hat-tip to [REDACTED]

NB No comments that violate the Censorship Order please.

Update
======
GDPR gets its revenge. Blogger can be set to email all new comments automatically - but since yesterday, no comments. I have to check blogger manually. Of course, under GDPR I actually need to consent to receive emails from my own blog to my own email addy ... this one has slipped under Google's radar, but with fines of up to 4% of t/o for such breaches no wonder they've just turned ALL blogger comment notifications off until they come up with a fix.

From the Desk of Dr Barrister Adoke Aboyongo

FROM THE DESK OF DR BARRISTER ADOKE ABOYONGO 

Dear Friend,

GDPR Regulations

Important changes are coming into effect today that govern the way in which we here communicate with you.

To remind you, I am the only child of the Late Chief and Mrs Abingo Aboyongo, a very wealthy stick merchant based in Lagos. The fish-scorpion bite that caused my father's death was, I believe, deliberately administered by a business rival. As he died in prolonged agony, his limbs turning emerald green in a side effect of the deadly venom, he whispered to me that he had secreted forty five million dollars ($45,000,000) in a secret UK bank account, the profits of European stick exports. The tragic death of my mother in a concrete pump accident shortly after means I remain sole heir to this fortune.

Sadly, restrictive Nigerian currency import regulations mean that I am unable to withdraw my fortune in person. I therefore wrote to you last year asking for your help in securing withdrawal of cleared funds in return for a 30% share of the capital balance. You were kind enough to provide me then with your bank details, pin, password, memorable word, mother's maiden name and first pet name (Dingo - really?) at that time, shortly before you so tragically lost so much money from your accounts due to the negligence and incompetence of the banks.

If you wish to continue to receive these 419 emails, please click on the link below. This will take you to a website which will install a small and unobtrusive piece of software on your computer. In return you will share in a ONE THIRD part of my unclaimed wealth to spend as you wish, on marsupials or other pet species of your choice, or to replenish your much diminished bank accounts. 

Yours most sincerely


Dr Barrister Adoke Aboyongo PhD MA BA(Hons) LLB
(Desk of)

Britain demands Lords reform - poll

It seems our disgust with the behaviour of the upper house is far more widely shared than I imagined; the Mail prints the latest ComRes poll, part graphic below;

With 79% of respondents agreeing that the red leather benches are stuffed with those we've called "Worthless dross, dags and liggers, spivs and crooks ... bribers, rent-seekers and hairdressers" and 76% agreeing that they're out of kilter with the wishes of the British people, the pressure will only grow for deep reform.

With the odious little scrote squatting on the Speaker's chair in the other place also under increasing pressure for his misconduct, it seems common sense is eventually beginning to prevail. 

Manchester one year on

Is it really just a year since the Manchester atrocity? It seems somehow more distant, more remote. A year ago I wrote -

That Islamists have no place in Western societies is not news. Nor that some of them are brutal, amoral killers and lack any vestige of human compassion. Nor that the followers of the perverted death cult frequently pick children as their victims. We knew that the Islamists were busy plotting to slaughter us, that our open borders have allowed killers, guns and explosives to enter the country without hindrance. Most Islamists are still free to broadcast their perverted and inhuman propaganda on social media - the death cult's forum. So nothing about last night's slaughter of children in Manchester should have shocked or surprised us - yet it has.   

It was a Monday night break for young girls and their mums, with the promise of the start of Summer and in the carefree days before exam results in August. Travel plans had been made and co-ordinated with other parents; tram and pick-up, taxi, last train and meet at the station. Mobiles checked, promises extracted. For some it would be their first late night out, the start of an adventure into young adulthood, with all its dreams and aspirations. This morning those dreams lay shattered in puddles of clotted blood and ironmongers' shrapnel. 

May God grant us strength to defeat the evil of this death cult. 

In later years the anniversaries segue into a sort of seamless blur, this year little different to last but it makes our losses all the more poignant. When young, life's events tumble upon each other, each marking epochal change; those first exams, A levels, living away from home, our first adult sexual and social conjugations. Young lives are lived with a fiery intensity of spirit and emotion, a whirlwind of discovery and change. A year is an eternity to those on the cusp of adult life. 

It remains therefore an unbearable cruelty for these evil Islamist monsters to target our children. We must remain ever vigilant against threat, ever confident in the rightness and justice of our nation and our society, ever jealous in defence of our freedoms and ever trusting in God to guide our arm.

Venezuela - when Socialists take power

There's an election today in Venezuela, but don't get excited. We all already know that the Socialist dictator Maduro will win by an estimated 8m votes - his cronies have been forging ballot papers and stuffing ballot boxes all week. Corrupt elections are one of the first changes that Socialists make to democracies. Little Owen Jones would no doubt rationalise electoral fraud as legitimate just so long as it's to cement Socialist power - anything, including genocide, is OK for lefties.

On that subject, can you imagine Pete Waterman, for example, making a comedy movie about the extermination camps, with Hitler, Goebbels, Jodl, Ribbentrop and the rest of the scum Nazi gang played by comedic actors? Yet Armando Ianucci, a man of supposed talent and intelligence, takes great pride in doing so about Stalin. It's part of the Socialist rehabilitation of Stalin's Soviet Union. Thirty millions exterminated? It's fine, it's OK, they were killed by Socialists, not Nazis, we're told. I'm showing it to my young German chums next week and I'll let you know their reaction. 

On social media, on the streets, and now even on mainstream broadcasts the spite, vituperation, hate and sheer nastiness of the left is in the ascendant. It's chillingly reminiscent of the early days of the NSDAP. Bullying opponents, intimidating democratic debate, shouting down contrary views are all becoming normalised.

Today Venezuela, tomorrow the United Kingdom.   

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.